The Real Lesson of January 6th – How Fascism Works

 

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the Insurrection at the Capitol.  This event remains prominent in the news due to ongoing civil and criminal litigation and the overall meaning to culture and politics in the United States.  At the level of accountability there are striking discrepancies between those who were physically at the Capitol and many who orchestrated the event. The most striking discrepancy and controversy is former President Trump. He has currently been removed from the ballots in 2 states pending what will likely be Supreme Court decisions.  The Supreme Court is clearly stacked in his favor and one of his attorneys stated an explicit quid pro quo this week as in “this President appointed you - better get him back on the ballot.”  There have also been threats that Republicans would remove Biden from the ballot to compensate for Trump being removed from ballots as a 14^th Amendment insurrectionist.

There is striking video footage of Republican legislators calling the initial event an insurrection and clearly stating that Trump was responsible – but years later walking all of that back and saying the Insurrection was just a protest – nothing to see here.

Former President Trump continues to promote The Big Lie whenever he has access to an open microphone despite overwhelming evidence being frequently recited that it is a lie. He continues to portray himself as a victim of politics even when partisans from his own party and administration recite why it is a good idea that he never be elected again. Since I ascribe to the Goldwater Rule, I will avoid any psychiatric speculation.  At an overt level, it is obvious he can keep going and continue to attack and alienate people even when it is not in his best interest. Many of his interviewed followers describe this as his best trait.

I happened to be watching a popular television show the other night and they put up a recent poll about the Insurrection and whether it was initiated by the FBI. Quite surprisingly 25% of the respondents were convinced the FBI initiated it and 26% were unsure or did not comment. So even though at this point 1200 people have been charged and 890 convicted of federal crimes associated with the Insurrection – over half of Americans are either certain that this was an FBI conspiracy or uncertain that it was not.  What is happening here?

Although much of politics is an irrational appeal to emotion – it is clearly at an all time high in the United States.  A recent Foreign Affairs article describes this trend as coinciding with the US now being a major exporter of white supremacist terrorism. Most Americans probably do not know that President Grant created the Department of Justice to counter white supremacist terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan in 1870.  A group who spread recruiting literature across Twin Cities suburbs in 2022 also promoted antisemitism.  Just the act of dispersing that literature is a clear sign that something in the US has gone horribly wrong.  What is the problem?

Listening to many of the supporters of these processes it is easy to attribute the support for autocracy, the Insurrection, and the MAGA movement to ignorance.  They see the former President as a strong man who speaks his mind and that is all that they are interested in. They do not care about the book length criticisms of people with worked closely with him during his Presidency.  Many of those criticisms have been severe – questioning his depth of knowledge and decision-making ability. They don’t care about public remarks he has made that were basically false or dog whistles.  They say they care about the economy but the Biden economy is clearly superior to the Trump economy and easily exceeded any warnings Trump had about not re-electing him.  They don't care about the fact that Trump does not campaign on relevant domestic or foreign policy issues.  

The lack of a rational basis for supporting Trump and MAGA suggest that other factors are at play. First and foremost is partisan politics.  Practically all the Republicans that were skeptical or critical of Trump have fallen in behind him – not wanting to provoke the ire of his MAGA loyalists.  Their affiliation is with a seriously compromised Republican party rather than the republic itself.  Better to have a good career and government job and let the Insurrection cards fall where they may.  The Republicans walking away rather than make that compromise are a small minority and deserve our gratitude.

Nihilism is a significant factor.  Nihilism is a vague term, I am using the existential meaning.  In other words, meaninglessness is pervasive both in terms of the truth being relative rather than absolute and the same is true for institutions. This is a large part of what Trump does on almost a daily basis.   Using a shotgun approach he has attacked just about every aspect of the government, military, public health, educational, and judicial systems and continues to do so.  Many of the attacks have been personal and directed at people who have distinguished government service. These attacks are unprecedented by any American president and unquestionably erode the authority of these agencies – not just with his followers but in general.  Some have endangered the people attacked and their families.  Many of his supporters clearly want to burn “the system” down and not replace it. Nihilism also reinforces many right-wing conspiracy theories like the secret Deep State or the FBI orchestrating the Insurrection.

