Alex Milan Tracy/AP Photo
A member of the far-right group Proud Boys holds a flag of former President Donald Trump during a rally in an abandoned parking lot on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, last month.
Today’s Altercation is guest-authored by my friend Chad Goldberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Chad’s most recent books are Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought and Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea, and he is at work on a new one on cultural pluralism and American democracy.
The Establishment and Its Trumpist Discontents
By Chad Alan Goldberg
Donald Trump may be out of office, twice impeached and disgraced in the eyes of many Americans, but the eyes of his supporters remain steadfastly turned toward him. “His exile in Mar-a-Lago notwithstanding,” the journalist Thomas Edsall wrote in April 2021, “Donald Trump’s authority over the Republican Party remains vast.” In July 2021, Trump garnered a 98 percent approval rating among attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference and overwhelmingly won the group’s 2024 presidential straw poll.
What is the secret of Trump’s continuing political appeal to millions of Americans? The standard explanations on the political left are that support for Trump is a reaction to decades of neoliberal policies in which Democrats were complicit, or an expression of Trump’s supporters’ racism. Yet neither of these explanations captures the obsessive character of devotion to Trump, which is so reminiscent of how Sigmund Freud described neurosis. Perhaps a deeper explanation—one that has received relatively little attention in the mainstream media—can be found by turning to earlier generations of social thinkers who drew on Freud for political insight into fascism and McCarthyism.
A few contemporary observers have taken this tack, revisiting Theodor Adorno’s classic 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality for a better understanding of Trumpism. To be sure, Trump and his followers exhibit many features of the authoritarian personality, but deviations from this type are also striking. Most notably, psychological dispositions toward conventionalism and authoritarian submission are hard to square with Trump’s penchant for rule-breaking. As the historian David Greenberg argued in January 2021, from Trump’s sexual misconduct, self-dealing, and compulsive mendacity to his abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, and incitement of the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, “rule-breaking came to define … Trump’s presidency.” Indeed, Greenberg added, “for many Americans—especially in Trump’s base—this rule-breaking was the whole point.”
The Authoritarian Personality does help to explain Trump’s political appeal, but not in the way one might think. Adorno and his co-authors were careful to note that an “authoritarian home régime” produces, alongside submission to rigidly glorified and idealized parents, an “underlying resentment against them” that “recurs in the attitudes to authority and social institutions.” This ambivalence explains why they often found in their “high-scoring subjects both overconformity and underlying destructiveness toward established authority, customs, and institutions.” It is important to recall here that the authoritarian personality’s adherence to conventional values is determined exclusively by “external social pressure.” But “if permitted to do so by outside authority,” the authoritarian person “may be induced very easily to uncontrolled release of his instinctual tendencies, especially those of destructiveness.”
Trump doesn’t represent the authority of a strong father-leader; he represents the rebellion of the son, which is the real source of his political appeal. This rebellion is expressed, however, in a context where “personal father-images have … disappeared behind the institutions.” It was the German-born political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Adorno’s Frankfurt School colleague and later guru of the New Left, who described postwar society this way. Trump’s rebellion against the father-rule, now transmuted into an impersonal and anonymous “rigged system,” permits and induces an explosive release of previously suppressed sexual and aggressive drives. The release of the sexual drive, in sadistic form, is evident from Trump’s own violations of sexual taboos. Most notably, he has been accused of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and/or rape by more than two dozen women. These transgressions authorize a comparable release of the sexual drive (again, in a sadistic form) among his devotees, either in phantasy or in their actual behavior. This is also true of what Marcuse, following Freud, called “the derivatives of the death instinct, aggressiveness and the destruction impulses.” Again, what is important for understanding Trump’s political appeal is that his publicly expressed wish-phantasies of violence permit and induce the release of aggressive and destructive impulses among his devotees. The most egregious instance was the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
If Trumpism encourages the release of suppressed sexual and aggressive drives, and this is an important factor in its political appeal, what are leftists to make of this phenomenon? In the 1950s, Marcuse argued that sexual repression buttressed a society in which people were shackled to alienated labor and stratified according to their “competitive economic performances” (what he called the “performance principle”). But with technical and material progress, the “instinctual energy … spent in alienated labor” could be greatly reduced, making possible a “non-repressive civilization.” At first blush, this radical project seems to offer little basis for criticizing Trump’s transgressions. To the contrary, it seems closer to the “counterstrain of criticism” on the left, as Greenberg describes it, that “rebukes Trump’s high-minded detractors for fetishizing ‘norms.’” But it would be a mistake to think that Trump is somehow furthering a radical project. Trumpism’s release of suppressed sexual and aggressive drives is a far cry from the genuine liberation from sexual repression that Marcuse envisioned. Rather, it represents what Marcuse called the “political utilization of sex” and aggression to reinforce social domination.
