“Pocketbook” issues such as grocery prices are central to voters, but only up to a point. More fundamental, though rarely articulated, are genetically hardwired values resting on 750,000 years of human evolution. These “primordial values” make humans distinctly human.
These primal drives are bred into our species, and their power reflects eons of evolution. No need to teach children to fear snakes; toddlers instinctively flee them.
These deeper values include an aversion to outsiders — people who are physically distinctive, speak a foreign tongue, or behave oddly. This aversion makes perfect sense, since, over human history, encountering outsiders often ended badly. Just ask the Aztecs. For human survival, xenophobia is deeply embedded in our psychology. The desire for diversity is unnatural.
Add the importance of one’s family and relatives. The state’s protection of people and property is a recent innovation. For millennia, people relied on kinsfolk for personal safety and sustenance. Those who lacked blood relatives were invariably defenseless and thus seldom had progeny.
Add the instinct to protect the vulnerable. Human society abounds with the vulnerable, and absent strong protection, Homo sapiens would go extinct. Children are especially defenseless, given their slow physical development, and women need protection from predators. A society that refuses to protect children and women has no future.
A functioning society also requires a common faith, whether a shared religion or a sense of national identity that motivates people to defend “one’s people.” Nor can society survive if people reject the prevailing morality as “arbitrary” while condemning sacred symbols and shared history. Groups of nihilist strangers, who share nothing, are easy pray for socially cohesive enemies. Why fight to the death to defend those who reject your values?
Donald Trump’s campaign embodied these primordial values, whereas Kamala Harris’s blithely ignored or even contradicted them.
Trump’s appeal to the primordial is best exemplified by his relentless patriotism. The phrase “Make America Great Again” was ubiquitous, along with U.S. flags everywhere. “America First” was a key message. Dressed in a blue suit and a white shirt, Trump often appeared in a bright red MAGA baseball cap, and the hat soon became the campaign’s most identifiable symbol.
For Trump, “inclusion” meant that everyone is an American regardless of other traits, not slicing and dicing people into endless “communities.” When he entered the stage, people always heard Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a song whose lyrics are almost jingoistic. One has almost to go back to WWII to see such patriotic fervor.
Thousands of supporters spontaneously chanted “USA! USA!” Trump’s entrance into football stadiums and boxing matches, frequently accompanied by his children, generated excitement that could not be manufactured. This boisterous outpouring undoubtedly terrified his enemies, who responded by labeling him “a fascist.” It’s hard to imagine similar spontaneous over-the-top pro-America outbursts at a Kamala rally.
There were also his relentless attacks on illegal aliens who easily violated our borders. For Trump and his supporters, this was a violation of national sovereignty: outsiders were taking our land and occupying our cities while the Biden/Harris administration stood by, powerless. He called many of them violent criminals, lunatics, and likely terrorists, and this characterization only sharpened the “us versus them” distinction. Trump stressed his vigorous stand-our-ground commitment to massive deportation by promising that it would begin on day one of his administration and be enforced by tough-as-nails U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. This violation element was driven home by his retelling of the murders and sexual assaults inflicted on attractive young women like Laken Riley. His rallies thus became a cathartic experience of the first order.
Meanwhile, his focus on men playing in women’s sports eschewed the biology of chromosomes or arcane legal issues in favor of the visceral: stopping physical damage inflicted by men on young girls, a plea that deeply resonated with the millions of parents whose daughters play sports. Add men “invading” women’s locker rooms and bathrooms. Again, Trump invoked hardwired instinctual beliefs: young girls need strong men to protect them, and Donald J. Trump is the man. As he himself said, he would protect women “whether they like it or not.” Men as protectors is an intuitively grasped truth since humans began walking upright.
The contrast between Trump’s and Harris’s campaigns was huge. He demanded that young women be kept safe from murder and rape, whereas Kamala Harris prioritized their “reproductive freedom.” Trump further enhanced his protective persona by surrounding himself with machismo figures like the super-sized former wrestler Hulk Hogan. By contrast, the Harris campaign featured multiple woke female celebrities like Oprah Winfrey. People don’t see Hollywood celebrities as protectors. Even Harris’s “manly” V.P. nominee, Tim Walz, came across as a girly wimp.
The transgender debate reinforced these divergent appeals. Trump was unequivocally opposed to chemically castrating young boys with hormonal therapy and surgically transforming young girls into boys. When confronted with her past support for this “gender-affirming care” surgery, Harris lamely responded with, “I’d follow the law.” According to a leading Harris super-PAC, Trump’s commercials highlighting her support for surgical genital mutilation cost her 2.7% of the vote, a significant number in a close contest. Americans were undoubtedly physically repulsed by hormonal castration or removing children’s reproductive organs and found it difficult to support a candidate who endorsed these stomach-turning procedures simply because “it is legal.”
The contrast between protecting women and children physically and protecting abortion cannot be exaggerated. Parents will die to protect their children, and everyone witnessed it at Trump’s Butler, Pa. rally. And when Trump returned to Butler, he honored Corey Comperatore at length. Without the instinctive sacrifices parents make for their offspring, Homo sapiens would have long gone extinct. But hardly anybody will die to protect “reproductive freedom.” That Harris is well past childbearing age and childless conceivably explains her coolness to protecting children, but just ask any mother about mutilating her daughter to cure teenage gender dysphoria. Nearly all would answer, “Over my dead body!” Trump, who has two daughters and several granddaughters, probably understood this deeply rooted emotion, and it showed.
It was as if Trump’s campaign was broadcasting its messages on two distinct communications channels. The first offered various policy-related appeals — for example, no tax on tips. The second, however, focused on deeper, primordial issues — promoting national unity, protecting vulnerable women and children, and thwarting “bad foreigners” from terrorizing Americans. Trump was connecting with a part of the human brain shaped over tens of thousands of years that Harris totally ignored.
Consider that thousands of people drove all day and waited hours in sweltering heat beforehand to gain entrance to Trump’s rallies. Attendees did not wait untold hours to hear details about Trump’s tax policies. Harris, by contrast, relied on abortion and a litany of shopworn government proposals such as “building an opportunity economy.”
Trump was willing to take a bullet to protect women from rape and murder while repelling eleven million invaders. Faced with Trump’s emotion-laden messages, Kamala doubled down on highly paid celebrities and word salad.
Kamala Harris may have had Taylor Swift in her corner, but Trump had Mother Nature, and Mother Nature always wins.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr (cropped).