The symbols of nihilism were prominent at the January 6 Insurrection and included a Confederate flag, a gallows and a noose, militia gear and paramilitary tactics.  Since then, at least one Republican candidate offered support for Lost Cause rhetoric that revises history to suggest that aggressive northern states fought the Civil War to suppress states’ rights in the south rather than end slavery. The idea of a rebellion is also suggested rather than an insurrection and an attack on the legitimate government of the United States.  The Civil War was really a war between the Confederacy and the United States rather than the North versus the South. All that rhetoric is designed to render the real history of the Civil War meaningless.  It was no accident that the Confederate flag appeared in the Capitol carried by insurrectionists.  There is nothing more nihilistic than vigilante law as evidenced by the threat of hanging rationalized as “so the traitors know the stakes” initially and then a site where insurrectionists chanted to “Hang Mike Pence!” while searching for him in the Capitol Building.

“Nihilistic hooliganism” or “striving to create the atmosphere of a street battle or barroom brawl” was a tactic used by Goebbels in the Nazi propaganda paper Der Angriff because at the time he knew it appealed to supporters (2). It seems obvious that several individuals and factions in the Republican party are intent creating this kind of atmosphere.  Late in 2023 it extended into Congress with threat of physical violence against a witness in a hearing and alleged physical contact between Republican members of Congress in the hallways.

In the vacuum of nihilism, the right does not hesitate to dictate how people should think on culture war or hot button issues like guns, abortion, LGBT issues, separation of church and state, control over education, climate change denial, and pandemic denial.   They cast attempts to remove overt misinformation as censorship and a return to rational gun control as a denial of Second Amendment rights.  In many cases there is a “doubling down” on any political gains made in these areas.  This level of cynicism and disingenuousness keeps the threat of gun violence very real for most Americans and has had a clear negative impact on women’s health where abortion access is considered essential health care by experts. This doubling down to the point of criminalization is characteristic of autocracies that consider winning cultural issues crucial for the survival of their ideology.

Trump and his supporters are using very well-known propaganda techniques.  The first is to establish Trump as a cult of personality. He has certainly done this himself by marketing himself as a superhero. Any search on superhero Trump merchandise brings up pages of this stuff.  He also markets himself as being a genius and being tough and ruthless if necessary. Practically all the drama surrounding the current court cases, including sustained attacks on court officials is all part of that image. An average citizen watching this unfold can only wonder why he can get away with behavior that would cause anyone else to get contempt charges and incarceration. Since this is also unprecedented behavior it is reminiscent of other negatively charismatic leaders like Hitler who cultivated mythical images:

“Hard, ruthless, resolute, uncompromising, and radical, he would destroy the old privilege - and class-ridden society and bring about a new beginning, uniting the people in an ethnically pure and socially harmonious 'national community'.” (1)

The entire MAGA movement and its associated “drain the swamp” mottos are consistent with Trump’s cultivated image that has successfully obliterated the fact that he has had far more privilege than practically any other person in the MAGA movement.

As in the case of Hitler, it takes more than a self-cultivated mythical image to establish a following that will ignore obvious deficits and vote for you no matter what. In the case of Republican politicians – self-interest is the obvious motivation.  If any other candidate has a chance in the national elections, they would not all be in lock step behind Trump. The fall out from that process has been astounding including continuing to support the Big Lie strategies and making the original January 6^th Insurrection out to be a picnic.

A pillar of the autocrat playbook is to attack everything in the existing government and suggest all these problems will be solved when the superior human being is elected.  That involves significant distortion at three levels.  First – it devalues clear accomplishments of the existing government.  Most serious students of government would describe the Biden administration as one of the most successful in modern history.  Some of that success depended on correcting the damage done by the last Trump administration.  Second - direct attacks on the opposition, unfounded accusations, and name calling.   Third – it depends on a distortion of the abilities of their ideal candidate.  In the case of Trump there is a long list of deficiencies provided by members of his own party and people who were in his own cabinet. Many of them are clear that he should never be re-elected.  That stands in sharp contrast to the hyperbole candidate Trump and his dedicated followers.   

