Ruy Teixeria, a political columnist writing in The Liberal Patriot, is the latest in a long line of commentators admonishing liberals and Democrats for their endless berating of Trump and MAGA – not so much loud objection to their behaviors, for which objections should absolutely be raised, but the manner of objection. Stop with the name-calling is the message.
“It is my sad duty to remind the gathering legions of anti-fascist fighters: it didn’t work last time and it won’t work this time.,” he wrote. “‘Trump, Trump, Trump, fascist, fascist, fascist, Trump, Trump, Trump, racist, racist, racist’ has repeatedly failed to stem the populist tide.”
He also points out, “The F-bomb has another political disadvantage: It disparages everyone who voted for Trump by implication.”
Calling Trump supporters ‘racist’ and ‘Nazis’ and ‘deplorable’ expresses justified anger and even outrage – and it certainly feels good, getting it off our chests – but it is only making a terrible situation much worse, making a difficult problem that much harder to solve.
In the first place, it’s often untrue; while some of these people are unquestionably racist and bigoted (and willfully ignorant, and morally onerous), many are not; having a lower level of empathy and a strong impulse to huddle in the security of tribe (both of which are as innate as eye color) is not the same thing as a bona fide belief in one’s superiority based on skin tone.
And even where it is true, shouting these things at them isn’t helping. It’s gasoline on a fire that’s already far out of control. Many things liberals and Democrats are saying in response to all that’s happening are justified and understandable, but if they want to seriously stem the tide, they need to zip it where the name-calling is concerned.
Here's why.
There are many moving parts in the social brain, and the irony pervading them all is that our perceptions, responses, decisions and actions are built on many different layers of cognition – and that’s only the conscious zone of our thoughts (and feelings). Once we dig into these dynamics, we rapidly realize that almost nothing we see in the behavior of others is what we think it is: the political trait of rallying for an authoritarian strongman, for instance, is actually a manifestation of the inherited neurological trait of a large amygdala and a small insular cortex.
And it’s the same with the interactions between those authoritarian followers – a more academic (and accurate) term for ‘racists’ and ‘Nazis’ and ‘deplorables’ – and those of us who find their rhetoric and behavior offensive and dangerous. It has many layers, and there’s stuff going on in our brains as a result of these interactions that we aren’t consciously aware of.
This latest piece of the social cognition puzzle comes to us by way of Robert Sapolsky, a Berkeley primatologist whose expertise includes a deep understanding of – wait for it! – testosterone.
Most of us have the layperson’s basic understanding of testosterone – that it is the cornerstone of aggression in men, a sex hormone, and the key component in masculinity. That’s an oversimplification, of course; women also have testosterone, just in lower amounts. And there are other things about testosterone most people don’t know.
“Testosterone does not invent aggression; testosterone exaggerates pre-existing social patterns of aggression,” Sapolsky explained. “What testosterone really does is, when your [social] status is being challenged, testosterone makes you do whatever you need to do to maintain status. You can have an economic game where people get status by making generous offers, and give people testosterone, and they become more generous in the game. In other words, if you shot up a whole bunch of Buddhist monks with testosterone, they would run amok doing random acts of kindness all over the place.”
That’s a very powerful distinction. We all tend to assume that testosterone makes us aggressive and even violent, because that’s what we often observe in the world around us. But what we’re really seeing is a status preservation response in a social universe where status is dispensed, not by the group, but by social dominators. In egalitarian communities (Paleolithic tribes, Native Americans pre-European invasion), status isn’t handed down; it’s uniform, and group-secured. In such an environment, members reward cooperation with status, rather than aggression.
Put another way by Sapolsky, “The trouble isn’t that testosterone makes us aggressive; the trouble is that we reward aggression with status so readily.”
Donald Trump may be the greatest recipient of status awarded for aggression in all of time and history, in Sapolskian terms, and his MAGA legions have ridden a similar escalator into political prominence: the more their status has been threatened, the more aggressive they’ve become. And that’s not a new story: social dominators through the ages have mustered vast followings of angry soldiers by the same means.
What the Left doesn’t seem to get is that their constant challenges to MAGA, with the perpetual name-calling and derision and denunciation imparts no shame or rebuke at all; it simply kicks up the threat and status-challenge level in the MAGA brain, making them that much more aggressive. The Left is not only failing to curb the aggression; they’re fueling it, making their own job much harder.
And the Sapolsky dynamic also explains our current political landscape in broader terms, surfacing a problem we may not have fully realized.
For many decades now, Western society has made slow but steady social progress – bolstering civil rights, the rights of women, recognition and support for LGBTQ, tolerance of other faiths. Since the Fifties, there has been victory after victory – hard-won, of course – leading to such landmark events as national recognition of gay marriage.
And each of these victories has represented a serious threat to the social status of the authoritarian follower – the traditional white Christian population that has exercised social dominance in the US since its founding.
We could plot these events as graphs and see aggression rising alongside equality: it’s no overstatement to call this synchronization a high-volume testosterone generator – in a society where aggression is rewarded with status.
Where are we now? We’re in the early stages of an all-out MAGA war on DEI. Why? Because the more equal our society gets, the more threat-to-status aggression is triggered.
And shouting at them only boosts the threat.
What is the answer? Sapolsky has already provided it: stop rewarding aggression with status. Start dispensing status, or affirming and supporting status, as a reward for something else.
Historically, that something else is cooperation. Sapolsky, in his discussion, suggests generosity. There are, of course, many other desirable alternatives that would make the situation much better and have far greater impact.
These ideas will frustrate those who feel emotional relief when they express their disdain for behaviors that they (rightly) find very offensive. The answer to that is simple: express your disdain, get it off your chest – but to each other, and privately.
When it comes to our public behavior, we need to take a page from George Lakoff, who has explained to us that framing is everything: when we are constantly responding to the rhetoric and memes of those who are harming our society, we are enmeshing ourselves in their frame, and that only bolsters their cause. We must, we must start deploying our own frames, rather than strengthening theirs.
That, of course, is hard work, requiring deep commitment. But aren’t we angry with them in the first place because of our deep commitment? Isn’t our fealty to human dignity and social justice what causes our revulsion to racism and bigotry and misogyny? Doesn’t our loyalty to those values require more investment than our drive-by condescension and meme-shaming?
Testosterone. It’s what’s for dinner. Let’s repurpose it…