Divided America: An Origin Story
To understand how we arrived at this moment in history, we can begin by looking at seminal studies of the Authoritarian Personality. (Part 1 of a series.)
I feel the need to frame and contextualize “Divided America,” which will be a series of essays. Think of this as a preface. I have been working on these essays for the last year and a half. Initially, I will probably be publishing about one a week.
As the essays drop, I will indicate their order in the subtitle (Part I, Part 2, etc.), and I will also summarize how each essay is fitting into a greater whole in a note like this.
The series will deal with understanding our divided country, navigating its politics, and maintaining democratic values. Rather than comment on recent events, I will be taking a few steps back to at least 1950, shortly after the World War II, the Holocaust, and the first use of atomic weapons. Our country did not become divided magically in 2015 when Donald Trump announced a presidential run. I think we will find that the history of how the great divide developed is long. It goes back to the origins of our country. Maybe, it goes back to the evolution of Homo Sapiens.
I began this Substack with a series of essays on Trump’s rhetoric. I do believe that Trump is an existential threat to our democracy. (That doesn’t mean that the Left is beyond critique.) In analyzing Trump’s rhetoric, a project that is ongoing on this site, I am attempting to understand that threat and suggest ways to counter it through rhetoric—not violence.
This series could be thought of as a continuation of the work on Trump’s rhetoric. It is audience analysis, a key component of rhetoric since Aristotle. To search for new ways to understand the great divide, I began by researching what is often called the “Authoritarian Personality.” I was finishing revisions on the first six essays in the series last Saturday, July 13, 2024, when I heard about the attempted assignation of former President Trump. Before you begin to read, I want to stress that the purpose of everything I am writing on this site is to promote democratic dialogue and subvert violence. The aim of democratic rhetoric is to use language to resolve differences. If we abandon rhetoric and dialogue, we are left with violence.
While I have already expressed and will continue to express my concerns about a second Trump administration, I feel more strongly than ever that we need to speak to each other and support political dialogue. We have been speaking past each other for too long. While I began reading about the “Authoritarian Personality” to understand the MAGA movement, I soon realized that the origins of the extreme Right and the extreme Left are similar, almost identical. This is a key part of understanding how our country became so divided. To find a way back to normal politics and respectful dialogue, we must realize this and accept that the selves of both sides are wounded. I hope these comments will provide a boarder context for what I am attempting to do in this series.
If this is going to be an origin story of how we arrived at this moment in history, a crisis in our democratic experiment, we need to begin by looking at societies that have lost their way. In the twentieth century, these were societies that evolved into totalitarianism. Notice that I wrote “evolved,” not “devolved.” As I will explain in more detail in a later essay, Hannah Arendt saw totalitarianism as a new form of government that emerged in the mid-twentieth century. It could not have developed without new forms of communication—daily newspapers, radio, and film—that are precursors to the Internet and social media. These media could support democracies or destroy them.
This first essay in the series will serve as an introduction, a hint at where the series will go. It will also serve as a qualification. In this series, I will need to discuss “types,” which is different than “stereotypes.” I will also discuss democratic thinking. When Hannah Arendt wrote about the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, she wrote about “the banality of evil.” She said that Eichmann was not the monster she expected to witness. He was a bureaucrat, and he thought like a bureaucrat. His kind of thinking made the Holocaust efficient. It is the kind of thinking we find in Project 2025. If we are going to preserve democracy, we all need to learn how to think better. This means moving past dichotomies that divide us into “we” (those who are beyond good) and “they” (those who are beyond evil). As I will attempt to explain in this introductory essay, we cannot think without dichotomies (also called binaries), but we can learn to move beyond them. We can’t talk about the weather without using binaries (it is either hot or cold), but we also realize that 102 degrees Fahrenheit feels quite different than 93 degrees.
So, let’s begin to think about the difference between a type and a stereotype.
In “The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood,” Erik H. Erikson, the developmental psychologist, wrote that “Nazism was only the German version—superbly planned and superbly bungled—of a universal contemporary potential.” In other words, the rise of totalitarianism in Germany in the 1930s needs to be understood as both uniquely German and as a historical pattern. The pattern also emerged in other countries at about the same time—Russia, Spain, Italy, and Japan—and it will, Erikson warned, emerge again. To learn from history, Erikson wants us to think about how we view it. One way to view history is as a series of unique events that are never repeated; Nazi Germany happened once and only once. Another way to view history is to look for patterns; we will see fascism or something like it again. Both approaches, Erikson says, are valid.
Understanding the uniqueness of historical events teaches us to be cautious about glib historical analogies. Seeing patterns teaches us that human beings, especially leaders, who too often are not the best of us, make the same stupid decisions over and over, creating decades of suffering for the people of a country—sometimes, the entire world. Even more importantly, most citizens fail to see it coming. We need to learn how to be cautious about how we read it, and we also need to learn from it.
Since the beginning of our democracy, our founders were concerned about the mob. They learned about the dangers of the mob by reading history, mostly the history of Athens and Rome. Our founders developed checks and balances to temper the impulses of a mob, but they didn’t conceive of what might happen with a virtual mob is spread across the branches of government that are supposed to check each other. Research and scholarship after World War II, after the Holocaust, has attempted to understand why people form mobs in the first place.
As I attempt to explain Trump’s audience, so perplexing to those who are outside of it, I will move through several studies, written about different societies and different historical periods. I will try to sort out the uniqueness of each perspective as well as move toward a pattern. It will seem to some readers that I am weaving my way through various disciplines (history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy) and various theoretical movements (modernism and postmodernism, structuralism and poststructuralism). I am. These shifts in perspective will be easier to navigate if we begin at the end—with the pattern that we need to both recognize and deconstruct.