The real lesson of January 6, 2021 is that American democracy is under attack from one of the major parties and a former President who is combative to the point of alienating members of his own party, never admits he is wrong, is hypersensitive to criticism, and is not honest with the American people.  A significant part of the electorate finds that attractive even though it is not clear what would happen if their candidate is reelected.  His stated first order of business is to get revenge on those who he feels have slighted him. That image should give any rational voter pause.  The only thing scarier is what happens when autocrats implode (and they all do).  It is typically as a colossal failure – negatively impacting the entire country for years.  In the United States there is a good chance that fall will be far greater than any other country.

That is why the lessons of January 6 at the Capitol should never be forgotten.

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

Supplementary 1:  How the FBI started the Insurrection Conspiracy Theory got started was discovered and debunked in January 2022.  An Arizona man named Ray Epps was filming the insurrection and apparently encouraging people to enter the Capitol.  Assuming he was an FBI agent provided the basis for the conspiracy theory.  When he was questioned by the January 6 Committee – Epps stated he was not working for law enforcement or a member of the FBI.  As the linked article states prominent Republicans including Sen. Ted Cruz promoted this theory. 

The actual story:

".....Fox News Channel and other right-wing media outlets amplified conspiracy theories that Epps, 62, was an undercover government agent who helped incite the Capitol attack to entrap Trump supporters. Epps filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News last year, saying the network was to blame for spreading baseless claims about him...."

Kunzelman M.   Ray Epps, a target of Jan. 6 conspiracy theories, gets a year of probation for his Capitol riot role.  Associated Press January 9, 2024.  https://www.yahoo.com/news/ray-epps-target-jan-6-164800399.html

References:

1:  Kershaw I.  The Hitler Myth.  History Today. 1985; 35(11): 23-29.  https://www.historytoday.com/archive/hitler-myth

2:  Lemmons R.  Goebbels and Der Angriff.  1994.  University of Kentucky Press. Lexington, Kentucky. p. 128-131.

 

Graphics Credit:

1:  Main Graphic is: DC Capitol Storming by TapTheForwardAssist, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DC_Capitol_Storming_IMG_7947.jpg

Note the original was altered by me with the superimposed transparency.

2:  Transparency is:  WWII, Europe, Germany, "Nazi Hierarchy, Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Hess", The Desperate Years p143 – NARA by National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WWII,_Europe,_Germany,_%22Nazi_Hierarchy,_Hitler,_Goering,_Goebbels,_Hess%22,_The_Desperate_Years_p143_-_NARA_-_196509.jpg

 

 

 

Death Cults

That may seem like an odd topic for a psychiatry blog but I did not know where to put this.  Earlier this week my wife and I decided to stop watching a popular television show called The Following.  It is basically a fictional show about a death cult that involves a charismatic psychopath who engages other psychopaths to do mass killing.  They typically use knives as murder weapons and kill large numbers of innocent people at public gatherings like book signings in book stores.  In one episode last year, the main psychopath in the show happened across the camp of another death cult run by a different psychopath and it was the expected lethal battle for leadership.  The dramatic tension is created by a group of FBI agents trying to catch and stop the psychopaths and the personal stories in that group.  In the opening show this year, there was a murder scene that was explained to the audience and then implicitly done that was so sadistic and so sick that we decided to shut off the show and never watch it again.

