By Professor John Bone, School of Social Sciences, University of Aberdeen
The events at the Trump rally on 13 July 2024 provided yet one more tragic illustration of how political behaviour can all too readily move from rational debate to violent action.
Political violence is, of course, sadly far from new and can happen in a wide range of circumstances. However, from the standpoint of the present, this incident appears as just another, albeit serious, symptom of the wider malaise that has been growing in the US and elsewhere for some time, where the fabric of our societies has seemingly been unravelling and anger, incivility, intolerance and aggression - from the interpersonal to the geopolitical - have become increasingly unrestrained.
The obvious question is how did we arrive at this point? To understand this more fully we need to look beyond superficial explanations to consider how we engage with each other and the societies we inhabit in greater depth, taking account of the biosocial processes that govern how we think, feel and act.
A critical issue in terms of our engagement with the world is that we are ill-equipped to deal with many of the complexities and demands presented by the societies we have created, a limitation rooted in our neurological functioning that has widespread implications. Our development has left us with limited conscious and attentional capacities that are regularly tested by complexity, too many simultaneous demands and environmental stimuli, a surfeit of novel situations where our well-practiced routines seem inadequate, as well as challenges to the worldview we have internalised and rely upon to make sense of our experiences and guide our actions.
In response to these types of challenges, we get stressed. A modicum of controlled short-term stress can be beneficial, psychologically and physically however prolonged stress can render us more responsive to environmental stressors, significantly where the amygdala (a key structure associated with fear, anger, as well as evaluation of experience), becomes sensitized and ‘trigger happy’. Uncontrolled stress can also impair the functioning of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), associated with working memory, higher-order thinking, and inhibition of emotion.
Applying these observations to social processes, when we experience significant difficulty in dealing with the demands and challenges of living in complex societies, thought and action become vulnerable to being overridden by anger and fear, reducing our capacity for clear thinking, rational reflection and sober calculation as we engage with each other and the world around us.
Related to this are epigenetic effects (changes to DNA expression) that also affect us neurologically, while impacting our immune systems and contributing to accelerated ageing. Recent evidence also suggests that epigenetic changes affecting one generation, while potentially reversible, can be passed to the next, offering further insight with respect to the negative effects of socio-economic disparities and environmental adversity.
The negative consequences of our inherent difficulties in adapting to complexity and unpredictability, as well as anxieties around social status, have understandably become more prevalent since expanding capitalism, industrialisation and urbanisation rapidly transformed the conditions in which people lived out their lives.
As with many aspects of modern life, however, this has not been a level playing field. Until the early 20th century, the advent of the capitalist, industrial economy and society entailed an increased level of comfort and significant insulation from many of modernity’s adversities for a gilded minority, often gained at the expense of the lives of drudgery, poverty, chronic insecurity and social exclusion imposed on the majority.
Arduous and poorly paid work, overcrowded, squalid and expensive housing, unbridgeable inequality, alienation and fractured communities were the order of the day for many of the masses of less favoured. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries the assertedly ‘free market’ organisation of the economy delivered these conditions, while producing social and political upheaval and successive economic crises, greatly aided by an underregulated financial sector, culminating with the Great Crash and subsequent economic depression.
The resultant social and political fallout was, of course, a key factor leading to the second global war within little more than a generation. In the aftermath of the war, a spillover of wartime solidarity, together with the perceived threat from below amid fear of communism, led policymakers to advance agendas aimed at tempering some of the excesses, instabilities and inequities that had hitherto destabilised economy and society.
Central to this economic and political shift was the post-war social contract that improved workers’ rights, pay and conditions, access to more affordable and higher quality housing, an improved welfare safety net, and the constraining of the power of the financial and corporate sector, all of which offered a measure of security and stability for increasing numbers, at least for a time.
All of this, of course, is a very well-worn narrative, as is the story of the dissolution of these arrangements with the advent of neoliberalism, the political and economic ‘revolution’ fronted by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the US and UK respectively, that rolled back the relatively high tax and regulated post-war arrangements that had only been very grudgingly accepted by financial and corporate powers.
As we also know, this led to the deregulation, privatization, financialization and rapid globalization of the world economy from the 1980s onwards. Over time, this has delivered a return to insecure work and stagnating wages, expensive and insecure housing, as well as crumbling public services and infrastructure, withering welfare provision, rampant inequality, growing poverty and destitution, within an ever more atomized and unforgiving, status-obsessed, aspirational culture, all of which has exacted a high price on individual lives while, once more, shaking the foundations of our civilisation and the legitimacy of our political institutions.
