This commentary is by Lane Felting, a psychologist who grew up in Sharon and moved back to town when the Covid-19 pandemic began to spend some time actively writing.
How did the party of Lincoln become the party of Trump?
Trump is often said to be a symptom of a larger sickness in America, and this analogy has its merits.
I see it differently. Trump is a prototypical phenotype of what was once the dominant strain of Americanism. As Americans, we each have our individual DNA, but we also have a larger, cultural genome. This cultural DNA is comprised of our laws, our institutions, our churches and our traditions.
One of these traditions is racism. Racism has been a part of America for the whole of our history, and it remains a part of us today. When this racism has been threatened — during Reconstruction, during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and during the presidency of Barack Obama — many white people have responded with violence and oppression of people of color.
It’s as if the threat of racial parity throws a switch in a segment of white America, and citizens who have hitherto been peaceful, law-abiding and church-going choose to become a ravening mob, bent on unspeakable violence.
We find this sudden change in behavior unnerving because we do not believe that our behavior is shaped by our cultural DNA. In other domains, we expect and even welcome radical shifts in behavior of this magnitude. For example, upon reaching puberty, we experience profound shifts in behavior. Whereas the preadolescent child is often anxious when left alone, teenagers crave alone-time.
This shift, which is accompanied by dramatic physical changes, is important for eventual self-sufficiency, and is a normal developmental stage. It does not occur because the teenager’s DNA (or genotype) has changed but rather because a surge in hormones results in a change in the expression of those genes: a change in phenotype.
A less benign example is seen in grasshoppers. Grasshoppers are typically solitary creatures making their ungainly way through life. However, when stressed — for instance, by a drought — they morph from the ordinary grasshoppers we know into the plagues of locusts we read of in the Bible: devourers of nations.
This change from grasshopper to locust is also a change in phenotype. Stress causes the activation of particular DNA and a change in behavior results.
In humans, psychopathy is also thought to be a phenotype. Certain individuals (usually male) have a genetic predisposition to psychopathy that is expressed when the individual undergoes prolonged stress in childhood, typically through abuse. This stress activates the relevant genes, and the individual becomes a monster, preying on the very society that supports him.
Many in the Republican Party are undergoing a similar metamorphosis. They have perceived a threat to the white hegemony that has prevailed in this country since its founding, and have chosen to activate the racist gene in their cultural genome.
That choice triggers a metamorphosis and they become unrecognizable “raciopaths”: willing to sacrifice truth, the rule of law, freedom of the press, and Christian values to gain their ends. They are even willing to sacrifice our representational democracy before admitting racial parity. Writers such as W.E.B. Dubois and Richard Wright recognized this tendency in white America and despaired.
Raciopaths respond to criticism by other Americans just as I am disposed to respond when a friend criticizes my family: I take exception. I can criticize my family, but my friends are rarely afforded that right. They do not share our genetic material, and I find myself closing ranks against them. So too, raciopaths close ranks against anyone with the temerity to suggest that America has flaws. Such criticism is inadmissible from anyone who has not chosen to express the racist cultural gene.
The irony is that many of the actions of raciopaths are antithetical to traditional American values such as freedom of expression and the rule of law.
The Republican Party has been overrun by raciopaths, just as raciopaths dominated the Democratic Party prior to the Civil War. Neither party is particularly susceptible or resistant to raciopathy — it is a phenotype of the dominant white culture as surely as your height is phenotypical of your DNA.
For the phenotypes with which we have long experience (for example, psychopathy), we know what must be done. For American raciopathy, our experience is only as long as the American Experiment itself, and we have repeatedly shown that we really do not know what to do when it confronts us.
This time we must decide to defeat it, or the American Experiment will turn out to have been the American Tragedy: a nation whose devotion to freedom and liberty for all was what made it great, and whose inability to grant freedom and liberty to all its people, regardless of skin color, also brought about its ruin.
