questions posed to John Auerbach

Dr. Auerbach often has wide-ranging knowledge of various things.  We began posting on the subjects of racial and religious prejudice. I remarked (my remarks are in red print) to Dr. Auerbach in a post...

Its curious how Jews time and again get targeted, and I've wondered why. Traditionally the negative view is a sort of Merchant of Venice caricature--a Rothschild facility with money and language. Whether it got worse post war is a good question, though my impression is that that is when the Jewish voice first began to be heard (Mailer, Roth, Bellow), including description that of soldiering in the war. That also seems to be a time when Jews began to dominate comedy. Jews and Italians have much in common, including family structure, and DNA. Possibly the Italian tendency towards conservatism (in politics, for example) has removed them from some of the prejudice associated with the Jews, seen as more incendiary intellectually. And even the intellectual bent associated with Jews is probably somewhat threatening. Possibly the venturing of Jews into foreign lands (the Diaspora?)also has exposed them to more bigotry. Thanks for your thoughts here.  Damon L

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  Thanks for your thoughts here.  Bigotry against Italian-Americans is also a complex topic and of course one about which I know fairly little, at least compared to my knowledge of antisemitism, but then this would depend on whose ox is being gored.  It is true that both Italians and Jews were targets of the Immigration Act of 1924, a law motivated by the racist and nativist tenor of the time, with its second rising of the Ku Klux Klan, and intended to stop the influx of immigrants from non-English-speaking and non-Protestant lands into the United States, but despite the obvious cultural similarities between Italians and Jews (e.g., focus on family and food, such that we used to say in New York that Italians are just Catholic Jews and Jews are just non-Catholic Italians), there are important reasons for their diverging social, cultural, and historical paths in the United States.                                                                                                                                 First, it must be understood that antisemitism is history’s oldest hatred, predating the Christian Era but changing greatly with the divergence of Judaism and Christianity in the First Century CE.  The psychology of antisemitism is complex but in my opinion has always involved the dominant religious culture’s need to exterminate a religious minority that, by its very existence, poses a threat to the dominant religious culture.  In the pagan world, Judaism presented the threat of monotheism.  In the Christian World, Judaism presents a threat because it is an older monotheism, one that denies the need for salvation through Jesus.  OTOH, Italians, as Catholics, can be excluded from Protestant America, it being understood that there are many Protestants whose faith would lead them to reject any form of social exclusion, but Italians, as Catholics, do not pose a threat to Christian dominance and are also too numerous to be exterminated.  In consequence, no matter where we go and no matter how successful we might become, Jews always carry with us a sense of persecution, a belief that safety and security can vanish at a moment’s notice. The last group of Jews who seem not to have understood this were the Jews of Germany, who were perhaps the most assimilated Jews in Europe prior to the rise of Hitler and many of whom paid with their lives because they could not believe that the German populace would turn against them. I can readily see how a fear of exclusion might figure prominently in the cultural psychology of Italian Americans, but I doubt that a sense of persecution or a fear of extermination would be present. Damon, if you can enlighten me here, I would be indebted.
  
  
  Second, as to the character of hatred directed against Jews, it involves mostly obsessional preoccupations, and here I am indebted to the work of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, historian, psychoanalyst, and biographer of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud.  She notes that Jews are regarded  as dirty and as vermin, prejudices consistent with obsessional needs for cleanliness and with the need to exterminate carriers of disease, or else are considered the miserly and concerned with money, prejudices that are reaction formations against fears of dirt and contamination.  If anyone thinks this latter point is a stretch, please consider the underlying meaning of the phrase “filthy lucre” and also the way that the obsessional character structure links cleanliness and miserliness.  This particular understanding of antisemitism also derives from the psychoanalytic Marxism of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm), which focuses on the obsessional structure of capitalism.  Meanwhile, per Young-Bruehl, prejudice against Catholics might include some of these more obsessional elements but are more likely to resemble prejudices against Blacks in the use of hysterical-histrionic defenses against fears of “excessive” sexuality and disorderly behavior.  Here, the relevant factor is that, in White Protestant America, it again being noted that numerous Protestants have a faith that could never allow such bigotry, certain groups are too numerous to be exterminated, the other group in our society that was subject to extermination being Native Americans, but are useful as a source of labor.  Here there is a need for society’s “lower orders” to breed in order to create this plentiful and therefore cheap labor, combined with a fear that these groups will breed too much, such that they will swamp the dominant group demographically.  This was one of the motive factors behind the eugenics of movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I believe this same fear underlies the rise of prejudice against Latinos, who are in the main also Catholics, and other large immigrant groups.
  