Marcuse envisioned the “spread” and “free development of transformed libido beyond the institutions of the performance principle.” Trumpism, in contrast, involves the explosive release of constrained sexuality within the institutions of the performance principle. Marcuse argued that when suppressed sexuality explodes in this fashion, “the libido continues to bear the mark of suppression and manifests itself in the hideous forms so well known in the history of civilization; in the sadistic and masochistic orgies of desperate masses, of ‘society elites,’ of starved bands of mercenaries, of prison and concentration-camp guards.” This passage finds a chilling echo not only in Trump’s remarks and behavior but also in the reports of sexual abuse in migrant detention camps at the U.S. border. Marcuse adds that “such release of sexuality provides a periodically necessary outlet for unbearable frustration; it strengthens rather than weakens the roots of instinctual constraint; consequently, it has been used time and again as a prop for suppressive regimes.”
Marcuse thought that a “non-repressive development of the libido” would also “alter the manifestations of the death instinct.” This is entirely different from the release of aggressive and destructive impulses under Trumpism. When domination becomes impersonal and anonymous, Marcuse suggested, the “aggressive impulse” previously directed at the father cannot find a suitable external target. “Thus repulsed,” the aggression is introjected in the form of guilt. But as postwar changes in the economy and family collectivized the “repressive organization of the instincts,” guilt became “a quality of the whole rather than of the individuals—collective guilt.” Once guilt becomes collective, aggression “turns against those who do not belong to the whole, whose existence is its denial.” Here, too, Marcuse was remarkably prescient. Trumpism’s channeling of aggression “against those who do not belong to the whole”—that is, anyone outside the narrow, purposely delusional circle of Trumpism—is its political utilization.
There are no easy remedies for the pathology of Trumpism because, as Marcuse pointed out, the “mobilization of instinctual energy” is “gratifying to the managed individuals” even when it serves as a prop for social domination. But we can start by deflating the enthusiasm on the far left that Slavoj Žižek and others have expressed for the chaos and disorder of Trump. What we learn from Marcuse is that the individual’s drives and desires may be released in such a way that they strengthen rather than negate social domination. Marcuse’s work helps us to see why Trump’s revolt against the establishment was a betrayed revolution from the beginning.
Odds and Ends
In case you missed it, here’s my essay in Democracy on this great city of mine.
The summer was a decided disappointment, return-to-normalcy-wise, but one small bright spot in my life was a series of free outdoor concerts put on by SummerStage and the city’s parks department. There was the three-day Charlie Parker festival in Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park and three wonderful, in their own way, shows in Central Park. I saw the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis opening gala, on nice, socially distanced chairs, with a special Juneteenth-influenced repertoire; crowded, sweaty free shows by the Sun Ra Arkestra led by the amazing 97-year-old Marshall Allen; and just last Sunday, the Patti Smith Group. The audiences at each show were all quite different, but each made one proud and grateful to live in a city where so many different kinds of people could come together in peace and good feeling to pay tribute to our heroes and longtime companions. And I ask you: Who represents the best of what it means to be a brave, creative, and inspirational New Yorker more than the great Ms. Patti Smith? I first saw her 45 years ago singing “Land of 1,000 Dances” into “Gloria” from Horses, and when she sang it Sunday night, she sounded just as powerful—and inspirational—as she did back then. (Has anyone ever begun an album, much less an entire recording career, with an opening line better than “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”?) Here she is, accompanied by yours truly, my gf, Laura, and about 250 other people rounded up by Choir! Choir! Choir! at the Public Theater in 2019 for “People Have the Power,” also the final encore on Sunday night.
