Re:Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided ...
by hn_throwaway_99 on Saturday November 07, 2020 @10:12PM
(#25022517)
My pet theory is similar, but slightly more nuanced, and comes from my history of being harshly bullied in middle school.
The group dynamics of bullying are pretty straightforward. There will always be bullies at the top who want to cement their status by showing their power as a bully. To get a significant group of people to go along with the bullying, however, (think everyone laughing along when the bully makes fun of someone) that group needs to be really unsure of their place in the social hierarchy. They know bullying is wrong but at that point are somewhat terrified of ending up on the wrong side of the bullying. That's why you see so much bullying in middle school, where kids are usually just starting to find their place in the social hierarchy.
I think in the US (and many Western democracies) there is currently so much unease about economics, about finding a good, and more importantly, stable job, that the situation is ripe for a bully to come along and take advantage of people's general worries about their place in the world to think "better for me to be a bully myself than to be the person that ends up on the bottom of the totem pole". Think of the crowd laughing along when Trump mocked a reporter with cerebral palsy.
When you couple this with large, structural racial changes in the US, it's not hard to see how Trump was able to take advantage.
The group dynamics of bullying are pretty straightforward. There will always be bullies at the top who want to cement their status by showing their power as a bully. To get a significant group of people to go along with the bullying, however, (think everyone laughing along when the bully makes fun of someone) that group needs to be really unsure of their place in the social hierarchy. They know bullying is wrong but at that point are somewhat terrified of ending up on the wrong side of the bullying. That's why you see so much bullying in middle school, where kids are usually just starting to find their place in the social hierarchy.
I think in the US (and many Western democracies) there is currently so much unease about economics, about finding a good, and more importantly, stable job, that the situation is ripe for a bully to come along and take advantage of people's general worries about their place in the world to think "better for me to be a bully myself than to be the person that ends up on the bottom of the totem pole". Think of the crowd laughing along when Trump mocked a reporter with cerebral palsy.
When you couple this with large, structural racial changes in the US, it's not hard to see how Trump was able to take advantage.