In trying to understand the appeal of Trump for rural white working-class voters, I want to draw upon studies of domestic abuse (Lundy, Why Does He Do That? and Jules Falquet, Pax Neoliberalia), and think about the rural white working-class culture as a culture of abuse both personal and political.
Lundy offers a way to critique what I am starting to describe as the “apologetics discourse” that makes excuses and tries to rationalize white rural fascism. That is, there is a persistent tendency to explain why white rural people are drawn to a reactionary politics, by suggesting that they have some legit grievance (see previous post citing Baldwin, Obama, Brooks, etc.).
Lundy was a therapist who worked in court-ordered group counseling for abusive men, and one of the most damning insights in Why Does He Do That? is the suggestion that domestic abusers have been persistently able to justify themselves with myths (e.g. that they cannot contain their anger, or have been abused themselves, or suffer from alcohol or drug dependency, or in other words have some reason to abuse). But as Lundy uncovers from working with many abusers, these men simply enjoy abusing people and feel that they have a right to abuse.
What Falquet has to say is also crucial for understanding domestic abuse as a political culture. Falquet, writing about Mexico & Central Am, shows that domestic abuse is typically practices by men who belong in some way to the power structure (cops, soldiers), and whose abuse has a political-economic function. Abuse, Falquet argues, is a form of right-wing paramilitary violence that men use strategically in order to extract wealth and labor from subordinated women and children.
I think that one could establish how the main institutions of rural white life—the family, the school, the church, the Boy Scouts, the factory—are all sites of incredible interpersonal violence which acculturates people into accepting and perpetuating abuse as a right-wing political formation.
One of the implications would be that people identify with Trump precisely because he is known to abuse women and subordinates. (Put Bill Clinton into the mix, why not? Part of his charm, in a perverse way, is that he is a womanizing creep often accused of sexual harassment and violation). Or in other words the trashy white culture, which thrives on domestic abuse, cathects people to such men and even in its intimate settings already has a right-wing political function…
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