The world faces five more years of Donald Trump. What insights, if any, can be made from this moment?
Trump himself is an embodiment of an American brand of right-wing authoritarianism. German theorist Erich Fromm characterised such individuals as ‘authoritarian personalities’ who seek to rule, control, or restrain others, and more generally value submission to authority figures or to fixed hierarchies.
These figures, who can comprise up to 25% of any given population, exhibit an anti-intellectualism in the United States in particular. This is due to the latter’s political culture which is suspicious of learning. Consider the MAGA movement’s singular obsession with ‘wokeness’ whose chrysalis is supposedly the university. Trump garnered the most applause at his inauguration speech for a reference to ‘males’ and ‘females’ being inherently different – in supposed defiance of this ‘woke mind virus’ sweeping the West.
What Trump promises to reestablish – in his own mind and that of his fanatical fanbase – is, in fact, peace and order amid the storm. Right-wing activists fixated on the decline of ‘Western civilisation’ pin their anxieties on various perceived barbarians at the gates – woke professors, immigrants at the southern border, China in the Panama Canal, etc. Trump promises to quell these forces while raising America back to a standard of greatness.
Fromm wrote that the authoritarian personality ‘is looking for the “leader,” the great power, to feel safe and protected through participation and to overcome his own inferiority. Subconsciously, he feels his own powerlessness and needs the leader to control this feeling. This masochistic and submissive individual, who fears freedom and escapes into idolatry, is the person on which the authoritarian systems — Nazism and Stalinism — rest’.
The conditions which brewed twentieth-century totalitarianisms may differ from those which nurture Trumpism today, but a common psychological phenomenon binds them. Trump and his ilk feel powerless at the prospect of a complex and multipolar global order; in its place, they hope to erect a more hierarchical – even imperial, structure. Consider Trump’s bizarre recent lurch into threatening Greenland, Canada, and other regions with annexation or invasion. There seems a genuine desire among these types to revive an imperial global order.
Can Trumpism itself actually make good on such a dystopian project? Unlikely – what we actually see is an American oligarchy as emboldened as ever before, certainly fearing the perceived barbarians at the gates – this is genuine, as per Fromm, not confected – but simultaneously quite excited about their own economic prospects. Barring some serious domestic or geopolitical debacle, Trump, Musk, and co. will govern as a kind of populist technocracy, mouthing slogans and perhaps introducing limited ‘populist’ policies – such as economic protectionism – while really acting to furnish their own pockets. For now, the phenomenon promises simply to postpone serious considerations of questions which ought to animate American politics – climate change, inequality – while rallying an at once submissive and aggressive base which has already attempted to overthrow United States democracy, and may do so again in five years’ time.