On Not Resisting the Temptation to write about Trump

I had been wanting to write something about anarchism – or Lawrence Ree’s most recent book “The Nazi Mind” or even a post about “contextual analysis” of which Rory Stewart is such a good exponent. 

Instead, I have been seduced by this post about Fascism in America from a site 

called The Rational League to speculate about the state of Donald Trump’s mind 

– and that of his MAGA followers.

You can’t negotiate with someone who sees compromise as surrender. You can’t persuade a person out of beliefs that serve as emotional armor against uncertainty and fear. And you certainly can’t build a functioning democracy when 30–40% of the population interprets equality as an attack, and compassion as weakness. This is the psychological blind spot at the heart of MAGA, and it explains why even policies that make life objectively worse for their own communities are still embraced if they reaffirm authoritarian values or hierarchical dominance. The MAGA movement thrives because it supplies this audience with what they crave: certainty, submission, identity, and an enemy. And once they have that, they will defend it, even to the detriment of their health, their economy, their fellow citizens, and democracy itself. That is why no policy rebuttal, no moral appeal, and no set of facts will shake them. These are not flaws in their thinking; they are features of it.

The history of authoritarianism teaches us that these minds will not course-correct. They require a society designed to check them, constrain them, and strip their ideology of legitimacy. If we fail to do that, their psychological needs will continue to override our collective needs. They will vote against healthcare, education, the environment, and equality, not because they are evil, but because fear and order are more important to them than fairness or truth. And once again, as before, they will drag civilization backwards. Not in a fiery revolution, but with the silent obedience of billions, marching to the steafdy beat of “order,” “tradition,” and “the way things ought to be.” The warning is simple: if you do not stop authoritarianism when it is soft and delusional, you will face it later when it is brutal and unapologetic.

Europe, of course, has seen this before – there was a flood of books in the early 

1950s trying to make sense of German behaviour in the 1930s, books like The 

Authoritarian Personality ed Adorno et al (1950) with a later edition – see the link 

- in 2019 and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. 

At Glasgow University in the early 1960s (when I studied Politics and Economics) 

I had a Romanian tutor (in political sociology) Zevedei Barbu who held me spellbound 

as he introduced me to Weber and Michels, drawing on his own experience (which 

I didn’t know about at the time) of Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology 

and patterns of life which he published in 1956. He was, after all, a psychologist 

by training. Bob Altemeyer was another psychologist (Canadian this time) who 

published 50 years later The Authoritarians (2006) which I found very confusing 

since it focuses more on the details of his psychological experiments and fails to 

mention Adorno let alone Barbu. 

But he’s published 2 further books on the theme Authoritarian Nightmare – 
Trump and his followers J Dean and R Altemeyer (2019) and a short (60 page) 

addition in the light of 3 important books Updating Authoritarian Nightmare (2021). 

The post with which I start quotes extensively from the first of these books and led 

me to another interesting book on the subject The Politics of Antagonism – security 

narratives and the remaking of political identity (2024) by a writer on war and 

international relations - Georg  Loefflemann 

This book demonstrates how populist security narratives served as the driving force 

behind the mobilization of Republican voters and the legitimation of an ‘America First’ 

policy agenda under the Trump presidency. Going beyond existing research on both 

populism and security narratives, the author links insights from political psychology on 

collective narcissism, blame attribution and emotionalization with research in political 

communication on narrative and framing to explore the political and societal impact of a 

populist security imaginary. Drawing on a comprehensive range of sources including key 

interviews, campaign and policy speeches, presidential addresses, and posts on social 

media, it shows how progressives, political opponents, immigrants, racial justice activists, 

and key institutions of liberal democracy collectively became an internal Other, 

delegitimated as ‘enemies of the people’. Developing an innovative conceptual‑analytical 

framework of nationalist populism that expands on established concepts of political 

identity and ontological security, the book will appeal to students of critical security studies, 

critical constructivist approaches in International Relations, and US politics 

A final article worth reading is Collective Narcissism and Weakening of American democracy Oliver Keenan and AG de Zavala 2021

A Critical German Redoubt

Grand Hotel Abyss – the lives of the Frankfurt School (2016) is the sort of book which has me salivating….it is the story of the individuals who came together in Germany in 1923 in an unusual multi-disciplinary institute; and used what came to be known as “critical theory” to try to make sense of the social, political and economic turbulence then being experienced in Europe and Russia…... Evicted by the Nazis after only a decade, they then moved to the States where their survey work focused initially on trying to understand the Nazi takeover and then on the cultural aspects of their adopted country – at least until 1949 when Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt, managing to attract a young Juergen Habermas to their ranks. The denazification process was, understandably an initial focus of their work there but, as the political momentum for this quickly faded, their focus on understanding the new forces of capitalism was renewed.

