The Politics of Rage

Beware of what you wish for

These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

A reader sent a link to Robert Reich’s Substack, in which he had posted an open letter from a senior Federal judge in the US who retired so he could speak out against what the Trumpists are doing to the Justice Dept and the rule of law in the US. If you can access it, it’s an important commentary on the state of that nation. The reader added:

I find it unbelievable that democracy & the rule of a just law in a country once admired for both, could have fallen so far into a cesspit. I recognise that no country is beyond reproach, but not just Trump but so many of his corrupt administration & many before, have pushed the boundaries to places one would never have believed possible.

With respect, I don’t find it unbelievable that this should be happening. I find it entirely predictable to the extent that it was not so much whether the US would slide into overt fascism but when. Behind the scenes, a lot of people have been working strenuously for this, more or less since independence but especially since the notorious Powell Memo of 1970. Granted, there have been times when they seemed to recede for a while, and they’re not quite there yet but, as the judge’s heartfelt letter shows, they can smell victory and it’s going to their little heads. Is Trump the cause? No, definitely not. He was a small child when Joe McCarthy was on the rampage; the vile racist film Birth of a Nation was made in 1915, and black people were being lynched in their thousands before Trump’s father, Fred, was born in 1905. There were anti-immigrant riots in Boston and New York in the 1880s, often taking the form of “anti-Red” pogroms. Slavery and slaughter of indigenous people, of course, we know all about. The theme of self-righteous racist violence goes right back, as Howard Zinn has documented.

Trump is, however, the most effective lightning rod for the intense and destructive pressures that exist in that country, not because he knows what he’s doing sufficient to plan it but because his normal, selfish, hate-filled and disgusting behaviour has caught the mood of a major part of the country. By indulging all his prejudices openly, he licenses people to get in touch with their inner goons and spray it around. However, he’s only part of it. He has surrounded himself with possibly the worst collection of incompetents, misfits, crooks, predators and crackpots ever assembled in one government. Part of it is that Trump doesn’t like competition but mostly it’s the quality of people who are breaking their necks to get close to power. Half his cabinet had previously said how much they despise him; as soon as he was back in the White House, they were knifing each other in the rush to kiss his ring. Is that just America? No, it’s everywhere. Is it just men? Emphatically not, after a reign of corruption, former Bangladesh PM Sheihk Hasina Wazed was recently sentenced to death for ordering troops to shoot demonstraters.

We look at the world today and we have to think: “There’s something seriously wrong going on.” The world we will hand to our children and grandchildren is not the world we inherited. Granted, the 1950s and 60s were pretty scary but there was always the thought that we could actually make things better. I don’t think that exists any more. It seems the younger generation have very largely given up. People at demonstrations are a lot older than they used to be; conservationists are all getting on. In every country, the political impetus seems to have moved from the young and idealistic to the older, marginalised and angry. That’s dangerous, it’s exactly what happened in Italy, Germany and Spain during the 1920s and 30s. The problem is the people who are taking advantage of the discontent are using it to advance themselves, not to advance a doctrine. They are using the widespread and growing sense of resentment, focussing it as the politics of hate, away from those who actually have control of the society on to outsiders such as gay and lesbian groups, of different religions, of strangers and immigrants.

In the UK, the boozy Nigel Farage, serial leader of fringe parties, is typical of the wave of “angry right wingers” that dominate the scene. It seems every photo of him shows him with a beer in one hand and his mouth stretched wide in some sort of exultant guffaw. His policies don’t seem to run much further than getting out of the EU, banning immigrants and blaming Muslims for everything wrong in Britain today. There’s a lot wrong, and most of it goes back to Thatcher’s brand of neoliberalism but he ignores that. So who is he? His family background was disturbed by his father’s alcoholism but they weren’t short of money, and young Nigel went to expensive private schools. His peers remember him as loud, objectionable, racist, manipulative and always wanting to be centre of attention. Nothing has changed, it seems, and he now has a good chance of becoming prime minister. People should pay attention to the personality and not the theatrics. Boris Johnson was severely criticised in the recent Covid enquiry but one of his schoolteachers fingered him decades ago:

Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies. [He] sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the school for the next half). I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else.

That attitude, of privilege and entitlement combined with disregard for the normal constraints, should be a disqualifier for any political position. Caroline Kennedy describes it in her cousin, RFK Jr., whom she has known all her life. Mary Trump, PhD psychologist and niece of Donald says “My uncle is the only person I’ve ever met who has no redeeming qualities. Not a single one.” She is definitely worth following on Substack and YouTube.

These people have accumulated immense power and yet they’re truly awful individuals. Why do they think they’ve got what it takes to run something as big and important as a modern nation? Well, the answer is they don’t think that, that’s not what they’re there for. They were drawn to the world of power because it fascinates them and seems to offer something they lack: approval, the ability to push people around in order to feel good about themselves by dominating everybody else. They’re not a new phenomenon, they’ve always been around; a chap called Shakespeare made a career out of writing about them. They’re more prominent now as there weren’t the same openings for complete pricks half a century ago. Where politicians once had to compete on offering visions of a glowing future in between kissing babies and old ladies, now they spew sulphurous fantasies of dark forces trying to batter our walls down. Where immigrants were once welcomed as “New Australians” helping to build the country, now they’re demonised. The politics of promise has degenerated into the politics of fear, envy and outrage.

The reason these people are rising in the polls is because they’ve realised there is a steadily growing wave of discontent, resentment and uncertainty for the future, just waiting for clever politicians to take control and channel it to their advantage. And that’s what’s happening. Clearly, the way to clip the wings of the various wannabe Duce’s is to deal with the resentment. There is, however, a problem with that plan. The people who are causing the resentment don’t want anybody to know about their role, and are funding the various right wing pollies to keep public attention over there, on immigrants stealing jobs, and not here, on how neoliberal capitalism is exporting the jobs. There are so many aspects to this, it’s impossible to keep up, especially as the people making all the money are very good at keeping secrets. Fortunately, the Epstein business has opened a large door into their subterranean world but what we’ve seen so far has only been depraved parties, not the real business of plunder.