  
  Third, as to the political divergence between Italians and Jews since the end of World War II, it is not surprising that until recently, when the politics of ethnocultural exclusion reawakened, pitting monocultural rural areas against diverse cities, White groups became more conservative as they rose economically and moved to the suburbs to create White enclaves that, like the various Levittowns, were made possible through federal housing laws that made permissible, until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the exclusion of African-Americans.  The one exception to this trend would be Jews.  This is not to say that there is no racism among Jews, for surely there is, but rather that Jews hold onto their liberal to left politics despite their economic success, such that about 70 to 75 percent of the Jewish vote went to Barack Obama, down from the 90 percent of the Jewish vote that went for FDR in the 1930s but very different from the rest of the present-day White vote, which has been majority Republican for some time now, especially among men.
  
  
  So what are the causes of this divergence? I think the main sources would be the Jewish sense of persecution, which creates our natural sympathy or identification with all marginalized groups, combined with the Jewish emphasis on justice, which is the main value taught in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the lack of a central authority in Judaism, such that there is no one running the show, except maybe our mothers.  By contrast, in Catholic ethnic groups, there is always a strong potential for social justice values, as captured in Liberation Theology, and in John Kerry’s frequent statement, “Faith without Works is dead,” but Catholic culture is much more hierarchical than Jewish culture by virtue of the priesthood and the Papacy, and in the matter of feminism, Jewish and Catholic teaching on abortion simply are different.  Thus, the dominant political pulls in Jewish culture are leftward, with the exception of pro-Israeli nationalism, but among Catholic ethnic groups, there appear to be multiple political pulls in diverging directions, sometimes in the direction of justice and equality, sometimes in the direction of order and hierarchy.
  
  
  
