Reflections on Trumpocracy: the sadistic roots of the authoritarian personalty

Underneath the Bully, the coward: powerlust as compensation.

The Boss can reward his "apprentices" or fire them, banish them. He has the power to totally crush his inferior's. Unlike the power of an inventor or artist, to create, his power is based on a deficiency, since it is the power over other people, who have no power. The power of the authoritarian is the power to take power from others to enhance his own. Thus, the root is the fear of freedom, which allows others to say NO! When you are fired, imprisoned, threatened, or murdered, your freedom is abridged. The power of the autocrat is based on taking power from those he controls, and if he cannot control them, he can have them killed, just as Hitler sent the Social Democrats, whom he scapegoated (equating them with Jews) were sent off to Dachau to be worked to death.

Freedom, in a healthy individual, is the foundation of his sense of self-worth and strength. It is no surprise that when unemployment grows and people lose their jobs, the suicide rate goes up. For even worse than a bruising job is the utter dependency and impotence of being without work, without a way to support yourself. For many, this is the ultimate punishment and death is preferable. Debt, another form of negating human freedom, is also highly correlated with suicide, as those who cannot pay back what they owe are often shamed into killing themselves.

Who, then, is the Boss? To answer this let's look at him through the eyes of Bartleby, whose Boss, the lawyer cannot find a way to remove Bartleby from his building and so decides instead to move his office, but the new Bossremoves Bartleby to prison, where he perishes. In no nation on earth are more people imprisoned than 'the land of the free." The power to take away the freedom of others, whether whistleblowers, writers who cannot find publishers (Hersh, Palast), or criminals who are denied opportunity or legal status, is the power of the Police State, the state that our new President strongly claimed he would create: "I am the Law and Order candidate." This line is from his role model Nixon, whose violation of law led to his resigning in disgrace.

Prison is the concrete cage into which we place those who cannot abide the lack of freedom and, in a self-destructive way, rebel by committing crimes. In this sense, we see that each crime is part of a large unconnected mosaic, the same energetic No of the Rebel without the connection to a larger group of solidarity. That is why, in many revolutions, one of the first acts is to break down the prison doors.

So the Boss is the Man (how many female tyrants have there been?) who can deny your manhood, your humanity, your dignity, your freedom. And he does this based not on his great confidence (confident people are very gentle, needing now rough treatment to find connection and satisfaction, but like, in the political sphere, on his fear of freedom.

The Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution feared the People (and thus erected the firewall against democracy of the Electoral College) and felt that democracy (as did Hitler and Mussolini) was mob rule (in reality, mobs are alway minorities and violent because they do not have majority support), and so the great fears were slave revolts and revolts of the poor who early on often joined with blacks to say NO to the oppression both faced,.

The purpose of the militia, control over which the slave masters, transferred to their own hands (ie Congress, which was full of slave owners, as were the first 7 Presidents), was to find escaped slaves (for a slave, escape is freedom: the slaves called the Civil War "The War for Freedom.") and to search slave quarters in "slave patrols" for instruments of rebellion such as guns and swords, for which they were whipped or killed. This is the archetype of the authoritarian personality, which turns out to be the dominating side of the master/slave relationship. The fact that slaves could choose to rebel (Historian Aptheker documents over 250 slave uprisings of 10 or more) was the greatest fear of the slave masters.

Buffalo Soldiers in the War for Freedom

What they feared was the loss of control, the reversal of their freedom to deny the freedom of others, and in this fear lies a fear of freedom itself as the core of human value.

There can be no great authoritarian leaders without blind followers, so we see then that those who desire a Tyrant, a Strongman, are experiencing their own alienated freedom in two forms: as through the Strongman, as a proxy for their stunted and insulted freedom. The Tyrant may defy political correctness, calling out racial slurs, insulting the defenseless, and for the followers, this is a liberation of their own repressed anger and hatred. In the middle of this leader/follower paradigm is the scapegoat.

Bully beating up an inflated toy.

Scapegoats are the most defenseless people (the Bully picks on the little kid or the sensitive kid) at whom the Strongman can direct the repressed anger and hatred of his followers, without fear of being challenged. A man whose job has been offshored may well support a leader to tells him he can vent his anger on the Jews, or the Mexicans, or the Liberals. This inauthentic liberation both supports the Strongman and gives a feeling of catharsis to the blind followers, too hypnotized by repeated propaganda, to think rationally and enjoying the collective happiness of venting their hatred, with other blind followers, on those who are unable to respond.

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).