The heightened emotional temperature of the current era produced by this reset has, of course, also been greatly exacerbated by the growth of social media. The algorithms employed by social media giants are deftly tailored to monetise our attention by cultivating and amplifying our fears, enmities and desires while also adding further layers of complexity and status anxiety to already agitated publics.
Repetitive and emotionally charged content shapes and hardens opinion, including political opinion, transforming differences into silos of mutual distaste and even hatred. The desire for escape and to find a sense of positive identity, community and, above all, hope, also renders social media a potent platform for political or other figures looking to exploit growing disaffection, disorientation and disenchantment for their own ends, as they offer affiliation, visions of an idyllic future (often based on distorted visions of the past), together with simplistic solutions and stigmatised targets on which to channel negative feelings.
While presenting themselves as champions of the underdog, many demagogic populists also advance economic policies largely favouring elite interests that threaten to further dispossess many of their followers, potentially deepening this descent.
The traditional political establishment in Western nations has, of course, been complicit in further catalysing these conditions, as leading political parties with increasingly little to differentiate them have tended to champion business and financial interests, marketisation and private wealth accumulation over public well-being. Hence, less favoured sectors of society have felt increasingly disenfranchised, reflected in growing distrust of mainstream politics and low electoral turnouts.
In the UK and across Europe right-wing populism has been on the march, in what were once considered solid liberal democracies. Even where they have not gained power, populists are knocking at the door, as in France where hard-right electoral success was recently only averted by a concerted collective effort. It has been suggested that we have notably bucked this trend in the UK, citing the Labour Party’s recent landslide majority. However, this was wind-assisted by the electoral system and aided by the showing of Farage’s Reform Party from a standing start, while the prospect of some form of accommodation between Reform and an increasingly strident Conservative hard right raises the prospect that, should the Labour government fail to deliver, there may well be a significant reckoning at the next election.
In the US, Donald Trump’s escape from both the recent assassination attempt and some of his major legal woes has only enhanced his prospects of advancing his brand of right-wing, authoritarian populism, albeit that the entry of Kamala Harris as the Democrat nominee will potentially shift the dial. As the election approaches, however, current divisions will doubtless intensify and persist, regardless of the outcome, symptomatic of the emotional intensity of contemporary American politics.
Of course, what happened to Trump and particularly those who were injured and died in the attack was unconscionable. Paradoxically, however, while he cannot be held responsible for this incident, Trump’s consistently bellicose and confrontational rhetoric and cultish Maga following has been greatly culpable for the increasing virulence of America’s angry, divisive politics, as exemplified on January 6.
The chilling implications of what has recently been revealed by Project 2025’s agenda, the ‘manifesto’ published by a coalition of wealthy Trump-supporting organisations, has further amplified a good deal of anxiety for mainstream America. Plans to enact revolutionary change by extending the executive powers of a conservative president, having civil service workers replaced by MAGA loyalists, detention and deportation of alleged ‘aliens’, and tax cuts for the rich while slashing benefits for the poor, are just a few of the measures proposed in advancing a Christian Nationalist led ultra-Conservative regime unfettered by longstanding and once sacrosanct constitutional checks and balances.
While Trump has denied knowledge of or involvement with this initiative, the fact that it has been compiled by supporters and allies, including a crop of former Trump aides, has concentrated the minds of US liberals. As to violent rhetoric, the recent comment by Kevin Roberts, one of the key architects of the project, raised considerable alarm with his statement that ‘We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be’.
Overall, it does not seem unreasonable or overly hyperbolic to argue that we are in the midst of a new age of angst. This has been growing for some time, driven by our strident form of capitalism, its attendant injustices and inequalities, and the bewildering demands, widespread distress, disaffection and degraded culture that it has spawned.
These were the drivers of similar upheavals in the past that, after a brief hiatus in the mid-20th century, have been resurgent over recent decades, turbo-charged in our hyper-mediated societies and further cultivated by the opportunists and populists who claim to offer salvation to its victims. We now have new ways of understanding the myriad negative consequences that flow from such arrangements, arguably putting beyond serious debate as to why the current status quo is so individually and collectively corrosive.
The question as to how we address this negative spiral in a constructive manner - particularly as existing tensions may well be further compounded as we confront the great challenges posed by AI and climate change - is perhaps the central issue of our times.
Read more about these themes in Professor Bone’s book The Great Decline - From the Era of Hope and Progress to the Age of Fear and Rage.