  
  John S. Auerbach, PhD
  
  
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• John                                                                                                                                                I think you are spot on in your views. There is a nice ambience between the groups. But the antagonism against Italians pales of that against that of Jews. I personally have never felt threatened or anxious that my ancestry would in any way put me at risk, nor did I sense that any great historical misdeeds had been done Italians. In fact, I hardly thought of my background growing up—though once in a while there would be reminders. Why, for example, were my elders rooting for boxer Nino Benvenuti in the Olympics.                                                                   
  I grew up amidst Catholics at parochial school, fifty or more in a class. Italians were second in the hierarchy, with most of the popular kids, team coaches, and local politicians Irish. On my Little League Team, every name was Irish except mine and another. We might have been playing in Dublin. Catholics from other than Ireland or Italy were lower on the implicit caste system. German, Polish, and Hispanic Catholics seemed to have less clout within that particular New York dioceses. The Jewish kids were in the public school system, so there was not much interaction.                                                                                                                                       
  Yes, Catholics are too numerous for any tyrant to exterminate, and one can’t be too naïve to believe it would otherwise be imaginable,  given genocides elsewhere and with the American Indian.                                                                                                                                              
  You cite that Judaism in various epochs presented a challenge to the prevailing religious orthodoxy which created conflict. I assume this is true, but one of many factors. Also, you note that Jews in Germany trusted they were secure. “The Berlin Stories”, by Christopher Isherwood, describes the protagonist’s relationship with a refined German Jewish businessman (Isherwood was gay), and gives a vignette of German Jewish family life, and the increasing alarming depradations made against that society, with the family eventually arrested. I have heard arguments (and counterarguments)that Jews were too passive during the holocaust. Is this another reason for ongoing watchfulness?                                                                                       
  I can see the obsessive compulsive formulation you describe as profoundly descriptive of ongoing antisemitism.  But isn’t the term you use associated with Jonathan Swift—"filthy lucre”. Also the histrionic underpinnings against blacks and Catholics make sense.  A Lutheran once gave me the stereotype on Catholics--partying and carousing all the time.                                    
  Catholicism does indeed have a hierarchical structure. There is a layered hierarchy with a priest as intermediary with God. However, my perception is somewhat different from yours, John. My perception is that this hierarchy is not a source of misdirection and conservatism. For one, there is going to be more emphasis on established authority, which includes a belief in science. Hence you are going to get less of the freewheeling antiscientism that is part of the conservative oppositional style. And if you want to look at the fruits of the hierarchy, say, in France, with the Jesuits at the top, you have the formulation of nearly ever modern philosophy—rationalism, structuralism (Piaget, Lacan, Levi Straus), contractarianism, existentialism (Camus, Sartre), Voltaire and the ideas of the enlightenment, and so forth.  All those formulations are coming out of a society where a structured hierarchy was in place.
  Your view, though, that Italians are pulled various directions politically is correct. Given the emphasis on family life (la via vechia) of Italians there is a chosen preference for safety—more conservative politics, involvement with established institutions (e.g., high rates of military service), and fewer of the riskier pursuits that might lead to scapegoating. "Blood of my Blood" is a book that describes this phenomena. Its been a possibly limiting strategy but safer. On the other hand, some well known socialists have been Italian—e.g., Ignazio Silone, etc. There has been a drift rightward over time, however.
  
  
  As for "Immigration Act of 1924", that is a nice little bit of arcania.  The Sacco and Vanzetti case comes to mind as an example of prejudice against Italians a little before. 
  
  
  Enjoy reading your opinions John--always so erudite. Also, isn't Auerbach a German name.
  
  
  Damon L

Damon,

Thanks for these thoughts, especially on the hierarchy of Catholic ethnicities in the United States—among American Jews, the hierarchy is Sephardic (meaning in this context the ethnicity, Iberian, not the adherence to Sephardic Jewish practice), then German, then Eastern European, on the basis of the order of arrival on these shores—and on the role of Jesuitism in French intellectual life.  I had not considered that idea, but I think it makes sense that Jesuitism would create an openness within hierarchy because of its Pelagian and Erasmian theology, hence its emphasis on free will and reason within spirituality.  Within French Catholicism, there is the counterexample of Pascal’s Jansenist, hence Augustinian and  quasi-Calvinist views, but I suspect that you are correct that the Jesuit view predominated, given the historical importance of Descartes, who had a Jesuit education.  One of the great myths of history is that the Catholic Church always opposed scientific and rational progress.  We can find many such currents in Catholic Church history, but we can find many important countercurrents.  

The phrase “filthy lucre” comes from 1 Timothy 3:3.  I did not know that until I looked it up.  As an Anglican clergyman, Jonathan Swift was of course familiar with the phrase, and Norman O. Brown, in his brilliant psychoanalytic classic, Life Against Death, has a fascinating study of Swift’s preoccupations with scatology.  However, Brown’s chapter, “Filthy Lucre,” is an analysis of the rise of capitalism that is highly congruent with the Frankfurt School’s synthesis of Freud, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, and Hegel that constitutes my intellectual background.  

As for the Holocaust, which means “burnt offering," or as Jews now increasingly call it, the Shoah, which is Hebrew for “annihilation,” nothing satisfactory can ever be said.  I do want to clarify, for all who do not routinely think about such things, that the Nazi genocide of the Jewish population of Europe was a far broader event than its persecution of the German-Jewish community of about 500,000.  I would write more about this, but then we would be moving from a discussion of the psychology of prejudice, antisemitism, and racism to the actual implementation of these ideas, something to which I do not want to expose this listserve, even though many of us on this listserve are Jews. I merely want to point out that the historical experience of German Jews, who had been emancipated early (1812), was very different from that of the approximately 6 million or so Russian and Polish Jews, who were emancipated much later (1917) and who were under no illusions as to what their neighbors thought of them.  I also do want to point out that more than half of Germany’s Jewish population managed to leave that country prior to the start of World War II in 1939 but that this escape would have proved fruitless unless emigration was to Great Britain or the United States.

