“It may seem odd to draw inferences about the operation of power from the parables and stories of individuals who suffer from psychotic disintegration. [….] I take these stories to be real experiences described by human beings who suffer, who know something about the structure and reality of power as it affects their lives, perceptions, and values. The feel of power, the reality of power for psychotic selves, suggests a firsthand knowledge of tyranny. In this sense, I believe, the raw, primitive, archaic quality of the schizophrenic experience demonstrates how power works.
What the schizophrenic self suffers is a microcosmic representation of the political form of power as tyranny and domination. Power is exercised on the self; it defines the world of knowledge and meaning in rigid terms of absolute good and evil [as in the populist cult of Trump]. This power derives not from social or consensual bases but from narcissism and solipsism [hence the shared and mutually reinforcing pathologies between the leader(s) and the led]. It seeks omnipotence [hence on the collective plain, the ‘power’ of those powerless is thus vicariously realized in the power of the authoritarian demagogue; the religious analogue of this is found in the notion of vicarious atonement]. It [i.e., that which is psychologically regressive and more sub- or un-conscious than not] is destructive, parasitic, and violent. It pushes the self into masochism and physical mutilation. [….]
The fragility of secondary process restraints perhaps implies that only a thin line separates a so-called democratic or participatory politics from equally powerful and dangerous tendencies within the culture to institute the infantile world of unlimited entitlement in the form of tyrannical power. What is repressed, as Freud discovered a century ago, refuses to disappear; it lingers; it affects action; it transforms life; it reappears.
Regression destroys secondary process structures, pushes the self into a state of boundlessness, releases enormous amounts of aggression and intensifies feelings of anxiety and panic. Living without limits, possessed by a delusional epistemology, the self faces a loss of continuity and being. What emerges in both the self and the group are actions or forms of power that have nothing to do with tolerance, respect for rights [such right are morally and legally limited at that point where they cause harm to others or when they interfere with the exercise of the joint or shared rights of others], or what John Stuart Mill calls liberty [Mill’s conception of liberty does not denote or imply, let alone exemplify, the predominant contemporary ‘libertarian’ ideological portrait of liberty].
Psychosis threatens democratic forms of conflict resolution by attacking a sense of limitation and those boundaries between groups which, while allowing each to pursue its own cultural ends, nonetheless protects the group’s integrity. What psychosis releases—intense vulnerability, rage, and hatred, Kristeva’s ‘unnameable space of need’—finds itself contained within [Liberal] democratic approaches to conflict resolution and negotiation, particularly acknowledgment of and respect for rights. A liberal democratic polity requires renunciation and sublimation and the willingness to endure restraint in the pursuit of self-interest. [….] The willingness to sustain conflict without resort to tyranny requires, to use Peter Gay’s words, ‘a capacity for tolerating delays, disappointments and ambiguities attendant upon any open society, an unimpaired capacity for reality testing, for curbing one’s aggressiveness without turning against oneself, for reliance on defensive stratagems that remain moderates in scope and flexible in application.’ Democracy that respects rights and liberty is indeed fragile. [….]
[Liberal] [d]emocracy is, in its politics as well as in its epistemology, a defense against more extreme (what I call psychotic) modes of being and power. It acts as a protection against regression, the tendency to embrace unyielding and totalizing ideological positions. And its method of conflict resolution functions much the same way as the mother/container does for her infant’s split-off, raging self. A resilient democratic culture (one embracing participatory modes of action) will hold or contain the rage of its constituent groups without allowing it to annihilate either the constitutional structures maintaining the community or the respect for rights which allows conflict to flourish with endangering individuality. Conflict is the lifeblood of democracy, but it consistently circulates around the respect for the capacity of the other to contain and detoxify disruptive aspect of the self or group emotion. Democratic institutions, from this perspective, do not eliminate conflict; rather, they detoxify anarchic or annihilating presence and consequence. Power becomes supportive and creative or, to use Erik Erikson’s concept, ‘generative;’ it fosters growth. Conflict is talked about and legislated rather than imposed and forced. Rage is held by institutional and cultural processes that work to bind the entropic tendency present in all expressions of political interest. [….]
