The Roots of Trumpism: The Birth of a Crisis Cult and Rural Conservatism

By Rupert L. Chapman III, Ph.D.

White House Archives. Public domain image.

Our brilliant Rupert Chapman III published this article last year. Many have since joined us a PolitiSage and haven’t seen it — and since this week we’re being treated to a wildly viral MAGA film telling us that Trump is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, I think we need to see this again. Read it and weep, but read it and also become clearer that this is a CRISIS CULT and we need to understand it to deal with it.

For the people of the rural hinterlands, the expectation of life is continuity, while for the urban populations, the expectation is change.

I. The Birth of a Crisis Cult

Events of the last few years have persuaded me to think more and more anthropologically about what is happening in American culture. Economically, the world in which my siblings and I grew up—the rural Deep South—was an agricultural world. As a unique kind of extractive economy, it was effectively static, almost by definition, because it was a world of commodity producers, large and small, mostly poor. Socially, this world was structured more by the churches, specifically by the Baptist and the Presbyterian churches—my own upbringing was weird, of course, as we were Methodists—than it was by anything else, including politics.

When I was in my teens, these social and economic structures began to break down. As agriculture was mechanised, the slow deaths of the small farms and the loss of independence by the larger ones—effected by economic pressures to consolidate land ownership into the burgeoning “agribusiness industry”—became obvious. The same kind of depopulation of the countryside that had occurred in the UK in the 19^th century (due to the same processes) caused the breakdown of the smaller rural communities in the South.

I watched the anger this caused, enmity initially aroused by the consolidation of schools and the closure of small rural ones, an aggregation that created what anthropologists term (or used to term) a new sodality.[1] Fellow students, who were mostly older than I was, remained loyal to the small schools from which they’d come, even while they went through the alien world of the town- and county-consolidated schools. The argument for the consolidation was irrefutably correct in terms of educational opportunities and outcomes, but the social destruction involved caused lasting unhappiness.

These changes in agriculture—and the ending of the jobs of millions of farmers and farm hands across the Deep South—provided a tremendous opportunity for the Northern capitalists to close down their unionized operations in the heartlands of American industry and move them to the Southern states. There they could soak up a vast pool of unemployed laborers who had never before worked in industrial production—and who hadn't inherited the union benefits that had resulted from two hundred years of activism against low-wage work in under-regulated industries. The Northern invaders were instead blessed with a work force that was steeped in passionate anti-union ideology and committed, with fundamentalist intensity, to laissez-faire capitalism.

The emptying of the countryside meant the loss of many of the small country churches that had centered the disappearing communities, along with the schools. It also, of course, meant the end of  those wonderful small country stores that I remember with great fondness—along with the groups of old men, like my Granddaddy Sealy, sitting on the front porches of those stores playing checkers and drinking coffee. I lived through all of this without particularly understanding what I was seeing or where it was leading.

Through all of this, the small businesses in the towns remained largely untouched. Then came the development of the large chain stores, which first appeared as one small store among many, distinguished largely by ownership—that is, by being corporation-administered rather than owner-operated. The competition with the owner-operated small stores, such as my father’s pharmacy, quickly became apparent and gradually increased until, with the advent of the predatory capitalism exemplified by Walmart, those small stores were driven out of business. All those entrepreneurs, so beloved of the Neo-Liberals (or Palaeo-Capitalists), were forced to yield their independence and become employees, living by selling their labor.

For my parents, as for so many others of their generation, that independence had been earned by hard work at home—and at the universities, which were made accessible to them by government programs, notably (in Pop’s case) by the GI Bill. So, the next target for the Palaeo-Capitalists became the universities, whose potential for wealth extraction was clearly seen. This gold mine would come in the form of dramatically raised tuition, which could only be afforded by taking out student loans that would be repaid at exorbitant interest rates—and which created new debt peons to replace the sharecroppers who had escaped during the industrialization of the rural South. Now, of course, those who profit from student-debt peonage howl the loudest at the possibility that they might lose their lucrative source of income—that their shiny new rentier economy might be curtailed or eliminated.

Meanwhile, in the deindustrialized North, another culture was being destroyed. Two hundred years of productive labor, resulting in the creation of entire industries and the social structures that went with them, was swept away as the capitalists moved those industries first to the South and then, latterly, onwards to the remaining pre-industrial countries beyond U.S. borders—and hence beyond the reach of U.S. labor laws—in search of the endlessly receding pool of cheap labor. With the industries went the labor unions and all the other sodalities that had formed the social framework of the culture. Just as the mechanization of agriculture had emptied the countryside in the South and the consolidation of land ownership under agribusiness had eliminated the small family farm, so deindustrialization in the North emptied the industrial towns and cities, the “company towns” that had been created by those industries in the first place. Along with the unions, all of the other social institutions went, too: the bowling alleys and their teams/clubs, the churches, the small, family-run businesses.

However, unlike in the rural South, where the incoming industries offered new and better paying jobs, in the deindustrialized North, the Rust Belt, there was nothing to replace what had been lost. The only option for those abandoned people was to abandon the places they had cherished as much as the agricultural workers in the Deep South had cherished their smaller communities. Just as the mechanization of agriculture led to deep discontent, deep anger, at the social destruction in the Deep South, the deindustrialization of the North led to deep anger among the dislocated and acculturated population. So, across a wide swath of the country, the same process of change produced the same cultural destruction, the same sort of fragmented and acculturated population, the same cultural crisis. 

This process has been observed time and again throughout history, and in virtually every case, it produces what anthropologists refer to as crisis cults. This can be seen in the U.S. in the rise of the mega-churches, each centered on a single charismatic preacher, frequently existing outside the framework of any established and recognized denomination—and they arose at the same time the memberships of all the so-called mainstream Christian denominations went into dramatic decline. And these mega-churches developed new theologies, such as the “prosperity gospel,” to suit the circumstances and needs of their adherents. 

Moreover, since the political leadership and organizations supported by the acculturated population had manifestly failed their followers/members, those followers/members sought new leadership that would address their grievances and offer them solutions for their problems. This led to the politicization of the Evangelical churches, a development that necessarily entailed the abandonment of their previous theology as politics, whether democratic or authoritarian, doesn’t conform in any way to received Christian teachings.

All of this led directly to the explosive rise of the so-called Tea Party and its takeover of the Republican Party, and then to the rise of Donald Trump and the ideology referred to for the sake of convenience (and because he has made himself its chief and loudest exponent) as Trumpism.

I In social anthropology, a sodality is a non-kin group organized for a specific purpose (economic, cultural, or other) that frequently spans villages or towns.

II. Rural Conservatism

Photograph by Dan Keck. Public domain image.

The first period of farming, the Neolithic, began in the Ancient Near East with the warming of the climate at the end of the Würm Glacial Period, around 11,700 years ago, and lasted until around 5,000 years ago. In the hunter-gatherer bands, there had been individuals who had authority, based on age and expertise in hunting, or reading the weather, or tracking, or making things (tools, clothing, or whatever). With the settlement in farming villages came the development of chiefdoms, in which the village/lineage head had authority, but not power.

Around 5,000 years ago, population density in a few regions—the Nile River valley, the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the valley of the Yangtse River, the Valley of Mexico, and the valleys of western South America—reached a point at which the old form of social organisation, by kinship groups and authority without compulsory power, could no longer cope with the problems that inevitably arise between individuals and groups. Over a period of a few thousand years leading up to this point, a more complex, hierarchical social order evolved that incorporated, but went beyond, the old organisation by kinship groups.

This new form of social organisation involved a single ruler, who was vested with both authority and compulsory power. This leader managed a religious hierarchy that supplied the ideological structure for the society and a bureaucracy that carried out the necessary administrative functions. This is the social organisation which, with many variations, has formed the framework for most of humanity ever since: the state.

The demographically dense, socially complex concentrations of population that we call cities are distinguished from the largest of the villages that preceded them (and continued alongside them) by their many functions: their variety of social and legal statuses and occupational specialisations, and their dependence for sustenance on the farmers and miners of the surrounding countryside. Prior to the development of cities, the terms rural and urban had no meaning because there was nothing with which to contrast them. After the cities emerged, the contrast between rural and urban (from the Latin urbs, meaning a city) had meaning and significance.

For the people of the rural hinterlands, the expectation of life is continuity, while for the urban populations, the expectation is change.

For the purposes of this essay, the significance of the distinction between rural and urban is that when cities, with their specialized occupations, arose, they became powerhouses of innovation, places where new developments took place, where change originated. New ideas, new technologies originated in the cities, and, insofar as they were relevant to the life of the countryside, they spread out from urban centers.

By contrast, the purposes of the countryside remained the same the same: the growing of crops, the husbanding of animals, and the mining of ores  In addition to the constancy of the purpose of production in rural areas, and of the dependency of the cities on the rural hinterlands for food, fibres for clothing, and other raw materials, the countryside remained and remains tied to the changing seasons in a way that is far less true of the cities. These aspects of the urban centers and the rural hinterlands are a part of what the great French historian Fernand Braudel called the longue durée[1], which forms the heart of the discipline of archaeology. It is also the social context within which the process about which I wrote in “The Roots of Trumpism, Part I” takes place. For the people of the rural hinterlands, the expectation of life is continuity, while for the urban populations, the expectation is change.