As for my German last name, here is a Wikipedia link:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auerbach_(surname)

As you can see, it is commonly a Jewish last name.  I personally know no Auerbachs who are not Jewish, although I recently found a pocket of Auerbachs in Eastern Iowa who clearly are not Members of the Tribe.  German colleagues in my psychoanalytic world have commented on my name because there is an Auerbachs Keller, a restaurant in Leipzig that is mentioned in Goethe’s Faust, but when I ask them whether they know any Auerbachs in Germany, they usually tell me that they do not.  They get my point rather quickly. Jews of Central and Eastern European origin tend to have German or Slavic last names because our ancestors were Yiddish speakers but, more important, because the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (i.e., Prussia, the Hapsburg Empire, Russia, etc.) in the 1700s and 1800s began requiring their subjects to have last names.  My family would like to think that we truly are German, not East European, Jews—it’s a status thing—but no one can trace my family past the Ukraine.  When Americans comment on my German last name, I start a personality assessment.  I say, “It’s German, but I am not.”  Very few ask further about it, and most who do are satisfied with my explanation that Prussia and Austria owned much of Eastern Europe until World War I.  The few who ask questions after that, especially when I was in East Tennessee, are fellow Members of the Tribe hoping to identify other Jews.  

Finally, no fair that your father is half-Jewish and half-Italian.  He gets to tell ethnic jokes about two groups, not just one, with impunity.

John

Dear John,

At the risk of venturing onto pseudoscientific terrain...

We talked about the relationship amongst Jews, Italians and more broadly Catholicism, and the history of prejudice against Jews, as well as the relative strategies of these groups in the wider culture. 

Its true that Jews predominate in western thought (Freud, Einstein, Marx, I guess Jesus, and the pantheon of Nobel Prize winners). Meanwhile, it has been a Catholic country (e.g., France) that has produced the philosophic systems--structuralism, existentialism, rationalism (e.g., the Enlightenment), and the philosophy (I forget the name) associated with Rousseau. Why France has produced these philosophies is unclear--possibly associated with the Jesuit hierarchical or educational system or some other idiosyncrasy of time, place, opportunity, or chance.

But there is another, to me strange, bifurcation between the two groups in terms of output. That concerns art. The heralded art from the last few centuries has been Christian--not only from Florence, but also in the US. Pollack, Georgia O'Keefe, Van Gogh, Dali, DeKoonig, Jasper Johns, Picasso, Miro, and even the lowly Leroy Nieman are, as far as I can tell, Catholic.  Essentially the fifth floor of MOMA is Catholic. Photography seems to be the one American art dominated by Jews, and much photography can be considered really a variant of journalism.  

Is there a cognitive style difference between the two groups, an emphasis, a difference in patronage systems or education that differentially encourage one or another endeavor.  

And might some related quality enhance the prejudice against Jews. Does scholarship, financial acumen, and verbal facility raise questions of sophistry, trickery or manipulation? Is there a more linguistic, as opposed to perceptual style of thinking that is encouraged. Is there some lesson in the Zohar about the importance of language. Also, why so few Jewish athletes-a more visual spatial activity. Just dumb questions I have thinking about...

Damon

 Damon,

Thanks for this searching post.  I have some thoughts in return.

First, of course there are great Jewish figures in visual art—e.g., Camille Pissarro, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Man Ray, Mark Rothko, Lucien Freud (of the Vienna Freuds), Frank Auerbach (no relation of mine)—but I suspect that Jewish contributions to the arts, per your thesis, are mainly in literature (too numerous to list, but including Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and some Nobel Prize winners) and music (e.g., Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler, Benny Goodman, Stan Getz, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, most Broadway composers, Carole King, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed,  Joey and Tommy Ramone, etc.), arts that are linear and abstract, rather than plastic or visual.  Meanwhile there are of course great Protestant visual artists, the greatest probably being Rembrandt, but a plausible case can me made that the Catholic world has “owned” painting since Giotto, and weren’t he and Leonardo and Michelangelo Italian?

