The Trump campaign took down the video, and said it was a repost from somewhere else, added by a staffer who failed to notice the nomenclature. But this makes its own point: Trump’s hysterics evoke and give form to the hysterics of his supporters, and so these tendencies go beyond Trump himself. He has clearly invited this form and content of hysteria, with statements that echo Hitler as his most inflammatory. This affair illustrates and symbolizes a growing fact: the American Right is refashioning itself as the American Reich.
Support for other dictators in the world, as well as Trump’s declared dictatorial ambitions, have become overt among them. Though some express resentment in public concerning Hitler references to Trump, and project them back on their political opponents, others seem willing and even happy to identify with Nazi symbolism and Hitler himself. Trump’s statements echoing Hitler’s so closely are not only hateful and inflammatory, they give permission to his followers to accept—privately and increasingly in public—the ambition’s of the Third Reich in the 1930s and 40s, perhaps somewhat differently applied for our time.
In his writings on Nazism and Fascism, Jung concentrated on psychological factors as the necessary foundation for such a societal response, but he acknowledged other contributing factors. “Naturally there were plenty of reasons—political, economic, social and historical—to drive the Germans to war, just as there are in the case of common murder,” he wrote.
Jung does not discuss any of those specifics. In this post I begin speculations on such contributing factors, briefly glancing at 20th century Germany, but looking at such elements in contemporary America, with their attendant psychological implications.
The now conventional shorthand version of history says that Nazi Germany was a reaction to the economic hardships and national shame imposed by the harsh terms of the peace treaty after Germany was defeated in World War I. Another factor, probably related, was the immense monetary inflation in Germany in the early 1920s.
Jung may have not bothered with such explanations partly because he saw similar hysteria in Germany that led to World War I, before any of this happened. But I emphasize the German inflation because in my lifetime I’ve observed that no economic misfortune is as likely to evoke an hysterical response as is inflation.
In my experience, we as a people will grimly survive recession and depression, but inflation drives us crazy. I believe the reason is that, even more than unemployment or recession, inflation makes us feel helpless. If you are unemployed, you could still imagine getting a job, or borrowing a certain amount, etc. Inflation attacks the value of money itself, and hence its reality.
In a recession, a dollar is still worth a dollar, and may even buy a little more. You can help yourself by getting more dollars. In inflation, the value of a dollar declines unpredictably. It’s unclear how to help yourself when dollars don’t have the same value from one week to the next. Each goal you might reach is not enough. Suddenly everything is uncertain, frightening and threatening.
We saw the intensity of response in the American inflation of the late 1970s, which was nowhere near as large as Germany in the 20s, but was larger than the recent inflation, which is still being felt. The response in 1980 (together with other factors) defeated a sitting President, and changed America profoundly. It led to the election of Ronald Reagan. The postwar consensus was over, and rapid change in institutions and daily life began.
An energy crisis caused by the Middle Eastern oil cartel, earlier recession and the ongoing flight of industries contributed (steel mills and auto plants closing, leading to economic hollowing especially in middle Atlantic and Midwestern state, including Detroit’s half-century of decline) but it was double-digit inflation that shook the security of the middle and upper middle classes as well as those below. I certainly found evidence of this in interviews I conducted for a New York Times Magazine cover story.
After decades of relative stability, even through various crises, global inflation hit again around 2022. But much of the US felt it in the past year or so through the sudden spike in grocery prices, and then prices for other goods and services. Although inflation is officially low, these prices—up to a third higher than a few years before-- continue to create anxiety and dismay. Going to the grocery store is shocking, or restaurants. According to a news story this week, many Americans now view their everyday fast food meals as a luxury. Many people are less secure, and many others feel insecure.
Higher food prices are likely caused by other real factors as well, such as the effects of various kinds of unaccustomed weather on crops, and related glitches in the supply line. Nevertheless, that the realities—and the shock—of inflated prices don’t register proportionately in official economic numbers is just one of the ways in which the whole system of measuring economic health is broken. These measurements (and what they don’t measure) add to the obscuring of the major and growing problem of the concentration of wealth in a few hands, while most Americans don’t share in the statistical growth, and feel themselves falling back.
Though this inflation is very recent and thus the icing on the cake, this huge imbalance known by the dubious shorthand of economic inequality is a persistent and now endemic problem. As people feel more and more insecure, they feel shame at their helplessness as well as anger. They look for scapegoats (such as immigrants and other races), and they listen to those who best resonate with their otherwise silent hysteria.
Though potent, anxiety based on money and status is not the only source of these feelings of helplessness. There is also the most comprehensive threat to the future, to existence itself, to the world as we know it, of climate distortion.
In Jung’s theories of the unconscious, the worst fears are likely to be the most repressed. In this case, the strongest of insecurities becomes the most threatening to even admit. In a healthier society, that tendency would be tempered by conscious efforts to address reality, however frightening and difficult.
But that is not happening in one segment of the public, reflected in those whose political power is built on forming and intensifying their hysteria. Perhaps the most classic example of this political as well as psychological response made the news last week, when Governor DeSantis of Florida signed into law a bill which removes any mention of climate as a priority in state energy policy, among similar provisions.
As numerous news stories mentioned, Florida was at that moment in the grips of a May heat wave that sent temperatures to 115F in Key West and gave Miami its hottest day in history. In its most dire predictions to date, NOAA forecasts a dangerously active hurricane season, even as Florida has already recently experienced rising seas, flooding rains, damaging storms, toxic algae blooms and other disasters that manifest climate distortion. In other words, Florida is ground zero for the climate crisis in America, and its governor’s solution is to forbid considering it—even forbidding the words.
This is denial writ large, done consciously no doubt for political effect (it got a lot of attention for a law that actually doesn’t change much) and to mollify Big Oil donors. But it also could not be a clearer example of hysteria, and the cynical exploitation of hysteria, which in the end amounts to the same thing.
