Writing by John Auerbach

Discussion with John  Auerbach

It seems to me that the biggest predictor of support, either side of the aisle, is geographical location. The center of the country, for the most part, goes one way while coastal urban regions go another. Worldwide, the same is true for other beliefs--religion, preference of political system, what is the most exciting sport, sexual mores, beliefs about the origin of humankind and the universe, and so on. Proxmity to others of the same belief system is overwhelmingly powerful and predictive.

Damon

(Dr. Auerbach reply)

In the US, we have seen a slow shift from class-dominated politics to politics dominated by race, ethnicity, religion, and culture. I don’t mean this is an absolute statement because racism is our country’s original sin, and waves of nativism have overtaken our country before, most notably in the 1840s through 1860s, with the influx of the predominantly Catholic Irish, in the 1910s and 1920s, with the influx of Jews, Italians, and Slavs, and in the current age, with the influx of Latinos, Middle Easterners, South Asians, and East Asians.  However, the  politics of the 1930s, saw the formation of the New Deal Coalition, uniting four groups—organized labor, African Americans, poor White Southerners, and various liberals, progressives, and socialists, groups that sometimes hated each other—against a capitalist elite represented by the Republican Party.  This New Deal Coalition fractured in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as a result of the collapse of organized labor and the rise of the anti war movement and a cultural revolution that gave rise first to feminism and then to the gay rights movement and, finally, to multiculturalism. Although all the current handwringing about multiculturalism and identity politics in our country forgets that the original identity politics in the US was the  privileging of white males, the cultural and therefore political divergence in the US is clearly between the multicultural and increasingly secular city and the monocultural and still religious country. The reason that coastal cities will be more liberal than inland cities is that ports, almost by definition, are likely to have greater cultural diversity, people coming and going, than will cities comprising ethnically homogenous natives.  

The Trump phenomenon clearly partakes of this split between the country and the city, a split that has defined every election since Bush 43 v. Gore in 2000, but in my opinion, this phenomenon goes well beyond the urban-rural divide in three ways—its open racism, more blatant than expressed by any Presidential politician since the late  Bush 41’s Willie Horton ad, the recent bout of hagiography since his death to the contrary; its open misogyny; and its open authoritarianism, the worst since Nixon was President.  These three things reflect the personality of Trump himself, and he is shameless in his views, as he is in his cupidity, with his shamelessness giving of comfort to a basket of deplorables who hold similar beliefs, such that white supremacists and neo-Nazis, although they are on the fringe of his support, now feel safe to march in our streets.  

But to attribute all of these problems to Trump’s personality or to state that all, or even the majority, of his supporters are found in the basket of deplorables is to badly misunderstand the situation.  In the first place, if we consider a much more extreme case, that of Nazi Germany, many of Hitler’s supporters were not actually Nazis, bigots, or racists, just good Germans willing to overlook a few of Hitler’s “excesses" because he made Germany great again, kept foreigners out, brought back religion and morality, and the like.  Most of those folks would never knowingly support evil practices but would be willing to rationalize them away.  It is surprisingly easy, per the Milgram study, to be a collaborator.  And if anyone here thinks I am being hyperbolic, I think that this part of the historical analogy for Trumpism fits the situation precisely.  Another part that fits extremely well is that there is good social science research to suggest that there is often a rise in right-wing authoritarian nationalism after economic downturns, particularly those caused by fiscal crises.  The rise of right-wing authoritarian regimes in the 1920s and 1930s would be the best example of that, and I am of half a mind to consider Stalin’s Soviet Union, officially a left-wing authoritarian regime, as consistent with the pattern.  But even without the inclusion of Stalin’s Russia, the rise of first Fascism and then Naziism in Europe during that particular period would be strong confirmatory evidence for the theory that fiscal crises produce authoritarianism in politics and government.  A contrary piece of evidence to this thesis in the current situation would be that the US experienced eight years of sustained economic growth under Barak Obama, but please also remember that this economic growth was extremely uneven, leaving many ethnically white rural areas that are likely to be Trump districts and where there is little contact with other ethnic, cultural, racial, and religious groups, behind.  Please also remember that other countries started seeing a rise in authoritarianism after the fiscal collapse of 2008 before we in the US did.  It would appear that this rise in right-wing authoritarian nationalism in certain regions of the country was just enough to push Trump over the top in the Electoral College, even as he lost the popular vote and lost it badly, by a far greater margin than Bush 43 did to Gore.

So what are the psychological factors involved in right-wing authoritarianism follows from financial crises?  I think many of the factors described in the Psychology Today post are relevant, most especially terror management and lack of exposure to people different from oneself.  Economic downturns from fiscal crises produce financial uncertainty and therefore mortality salience, with the decline in life expectancy in certain economically left-behind areas of the country contributing to this mortality salience, and increased mortality salience, per terror management theory, produces aggression, especially toward perceived outsiders, combined with submission toward those who seem to be more powerful, presumably because those who are more powerful provide the allure of protection from the perceived increased danger in the world. This particular rage at outsiders is the worst precisely where there are fewer outsiders—fewer racial and ethnic minorities—with which to come in contact so as to provide a dose of reality as to who The Other really is.  This kind of analysis was advanced by the Frankfurt School (most prominent members being Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm), in more classically Freudian language, to explain why the German working class, presumably socialist in political affiliation, voted against its class interest in support of the Nazi Party.  One essential piece of this analysis that should not be ignored is the combination of rage and submission toward ruling elites, the people who benefited the most from the fiscal crises of both the 1920s and the 2000s, and here the issue is that a significant proportion of the populace feels betrayed by policies that benefit the ruling elites above all else, an assertion that I believe to valid because of the growing income and wealth inequality in the US in the last 50 years.  So much of current-day “populist” politics involves a rage at these elites, but unlike the populist politics of 19th Century America, which was interested in income redistribution, the “populist" politics of today (note quotation marks) involves identification with, and therefore authoritarian submission to, the same betraying elites who benefited from the recent fiscal crises at the expense of those left behind.  In psychoanalytic terms, this phenomenon would be called identification with the aggressor.  Can I prove all of this?  No, but I knew a lot of people in East Tennessee who would willingly vote against their economic interests time after time, often out of genuine religious conviction, which I would have to respect, about cultural changes that they found unacceptable, but also often out of all kinds of fears of The Other—Blacks, Yankees, Gays and Lesbians, etc., groups seen as subverting the dominant order.  

My apologies for such a dark and opinionated piece of analysis, but I believe it to be correct.  There is one strange bright spot in the picture, however.  Trump is most certainly an authoritarian, but not all authoritarians are the same.  Just as, on the Left side of the spectrum, Lenin is not Stalin, Stalin is not Mao, and Mao is not Pol Pot, on the Right side of the spectrum, Trump is not Franco, Franco is not Mussolini, and Mussolini is not Hitler.  Alternatively, it is still a long walk from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, and Trump simply lacks the discipline, the ideological consistency, and the systematic racism to be a Fascist or a Nazi.  There is, therefore, a good chance that the US can survive him, but he can do a great deal of damage in the short term.  A case in point would be his decision to separate children from their parents at the Mexico border, a decision that was completely unnecessary and that will likely result in decades of psychological traumatization as a result.  I mention this one piece of damage because it is specifically psychological in nature, whereas things like, say, global warming are not.

I expect to receive some critical feedback on this post.

John S. Auerbach, PhD

On Jan 6, 2019, at 3:01 PM, Damon LaBarbera <00000051867784e1-dmarc-request@listserv.icors.org> wrote:

~Psychology Practice in Florida

Good essay, I agree.