A democratic theory of rights and participation protects against the fragility of human defenses against regression (the psychotic substratum to all human experience, Kristeva’s ‘hole’ that threatens to engulf the ‘subject’), the unbinding of the self, the refuge in solipsism, a kind of political variant on what Otto Kernberg calls ‘pathological narcissism.’ Democracy respects conflict, works to contain its entropy; the dynamic is dialectical, and the relationship between container and contained is reciprocal. Hobbes and Machiavelli fear conflict and its effects and desire to suppress or enchain its consequences; the push is to close off communication, to repress, hold down, crush.
Democracy as a political theory protects the values of liberty and autonomy, which at the level of individual psychology are parallel to the acceptance of boundary, proportion, limitation. Democracy opposes the affect or symptom of nonreciprocal power: unrestrained narcissism, unlimited entitlement, perceptions of omnipotence, delusions or images of grandeur and dominance. As Peter Gay puts it: ‘Cultures … regress just as individuals do …. Jingoism is a triumph of the primary process.’ It is one political equivalent of narcissistic rage.”—James M. Glass, Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995)
* * *
From The New York Times today:
“The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it ‘legitimate political discourse,’ formally rebuking two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it. The Republican National Committee’s overwhelming voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.
On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in ‘persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.’ It was an extraordinary statement about the deadliest attack on the Capitol in 200 years, in which a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the complex, brutalizing police officers and sending lawmakers into hiding. Nine people died in connection with the attack and more than 150 officers were injured. The party passed the resolution without discussion and almost without dissent.”
One can no longer be a member of the GOP and claim to believe in the values, principles, and practices of our Liberal, constitutional democratic republic. Remaining in the Party from this point forward embodies an avowed and shameless identification of and active support for the politics of fascism as exemplified in the sociopathic cult of Donald Trump. We can quibble about the precise components that define fascism in general, but the following selected from Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works (Random House, 2020 ed.) will suffice for our purposes:
(i) “… [F]ascist politics distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘them’ [by] appealing to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions, and using this division to shape ideology … and policy.” In the case of the GOP, this involves white supremacist beliefs and (‘so-called’) xenophobic “Christian” nationalism [Christianity reduced here to right-wing evangelicalism], as well as a libertarian, hyper-technocratic capitalism granting a de facto and de jure imprimatur to an emergent fascist plutocracy.
(ii) “Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present.” With the cult of Trump, this involves a denial of the historical consequences and systematic effects of slavery and racism, as well as the belief that this country can return to an economic world defined by historically unprecedented economic growth that occurred, roughly, between 1870 and 1970 in this country. Deregulation and privatization are the core “policies” of an economically regressive strategy, one that has already let to democratically destructive levels of income (and other forms of) inequality. Globally, this involves unregulated capital movement (fueled by ‘finance capitalism’) which guarantees the manias, crashes, and panics endemic to capitalist cycles will continue to haunt the affluent nation-states, especially those lacking social democratic welfare policies and programs. The myriad predictable and unpredictable effects of these cycles will be exacerbated by the uncoordinated and weak response among the more affluent nations to climate change and global warming. The picture sketched by Meghnad Desai is stark, providing a peak into both the present and future. As he explains, we are in the midst of another revolutionary phase of capitalism (i.e., ‘a profit-driven system of accumulation and incessant search for new technologies to increase productivity’). This time round, however, it is truly global:
“The influence of capital—either as portfolio finance or as direct investment—the hegemony of financial markets, the increasing penetration of trade, have become experience by all the worlds: First, Second and Third. Indeed, this numerical categorization is now otiose. The benefits and costs of capitalism fall symmetrically—though not equally—on all parts of the world. For the first time in two hundred years, the cradle of capitalism—the metropolis, the core—has as much to fear from the rapidity of change as does the periphery.”