Second, studies of IQ in Ashkenazi Jews suggest above average verbal and mathematical abilities but visual abilities that are only average.

But, third, per the Second Commandment’s prohibition on making images, Hebraic culture is verbal. Hellenic culture, the other source of Western civilization, is visual, starting with Plato’s ideas about Ideas or Forms, and was absorbed into Christianity, first through Saul of Tarsus, aka St. Paul, a Hellenized Jew and then through all the theologians, such as St. Augustine, who were influenced by Platonic thought in addition to the Hebraic sources that also had underlie Christianity.  

So, in New York, I would not be surprised that Catholics “own” the MoMA and the Met (the museum, not the opera house), but that Jews “own” the NY Philharmonic, the Village Vanguard, and Broadway.  

About the Broadway thing, check out this link from Spamalot

https://youtu.be/R6VKf6bXCCo

Best,

John

Sent from my iPhone

Damon,

One remaining thought on French education and thought:  Of all the figures you mentioned, one does not quite belong to the Catholic tradition.  That of course would be Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of structural anthropology and the son of Alsatian Jews. There are several other important Jewish contributors to French intellectual life, among them Émile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, Roman Jakobson, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, but I am sure you are correct that the predominant historical lineage in French intellectual life is Catholic and heavily Jesuit.

John

John S. Auerbach, PhD

And a final last thought. In French psychoanalysis, there are Rudolf Löwenstein, who was the analyst of Jacques Lacan, and André Green, among many others. 

That makes sense about Matthew Arnold and the Hebraic/Hellenic Distinction.  I think Aldous and Julian Huxley were Matthew Arnold's grandchildren, and Huxley continued the theme along (along with the themes of his other grandfather, TE Huxley). Huxley wrote about the bridge between the thought and experienced world, and our other bifurcations such as mind/body.  Though blind, Huxley was preoccupied with sight, involving himself with experimental eye treatments as well as psychedelic and visionary experience (i.e., Doors of Perception). He consorted with psychologist Timothy Leary (whom he thought very little of) and other progenitors of thinking at that time,  nowadays morphed into some of the mindfulness treatments.

Damon 

Comments by Dr. Auerbach

These are some snippets of email conversation with John Auerbach that might be of interest. Dr. Auerbach is a thinker of unusual depth and breadth. The first comments concern differences in relational aggression in the North and South. The second is commentary of the development of politically homogenous areas in the country, and the third bit of commentary describes the shift in politics, over the decades, from a class oriented division to identity politics. Also, he comments on how financial setbacks seemed to be followed by conservative upsurges. Some comments are directed to a larger audience and hence he references to me (Damon L) in the third person.

One other point. Damon wanted to know some thoughts on relational aggression in the South versus relational aggression on Long Island, where I am from. There is no question that people from the New York metro area are among the most overtly aggressive in the United States, and as for Long Island, I can assert, with total confidence, that it is one of the world’s epicenters for the culture of narcissism, that salient fact explaining why my early publications are about narcissism and why, after I left to go to college, I did my best, aside from family gatherings, never to come back. However, one big advantage about life in the New York metro area is that you always know where you stand with someone. Not much is held back. In my life in the South, I not surprisingly found people much friendlier than in the Northeast, and among the mountain men whom I treated as Veterans, I found a similar kind of directness that I believe to be the case in mountain cultures all over the world. Alternatively, what I found was a cultural style that I often encountered in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. But in the South, I also found the more subtle, more enigmatic kinds of communications that I have described earlier as masked hostility, communications that took a great deal of psychological energy on my part to decode, such as how someone could revere me as one of God’s chosen people and yet know nothing about what my religion is about. Which is better (or worse)—the directness and therefore sometimes overt hostility of the North or the superficial friendliness and sometimes masked hostility of the South? De gustibus non disputandum est.

