Donald Trump’s claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, this month were bizarre and outlandish, but they worked. Within days, the city had become what Gov. Mike DeWine called the “epicenter of vitriol over America’s immigration policy.”
Soon, it was awash in bomb threats. The accusations divided not only the city’s residents but also Americans more broadly. A recent poll suggests that more than half of Trump supporters accept his unsubstantiated allegations as true while only 4 percent of Kamala Harris’s supporters do.
Fractious rhetoric has always been a feature of politics. But it is still difficult to discern why such appeals resonate so much now. Taking a few steps back to an early diagnostician of divisiveness, the prickly 18th-century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, can help.
Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind,” in which he explored the origins and effects of economic inequality on societies, is perhaps his most enduring work. In it, he observed that unequal societies are inevitably divided into two diametrically opposed classes, rich and poor. While the poor struggle to liberate themselves from poverty and oppression, the rich and powerful employ clever techniques to maintain their wealth, power and status.
Inequality wasn’t new to the 18th century. It had been a central attribute of the feudal world. But its ability to survive feudalism’s decline during the Enlightenment was alarming, and it became increasingly important for Rousseau to understand the techniques by which it was maintained.
One tool that sustained inequality, Rousseau observed, was divisiveness. It is, he observed, in conditions of extreme inequality that cynical leaders would foment “everything that might weaken men united in society, by promoting dissension among them” and sowing the “seeds of real division.” Those in power accomplish this, he speculated, by fostering a “mutual hatred and distrust, by setting the rights and interests of one against those of another.”
In a world where a few have much and the many have comparatively little, political leaders seek to distract the people from the fact of their meager wealth and status. They can achieve this by pitting the relatively poor against one another. So long as the poor come to see other segments of their economic class as “the problem,” the position of the rich and powerful is secure.
The rhetoric of division is, for Rousseau, a tool of distraction. This is why he elsewhere cautioned the people against being “seduced by private interests which some few skillful men succeed by their reputation and eloquence to substitute for the people’s own interest.” Namely, he worried about the talents of skillful demagogues.
Beyond this, however, Rousseau probed the question of why such techniques succeed, since, as the formidable Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar once observed, “he was foremost a psychologist.” The divisive techniques of skilled orators, Rousseau wrote, work because people in conditions of inequality “look more below than above them,” such that “domination becomes dearer to them than independence.” That is, Rousseau understood that the greatest comforts of people in unequal societies are the sense that they are still better off than some others and the conviction that they might even exercise some power over them. Bomb threats against schools teaching migrant children is despicable on any just moral system, but it is also likely experienced as a form of power by those issuing the threats.
The inequality that concerned Rousseau in the 18th century has not abated in the 21st. According to some measures, American inequality, in particular, has soared to levels unseen since the Gilded Age, accompanied by genuine sentiments of financial insecurity, as the foundations of the recent period of sustained postwar equality — secure manufacturing jobs with health care and pensions — have become distant memories, particularly in small Midwestern cities like Springfield. This is the necessary context for Mr. Trump’s appeals, and a big part of why they land powerfully with so many voters.
While the racial dimension was not part of Rousseau’s diagnosis, it fits seamlessly into the strategy he describes. America’s uncomfortable history of racial prejudices only facilitate such divisions, even among those who share much in common economically. It probably does not matter to Mr. Trump or his running mate, JD Vance, whether Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets. What matters politically is that it causes one segment of the working poor to turn against another.
Just as Rousseau might have predicted.
The post Why Is Trump Spreading Rumors About Haitian Immigrants? Rousseau Knows. appeared first on New York Times.
