The Roots of Trumpism, Part I: The Birth of a Crisis Cult

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

Photo: White House archives. Public Domain. …

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.