For my friends

Excellent Sam Harris POV on his Waking Up Podcast.

 

Looks like it might be a thoughtful thread, so I'm going to put this here. It's a grim but interesting response in the "very worried" camp, informed by history and philosophy both. I hope the work of Adorno is not as relevant as this academic believes. (This is a fellow professor, a sociologist, but I do not know him personally. The post was shared via a mutual friend) The bolding is mine.

Yesterday my class lectures took a detour into Critical Theory, specifically Theodore Adorno. The thematic mission of Critical Theorists (often called the “Frankfort School”) was to explain the successes and functions of fascism. Think of it as the “How could this happen?” question of the 1940s. It required employing class-conscious analyses along with elements of psychoanalytic thought. The only underlying assumption was that history could and would repeat itself – that fascism wasn’t dead.

Explaining fascism means we must look at the intense relationship between the leader and masses of people who support him. It requires us to understand the faith and adoration they deliver him. Educated people have always dismissed the phenomenon, at least in the moment, because the fascist leader’s appeal is founded on outlandish falsehoods. In order to understand people's attribution of authenticity to the leader, we must understand that the leader and his followers speak in terms of “wishes” rather than in terms of empirical reality. They form a marriage of wishes.

When a fascist leader lies about himself, he is announcing what he wishes were true. He says things like, “I am the gentlest person ever” … “No one has ever been more _____ than me” … “I will make us great” (implying he will be the greatest) “I am you" (those who adore me are who I am) and even “If she weren’t my daughter…”. To the fascist, wishes are facts. Wishes are so many and insatiable that they contradict each other, and he is disconnected from reality, but he is honest about what he wishes were true. And he attracts a mass of people who share his wishes, especially wishes that violate taboos.

Rational, well educated people dismiss the fascist leader because of this. And they extend their dismissal to his claims about what he wishes to do. Seen only as an infantile bundle of desires, however, the fascist leader is honest. His plans are extensions of his wishes. In fact, there is no plan but the wish.

Strikingly, the leader is powerless to change who he is. He cannot make himself virtuous, empathic, or all-powerful. Granted power, however, he will act on his wishes. With power, he can neuter or even abolish institutions that were designed to protect people from him. With power, he can carry out vindictive plans against individuals, groups, and categories of people who would deprive him of his desires. He can attempt to create legal mechanisms that perpetually feed his insatiable appetite. He will not be successful in the long run because of his distortions, but the fascist leader can gut a society. So it is with Donald Trump.

I admire the cautious optimism of my optimistic friends. I love each of you and subscribe to a sliver of optimism I’ll call “hope”. But I wish I could caution all of us against optimism in the short-term. Right now, long term hope requires resistance. It will require that the less twisted among us employ our own childlike honesty when the emperor has no clothes. It is not time to wait and see if a fascist agitator succeeds in bending the judiciary to serve him. It is not time to wait and see if the legislature submits their autonomy to his wishes. The patriot in me must resist. The introvert in me must find creative ways to turn my resistance outward. None of us can do this alone. It is time for reasonable people to resist.