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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Authoritarians Amok
Explaining Trumpism, with some help from Chad Goldberg and Herbert
Marcuse

Today's Altercation is guest-authored by my friend Chad Goldberg
, a professor of sociology at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. Chad's most recent books are
Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought

and Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea
, and he is at work on a new
one on cultural pluralism and American democracy.

The Establishment and Its Trumpist Discontents
By Chad Alan Goldberg

Donald Trump may be out of office, twice impeached and disgraced in the
eyes of many Americans, but the eyes of his supporters remain
steadfastly turned toward him. "His exile in Mar-a-Lago
notwithstanding," the journalist Thomas Edsall wrote
in
April 2021, "Donald Trump's authority over the Republican Party
remains vast." In July 2021, Trump garnered a 98 percent approval
rating among attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference
and overwhelmingly won

the group's 2024 presidential straw poll.

What is the secret of Trump's continuing political appeal to millions
of Americans? The standard explanations on the political left are that
support for Trump is a reaction to decades of neoliberal policies in
which Democrats were complicit, or an expression of Trump's
supporters' racism. Yet neither of these explanations captures the
obsessive character of devotion to Trump, which is so reminiscent of how
Sigmund Freud described neurosis. Perhaps a deeper explanation-one
that has received relatively little attention in the mainstream
media-can be found by turning to earlier generations of social
thinkers who drew on Freud for political insight into fascism and
McCarthyism.

A few contemporary observers

have taken this tack, revisiting Theodor Adorno's classic 1950 study
The Authoritarian Personality for a better understanding of Trumpism. To
be sure, Trump and his followers exhibit many features of the
authoritarian personality, but deviations from this type are also
striking. Most notably, psychological dispositions toward
conventionalism and authoritarian submission are hard to square with
Trump's penchant for rule-breaking. As the historian David Greenberg
argued

in January 2021, from Trump's sexual misconduct, self-dealing, and
compulsive mendacity to his abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, and
incitement of the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol,
"rule-breaking came to define ... Trump's presidency." Indeed,
Greenberg added, "for many Americans-especially in Trump's
base-this rule-breaking was the whole point."

The Authoritarian Personality does help to explain Trump's political
appeal, but not in the way one might think. Adorno and his co-authors
were careful to note that an "authoritarian home régime" produces,
alongside submission to rigidly glorified and idealized parents, an
"underlying resentment against them" that "recurs in the attitudes
to authority and social institutions." This ambivalence explains why
they often found in their "high-scoring subjects both overconformity
and underlying destructiveness toward established authority, customs,
and institutions." It is important to recall here that the
authoritarian personality's adherence to conventional values is
determined exclusively by "external social pressure." But "if
permitted to do so by outside authority," the authoritarian person
"may be induced very easily to uncontrolled release of his instinctual
tendencies, especially those of destructiveness."

Trump doesn't represent the authority of a strong father-leader; he
represents the rebellion of the son, which is the real source of his
political appeal. This rebellion is expressed, however, in a context
where "personal father-images have ... disappeared behind the
institutions." It was the German-born political philosopher Herbert
Marcuse, Adorno's Frankfurt School colleague and later guru of the New
Left, who described postwar society this way. Trump's rebellion
against the father-rule, now transmuted into an impersonal and anonymous
"rigged system," permits and induces an explosive release of
previously suppressed sexual and aggressive drives. The release of the
sexual drive, in sadistic form, is evident from Trump's own violations
of sexual taboos. Most notably, he has been accused of sexual
harassment, sexual assault, and/or rape by more than two dozen women.
These transgressions authorize a comparable release of the sexual drive
(again, in a sadistic form) among his devotees, either in phantasy or in
their actual behavior. This is also true of what Marcuse, following
Freud, called "the derivatives of the death instinct, aggressiveness
and the destruction impulses." Again, what is important for
understanding Trump's political appeal is that his publicly expressed
wish-phantasies of violence permit and induce the release of aggressive
and destructive impulses among his devotees. The most egregious instance
was the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

If Trumpism encourages the release of suppressed sexual and aggressive
drives, and this is an important factor in its political appeal, what
are leftists to make of this phenomenon? In the 1950s, Marcuse argued
that sexual repression buttressed a society in which people were
shackled to alienated labor and stratified according to their
"competitive economic performances" (what he called the
"performance principle"). But with technical and material progress,
the "instinctual energy ... spent in alienated labor" could be
greatly reduced, making possible a "non-repressive civilization." At
first blush, this radical project seems to offer little basis for
criticizing Trump's transgressions. To the contrary, it seems closer
to the "counterstrain of criticism" on the left, as Greenberg
describes it, that "rebukes Trump's high-minded detractors for
fetishizing 'norms.'" But it would be a mistake to think that
Trump is somehow furthering a radical project. Trumpism's release of
suppressed sexual and aggressive drives is a far cry from the genuine
liberation from sexual repression that Marcuse envisioned. Rather, it
represents what Marcuse called the "political utilization of sex"
and aggression to reinforce social domination.