John S. Auerbach, PhD

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Damon,

Two thoughts in return:  

First, on liberalism and radicalism in the South, Midwest, and West, the voice of the small farmer in the 19th Century was the People’s Party, and this true Populism, fueled by farmers’ anxiety about Wall Street domination on the one hand and by the Social Gospel on the other, is undoubtedly the source of the populist and progressive politics in the 20th century that you describe. In the 19th century, these politics seldom linked up with the organized labor movement in urban areas, a movement that was also likely to be socialist, but one place where you can see this kind of coming together, at least in the mid-20th century, is in Minnesota.  Their Democratic Party is actually the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party.  But back in the mid-20th century, politics were more class based.  A political quip, attributable to the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, about his and my ethnic group, illustrates the point:  Jews in the United States live like Episcopalians but vote like Pentecostals.  This was of course back when Episcopalians were rock-ribbed Republicans and Pentecostals were Yellow Dog Democrats.  Nowadays the joke does not work so well.

Second, about economic downturns and left-wing movements, much though I love E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class,  a book I read a long time ago, I suspect that the classical Marxist argument might work better for capitalist societies prior to the formation of mass political parties than for the current age.  Mind you, I am far from an expert on this, but here is a link discussing data on political responses to financial crises since 1870:

https://voxeu.org/article/political-aftermath-financial-crises-going-extremes

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I appreciate the responses thus far, and I hope to say a few words in return, probably no more briefly than in my original post.

First, to Damon LaBarbera:  I was discussing a statistical generalization regarding the culture of the coast versus the culture of the city, but statistical generalizations, especially in the social sciences, always have exceptions and countertrends.  It should be no surprise, therefore, that some radicals come from the hinterlands —the Wobblies, Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, and of course Woody Guthrie come to mind—and that some conservatives, such as William Buckley, come from the coasts.  But it is well to remember that all of these figures come from an earlier, more class-based era in American politics, again with the proviso that class, pace orthodox Marxists, is never fully explanatory but, pace various culturalists, is never irrelevant and never fully goes away.  I have never been a big believer in Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis because of the wide variety of experiences that different nations and cultures have had with frontiers; I regard it as an attempt at national myth making, a justification of European suppression of Native Americans as the United States expanded and of America imperialism otherwise.  I do think that coasts, internal flatlands, and mountains are likely to have differing cultures because of how production is organized in these three kinds of areas—e.g., it is possible to be a “rugged individual” in mountains, although there are countervailing tendencies here too, but a seafaring society is likely to be a cooperative society because you need both a crew and an on-shore group of suppliers to run a ship, even though the culture of a ship is likely to be hierarchical.  

Politics in general appear more likely to move right than to move left at such times. From this perspective, FDR and the New Deal would appear to be the exception, not the rule.  I had hoped this would not be so, but it appears to be true; it also appears that the last period of widespread left-wing activism, apparently worldwide, the 1960s was a time of economic growth.  Obviously, these are statistical relationships, so exceptions may be everywhere, especially on the matter of left-wing versus right-wing populism.  And if someone has a better reference on these issues, I am eager to learn.

John 

Sent from my iPhone
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On Jan 9, 2019, at 10:39 AM, Damon LaBarbera  wrote:

I agree John, that liberals are in the ports and conservatives in the Midwestern hinterlands, statistically speaking. But the exceptions seem notable. Other names besides Debs and Hall that come to mind are numerous candidate for the Presidency. Stevenson (Illinois?), Humphrey, McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, Truman. They seem to be coming out of a certain region. Possibly that is numbers--these are populous places, and in a sense, on a coast--with Canada and near the Great Lakes. But does this region have some intellectual backdrop that fosters liberal thinking. Or is there another difference. Does that part of the country produce a more dogmatically consistent ideologue who rises to the party top. 

