WHAT'S THAT SMELL? YOUR POLITICS MAY FOLLOW YOUR NOSE!

You've arrived at your current political stance through a thoughtful integration of your family values, personal experience, education, moral development, and social and economic observations, right?

Not very likely, implies new research about the relationship between how people react to body odors and their politics. If you are disgusted by smells such as sweat or urine, you may very well be drawn to authoritarian political leaders like Donald Trump.

 Trump shows his disgust

Remember Trump's reaction to Hillary Clinton's bathroom break during the last Democratic debate?

“I know where she went, it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting . . ."

I have no way of knowing if Trump's frequent verbal and facial expressions of disgust--at women, immigrants, minorities, blood, sweat, breastfeeding, people eating, babies, reporters, weakness and who knows what else, are genuine or feigned. But either way, he knows his audience.

Evidence for a link between finding body odors repugnant and authoritarian politics and despotic leadership comes from a series of studies carried out by researchers in Sweden and Greece. They used a carefully designed set of questions to measure the degree to which online participants reported being disgusted by scenarios involving exposure to other people's bad breath, sweat, urine, feces, etc.--their Body Odor Disgust Sensitivity (BODS). 

The researchers also measured participants' authoritarian attitudes on a 15-question Right-Wing Authoritariansm scale (RWA). As the following item from the scale indicates, it taps into desire for a strong leader, support for traditional values, and a punitive attitude towards "others" perceived as a threat:

"Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us."

Two separate studies showed a statistically significant link between body odor disgust sensitivity and authoritarianism--desire for a strong leader and traditional values plus a punitive stance towards threatening "others." A third study found a similar link between BODS scores and support for Trump, who was then just a candidate.

Interestingly for those who are still struggling to understand exactly whom Trump appealed to and why, the correlation between BODS and authoritarianism was strong enough to fully explain the link between BODS and support for Trump.

The implication is that, real or feigned, Trump's frequent and emphatic expressions of disgust at a wide variety of targets mirrored, authorized and amplified similar feelings among many Americans--and perhaps got them all the way to the voting booth.

The researchers hypothesize that this link may represent an exaggerated expression of a kind of social immune system--a reflex to avoid potential contamination. They write:

"From a behavioural immune system perspective, prejudice can be seen as a social
discriminatory behaviour partly motivated by the fact that pathogens represent an invisible
threat, and individuals with high levels of disgust sensitivity might be more likely to avoid
foreign people, and to promote policies that avoid the contact with them, because they are
perceived as potentially spreading unfamiliar pathogens, different hygienic or food habits."

They say that forewarned is forearmed. So the next time you see a politician making a disgusted face or voicing his or her disgust towards some other person or group, it might be time to step back, hold your nose, and realize that someone is trying hard to bypass your brain and send a message that goes straight from your nose to your finger pushing a "DONATE" button on your screen or a "VOTE" button in the voting booth.

Politics may stink, but we don't have to let the smells push our buttons, or determine which buttons we push.

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

The famous Milgram Experiments carried out at Yale in the early 1960’s and verified many times since then show that under the right conditions and given the overt or covert approval of authority figures, normally sane and rational people can carry out or allow others to engage in horrifying acts of aggression and cruelty towards their fellow human beings. One need look no further than current events in Myanmar involving the Rohingya minority, recent Sunni-Shiite atrocities in Syria and Iraq, Serbian attacks on Muslims in Bosnia or the Hutu massacres of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in the 1990’s to demonstrate the terrible destruction the right combination of conditions and leadership can provoke.

Donald Trump at a rally, May 5, 2016, Charleston, West Virginia. 

AFP PHOTO /BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

The question “Can it happen here?” is one which every American, regardless of party affiliation, political ideology or economic standing should be asking at this critical point in our national history. The alternative is to blindly assume that America is somehow exempt or immune from tides of history which have swept over so many other nations before us.

We have, for perhaps the first time, a Chief Executive whose authoritarian tendencies, ability to incite violent passions in significant portions of the population, lack of empathy towards minorities and vindictiveness toward those who stand against him significantly increase the possibility that, under the right conditions, this country as well could act out in a similarly destructive manner both at home and abroad.

The President has frequently demonstrated a willingness and even compulsion to assert his dominance by publicly humiliating and attacking members of his own Party and Administration—as well as gratuitously mocking and demeaning both his predecessors and political opponents. His seemingly boundless capacity for distorting and denying factual evidence while stirring up resentment toward vaguely-defined ‘others’, leaves little hope that he will observe any of the normally accepted rules of personal, social or political discourse or behavior.

By continually attacking the Press (“fake news”) for doing its job he has indicated either profound ignorance of or a deliberate effort to override Constitutional protections regarding freedom of speech and publication. In fact, even when his more cautious advisers have counseled restraint, he has acted as though restrictions on executive power were inconveniences to be ignored or disregarded rather than guidelines carefully designed to preserve the balance of powers necessary for democratic government.

Rather than seeking to understand and heal national or international divisions, President Trump revels in every opportunity to stir controversy and provoke passionate reactions, tweeting relentlessly about alleged ‘wars on Christmas,’ ‘wars on coal,’ ‘disrespect toward the flag;’ or demeaning a foreign leader as ‘Rocket Man’ while heightening tensions with Iran over a nuclear deal hammered-out by the US and multiple powers.

It is not difficult to imagine conditions under which a Trump-led administration would find it nearly irresistible to identify those with differing political interests, ideological beliefs and religious practices, as well as ethnic characteristics, not merely as legitimate opponents but as ‘enemies of the state,’ a term he has already dredged from what the New York Times has called a “Venomous Past.” A serious economic crisis such as that in 2007-2008; the outbreak of war in Asia; a damaging terrorist act on our homeland could provide the necessary excuse.  Each of these scenarios would heighten public polarization and facilitate a default to strong administrative action. Legal restraints would inevitably yield to aggressive policing behavior and the suppression of dissent. In such a moment of crisis, Congressional reaction would likely follow the President’s lead.

For the most part, the American political system has succeeded by containing differences--with the Civil War being the great exception—due ultimately to the recognition by those in power that dissent need not be perceived as disloyalty and that compromise is ultimately more powerful than winning at all cost.  Periods of enormous tension such as those during the “Red Scares” following World Wars I and II and the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960’s and ‘70’s tested the system to, and at times, beyond its limits.  But it is this current test, occurring during a period of relative peace and prosperity but enormous cultural, technological and economic upheaval that may well provide its greatest challenge yet.

Never before has so much of our future fallen into the hands of a leader who seems unwilling, and perhaps psychologically unable to abide by either the formal or informal rules and standards of democratic governance.  Checks and balances are fine on paper, but, like paper, they can far-too-easily be blown away by tumultuous winds stirred by the unstable combination of crisis, unfettered passion and the authoritarian proclivities of a populist leader.

Les Adler

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