Will Americans submit to despotism in an urge to escape from freedom? Erich Fromm saw it coming – Salon

President Donald Trump took his rancorousfeudwith the press to afrightening new level last week when he posted an inflammatory tweet that echoed tyrantsof the past,callingthe all-caps FAKE NEWS media the enemy of the American People.

As many were quick to point out, the phrase enemy of the people has adisturbing and violent history, and has long been used by totalitarian dictatorsto foster resentment and hatred of certain groups, and eventually to crush dissent and opposition. The infamous French revolutionary and Reign of Terror apologistRobespierre declared that the revolutionary government owed nothing to the enemies of the people but death,while the term was widelyused in Stalinist Russia to single outdissidents,who wereeither imprisoned, executed or sent to the Gulag (in the end, almost all of the original Bolsheviks became enemies of the people during the great purge which in reality meant enemies of Joseph Stalin).

Needless to say, the fact that President Trump thought it was appropriate to usethis incendiarylanguage onthe free press long considered thebulwark of liberty is dangerous and alarming, and just the latest manifestation ofthe Trump administrations authoritarian tendencies. Just one month into his term, the president has spent mostof his time in publicscapegoating and demonizing the free press,blatantly lying and espousingconspiracy theories that undermine faith in the electoral system and displaying his contempt for the ideaof separation of powers and judicial review (once again attacking a sitting federal judge).

None of this behavior is particularly surprising fora man who has spent that past two years shattering democratic norms e.g., threatening to jail his political opponent, encouraging violence against peaceful protesters, publiclysympathizing with oppressive dictators, advocatingwar crimesand so on.

Itis tempting to write this all off as Donald being Donald an impulsive, thin-skinned little man-child who cant take any criticismbut that would be a mistake. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophantic enablers and right-wing extremists who appear eager to advance his authoritarian agenda. One of these individuals is the presidents31-year-old senior adviser, Stephen Miller, a weaselly young man who would be perfectly cast as a Star Wars villain. Last week, Miller madethe almost cartoonish assertion that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, thatthe powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.

Like the phrase enemy of the people, this is the kind of language used by party hacks in a totalitarian state, not a free anddemocratic society.

Not long ago this kind of rhetoric would have provoked outrage from both sides of the aisle and widespread disapproval from the populace. But today, in our hyper-partisan political landscape, many Americans have instead cheered Trump and his administrations increasingly dictatorial and undemocratic behavior. This invites the question of whether the American people will stand up to autocracy if and when it comes, and how much of the populace is actually prepared to give up its freedom and submit to a strongman.

Shortly after the election, Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who recently said that we have at most a year to defend the Republic, wrote a chilling articlein Slate narrating Adolf Hitlers unexpected rise to power without once sayinghis name to draw parallels with our current historical situation, and to highlight how the German people quickly fell in line once Hitler had consolidated power and established his totalitarian regime.

One of the many brilliant Jewishintellectuals to fleefrom Germany after Hitlers rise, philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm attemptedto explain the shocking spread of totalitarianism in his lifetime with his influential and urgent 1941 book, Escape from Freedom. This classic investigation into the psychology of authoritarianism can help elucidate some of what is happening today. In the first half of the book, Fromm surveysthe profound cultural, economic and political changesthat had occurred since the Middle Ageswith the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of industrial capitalism, and explores how these shifts impacted the human psycheand the individuals interaction with the external world.

Fromm posits that industrialization and the rise of liberalismresulted in the complete emergence of the individual (i.e., individuation), along with newfound freedom, but also upended primary ties that hadonce provided men and women with security and a feeling of belonging and of being rooted somewhere. In other words, modernization freed man from traditionalauthorities that had greatly limited him, but also provided him withsecurity and meaning in life. Growing individuation, writes Fromm, means growing isolation, insecurity, and thereby growing doubt concerning ones role in the universe, the meaning of ones life, and with all that a growing feeling of ones own powerlessness and insignificance as an individual.

That brings us to Fromms powerful thesis:

If the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.

The crucialpoint Fromm was trying to get acrossis that personal freedom may not be enjoyable or even desirable to the individual if it also leaves him or her feeling isolated and powerless, or without any kind of meaning or purpose in life. Like Karl Marx, Fromm believed that capitalism had turned human beings into cogs in a machine, sapping them of their individuality and creativity, and leaving them alienated and susceptible to authoritarian forces.

Fromm distinguished between negative freedom, or the freedom from traditional authorities and cultural/social restraints, and the positive freedom to live authentically and realize ones true individual self. If one is granted negative freedom without positive freedom, and thus left uncertain, alone and powerless, he or she may be inclined to escape from freedom and submit to a higher authority. An analogy would be the urge that many adults have feltat least oncein their lifeto return to their mothers womb, where one is deprived of freedom, but safe from the dangerous and chaotic outside world.

It is not hard to see this psychology at work in modern America, where economic inequality has grown rapidly over the past several decades, where livelihoods have been outsourced or automated and where communities have collapseddue to the forces of globalization and the technological revolution, leaving millions of people desperate and isolated. When these economic factorsare combined withotherfactors, includingthe perceived dangers facing America(i.e., Islamic terrorism) which are greatly inflated by the mass media and politiciansand cultural/social shifts over the past few decades, the victory of an authoritarian demagogue like Trump becomes less surprising (as doesthe factthat Trump supporters are more likely to display authoritarian personality traits).

The danger of the increasingly authoritarian Trump administration is heightenedby the growing number of Americans who are nowpreparedto support a strongman if it means restoring, as it were,primary ties that once provided security and a feeling of belonging and of being rooted somewhere.

Seventy-five years agoFromm arguedthat to counteract thisdangerous drive toward authoritarianism,it was necessary to expand the principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people, from the formal political to the economic sphere. Democracy, he continued, will triumph over the forces of nihilism only if it can imbue people with a faith in life and in truth, and in freedom as the active and spontaneous realization of the individual self.

Like Bernie Sanders today, Frommadvocated democratic socialism and believed that only a trulydemocratic society politically and economically could stopthe dark clouds of despotism. Today, as President Trump rehashes the language of past tyrants, one can only hope that the desire for freedom will triumph over the urge to submit.

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Will Americans submit to despotism in an urge to escape from freedom? Erich Fromm saw it coming - Salon