The idea that right wing authoritarianism rises in the wake of economic distress makes sense, although it might delegitimize a political strain of thought as merely brute reaction to adversity, without looking at the ideas themselves. The making of the English working class was undoubtedly due to economic hardship, and that is a left wing or Marxist phenomena. Maybe that pattern would not happen today.

There seems to be another feature of Trump's popularity. That is, the notion of oppositionality. Many people speak of the paranoid style of the right. It seems more of an oppositional style (which is not inconsistent with paranoia)--watching someone who is gleefully disruptive to the status quo.

Damon

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In the US, we have seen a slow shift from class-dominated politics to politics dominated by race, ethnicity, religion, and culture. I don’t mean this is an absolute statement because racism is our country’s original sin, and waves of nativism have overtaken our country before, most notably in the 1840s through 1860s, with the influx of the predominantly Catholic Irish, in the 1910s and 1920s, with the influx of Jews, Italians, and Slavs, and in the current age, with the influx of Latinos, Middle Easterners, South Asians, and East Asians.  However, the  politics of the 1930s, saw the formation of the New Deal Coalition, uniting four groups—organized labor, African Americans, poor White Southerners, and various liberals, progressives, and socialists, groups that sometimes hated each other—against a capitalist elite represented by the Republican Party.  This New Deal Coalition fractured in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as a result of the collapse of organized labor and the rise of the anti war movement and a cultural revolution that gave rise first to feminism and then to the gay rights movement and, finally, to multiculturalism. Although all the current handwringing about multiculturalism and identity politics in our country forgets that the original identity politics in the US was the  privileging of white males, the cultural and therefore political divergence in the US is clearly between the multicultural and increasingly secular city and the monocultural and still religious country. The reason that coastal cities will be more liberal than inland cities is that ports, almost by definition, are likely to have greater cultural diversity, people coming and going, than will cities comprising ethnically homogenous natives.  

The Trump phenomenon clearly partakes of this split between the country and the city, a split that has defined every election since Bush 43 v. Gore in 2000, but in my opinion, this phenomenon goes well beyond the urban-rural divide in three ways—its open racism, more blatant than expressed by any Presidential politician since the late  Bush 41’s Willie Horton ad, the recent bout of hagiography since his death to the contrary; its open misogyny; and its open authoritarianism, the worst since Nixon was President.  These three things reflect the personality of Trump himself, and he is shameless in his views, as he is in his cupidity, with his shamelessness giving of comfort to a basket of deplorables who hold similar beliefs, such that white supremacists and neo-Nazis, although they are on the fringe of his support, now feel safe to march in our streets.  

But to attribute all of these problems to Trump’s personality or to state that all, or even the majority, of his supporters are found in the basket of deplorables is to badly misunderstand the situation.  In the first place, if we consider a much more extreme case, that of Nazi Germany, many of Hitler’s supporters were not actually Nazis, bigots, or racists, just good Germans willing to overlook a few of Hitler’s “excesses" because he made Germany great again, kept foreigners out, brought back religion and morality, and the like.  Most of those folks would never knowingly support evil practices but would be willing to rationalize them away.  It is surprisingly easy, per the Milgram study, to be a collaborator.  And if anyone here thinks I am being hyperbolic, I think that this part of the historical analogy for Trumpism fits the situation precisely.  Another part that fits extremely well is that there is good social science research to suggest that there is often a rise in right-wing authoritarian nationalism after economic downturns, particularly those caused by fiscal crises.  The rise of right-wing authoritarian regimes in the 1920s and 1930s would be the best example of that, and I am of half a mind to consider Stalin’s Soviet Union, officially a left-wing authoritarian regime, as consistent with the pattern.  But even without the inclusion of Stalin’s Russia, the rise of first Fascism and then Naziism in Europe during that particular period would be strong confirmatory evidence for the theory that fiscal crises produce authoritarianism in politics and government.  A contrary piece of evidence to this thesis in the current situation would be that the US experienced eight years of sustained economic growth under Barak Obama, but please also remember that this economic growth was extremely uneven, leaving many ethnically white rural areas that are likely to be Trump districts and where there is little contact with other ethnic, cultural, racial, and religious groups, behind.  Please also remember that other countries started seeing a rise in authoritarianism after the fiscal collapse of 2008 before we in the US did.  It would appear that this rise in right-wing authoritarian nationalism in certain regions of the country was just enough to push Trump over the top in the Electoral College, even as he lost the popular vote and lost it badly, by a far greater margin than Bush 43 did to Gore.