Marcuse envisioned the "spread" and "free development of
transformed libido beyond the institutions of the performance
principle." Trumpism, in contrast, involves the explosive release of
constrained sexuality within the institutions of the performance
principle. Marcuse argued that when suppressed sexuality explodes in
this fashion, "the libido continues to bear the mark of suppression
and manifests itself in the hideous forms so well known in the history
of civilization; in the sadistic and masochistic orgies of desperate
masses, of 'society elites,' of starved bands of mercenaries, of
prison and concentration-camp guards." This passage finds a chilling
echo not only in Trump's remarks and behavior but also in the reports
of sexual abuse in migrant detention camps at the U.S. border. Marcuse
adds that "such release of sexuality provides a periodically necessary
outlet for unbearable frustration; it strengthens rather than weakens
the roots of instinctual constraint; consequently, it has been used time
and again as a prop for suppressive regimes."

Marcuse thought that a "non-repressive development of the libido"
would also "alter the manifestations of the death instinct." This is
entirely different from the release of aggressive and destructive
impulses under Trumpism. When domination becomes impersonal and
anonymous, Marcuse suggested, the "aggressive impulse" previously
directed at the father cannot find a suitable external target. "Thus
repulsed," the aggression is introjected in the form of guilt. But as
postwar changes in the economy and family collectivized the
"repressive organization of the instincts," guilt became "a
quality of the whole rather than of the individuals-collective
guilt." Once guilt becomes collective, aggression "turns against
those who do not belong to the whole, whose existence is its denial."
Here, too, Marcuse was remarkably prescient. Trumpism's channeling of
aggression "against those who do not belong to the whole"-that is,
anyone outside the narrow, purposely delusional circle of Trumpism-is
its political utilization.

There are no easy remedies for the pathology of Trumpism because, as
Marcuse pointed out, the "mobilization of instinctual energy" is
"gratifying to the managed individuals" even when it serves as a
prop for social domination. But we can start by deflating the enthusiasm
on the far left that Slavoj Žižek and others have expressed for the
chaos and disorder of Trump. What we learn from Marcuse is that the
individual's drives and desires may be released in such a way that
they strengthen rather than negate social domination. Marcuse's work
helps us to see why Trump's revolt against the establishment was a
betrayed revolution from the beginning.

Odds and Ends

In case you missed it, here
's my essay in
Democracy on this great city of mine.

The summer was a decided disappointment, return-to-normalcy-wise, but
one small bright spot in my life was a series of free outdoor concerts
put on by SummerStage

and the city's parks department. There was the three-day Charlie
Parker festival in
Harlem's Marcus Garvey Park and three wonderful, in their own way,
shows in Central Park. I saw the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with
Wynton Marsalis opening gala, on nice, socially
distanced chairs, with a special Juneteenth-influenced repertoire;
crowded, sweaty free shows by the Sun Ra Arkestra
led by the amazing 97-year-old Marshall
Allen
;
and just last Sunday, the Patti Smith Group
. The audiences at each show were
all quite different, but each made one proud and grateful to live in a
city where so many different kinds of people could come together in
peace and good feeling to pay tribute to our heroes and longtime
companions. And I ask you: Who represents the best of what it means to
be a brave, creative, and inspirational New Yorker more than the great
Ms. Patti Smith? I first saw her 45 years ago singing "Land of 1,000
Dances" into "Gloria" from Horses,
and when she sang it Sunday night, she sounded just as powerful-and
inspirational-as she did back then. (Has anyone ever begun an album,
much less an entire recording career, with an opening line better than
"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine"?) Here she is,
accompanied by yours truly, my gf, Laura, and about 250 other people
rounded up by Choir! Choir! Choir! at the Public Theater in 2019 for
"People Have the Power ," also the
final encore on Sunday night.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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