A former President of the United States was convicted of 34 felonies by a unanimous jury in criminal court, and most commentators I read or heard said that this will have little or no effect on his very good chances to be elected to that office again in November. When in American history has something like this been even a remote possibility?
Yet, despite a jury trial with no procedural glitches, Republican Congressional and other elected government officials lined up against the judicial process. Trump referred to the judge as “the devil,” and some of his supporters threatened retribution against the judge, prosecutors and the jury. What other word is there for all this but hysteria?
The premise of this post and the two previous in this series (part 1 here, part 2 here) is simple: there seems to be no rational explanation for the current political situation in the United States, especially pertaining to the upcoming presidential election. Attempts have been made to explain it in economic, political, cultural, even demographic terms, but none is sufficient. Journalists are left to find new ways to say the situation is unprecedented, that it defies logic and certainly previous political norms.
So it seems to me we need to broaden (and deepen) our exploration for answers, especially in the area that the modern West knows as the psychological. The phenomena being manifested however has been well known to other ages and other cultures, dealt with under what we would call (but not all of them call) religion, and earlier definitions of philosophy.
Since the rise of our current dictator-in-waiting, I’ve tried to account for these phenomena. I found some relevance in cult behavior, but this may be insufficient. I recently turned to the essays of Carl Jung before and after World War II, analyzing the most notorious twentieth century outbreak of a thirst for authoritarian leadership in Germany and Hitler. Jung applied a psychological term not much in use today: hysteria. I find it very evocative. It clearly bypasses rationality and reference to consensus reality. And it fits the rise of Trump to a chilling extent.
Jung writes of these phenomena in terms of the human unconscious, which is partly personal and partly collective, and its relationship to the conscious mind. As a rule, an eruption from the unconscious that infects consciousness but is not recognized or evaluated by it, is dangerous to the individual, and when it is part of a mass phenomenon, to society as a whole. This is particularly true when the eruptions come primarily from the darker unconscious, also known as the shadow.
Mass hysteria is galvanized and defined by the hysteric that demands it, and so in addition to image etc. this individual becomes a symbol. How else to explain a person holding such sway whose speeches and so-called press conferences are largely incoherent? Especially one who has gone from “I alone can fix it” to “I am your retribution.”
One sign of being ruled by the unconscious is what Jung called one-sidedness, in which simplistic certainties dripping with self-righteousness replace the recognition of complexities. From denial, projection, etc. comes stereotypes of the Other as objects of hate. This is currently manifest on both sides of the American political divide, but most rabidly on the right, now quickly forming the American Reich. Their hysteria is defined by their eagerness to override the procedures of the government of all.
It is a sign of the extremes of the current situation that the American Reich routinely denies realities which pass all rational tests: even of the violent events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, caught by cameras and witnessed by millions on television. Though not identical, this is related to the pathological lying that Jung identified as part of a particular kind of hysteric personality, such as Hitler’s.
How have we gotten here? We have individual responsibilities to look to ourselves, as well as to represent a conscious evaluation of our politics and society. But Jung also identifies culture as a bulwark against rule by the dark unconscious, and that aspect is the subject of this post.
Our American past is not free of eruptions of irrational violence, even if our histories gloss over them. The country began with an invasion and cultural as well as physical genocide. We still suffer effects from a century or more of the slavery of African Americans,. There have been other periods and episodes of racial violence that erupted in various places.
Our politics also has had episodes of violence and conspiracy, and of the urge (even in high places) towards authoritarian rule. But we can also cite a political culture that was established with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and created a civic stability that became the envy of the world. America had political and legal norms. The rule of law under the Constitution was sacrosanct, the equivalent of a secular religion.
While attitudes and behavior we now define as racist and sexist, etc. were embedded in the culture, they were not essential to the founding principles, and therefore its culture. In fact progress was made partly by repeatedly invoking those principles.
The culture enforced rules on political behavior not completely enshrined in law, through the consensual behavior we call tradition. There was always jockeying for advantage, but all parties were forced to obey rules enforced by the political system itself, and the public will behind it. The Supreme Court became the final arbiter, and its interpretations of the Constitution at times may have been met with consternation by some, but they were accepted.
So for example, duly confirmed vote totals were accepted by losers as well as winners. The presidency was a high moral as well as political office, and though the office was held by men of questionable ethics, even the hint of criminal behavior would doom a candidate from the start.
More broadly, there was a consensus reality accepted by all (or nearly all), and an accepted set of tests that said what was a fact and what was not. And there was plenty of fierce debate within these strictures and structures.
So what the hell happened? People with a longer memory or deeper knowledge of history may point to prior precedents, but in my lifetime, the Vietnam War era exposed falsehoods and corruption in government and related institutions that damaged the sense of legitimacy.
Trusted elements of the federal government (supported by large businesses and elements of academia with a common self-interest) were found to be lying, when they were not simply ignoring facts. The cost was paid in blood and resources. War protesters challenged their legitimacy, both in themselves and in contrast to the cultural principles everyone said they believed in.
This war protest all began with conscious use of the research of facts, of applying ethical standards and of analyzing and speculating on structures that were responsible. But as time went on darker elements of the unconscious joined in, as some became more desperate to end the war, and transform society. There were excesses resulting in violence, and visions of conspiracies that might have been fruitful speculation but were characterized more by the emotional power of unjustified certainty. Recognizing complexity and ambiguity just wasn’t very satisfying.
It is important to note that for all its challenges to the legitimacy of the three branches of government, the antiwar movement mostly respected the established norms of process—of elections and judicial decisions. And from the beginning, it dealt in facts as well as interpretations of their meaning.
I’m not going to even try to follow the ramifications over the decades, but it’s pretty clear that in 2024 that politically both sides have in startling ways become their opposites. The previously conservative right, that defended the establishment against the hippies and leftists, has become the insurrectionist, conspiracy-pushing antiestablishment totalitarian hysterics (maintaining however a still pious regard for wealth), more extreme than all but the fringe of the New Left ever was.
The flip is sometimes remarkable. Conservative America and the medical establishment once could only scoff and stare when hippie lefty types droned on about health food and organic processes, plant-based medicine and foreign techniques like acupuncture, meditation and massage. Now that elements of these radical practices are fairly standard in establishment medicine, advocates, practitioners and “influencers” on YouTube promote supposed natural remedies, and turn out to be among the right wing deniers of Covid vaccines, absorbed as a convenient article of faith on the new right.
The answer to the why question is probably in the area suggested last time: in the conflict between what they know has been done to their lives that’s not directly their fault, and the deep shame (however unjustified) and various inferiority feelings they nevertheless have and desperately repress, even from their own consciousness, as well as undifferentiated anger at their plight as perceived victims of injustice or a national turn towards "evil."
Judging from what this segment is visibly eager to suppress or reverse, they feel particularly threatened by cultural changes that get grouped under the term of diversity. This trend that has been going on in fits and starts for generations has sometimes been accompanied by conflict and violence, but now it is met by political power. The difference is that this power embraces non-democratic means, which in itself for Americans indicates a dangerous eruption from the unconscious, an increasingly organized hysteria.
Probably none of this would have emerged so strongly had not they had real grievances that were ignored or belittled, and real basis for feeling shamed and excluded. Or if instead of being cowed by them and trying to avoid controversy, politicians had shown some vision and conviction, especially when they weren’t facing an immediate election. Those in other political niches have their own shadow problems, and until they (or we) deal with those, this won’t get better.
To some extent, we all feel threatened by change. How we evaluate those feelings in consciousness makes the difference. Whether we project, or on the other hand, feel empathy; whether we act out, or act to accommodate change.
That’s some of the “why.” The answer to “how” is partly, and I would still say greatly, in their self-created Internet-linked cult, in which they find mutual support, outlets and forms for their repressed rage, even a special language, and a drug-like feeling of power which lifts them from a knowing helplessness. Radio made Hitler and television made Trump, but the membership of the American Reich is being made via the Internet, its social media and its algorithms. This is dangerous for any group, who must remain conscious of what all this evokes in them.
In dynamic back and forth, Trump and opportunists of the Internet (with lots of help from Russian and Chinese trolls) define for their passionate if quickly substituted beliefs, cobbled together from confronting new situations with hysterical interpretations of old doctrine and the grimmest hits of the past, plus fantasies of rebellious early America and the bluster common to dictatorships and organized crime.
