America Michael Tesler (2018)
The
election was also symptomatic of a broader American identity crisis. Issues
like immigration, racial discrimination, and the integration of
Muslims boil down to competing visions of American identity and
inclusiveness. To
have politics oriented around this debate—as opposed to more
prosaic issues like, say, entitlement reform—makes politics “feel”
angrier, precisely because debates about ethnic, racial, and national
identities engender strong emotions. It is possible to have a
technocratic discussion about how to calculate cost-of-living
increases in Social Security payments. It is harder to have such a
discussion about whether undocumented immigrants deserve a chance for
permanent residency or even citizenship. It is even harder when group
loyalties and attitudes are aligned with partisanship, and harder
still when presidential candidates are stoking the divisions.
Elections will then polarize people not only in terms of party—which
is virtually inevitable—but also in terms of other group
identities. The upshot is a more divisive and explosive politics.
Authoritarian
Nightmare – Trump and his followers
J
Dean and R Altemeyer (2020)
Perhaps
the definitive explanation
If
you
Google “books about Trump,” the answer seems obvious: “You’ve
got to be kidding!” But while there are many books about the man
and his presidency, favorable and not so favorable, we
could find no book that explains why he acts the way he does.
Nor are there any books that explain his base, the source of his
power. In fact, many observers have thrown up their hands in despair
at Trump’s very steadfast supporters. They seem beyond the pale,
beyond understanding. Well, give us a chance, for we believe we have
solid science-based answers.First
things first. Many people have opined there is something seriously
wrong, psychologically, with Donald Trump. If you proudly wear a Make America
Great Again hat, you may be offended by the suggestion. For you, as
for him, Trump should be immortalized on his own Mount Rushmore,
maybe renamed Mount Trump, as America’s greatest president. But if
you have passed on a twenty-five-dollar official MAGA hat while
observing Donald Trump for any time at all, you may believe the man
is deeply troubled mentally. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists
have been riveted by his behavior from the outset of his presidential
bid. They wondered during the campaign, “Is this an act just to get
elected?” But by the time he moved into the White House, many
concluded Trump was not “crazy like a fox” but “crazy like a
crazy.” This
point was made by one of the mental health professionals who wrote
the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”, edited
by Dr. Bandy Lee of the Yale School of Medicine.
The
conclusions of these analysts and therapists varied quite a bit,
understandably, since clinical diagnosis remains something of an art.
But more than anything, these psychiatrists and psychologists
believed that Trump displayed extreme narcissism with more than a
touch of psychopathy. He is, as one therapist put it, in a phrase
reflecting years of professional training, “a dog with both ticks
and fleas.” These
professionals have company. Many sophisticated Washington pundits
and presidential observers have deep concerns about Trump.
Republican
leaders and other influential conservatives who hoped he would
grow into the job have often been disappointed. Trump’s
interactions with his cabinet and senior advisors led some of them to
expose the man, warts, more warts, and even more warts, to
journalists such as Bob Woodward, who compiled them in his
bestseller, “Fear: Trump in the White House”.
One
senior official, “Anonymous,” reported strikingly similar
information in an op-ed in the New York Times on September 5, 2018,
and later, a book, revealing that a group of alarmed officials had
quietly banded together to keep some of Trump’s decisions from
being enacted.
Other
aides, competing with one another for the president’s favor, leaked
damaging information about their opponents in Trump’s inner circle,
which implicitly diss Trump for hiring their opponents. The Trump
White House “leaks” more than Nixon’s did when he formed the
infamous “Plumbers” unit to shut off the flow. It appears
everybody is trying to get even. John Bolton’s book “The Room
Where It Happened” revealed just how dysfunctional the White House
had become by 2018 and what
a terrible manager and decision maker Trump was. During
the first five months of the 2016 GOP primaries, the New York Times
was so struck by Trump’s demagogic rhetoric they gathered and
analyzed “every public utterance” by him, some 95,000 words. They
retained historians, psychologists, and political scientists to
review the material, and the experts concluded it echoed “some of
the [worst] demagogues of the past century.” Trump was campaigning
in the traditions of segregationist George Wallace and anticommunist
red-baiter Joseph McCarthy, “vilifying groups” and “stoking
insecurities of his audiences,” except the Times noted, by
contrast, Trump was a more “energetic and charismatic speaker who
can be entertaining and ingratiating,” thus more engaging than his
predecessors, which the Times found made his demagoguery “more
palatable when it is leavened with a smile and joke.”
Nonetheless,
in words and action, Trump was and is a demagogue, pure and simple,
albeit ranked stylistically slightly better by one leading American
news organization than his predecessors, like Joe McCarthy and George
Wallace (p27).
In 1950, they published “The Authoritarian Personality”, nearly
one thousand pages filled with psychoanalytic theory and preliminary
explorations in the fields of personality and social psychology. A
fourth contributor, Theodor Adorno, was added to the project by its
sponsor after the work was nearly finished.
Other
American researchers at the time believed that what happened in
Germany in the 1930s “could happen here” as well. The experience
of McCarthyism soon after The
Authoritarian Personality was
published convinced many social scientists that a large segment of
the American public could be stampeded into surrendering the
democratic rights the country had just fought to preserve in the war
against fascism (p28).
Authoritarianism
is studied by psychologists, political scientists, and sociologists,
with each discipline developing its own focus and definitions while
using its preferred methods. We have focused on the psychological
research in this field.
No
one in the media apparently knows about this body of evidence but we
do not think it is a secret. Our narrative is largely based on the
findings of one academic investigator, who happens to be the person
Dean asked to cowrite this book. If that was a mistake, blame him.
He, however, believes he has chosen wisely because the data, set
forth in the pages that follow, speaks for itself and should not be
ignored as America faces the crisis we believe lies immediately
ahead.
• “One
of the most useful skills a person should develop is how to look
someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly.”
• “The
best skill you can have is knowing the ‘right move at the right
time’: when to ‘soft-sell’ someone, when to be tough, when to
flatter, when to threaten, when to bribe, etc.”
•
“There’s
a sucker born every minute, and smart people learn how to take
advantage of them.”
• “It
is more important to create a good image of yourself in the minds of
others than to actually be the person others think you are.”
• “One
of the best ways to handle people is to tell them what they want to
hear.”
4
February
