Divided America: A Summary
The seminal works on the authoritarian personality and totalitarianism can teach us to see the MAGA movement--and ourselves--in new ways.
For the past month, I have been doing a deep dive into an audience analysis of the MAGA movement, beginning with “Divided America: An Origin Story,” posted on July 18, 2024.
Since Aristotle, audience analysis has been the foundation of rhetoric. It leads to rhetorical strategies, including how we think about ethos, which is more than a lunatic shouting in a crowd, “Hey, this is who I am.” It is a transaction between speaker and audience. As the speaker tells the audience this is who I am, the audience discovers who they are in that moment. And, even before the speaker utters a word, the audience affects what the speaker will say. The speaker anticipates how the audience will react.
This transaction often happens unconsciously, as I suspect it does for Donald Trump, in a process of mimesis, or imitation. The speaker imitates models that seem appropriate to the occasion. While I doubt that Trump ever thought about rhetorical strategies, he knew that a large segment of Americans responded to his birther claims—the claim that Obama was not born in the United States.
As I have said in a string of posts, to understand how the MAGA movement developed, we need to understand its origin story and how a large segment of the American people were waiting for a strong leader. The nascent MAGA movement created Trump. Trump only shaped them. He was the catalyst. He gave the crowd—the potential mob—permission to unleash pent-up anger, fear, frustration, and resentment.
Those who have opposed the MAGA movement, an extended audience, have also played a role in this transaction, again, through a process of mimesis. For the MAGA movement to gain force, it needed an enemy who would confirm everything they believed—that the country had disrespected them and left them behind. Liberals and Wokers were everything that Trump needed to fuel the MAGA movement.
This is how our country became so divided. One side said, “I hate you.” The other side said, “I hate you even more.” It escalates like children behaving badly on a playground, and soon it became violent.
As I summarize the history, research, and theory on the authoritarian personality and totalitarianism, keep ethos in mind—the transaction between speaker and audience and extended audience. Also, keep in mind mimesis—the way that an aggressive act begets an even more aggressive reaction.
In our historical moment, when the future of democracy is in danger, an effective approach to ethos begins with the realization that the MAGA movement did not rise out of nothing—without its history and within the history of our entire country. All of us bear some responsibility for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. If we hope for a better America, we must begin with a recognition of our own complicity and a commitment to become a better version of our selves.
In the “Divided America” series, I wanted to come to a better understanding of what has seemed baffling to many of us—the rise of the MAGA movement and the ability of Trump to take over the Republican party.
Those of us who have not been sucked into the MAGA world have been trying to understand Trump’s appeal since June 16, 2015, when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce that he was running for President of the United States. Even though 2015 seems like a lifetime ago, it is recent history. To explore a longer view of our moment, I have been writing about psychologists, philosophers, and political theorists who wrote about Nazi Germany and the Authoritarian Personality. All of these studies were published shortly after World War II, within a two-year period:
· Erik Erikson’s “The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood” (published in 1950, see my post on July 27)
· Theodor W. Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality (published in 1950, see my posts on July 30 and August 7)
· Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (published in 1951, see my post on August 9)
· Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (published in 1951, see my post on August 16)
I began the “Divided America” series, on July 18, with this summary of what would follow, the origin story of the authoritarian personality, which also serves as an origin story for the MAGA movement. It has a lot to do with trauma and families:
The people who form a mob, the people who have an “authoritarian personality” are born in trauma. The original trauma for most of us is our family of origin, although this is certainly not the only trauma that might leave people vulnerable to charismatic leaders. The trauma of the family is more fundamental because it disrupts a person’s maturation, which means the person does not construct an integrated self and is left with few resources to bring order to a chaotic inner life. A delicate balance can only be maintained by aligning with an outside force (a strong leader, a cult, a group, a dogma, drugs, alcohol) that brings simplicity to a confusing world or takes us away from our own thoughts to the dogma of a group. An important feature of this simplicity is dividing the world into an “ingroup,” which is idealized as the good people, and “outgroups,” which are the bad people. Reflection is avoided. What the person feels intensely (anger, fear, confusion, weakness) is projected onto an outgroup. The members of the outgroup are portrayed as being so bad that they are feared like a contagion and might even need to be eradicated. What the person feels can be more readily projected—released in an ecstatic ritual—when in a group that functions like a single mind.
This family pattern is not deterministic. I grew up in an alcoholic family, but, when I was seven years old, my mother had the courage to ask my father to leave. And he left. My family was able to heal.
However, the pattern is predictive. It explains why many Americans support Trump, despite all his flaws.
The pattern is both rigid and fragile. It limits our field of vision, and there seems to be only one future, a dystopia. We need to expand the ways we read history and our world. We need to see that our society and our citizens have many paths to a different future.
Now that I have completed this series, I wanted to offer some thoughts. I don’t want to call these conclusions. These are more like waypoints that mark one point on a journey. They are not the end of the journey, but they should help us to know where we have been, in case we ever feel lost, or where we are going, in case we ever lose hope.
