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Transcript
One of the most confusing things about Trumpism is this paradox: The people who are his most devoted followers are also the people who believe they are most committed to individual freedom.
They hate big government. They fly “Don’t tread on me” flags. They prize individual freedom above all. One of their most aspirational and inspirational symbols is the American cowboy making his own way in the world, accepting responsibility for his successes and for his failures. And yet they hand over all their power to one man.
Why?
We’re supposed to be living in the most free society in history. The history of the West was supposed to be a march towards freedom. A few of the milestones: Athenian democracy, the Roman Republic, the rise of science, the Renaissance, the American Revolution followed by revolutions across Europe. And then what many people thought at the time was the final turning point:
World War 1, the collapse of empires, the formation of new free societies, pointing the way towards the future. But instead, we saw the rise of communist dictatorship in Russia, fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, the most horrific repressions of freedom in all of history.
And yet many people embraced repression. And you can still find people who long for the days of Hitler or Stalin or one of their successors. Just like there are so many Americans who long for rule by a strongman, mistaking Donald Trump for a strong man.
In trying to understand this paradox, we don’t need to start from scratch. History provides us with a head start — if we’re willing to pay attention to history,
And a good place to look is back in 1941, when the psychologist Erich Fromm published his book Escape from Freedom. I’d like to read a few passages from it now. See if they sound familiar.
The First World War was regarded by many as the final struggle and its conclusion, the ultimate victory for freedom.
Existing democracies appeared strengthened and new ones replaced old monarchies. But only a few years elapsed before new systems emerged, which denied everything that men believed they had won in centuries of struggle.
As Fromm points out, when people lose their freedom, we want to believe it’s because it was taken away from them by a madman dictator like Hitler or Stalin or the many others, or, today, by Trump, or by propaganda, wrapping them in a bubble of disinformation so they believe things that aren’t true. But Fromm was a psychologist. He’d made a deep study of Freud — although he modified Freud’s ideas — and he believed much of the problem was psychological.
People often give away their freedom willingly, even eagerly, even while also believing that they are free or will be.
Of course, it’s a logical paradox, and yet it seems to make sense to them.
The more men succeeded in mastering nature, and the more millions of individuals became economically independent, the more did one come to believe in a rational world and in man as an essentially rational being. The dark and diabolical forces of man’s nature were relegated to the Middle Ages and to still earlier periods of history, and they were explained by lack of knowledge, or by the cunning schemes of deceitful kings and priests.
When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission.
In the 20th century, it was common to believe that there was something wrong with Germans or Italians or Russians or other peoples who had embraced authoritarianism. Now we’re forced to confront the fact that the same thing is wrong with Americans or the British or the French or people in other countries where authoritarianism is making a comeback Fromm argued the problem is not sin. It’s psychology.
Communication with others is a matter of life and death for the child. The possibility of being left alone is necessarily the most serious threat to the child’s whole existence. There is another element, however, which makes the need to belong so compelling: the fact of subjective self-consciousness, of the faculty of thinking by which man is aware of himself as an individual entity, different from nature and other people.
Unless he belonged somewhere, unless his life had some meaning and direction, he would feel like a particle of dust and be overcome by his individual insignificance.
In other words, freedom can be terrifying. We may think we want it until we actually experience it, and then discover it can feel like being lost in a wilderness. And this isn’t just a problem for people on the right. As Fromm notes, people on the left often want to escape from freedom as well, into a form of solidarity that frees them from having to decide for themselves.
I don’t agree with Erich Fromm about everything. He was a member of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theorists. And if you’ve heard me talk about that before, you know that I think they got some important stuff fundamentally wrong. And a lot of research has been done in this area since Fromm wrote. But many of his insights stand up.
And if you want to understand the paradox of Trumpism, how people can long to be free while longing to escape from freedom, a good place to start is with Erich Fromm in 1941.
Image: Giant screen image of Donald Trump addressing Capitol rally of Jan. 6, 2021. Voice of America, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons