The question we must ask is: Why does an ordinary white American support the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump? What is in it for them? What do they get out of it? Trump certainly does not represent their economic interests. So, what can it be?

The answer can only be this: Trump provides his supporters a public medium (or social space) to openly enjoy their hate. But what is hate? Interestingly enough, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Spinoza asked this very question in his compact book Ethics, one of the greatest works of Western philosophy. He asked: What is hate? His answer: It is what you feel toward a person who makes you unhappy. And what does being unhappy involve? The feeling that your power to act has been diminished by this person. (For Spinoza, the power to act is literally the freedom to move, to get around, to be in motion.) This check on your body's power to act might be real or imagined.

But Spinoza also points out that there are two main passions: joy and unhappiness (or sadness). Now Joy is interesting because it can either be the feeling that your power has increased (freedom) or the feeling that the power of someone else—the one you really, really hate—has decreased. The first is a positive passion; the second kind is a negative one, because it is a joy that does not increase your power to act. You are still a sad person.

This is how the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it in a lecture he delivered 15 years before he jumped out of a window and died:

The man of hate, the man of resentment, etc., for Spinoza, is the one all of whose joys are poisoned by the initial sadness... In the end he can only derive joy from sadness. Sadness that he experiences himself by virtue of the existence of the other, sadness that he imagines inflicting on the other to please himself, all of this is for measly joys, says Spinoza.

Is this not the definition of a person (man or woman) who supports Trump? Is this not the nature of their joy? Theirs is not a joy that comes from joy, the power to act, to move, to be in motion—the mode of a free person.

The GOP is worried because for over three decades it refused to provide its base, its sad voters (a class of working-class whites), any real opportunity to enjoy their sadness. The party wanted to look respectable, to appear to be the party of freedom, which is only the joy from being joyful. Trump seized on this raw opportunity—that many in the base wanted to enjoy their hate for once—and transformed it into a movement that's transporting him to the center of American politics, right to the magic circle that surrounds the seat of the highest office in the world.