Image: Wikimedia Commons
By Jim Aitken
It is a real pity that Erich Fromm was not around to psychoanalyse Donald Trump. The only terms that have been used to equate remotely with his science are the terms ‘man-baby’, ‘narcissist’ and ‘egotist.’ He has had many other terms used to describe his personality by those who oppose him, of course. If his first term in office was deeply unsettling, his second term is both alarming and frightening.
Fromm spent a great deal of time studying the authoritarian and aggressive personality with its recourse to violence. In his brilliant study, ‘The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)’, he concludes that society today fails to make use of our capacity for love and reason. This failure, in fact, results in the direct opposite of love and reason whereby we wish to control life totally or seek to destroy it.
In other works – like ‘To Have or To Be? (1976)’ – he wrote about how the desire to have has lost our sense of enjoying the simple pleasure of being, and how this having mode is bringing us to the precipice of both ecological and psychological disaster.
Capitalism is – and always has been – an aggressive, competitive system. It demands more and more from us in order to make more and more profit. And there can be no limit to this capital accumulation. Capitalism is alienation not just at work but in every other aspect of our lives. The United States is the most aggressive and destructive capitalism today and it breeds psychologically unbalanced, alienated individuals who rise through this inhuman world to become corporate leaders, moguls, magnates and ultimately presidents.
And every American president becomes the immediate head of an Imperium with 750 military bases across 80 different countries. In modern times there has never been an American president who has not used his executive powers to kill people. It simply goes with the territory. All have seemed to relish it, in fact.
Many nations cultivate their national myths about themselves. The UK believes it was – and is – the mother of all parliaments, despite having an unelected head of state and an unelected second chamber. Russian history has cultivated the figure of Mother Russia, a figure who is ever present during the good times and, more usually, during the bad. China is an ancestral land linking all present-day Chinese with a 5,000- year history of ancestors to thank for getting them here.
Other nations are fatherlands, with legends and tales of great heroes like in Greece, Germany and the Slavic lands. Some look back to literature like the Icelandic sagas, the Shahnameh of Iran, an epic poem written by Ferdowsi between 977 – 1010, the Kalevala of Finland, another epic poem written by Elias Lönnrot in the 19th century. And Israel is a promised land, promised to Abraham in the Old Testament. This has become a foundational national myth in the context of Israeli identity.
Netanyahu spoke last year in the Knesset while addressing Trump of their ‘two Promised Lands.’ But America, formed through genocide against the indigenous people and built on African slavery, is also an exceptional nation with a manifest destiny. Trump used the terms of exceptionalism and manifest destiny during his second inaugural speech. He also mentioned former President McKinley, the 25th President of the United States, who served from 1897 -1901. His Presidency was marked by American expansionism with the annexations of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and American Samoa. Imperialism, Lenin said, was the highest form of capitalism. Britain and France had been doing it, the Spanish and Portuguese had done it, the Dutch were doing it and it was now America’s time. Before McKinley there was President Monroe with his famous Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that said to Europe to stay out of Latin America since this was America’s sphere of influence.
The greatest myth of all is that somehow capitalism is free, democratic, and not authoritarian. It conquers abroad and demands obeisance at home. Only capitalist political parties are allowed to govern since the mass media, owned by capitalists, organises things this way. And if nations get above themselves and elect a left government like in Chile in 1973, or overthrow their colonial masters and want to orient their politics and economics in a socialist or communist direction there is military intervention. And if that fails then there is US – imposed sanctions. This is how the world works.
There is the myth of democracy at home and no hypocrisy about the preference for military and fascist regimes abroad. Royal dictatorships in the Middle East are perfectly acceptable too. And if there is a demand for ‘democratic’ parties abroad then pliable client states can be arranged. All nations must be answerable to the head of the imperium.
What is incredible today is the way our media commentariat seems obsessed with the demise of what they call ‘the rules-based order.’ This has been occasioned by the antics and policies of Trump’s current term in office. Some commentators like the generally intelligent Matt Frei of Channel 4 News asks confusedly, ‘What about our common values and our rules – based order?’ He really should know better, but then again, if he did, he would not be a presenter on Channel 4 News.
And here again is another myth that we have all been fed that somehow western countries are guardians of democratic decencies at home and abroad. The post-World War 2 order was brought into being by the professing Baptist president Truman dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Within two months of this atrocity the United Nations was set up in New York. It had a charter with articles that imply decencies in the way the world should operate. An International court of justice was also set up in the Hague the same year and no-one in the west thought of using it to try Truman for crimes against humanity.
Similarly, after the depravities of WW2, came the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention in 1948. In 1951 came the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, updated in 1967. And the Geneva Convention of 1864 was updated in 1949 with protocols added in 1977 and 2005.
From a European angle came the Court of Human Rights in 1951. This organisation is loathed by both the Conservatives and Reform UK. It also makes Starmer’s Labour Government decidedly uneasy as it has moved ever-right in the wholly mistaken view that that is somehow countering Reform.
All these organisations, conventions and declarations have done nothing to prevent the US doing what it does in what is called its national interest. And what the US has done in her national interest, Britain, France and others in the western sphere have joined the US in pursuit of those goals since we share these common values, apparently.