Such figures, however, as Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm stayed behind to plough their distinctive radical furrows in the USA – which bore fruit in the heady 60s when their writings indeed were far more influential in 60s Germany than those of Adorno and co at the Frankfurt school. I vividly remember the anger of the Marxist students at Berlin’s Freie University when I spent 2 summer months in Berlin in 1964 – and it was Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man” which was one of the crystallising text for them.

Adorno died in 1969 but the Institute operates to this day – if with little of the global influence it had in its heady days….. For those who want their analysis in small bites, the excellent Aeon magazine has article about the school with the appropriate title – How the Frankfurt school diagnosed the ills of western civilisation 

The author of Grand Hotel Abyss, Stuart Jeffries, is one of many who have penned the history of this group – although he may be the first English journalist so to do. Many Germans have been down this road eg The Frankfurt School – by Wiggershaus (1995); and at least 2 American scholars – with The Dialectical Imagination (Martin Jay 1973); and Rethinking the Frankfurt School – alternative legacies of cultural critique; ed JT Nealon and C Irr (2002).

Jeffries’ book has an excellent bibliography – which lists (some of) these books – but, as I discovered them, I wondered why he had not thought to offer a comment in (say) the Introduction to help us understand what exactly his new book offers that is different and distinctive….. I should imagine that he feels that a journalistic approach will clearly be more accessible than an academic’s – but have to confess that I find his language, on occasion, a bit elliptic if not cryptic….

In these times, however, it’s useful for a British audience to be reminded that, for almost a hundred years, this Institute has been articulating a different way of seeing and thinking……

But I often had the feeling in the first half of the book that he would have preferred to be writing about Walter Benjamin…….  whose various writings are generally much more lucid than those of his colleagues at the School – eg Early Writings 1910-1917; Reflections – essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings (1978); and Selected Writings volume 2 part 2 (1931-1934) – perhaps because Benjamin was actually a journalist

I was also disappointed that, apart from a solitary paragraph, the book failed to make the connection with the group of New Left writers who have been active in Britain from 1960 to the present – particularly with the “cultural wing” which found expression in the British Centre for Cultural Studies from 1964 until its demise in 2002. British Cultural Studies – an introduction by Graeme Turner (1990) offers a good treatment of their work.

Admittedly, the Frankfurt School had a 40 year start on the Brits but, for some reason it’s the French whose influence permeates UK cultural studies (as Turner’s book shows) – with only Gramsci challenging this. Germans such as Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas simply made no impact on the Brits…Why is this I wonder? The Frankfurt School and British cultural Studies – a missed articulation is an interesting article which explores this question……

Let me finish with an excerpt from an interview with the author of Grand Hotel Abyss (and recommend that you read the full interview)  

What legacies has the Frankfurt School left us? And which thinkers do you regard as its inheritors?They were certainly attentive to how culture changes us and can be a force for change. In the 1930s Benjamin imagined that cinema, for instance, by using jump cuts and close ups, would change our perspectives on reality and so might have a revolutionary potential; a few years later, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote of Hollywood as if it were a totalitarian tool of oppression akin to the Nazi film studio UFA.

 One Frankfurt School legacy, then, then is to make us think about the politics of culture. For them, art is never just for art’s sake, and entertainment is never just entertaining. By taking the politics of culture seriously, the Frankfurt School opened up new lines of thinking. Without them, all the stuff that happened in a little corner of Frankfurt’s twin city of Birmingham (the now-defunct Centre for Cultural Studies) wouldn’t have been conceivable and our approach to culture would have been very different.

To be sure, the likes of Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams saw culture very differently from Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. They followed the Frankfurt School in seeing culture as a key instrument of political and social control, but, unlike the Germans, appreciated how the culture industry could be aberrantly, even rebelliously decoded, by its mass consumers and that popular sub-cultures might subvert the culture industry in a form of immanent critique.

Further Reading
The New Left in Britain - https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/2756/MA%20Thesis%20in%20History%20-%20Jacob%20Thurman%20.pdf;sequence=3