The Internet links huge numbers of people who may be otherwise isolated, and the speed and intensity of the communication can take hold at a level below consciousness, urging people to more extreme views as their unstated membership fee. Cult behavior is even more personal—members who deviate can become immediate exiles.
Add to the more active hysteria the “low information voter” (who may or may not eventually vote) who has little basis for choice other than feelings, which are usually negative, emerging without filter from the shadow of the unconscious. They see Trump as the champion of their own shadow, now liberated to express itself without the effective cautions of institutional culture. (Low information voters also used to vote based on party loyalty, but as party and other supporting mechanisms fade, there seems to be less of this.)
This feeling of shared beliefs and truths, of belonging, becomes more important when other sources of identity (like the steady job in a community of intact families) are failing. There is also the rush of battling common cause and a common enemy that must always be renewed. It’s similar to the pumped-up “outrage” that some on the opposite side can get from demonstrations etc. as well as internal group sessions.
So in a broad political historical sense, the mostly justified distrust of political institutions in the 1960s and 70s may have set the template for those who wish to take over if not destroy those institutions, not to expand democracy and diversity (as the 60s radicals advocated) but to establish White authoritarian rule dominated by a certain, mostly dark kind of Christianity. The American Reich is still a minority, but seems dangerously close to taking power in a more significant way.
Responding to this distrust of those who defend these institutions, new standards has been applied to electing officials, so that today there are more members of Congress and Senators who are ideologically rigid and otherwise more ignorant, added to those whose moral sense stops at what is good for their party. They are representatives of the shadow. This ideological fervor and partisanship has most alarmingly infect the Supreme Court, now effectively corrupted and politicized in ways that clearly benefit the American Reich.
However it is worth saying that while the culture of American civic institutions has been badly eroded, it has not been eradicated. The New York jury that convicted Trump on the evidence presented is an example of it, as are the many election officials throughout the country that have stood up to the bullying of the American Reich.
In the 1950s, Jung expanded on the dynamics of culture, the individual and mass society, especially in the writings that were translated and published in the US as a book in 1958, The Undiscovered Self. Jung’s discussion of religion as a cultural counterbalance raises too many complicated issues to address here, especially in view of how much has changed since then, and the different context of the US. Here, the civic religion of Constitutional freedom and democracy was strong, and for at least much of my lifetime, pretty much in tandem with the ethical teachings of institutional religion. But now both are divisive and often at odds, especially as civic education itself has been weakened.
Particularly when established religion is no longer the basis of a cultural consensus, Jung writes, it is up to the individual to do the work of confronting the unconscious with personal religious experience. The individual, he writes “needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass.”
Jung believed that modern people are susceptible to mass suggestion also because they tend to be insufficiently grounded in nature. Beyond a mention or two in his 1946 essay, he elaborates on this in other parts of his work, and again, the topic is too complex and fraught with a different contemporary significance to be more than just mentioned here.
Jung realized that the intellectual tenor of the time made a certain kind of rationalism the standard of validity, and that all this talk of the unconscious and so on was likely to fall on deaf and perhaps embarrassed ears. So his outlook for the future wasn’t optimistic: “The underestimation of the psychological factor is likely to take a bitter revenge.”
We may want or need to ignore the insanity of what’s going on—it makes for clickable sensationalism, but it fits into the everyday decadence on the rest of the front page. Most of the time we have to ignore it to stay sane. But that very insanity ought to be telling us that there’s more going on here than can be explained in newspaper columns and cable television roundtables.
Jung believed that the possibility of the destructive contents of the unconscious expressing themselves in a “collective possession” is always present in society, even in our supposedly enlightened, rational times. Nuclear arsenals made this possibility infinitely more dangerous even in his time, and now, we can add climate distortion.
In the best of times, he speculates, it is held back by “the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population.” He suggests an optimistic estimate of its upper limit is “about forty percent of the electorate.”
Perhaps ordinary political strategies and voting patterns will result in at least holding back this hysteria from power in the next election. But it may take more than that—it may require some scrutiny from a different perspective, a wider view of what is relevant, as well as what is at stake.