· Unresolved trauma creates chaotic inner lives. For many, that trauma happened in their families of origin. If we recognize that MAGAs are struggling to get through each day, as many of us are, we can learn to respect them. This is how democratic dialogue begins.
· The family pattern that tends to produce a hardcore MAGA is all too common. The domineering and demanding father, the passive mother, the strict rules and gender roles, hinder maturation, the development of individuals who are capable of thinking independently, the kind of person we need in a democracy. The pattern is rigid, but it is also easily disrupted. One slight deviation, like a father who stops drinking, a mother who stands up to the father and defends the children, or the children finding a mentor, can change the future of every family member. We need to be better parents and mentors.
· For others, the trauma occurs later in life, often in war. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew writes about how right-wing insurgencies grow after major wars. We need to take care of our veterans.
· They feel inner chaos, a bundle of conflicting emotions. They seek out strong leaders to bring rigid order to the outer world so that they might control what is inside. They construct their entire world to guard against change. We need to promote a public space to practice democratic dialogue that is safe, where all views are respected.
· In times of rapid change and economic disorder, the chaotic inner life reaches a crisis point. The strong leader is seen as the fixer. His appeal grows as chaos intensifies. The best way to react to chaos is to remain calm.
· We need to remember, however, that the MAGA is a stereotype. We should always use the term MAGA with caution. It is best to think of the hardcore MAGA as only existing within the group—at times, the mob—of a Trump rally. No one is only a MAGA. It is hard, maybe impossible, to avoid the term, but it is a stereotype, more like a racial slur than we might want to admit. In earlier posts, I have argued that we should think of our rhetoric as disruption rather than persuasion. This means helping MAGAs to see that the world outside of a MAGA rally is different. That different world is not only better for us; it is also better for them.
· The group—or mob—of a MAGA rally erases difference and creates what we might call a “hive mind,” but that does not last. With friends and family who support Trump, we need to model independent thought. We need to do more than say, “This is what I believe.” We need to also explain how we arrived at that conclusion.
· The MAGA movement is more diverse than it seems at first. The more we recognize that diversity, the more likely that hardcore MAGAs who are Christians, who are taught to love their neighbors, might wonder why they are standing beside Proud Boys who are filled with hate and anger.
· While MAGAs seems fixed in their beliefs, the very rigidity of their beliefs makes them difficult to sustain. MAGAs are capable of changing, but they do fear change. Like many in our digital world, they feel lonely. They fear, if they leave the MAGA movement, they will lose their family and friends. They will not change unless we offer than a “soft landing,” unless we help them to see an America that also has a place for them. If we truly embrace diversity, we must help all Americans find a home and a community.
· The children of the dysfunctional family with a domineering (often alcoholic) father fear and obey him, but they also resent him. These conflicted feelings are transferred to the strong leader. So, while MAGAs seem to adore Trump without qualification, they are actually conflicted. Their suppressed resentment is what will break their loyalty to the strong leader. This is more than a matter of persuasion. It is also a matter of helping us all to find healthy ways to confront our fears and resentments.
· Hardcore MAGAs tend to think in binaries. Their world is divided into we/they, that is, an ingroup and outgroups. The ingroup is, as Arendt says, “beyond good.” The outgroup is “beyond evil.” For example, “Trump never makes mistakes,” but “Biden is evil.” We need to learn how to blur binaries, not just on issues like women’s health but also in how we view ourselves in opposition to how we view others.
· Without seeing the contradiction, MAGAs tend to believe that “outgroups” are weak, but they also have the power to harm “ingroups.” As research by Robert A. Pape, Chicago Project on Security and Threats, has shown, the “great replacement theory,” the idea that minorities and immigrants are replacing white people, was the key driver for many who participated in the January 6th insurrection. Being inclusive also means finding ways to help all Americans, including MAGAs, feel a part of America’s future.
· The extreme right and the extreme left are more similar than we might first expect, but they are both sure of one thing—they are always right and the other side is always wrong. We should not assume that our side is morally superior.
From reading seminal works on the authoritarian personality and totalitarianism, my most significant takeaway comes, no surprise, from Hannah Arendt. She said that people who are beyond good and beyond evil do not serve a democracy. They endanger it. I think she might have gotten this idea from reading Montaigne, who deeply and critically examined his life, the good and the bad, and strove to be more human, not more perfect.
During his speech at the DNC on August 19, Biden said, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career.” I can’t imagine Trump saying this. For his fifty years of service and his willingness to step aside for the good of his country, I respect Biden. I do not worship him. And I never expected him to be perfect. In a democracy, this is how we should view our leaders. It is how we should view ourselves.
If we expect MAGAs to change, we must be willing to change ourselves—to change our selves. This means learning to think beyond binaries that reduce MAGAs to stereotypes and make us feel morally superior. This means listening more than speaking. This means seeing our own faults before we denounce the faults in others.