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Anthropology has long challenged etic characterizations of the contradictory other, highlighting the logics of putatively backward subjects. Recent punditry on Donald Trump’s election echoes this ethnographic imperative, calling on concerned citizens to empathetically listen to the otherized Trump Voter to resolve the alleged contradictions in his worldview. This article calls for a different ethnographic approach to elucidating this confounding political moment. Instead of searching for coherent subjects beneath Red State contradictions, we must explore the ways in which today’s caustic politics give a particular shape to the inconsistencies and illogical predilections endemic to the human condition. Drawing from interviews with several Trump supporters and anthropological literature on political subjecthood in Argentina, Indonesia, Micronesia, and Sierra Leone, I highlight three ethnographic insights on contradictions that destabilize the alleged “spectrum” of deliberative political subjects. In so doing, I situate the United States’ current political landscape within the broader existential paradoxes salient to human society.
Myles Lennon (Mon,) studied this question.