Opinion: The travails of disinhibition

A flag with President Donald Trump holding a rocket launcher as a Rambo figure is seen in front of the New Hampshire State House in 2020. File photo
Published: 11-17-2024 6:00 AM |
John Buttrick writes from his Vermont Folk Rocker in his Concord home, Minds Crossing. He can be reached at johndbuttrick@gmail.com
Along with friends and the media, I’ve been trying to understand the dynamic behind Donald Trump being elected to be our next president. One of the prevailing explanations is that voters know what the new president is like and it doesn’t matter to them.
They are focusing on their own personal finances, their feelings of powerlessness, their being among the unappreciated, and the fear of immigrants and refugees. This all sounds very obvious, but there is more to be considered. The results of the election raise up two questions: who is a normal American? And what is the meaning of the strong male vote for President Trump? I suggest that the answers overlap.
In my life span, there has been significant change in the role of men in society. In my early years, it was considered normal for the male in the family to work outside the home to bring home the bacon. My mother was trained as a secretary but after marriage, she became the cook and bottlewasher, the house cleaner and clothes washer, the manager of the household finances, and had primary responsibility for raising her four children.
Also, during our years living on the farm, my mother was the one who put down, canned, and froze the harvested food that would feed us through the winter. My father would come home from work to practice his woodworking hobby, repair and remodel the house, and occasionally discipline me or one of my siblings. He was also the initiator of dinner table conversations, inviting his children into the world of adult discussions about politics and social issues. Those were the days!
Many of the Trump supporters harken back to those “great days,” normal for men. Up to the 1960s, men were the ones called to war as well as the ones with the physical prowess for construction and manufacturing work. Real men were physically strong and used strong language. As teenage boys, we taught each other how to swear and curse among ourselves and learned to compete in games like football, basketball and baseball.
(My father did not swear in my presence, but I remember comparing my arm muscles with my father’s and feeling like a man when joining him in harvesting a cord of firewood using axes and crosscut saws). Meaningful male work required brawn and mechanical skill.
However, today, over fifty years later, the expectations of those “great days” have been challenged with other realities. Our changing culture accepts real men to be stay-at-home dads, the mediators in conflicts, skillful in censoring their language, and to perform meaningful work using the mind and scholarship. They can be nurses, kindergarten teachers, and office workers. They are also expected to be unthreatened by the open honest reality of a non-binary humanity, LGBTQ+.
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These role changes have left many men behind, that is until Donald Trump’s behavior; which includes misogyny, xenophobia, bullying, and mendacity; pointed them back to the head of the line. The conduct of the new leader of our country personifies a return to male domination.
Fintan O’Toole, writing for the New York Review of Books, points out that this disinhibition is becoming the norm for Americans. Indeed, Trump’s behavior matters. The irony is, according to O’Toole, “unfiltered behavior is perceived as an indication of honesty, truthfulness, and authentically being among ‘the boys.’” Censoring words is believed to lead to deceptions. Real men say it like it is. They do not soften the language.
This backlash against contemporary societal norms contributes significantly to the explanation for Donald Trump winning the election. It accounts for the heavy male vote for Trump as well as the vote from admirers of Trump’s bluster. But we must not lose sight of the consequences of Trump’s victory – the retro-definition of a normal American.
O’Toole writes, “People become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges … obviously applied to Trump’s increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. But it now must also apply to the institutions of American government… (therefore) Trump will have no one to regulate his urges.” It will no longer be necessary to be polite or soft on rivals.
Those who think the U.S. cannot afford to gamble its future on “a carnival barker, a wild improviser, and a reckless disrupter,” have the task of creating an alternative movement that is clear and coherent enough to break out of the coming madhouse. It takes strength, not weakness, to overcome impulses and fear. It takes compassion to overcome a diminishment of the motives of asylum seekers. It takes curiosity and good reasoning to overcome paranoia and conspiracy theories.
It takes a command of clear precise language to overcome expletives and name calling. It takes active listening to overcome assumptions and unwarranted judgments. And it takes seeing all human beings as neighbors to overcome cruelty and ethnic cleansing.
We humans have it in us to normalize good order, respect for one another, and focus upon the health of our country and its inhabitants. We can overcome disinhibition. Let’s get started.