(iii) “[Fascists] rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas.” We witnessed this in the reckless and immoral Republican response to the pandemic and in their relentless assault on Liberal public education at all levels, which includes, of late, book banning (and book burning) and purely partisan control of the curriculum and local school boards.
(iv) “Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.” I have previously explained why we should not call these “theories,” for that accords them a type of coherence and plausibility they conspicuously lack, indeed, these are ideological phantasies, propagated by people steeped in illusions and delusions, and motivated by wishful thinking and willful ignorance. This state of unreality or madness is further fueled by denial and individual and collective self-deception, among other deleterious cognitive and psychological mechanisms and processes, often in conjunction with deadly dispositional vices. This state of “unreality” is reminiscent of what Erich Fromm earlier termed the “pathology of normalcy,” while political groups on the Right have come to resemble a world characterized by psychotic agency, that is, and after Bion (as summarized by James M. Glass), a time “where the world appears in the ominous gray of panic, anxiety, fear, compulsion, and fragmentation,” “nothing remains but impulse and power,” an “assertion,” therefore, “of unconscious phantasy as both will and desire.”
Essential Reading
- Alford, C. Fred. What Evil Means to Us (Cornell University Press, 1997).
- Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, revised ed., 1991).
- Auestad, Lene, ed. Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac Books, 2014).
- Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1994).
- Brudner, Alan. Constitutional Goods (Oxford University Press, 2004).
- Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991).
- Cassam, Quassim. Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford University Press, 2019).
- Coady, C.A.J. Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
- Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
- Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded ed., 1970).
- Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (Yale University Press, 1993).
- Collins, Adela Yarbro. “The Book of Revelation,” in John J. Collins, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity (Continuum, 2000): 384-414.
- Desai, Meghnad. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, 2002).
- Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction (Verso, new ed., 2007).
- Elster, Jon. Ch. 8, “Ideologies,” in Elster’s Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1985): 459-510.
- Glass, James M. Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995).
- Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2016).
- Gruen, Arno. The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward an Understanding of Human Destructiveness (Grove Press, 1992).
- Harcourt, Edward, ed. Morality, Reflection and Ideology (Oxford University Press, 2000).
- Hasen, Richard L. Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (Yale University Press, 2020).
- Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
- Hirschman, Albert O. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).
- Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
- Jamieson, Dale. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014).
- Keane, John. Violence and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- Larrain, Jorge. Marxism and Ideology (Macmillan Press, 1983).
- Lee, Bandy, ed. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, expanded ed., 2017).
- Lefebvre, Henri (John Moore, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 (Verso, 1991).
- Lefebvre, Henri (John Moore, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (Verso, 2002).
- Lefebvre, Henri (Gregory Elliott, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 3: From Modernity to Modernism (Verso, 2005).
- Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- Marlin, Randall. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (Broadview Press, 2002).
- McGinn, Bernard, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Vol. 2: Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture (Continuum, 2000).
- Piketty, Thomas (Arthur Goldhammer, trans.) Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
- Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press, 2011).
- Seidel, Andrew L. The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American (Sterling, 2019).
- Stanley, Jason. How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press, 2015).
- Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works (Random House, 2018).
- Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
- Straub, Michael S. Madness is Civilization: When the Diagnosis was Social, 1948-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
- Taylor, Gabrielle. Deadly Vices (Oxford University Press, 2006).
- Therborn, Göran. The Killing Fields of Inequality (Polity Press, 2013).
- Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton University Press, 1998).
- Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
Relevant Bibliographies
- After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization
- Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
- Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
- Constitutionalism
- Democratic Theory and Praxis
- The Deformation and Perversion of Education in a Capitalist Democracy
- Elections and Voting
- The Emotions
- Toward an Understanding of Liberalism
- Marxism
- Marxism and Freudian Psychology
- Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
- Utopian Imagination, Thought and Praxis
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