So what are the psychological factors involved in right-wing authoritarianism follows from financial crises?  I think many of the factors described in the Psychology Today post are relevant, most especially terror management and lack of exposure to people different from oneself.  Economic downturns from fiscal crises produce financial uncertainty and therefore mortality salience, with the decline in life expectancy in certain economically left-behind areas of the country contributing to this mortality salience, and increased mortality salience, per terror management theory, produces aggression, especially toward perceived outsiders, combined with submission toward those who seem to be more powerful, presumably because those who are more powerful provide the allure of protection from the perceived increased danger in the world. This particular rage at outsiders is the worst precisely where there are fewer outsiders—fewer racial and ethnic minorities—with which to come in contact so as to provide a dose of reality as to who The Other really is.  This kind of analysis was advanced by the Frankfurt School (most prominent members being Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm), in more classically Freudian language, to explain why the German working class, presumably socialist in political affiliation, voted against its class interest in support of the Nazi Party.  One essential piece of this analysis that should not be ignored is the combination of rage and submission toward ruling elites, the people who benefited the most from the fiscal crises of both the 1920s and the 2000s, and here the issue is that a significant proportion of the populace feels betrayed by policies that benefit the ruling elites above all else, an assertion that I believe to valid because of the growing income and wealth inequality in the US in the last 50 years.  So much of current-day “populist” politics involves a rage at these elites, but unlike the populist politics of 19th Century America, which was interested in income redistribution, the “populist" politics of today (note quotation marks) involves identification with, and therefore authoritarian submission to, the same betraying elites who benefited from the recent fiscal crises at the expense of those left behind.  In psychoanalytic terms, this phenomenon would be called identification with the aggressor.  Can I prove all of this?  No, but I knew a lot of people in East Tennessee who would willingly vote against their economic interests time after time, often out of genuine religious conviction, which I would have to respect, about cultural changes that they found unacceptable, but also often out of all kinds of fears of The Other—Blacks, Yankees, Gays and Lesbians, etc., groups seen as subverting the dominant order.  

My apologies for such a dark and opinionated piece of analysis, but I believe it to be correct.  There is one strange bright spot in the picture, however.  Trump is most certainly an authoritarian, but not all authoritarians are the same.  Just as, on the Left side of the spectrum, Lenin is not Stalin, Stalin is not Mao, and Mao is not Pol Pot, on the Right side of the spectrum, Trump is not Franco, Franco is not Mussolini, and Mussolini is not Hitler.  Alternatively, it is still a long walk from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, and Trump simply lacks the discipline, the ideological consistency, and the systematic racism to be a Fascist or a Nazi.  There is, therefore, a good chance that the US can survive him, but he can do a great deal of damage in the short term.  A case in point would be his decision to separate children from their parents at the Mexico border, a decision that was completely unnecessary and that will likely result in decades of psychological traumatization as a result.  I mention this one piece of damage because it is specifically psychological in nature, whereas things like, say, global warming are not.

I expect to receive some critical feedback on this post.

John S. Auerbach, PhD

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On Jan 6, 2019, at 3:01 PM, Damon LaBarbera 

Good essay, I agree.

It seems to me that the biggest predictor of support, either side of the aisle, is geographical location. The center of the country, for the most part, goes one way while coastal urban regions go another. Worldwide, the same is true for other beliefs--religion, preference of political system, what is the most exciting sport, sexual mores, beliefs about the origin of humankind and the universe, and so on. Proximity to others of the same belief system is overwhelmingly powerful and predictive.

Damon