Hysterics in movies usually throw fits under pressure, crying we’re all going to die. But totally ignoring mortal danger is also an hysterical response. In practice these two responses often cause each other.
The potential consequences of climate distortion are huge, too awful to fully grasp, or allow oneself to contemplate for long. Not much could be bigger than the end of the world as we know it. But this is not the first such situation, and there is a longer history in how Americans responded to the earlier one.
From almost the moment the first atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima was known, fear of a future that included the threat of instant and total annihilation began to take root. As the nuclear arms race went on relentlessly, and it became a patriotic duty to support it with at least silent consent, or thanks to McCarthyism, the Blacklist and J. Edgar Hoover, risk ostracism if not arrest, the feeling of helplessness grew in every direction.
At first government officials were amazed that the public was silent. Psychologists talked about a national numbing, and the 1950s became known for a kind of hysterical quiescence: a manically happy face that any unusual event could turn into panic. Later psychologists came up with the theory of “learned helplessness,” based on rats in a maze who stopped trying to escape when their previous efforts always led to failure—even after escape routes were open.
Denial seems proportionate to the dimensions of helplessness. People are not insensible to floods, fires, smoke, rising waters and heatwaves when they are their victims, though even then the denial can be quite remarkable. Everyone else would like to ignore stories about these threatening events that lurk in the news somewhere every day. These are “natural” disasters, almost by definition outside human control. Yet those damn scientists pile up evidence that they are caused by how we’ve lived our modern lives. So suppressed shame is also part of the response, and anger at the double bind of creating havoc by leading normal lives.
But it’s all so big that it seems impossible to address. We seem to be helpless. Individual efforts seem pitiful and deluded. It must require a major and therefore threatening change to our way of life, which must be in some ways more threatening than the ultimate climate crisis consequences. At least when they hit we’ll all be dead. Maybe.
How can it be my fault anyway? I did what I was supposed to do. It must be a hoax perpetrated by evil forces just to shame and intimidate me, and to give them more power over me.
The contents of the unconscious, Jung writes, are not evil or destructive in themselves, “but are ambivalent, and it depends entirely on the constitution of the intercepting consciousness whether they will turn out to be a curse or a blessing.”
This seems true also of the phenomena apparently behind this hysteria of helplessness. The problem of income inequality can be addressed by higher taxes on the wealthy, and even a wealth limit, with the excess devoted to (for example) addressing the effects of inequality, and addressing climate distortion causes and effects. This method was American policy from the 1930s through the 1970s to some degree, and some redress of excessive tax cuts of Reagan and the Bushes did begin in the Obama years, to be immediately reversed. But the American Reich for its various political and psychological reasons, ignores any such remedy.
Though incremental measures to address climate distortion may well help and perhaps eventually lead to societal attempts at solutions, this is not a mere political problem, nor one that can entirely be addressed through bureaucratic or economic means. Jung warned (as early as 1919) that if the collective unconscious becomes animated “due to a complete breakdown of all conscious hopes and expectations, the danger arises that the unconscious may take the place of conscious reality.” For many, it seems that it already has.
This is the essence of the American Reich. The conscious reality is denied. They believe their unconscious fantasies and projections. Some news outlets now routinely provide “fact checks” of absurd rumors and claims, most of them promulgated on American Reich social media.
So powerful are these fantasies, especially those promoted by their dictator-in-waiting, that previously establishment Republican politicians, eager for power, abase themselves by supporting claims in spite of quite obvious evidence that they are false. This extends even to Members of Congress who hid from rampaging mobs, saw blood on the floor of the Capitol, and now deny that anything unusual took place there on January 6, 2021.
Obvious hysteria has become an American Reich technique, from social media and vigilante activity to the halls of Congress and the Supreme Court.
How can this hysteria itself be addressed? Jung suggests two ways. First and foremost, as individuals, we look deeply into ourselves, for as he writes, if there’s something really wrong in society, there’s something really wrong in me.
This is true politically as well. There is something to some political responses and even right wing fantasies, however distorted, that some on the left self-righteously ignore or one-sidedly deny.
We must all examine ourselves, to consciously restore balance with the unconscious. For the hysteria, the anger, the hatred and helpless rage, the avarice and greed for power, as well as the arrogance, the envy, the prejudice, the projections and denial and the repressed feelings of inferiority, do not all occur on one side of any question, and certainly not on just one side of the political divide. Haven’t we all seen the environmentalist who is always angry, always in a bad mood, glowering in the woods in his Save the Redwoods t-shirt?
“As a psychiatrist, accustomed to dealing with patients who are in danger of being overwhelmed by unconscious contents,” Jung writes, “I know that is of utmost importance, from the therapeutic point of view, to strengthen as far as possible their conscious position and powers of understanding, so that something is there to intercept and integrate the contents that are breaking through into consciousness.”
The other remedy is the culture—cultural norms, bonds, institutions. For culture, Jung writes, “is our only weapon against the fearful danger of mass-mindedness.”
Speculations on how the American culture broke down to become the breeding grounds of the American Reich is the subject of a future post. But Jung has something else to say about the importance of our political culture in surviving this hysteria of helplessness: the function of a democracy:
“True democracy is a highly psychological institution,” Jung wrote in this same postwar context, “which takes account of human nature as it is, and makes allowances for the necessity of conflict within its own national boundaries.”
Later he adds: “The marked tendency of the Western democracies to internal dissension is the very thing that could lead them onto a more hopeful path.”
This of course is the most proximate threat of the American Reich: an end to this democracy in their totalitarian “unified” Reich. Preserving what is left of American democracy is at stake in the 2024 election. That also is a topic for next time, but is always worth emphasizing.
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