Here is the pattern I have condensed from the major studies on the Authoritarian Personality:
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 is the pattern that will help us to understand events that come at us so quickly that we are rendered dizzy and baffled. This pattern is a moment of clarity. We understandably want to latch onto it. We will not, I hope, want to stay here. We should want more depth, detail, and nuance. Learning to feel comfortable with doubt, I will repeat through this series of essays, is an important part of democratic thinking.
We might be less likely to latch onto clarity if we understand how it functions in rhetoric. If I am a prosecutor trying to prove that a man killed his boss and I have an abundance of evidence, I want to present my case in a clear, simple (as simple as possible), linear narrative. I want my case to sound like a bedtime story. If I am the lawyer for the defendant, I want to take what might actually be a simple story (he did it, as the evidence clearly shows) and disrupt it. I want to make my case as complex and confusing as possible. I want a postmodern novel.
Regardless of what the truth is (sometimes the truth is simple and sometimes it is complex), we crave clarity and simplicity. Cicero used this strategy in some of his trials. He would confuse the jury for a long time, maybe an hour or so, and then hit them with a moment of clarity. The jury, uncomfortable with their inability to understand the complicated story, would latch onto the moment of clarity. Propaganda works because it presents a simple message repeatedly. Since World War I, political rhetoric has functioned more and more like propaganda. Find a simple message, one that will fit onto a bumper sticker, and repeat it over and over.
Notice what I’ve done. The opposite of what Cicero did. I gave you a simple explanation of how the Authoritarian Personality develops and why that kind of person is susceptible to the influence of a charismatic leader. Then, I explained why you shouldn’t believe that the type explains everything—that is, why the type should be the beginning of thought, not the end of it. We need to learn how to throw rocks at our own ideas.
The first move away from this simple explanation of the mob is to accept what should be obvious: This paradigm, at best, explains only a segment of Trump supporters—the hardcore MAGAs. And it may only explain MAGAs when they are in a group—that is, at a Trump rally, within an Internet bubble, or perhaps within their family. If we are going to be the kind of individual who supports democracy, we should keep reminding ourselves that the MAGA, the stereotype, does not exist—at least, outside of a MAGA environment. The term MAGA is a necessary fiction. The MAGA movement, however, is real enough. To understand the MAGA movement, we need to understand why people are drawn into it and why their identity becomes fused with it. We should recognize that the MAGA stereotype is dehumanizing. We should also recognize that MAGAs have dehumanized themselves as they adapt to a group identity that does not tolerate diversity. This is going to be a difficult balance.
Even within this more circumscribed group of Trump supporters are groups that live within and beyond the MAGA world—the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, Christian Nationalists, and Christian Fundamentalists. The motives for each of these groups differ. At another move beyond the MAGA type, there are traditional small-government conservatives who continue to vote for Trump for lower taxes but would never consider attending a Trump rally. They have voted a strait Republican ticket their entire lives and cannot imagine voting for a Democratic, maybe even to save democracy. Recognizing and acknowledging the differences among Trump voters may be the best way to help some Trump supporters see themselves and our political landscape anew. In other words, we need to be sophisticated enough to see similarities and diversity within a broad political movement that does its best to erase difference.
Erikson realized that his subject was complex. No single factor, he knew, like the German economy being crippled by the Treaty of Versailles, could explain everything. We should follow his lead. In trying to understand Trump’s audience, what it reveals about the election of 2016 and how it might instruct us about the election in 2024, we should learn what we can from Erikson and others. We should first learn that we are attempting to understand a complex historical progression and a movement that is multifaceted. America in the 2020s is not Germany in the 1930s, and the MAGA movement is not German Nazism. We can learn from Erikson and others to understand the MAGA type, but we also need to qualify how we use these sources. We need to use types and avoid stereotypes. We need to avoid lapsing into the same kind of thinking that has fueled the MAGA movement. We need to avoid “we-they” thinking. “We,” our side of the great divide, often exhibits exactly what we loath about “they.”
This requires reflection. As we try to understand what is behind the MAGA movement, we need to also ask: Do Woke Liberals really think differently than the hardest of hardcore MAGAs? In 2016, many supporters of Bernie Sanders thought about voting for Trump, and many supporters of Trump had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. As we attempt to understand the MAGA movement, it is appropriate to draw upon works like The Authoritarian Personality, a massive study conducted by Theodore Adorno and a team of Berkeley experimental psychologists, published in 1950. Adorno and his colleagues found that the authoritarian personality thinks in stereotypes. As one of their subjects said, “Jews are all alike and they are incapable of changing.” These researchers were well aware that, as they used their surveys and interviews to construct the Authoritarian Personality as a concept, they could be accused of thinking in stereotypes, that is, the same kind of thinking they were finding among anti-Semites and racists.
Certainly, as Adorno points out, a construct—like the Authoritarian Personality—that helps us to understand why certain people are more susceptible to totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, and racism, which analyzes data from over two thousand subjects, is not the same as a stereotype of the “Jew” or the “Negro” that is constructed without science, without a method, and without qualifications. A stereotype is constructed in a mind that fears the future.
Most of all, we need to go to empathy before judgment. David Brooks’ How to Know a Person can serve as an important guide. As I discuss research on the Authoritarian Personality, I will attempt to provide hooks, core explanations, such as a description of the family pattern that leaves individuals more susceptible to authoritarism. These hooks might seem reductive, but they will help us to understand complex and often contradictory data. At other times, I will cover exceptions, which might frustrate our wish to understand what has been happening in our country. This is also a lesson in democratic thinking. We need to learn to live with doubt and ambiguity. The greatest damage to democracy is done by people who are damn sure they are doing the right thing.
In the coming essays, I will comment on and critique a number of important studies of the Authoritarian Personality, beginning with Erikson. I hope you will join me.