Some of it is starting to leak, e.g. Epstein’s close relationship with former Israeli general and prime minister, Ehud Barak, but that’s still a small part of the vast, hidden networks of corruption they ran. The other point to remember is that, as a successful criminal, Epstein was only one of many thousands of equally vile human beings scurrying around behind the scenes, each with thousands of contacts reaching to every corner of the world, into every boardroom and every parliament. The worrying part of the whole deal is that if he hadn’t gone after children, if he’d simply stayed in the background trafficking in illegal weapons, spyware, women, drugs, gambling and other joys, nobody would have worried about him. His downfall was that he was indiscreet. Which, if you have a private island and a private 727 jet and half a dozen mansions, is very, very silly. The most successful crooks stay in the background, out of range of the paparazzi and, quietly cultivating their contacts and amassing their billions.

Question then arises: where does it all end? This is not fascism à la 1930s, where people joined movements that were bigger than themselves with the goal of rebuilding their countries. Hitler was considered ascetic; he was working for the greater glory of the German nation, not for himself. The Reich was to last a thousand years so their building program had to reflect that. But he didn’t get personally rich; his relatives were kept out of sight and he disapproved of how Göring was getting fat. Instead, what we are now seeing is an unholy mix of grotesque psychopathy and the narcissistic elements of fascism. As a political system, it is inherently unstable. There is no foundational doctrine like Marx’s Communist Manifesto or even Mein Kampf. Today’s neofascism is built on personalities who are adept at whipping up rage, smashing things and making themselves rich but not much else.

How, then, is all this going to end? The short answer is that it won’t end well. As a movement, fascism has only one direction, it rachets up but never down again. It is sustained only by a constant threat of enemies, forcing the people to give up more and more of their freedom, sacrificing more of their sons and daughters, burning more and more of the national wealth on militarism. The enemies are not just external but, crucially, internal as well, and that’s where it all falls apart. Eventually, if the regime isn’t overthrown by a war it has started, it turns on itself. The US is well down this path. The titular head of Trumpism is 79, overweight and manifestly dementing. Some months ago, he had a medical assessment and let slip that he’d had an MRI. Everybody wanted to know the results but he refused to release them. Eventually, he had to but all they revealed was his heart and abdominal cavity. Excuse us, what about his head? That was what the scan was for. Even in America, you don’t scan bellies and so on unless you’re actually looking for something.

My clear impression, having worked with many hundreds of dementing veterans, is that he’s now in early-moderate dementia and progressing fairly fast. I don’t expect he will still be in office by end of next year. He will not go voluntarily but go he will. Vance will move up a notch and then the fun will start as all the misfits and wannabes and shysters in his cabinet get out their knives in the rush to be appointed vice-president. Don’t forget the Trump sons, of course, they have a most powerful interest in keeping one of theirs in the White House to keep the FBI and IRS and SEC off their collective backs. Kushner? No, he’s too clever. He knows he has the voting appeal of an old toilet brush but he doesn’t care. He has enough money and contacts scattered around to leave the country and never look back. But what a cat fight it will be. We ordinary mortals can only sit back with the popcorn and wait for the heads to roll. The battle to succeed Mao will be nothing compared with this. But what will happen then? Vance won’t be able to control his troops, they won’t stand quietly behind him while he raves on.

At this stage, the Republican party is facing devastation in the mid-term elections due in just under a year. They can expect a hammering similar to the Tories in the UK last year, possibly worse, but it’s only what they deserve. Trump is incapable of coexisting with a hostile Congress and would probably try to rule by executive order, which the public won’t stand, so that may be the trigger for him to be wheeled out. Regardless, the last two years of this so-called administration will be chaotic, with a dozen or more princelings all fighting each other for the prize of winning the nomination in 2028. The rudderless carnage known as their foreign policy will swerve off in fifty directions at once and eventually run aground somewhere as the public realise that financing “America the Greatest” is bankrupting them. If you can’t afford the rent or to get your mother treated or feed the kids, who gives a bugger about whatever the Venezuelans are doing? How many Americans even know where it is?

Anyway, all this is speculation. We lesser mortals have to wait and see what emerges. It’s possible that as Trump declines, the different factions will come to some agreement to keep him alive and propped up at his desk rather than allow a free-for-all. However, that would require a degree of political maturity and selflessness that none of them have ever displayed in their lives. The crucial point is that once it is unleashed, fascism has only one direction: up, and up, and up, until it runs out of air, then it crashes. Fascists don’t wake up one day and say to each other: “Looks as though we’ve failed. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. What about a nice round of golf?” If they fail, somebody is to blame, somebody did it to them because in their eyes, they’re perfect, they can’t possibly be wrong. Whoever did the dirty on them has to be uncovered and dealt with, and so the bloodletting, literal or figurative, starts another cycle.

And there’s a further point to consider. Just as the USSR fell apart into fifteen countries, the same might happen to the US because it isn’t actually one country at all. It’s at least three distinct countries. Trouble is, they’re all spread across much the same area. They aren’t geographic isolates as were, say, Belarus and Ukraine, the three Baltic states or the five Stans of Central Asia, which made for a relatively clean parting of ways. It’s possible they could hold the country together, we have to wait and see, but one thing is clear: All this is going to get worse before it gets any better. Once the demons of hate are on the loose, they don’t willingly go back on their chains. Americans may yet learn the hard way why the Chinese fear chaos.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.