The Observer newspaper of 11th January this year used the following question on its front page – ‘World Without Rules’. This came about after Trump gave the executive order to kidnap President Maduro of Venezuela. Our craven media, of course, used the words ‘captured’ or ‘arrested.’ And then Trump said he wanted to take Venezuela’s oil as candidly honest as any bullyboy could be.
About a third of the entire paper was given over to variations on the theme of the end of the rules-based order. One article bemoaned the fact that the US spies are now sharing less with UK ones. Another article stated that the ‘US has torn up the rulebook.’ One can only wonder which rulebook they mean.
And, more seriously, for these commentators is the fact that Trump wants Greenland and is prepared to use force to have it; force that would be directed against a fellow NATO member. The sense of bewilderment should have been avoided had the commentators listened to Trump bemoaning NATO during his first Presidential term.
The best way to understand NATO is to compare it with our royal family. The ruling class of the UK use the royals as a mask, a foil, a shield to hide behind to guarantee their class- based rule. Similarly, the formation of NATO in 1949 – some six years before the formation of the Warsaw Pact – has always acted as a cover for US interests.
Trump has simply removed the need for any cover any more. Starmer, Macron and Merz are all terrified at how naked they all seem. Trump has got them all to up their expenditure on defence under the pretext that they can deal with the Ukrainian situation while also getting them to spend this money buying US weapons.
The erroneous concern about the end of a rules-based order is in fact concern that Trump may have a serious look at Europe after Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, Panama and Iran, maybe even Canada. One hundred years on from the rise of fascism in Europe we seem to have learned nothing. We were told never again but forget about Vietnam, and forget about Gaza. Trump needs no justification from anyone.
He is a product of the most aggressive capitalism on earth and he came through it to become president for the second time. He is a gunslinger, a cowboy, a gangster, a hate preacher, a Don. And the rest of the west know this and now act surprised, apparently.
When faced with seemingly impossible odds it is invariably left to our writers and cultural sector to challenge. Make no mistake, we are faced with fascism returning all over again. Trump’s acolytes like Farage, Le Pen, Wilders are all waiting in the wings. Trump’s backers are the techno-fascists who all attended his second inauguration. They have chipped in to build his Ozymandian ballroom.
Resisting Trump
Bertolt Brecht’s play ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,’ was written in 1941 while Brecht was in Finland. Arturo Ui is a fictionalised version of Hitler who plays the part of a Chicago mobster who attempts to control the cauliflower racket by brutally getting rid of any competition. For cauliflower read oil or rare earth minerals required by the techno-fascists of today. Such an analogy is not difficult to make. This play is a wonderful piece of theatre, a satire and a warning.
The most important word in this play is the word ‘Resistible’ used in the title. If things do not need to be the way they are, then change them. That may not always be so easy when the media and, more importantly today, social media can stir up hysteria and conspiracy theories as well as supplying us with misinformation. Nonetheless, challenged it must be. The techno-fascists behind Trump, just like all capitalists down the years, detest the word regulation, both in theory and practice. Less regulation means more profit more regulation means less profit. Regulation also means protection for workers, nations and the environment. Surely, we need to be shouting this out!
Another play, this time by Eugene Ionesco in 1959 was called ‘The Rhinoceros’. Martin Esslin included it for consideration in his ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ (1961). Ionesco came from Romania and moved to France to escape the fascist Iron Guard. The play is set in a provincial town in France and the main character Bérenger watches his friends all turning into rhinoceroses. They have succumbed to the crushing conformity within their society and being metamorphosed into a rhinoceros means that they have lost their sense of humanity. Fascism has slowly spread like a virus, like some contagion.
The play was not only an attack on Romania but was also a swipe at the collaborationist Vichy regime. Is this not what we see happening with the rise of Reform today with more and more recruits joining them? Immigration, we are told, is the number one issue of the British public. If we agree to this we are done and turn into rhinos. Bérenger refuses to become a rhinoceros and proclaims,’ I’m not capitulating!’ Neither should we.
The ogre that is Trump oversees a nation in deep decline with millions in private prisons, millions more homeless, tens of millions in dire poverty, many more struggling economically. Added to this Big Pharma doles out legal drugs as narco-terrorists, as Trump calls them, supply illegal drugs. What Trump fails to mention is the simple economic principle of supply and demand. Why do so many Americans demand such drugs in the first place? And thousands kill themselves each year and tens of thousands are murdered year on year in this land of the free.
Trump is not just the principal rhino but also the Golden Calf to be worshipped. He idolises capital and is using his presidency this time round to amass more of it. He is using American nationalism, his Make America Great Again campaign, to do so. It has all the hallmarks of fascism and it can be resisted. Fromm sums it up more clinically for us:
Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult… Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one‘s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
The time of believing in the myth of a rules-based order must surely be over. The mask has gone. Trump has no use for it and in this he is brutally and obscenely honest. Resisting Trump and his allies is paramount if we wish to institute a genuine rules- based order on the ideas of Fromm so that the whole of humanity can thrive and love and prosper.