This truth—about the difference in expectations between rural and urban populations—has been much remarked upon from the beginning. It can be seen in the origin story of Enkidu, his taming by a courtesan from Uruk, and his first encounter with Gilgamesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It has been intensely studied by anthropologists and sociologists. What these studies have repeatedly shown is the life of the small farmer is not merely an arduous one, it is a precarious one. The hazards are many. Leaving aside the threats pertaining to the life of humans, there are diseases which strike farm animals and crops. The weather is never perfect, and in most climates can be disastrous—too much or too little rain, too short a growing season, hail, wind, and so on. When the crop has been harvested, and the portions destined for the next season’s seed, for animal feed through the winter, and for food for the family have been set aside, whatever is left can be sent to the market, where it is subject to the price fluctuations due to shifts in demand. Any worn-out equipment must be repaired or replaced, as must clothing. And, of course, in any hierarchical (state) society, something will go in taxes. 

Farming populations, wherever they live, are adapted to their situation and have means for hedging against each of these potential disasters or even multiples of them at once. These adaptations are honed over generations and shape the behaviour and society of the population concerned. They will be different for each population, as the risks differ both in nature and intensity. The means of dealing with them will also vary, from the mundane and purely practical/pragmatic, to the ideological, to religious rites and festivals, to offerings and sacrifices to deities (or, in earlier, unstratified societies, to local spirits). Anything which changes any of the aspects of this way of life is seen as a threat to all of it. This can be an aid agency attempting to introduce changes to a fallow cycle with artificial fertilizer to maintain the productivity of the soil, new breeds of farm animals or plants, new methods of cultivation and harvest, or changes in ideology. The way the population has lived “time out of mind” has enabled its people to survive, and any changes to that way of life are seen as a threat not simply to that way of life but to the very survival of the population.

In these circumstances no one should be surprised that rural populations are conservative and suspicious of change and of the “outsiders” who bring that change. One thing that very quickly emerges from the study of long-term history is that, for most populations, history has consisted of long periods of stability with slow, gradual, incremental change interrupted by brief periods of rapid, frequently painful change. 

The emergence of cities and states that followed the slow growth of populations was the first period of truly rapid change and was originally dubbed “The Urban Revolution” by the great prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe; it was a term he modelled on the next such period of very rapid change, which was long since known as “The Industrial Revolution.”

During the Urban Revolution, the cities took the preexisting technology, developed it, and introduced several innovations, most notably complex systems of writing representing the sounds of languages, as opposed to the simpler systems of written signs which had already existed for thousands of years. The dynamism of the cities was also expressed in the existence of fashion—in all of the arts, not just clothing—and fashion demands constant change. By contrast, in the countryside, traditional folkways—folk dances, folk costumes, and so on—continue for centuries at a time.

Critically, with the rise of the cities, new rulers had both authority and power, which was imposed on both the city dwellers and the country folk alike. And with the advent of kings came the concept of ruling deities, and the older animistic spirits were relegated to lower ranks.

 In my own lifetime, we have begun living through a third such period, which hasn’t yet acquired its own name. When I was small, it was still normal to see farmers ploughing their fields with a team of ponies or mules. (I never saw any ploughing with oxen.) My maternal grandfather was considered a very good judge of mules, and his neighbors would ask him to go up to Memphis and buy them the best mule they could afford. The precariousness of his own living was cushioned in a way which later became much more common: in addition to running his own small farm, he was a rural mailman, itself an arduous and highly responsible job on the unpaved backroads of the early 20^th century. His was the last generation of farmers in my close family.

In the first part of this essay, I wrote about the way rapid changes of the 20^th century affected the lives of rural people in the U.S. (and the Deep South, in particular). From this rather impressionistic portrait of the way rural populations have adapted to the hazards of their lives over the last 10,000 years, I have sought to construct a picture of exactly why they have been and are more conservative, and less open to change, than their urban relations (such as myself)—and why they see the sort of sweeping change which has taken place since the 1950s as a threat to their very existence, to everything which they value. While I’m under no illusion that this understanding offers any practical suggestions as to how to change the minds of rural populations about change, to encourage them to accept it, what I hope is that it does offer a way for both the urban and the rural populations to better understand one another, and, in so doing, to find the solutions (plural) to the problems which currently divide them.

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[1] Longue Durée.  A term that literally means “long duration” introduced by the French historian Fernand Braudel. It is a standard term of reference in the work of the Annales School, which Braudel helped to establish. It is used to indicate a perspective on history that extends further into the past than both human memory and the archaeological record so as to incorporate climatology, demography, geology, and oceanology, and chart the effects of events that occur so slowly as to be imperceptible to those who experience them, such as the changing nature of the planet or the steady increase in population in a particular area. (Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory)

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Rupert L. Chapman III, Ph.D. is a retired field archaeologist and Curator of Levantine Antiquities at The British Museum.