Violence and aggression are always in the background in America.  We take violence and aggression for granted and it seems surprising when they are excluded from entertainment.  What no car chases or shootings?  And it has been there a long time.  I can remember being in East Africa in the 1970s and at that time many of the Africans that I met, had the idea that most Americans carried guns.  That conclusion was from watching American films.  There has always been the debate about whether or not the display of all of this violence affects people.  Like practically all research of this type, I would expect the results to reflect the biases of the researchers.  Typical research would look at a large group  exposed and not exposed to violence in the media and the results are mixed.  Mixed results lead to the status quo, but the status quo has gradually gotten worse.  Television shows commonly have sadistic serial killers as their plot line and in one case a serial killer is the main character and hero.  

According to a 2012 report by the Media Violence Commission (1) major medical (including the American Psychiatric Association) and the major psychological organization in this country support the argument that there is a casual connection between media violence and aggressive behavior.  This report also looks at the biases that may be in place that might obscure that connection.  The authors mentioned the belief that the effects must be immediate and severe is a common bias.  In other words, I see a violent movie and perpetrate a violent act within the next day or two.  Instead over time, exposure may decrease prosocial behaviors.  This report briefly summarizes the literature on possible psychological mechanisms that occur with exposure to violence but the most important  conclusion is:

"One conclusion appears clear-extreme conclusions are to be avoided. Not every viewer or player will be affected noticeably, but from understanding the psychological processes involved, we know that every viewer or player is affected in some way."

Many clinical psychiatrists have talked with people who have perpetrated violence based on some act that was portrayed in the media.  These stories are also described in the media with some regularity.  I think that if there are any factors containing a media effect it is the moral development of most people and that fact that a lot of the violence is hypothetical and it could not be enacted without considerable resources.  Factors that may facilitate violence after exposure would include a developmentally immature brain or a brain that would be more susceptible to the priming effects of violence.  That would include various forms of severe mental illnesses or personality effects like psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder.  In many cases the perpetrators of violence has no idea about how devastating injuries can occur from fictional portrayals where people get up after being hit over the head with a pipe.  They don't realize that in many cases that results in a fatal or disabling brain injury.

The overriding dimension affecting violence that needs to be addressed is at the cultural level.  A critical recent development is the resurgence of the death cult.  The concept of death cult is poorly defined at this time and as far as I know there are no definitive scholars.  They seem to come in two forms.  The first requirement is a cult or an organization with a charismatic leader and followers who are willing to uncritically follow the edicts of the leader.  There have been various studies of the dynamics of these groups and who might be susceptible to becoming a cult member.  Jerrold Post, MD has analyzed the dynamics of charismatic leaders and describes them as "mirror hungry" personalities that require constant admiration, convey a sense of omnipotence and grandeur,  have the appearance of certainty, and rely heavily on splitting as an adaptive psychological defense (2).   Death cults seem to come down to 2 varieties - those predisposed to mass suicide and those that are predisposed to homicide and mass homicide or in some cases genocide.  For the purposes of this post, I am focused on the latter, because they seem to pose the most immediate danger to the most people.

Prototypical homicide focused cults or movements in my lifetime have included the Nazis and Pol Pot.  The concept of "charismatic leader" can probably extend to larger groups of extremists that have been described as being responsible for genocides (3).  Over the past 30 years, we have seen many of these cults or movements commit homicide to various degrees often with loose religious rationalizations.  The killings have become increasingly vicious and sadistic.  The killings have reached a level of intensity that all of the religious justifications no longer seem to apply.  The international solution has been to mobilize against these groups and in some cases, explicitly threaten to kill them.  The media is always complicit with death cult propaganda and the resulting desensitization may have been one of the factors in the escalation.  This is an interesting parallel with television entertainment that seems to be in the same cycle of escalating to the most horrifically sadistic and brutal types of killing and torture.

What is missing in all of this mass exposure to violence and killing is an explanation of the driving forces and a plan for change at a cultural level.  There is a current and shocking increase in antisemitism spreading across Europe, to the point that one author has suggested that it may be time for the Jews to leave Europe (4).  There don't seem to be any pacifists any more.  There is no peace movement like there was in the 1970s.   I have not seen any explanations for this primitive behavior and why it occurs even though many explanations have been around for years.  Here is one from Lifton that has been available since 1986 and it is accessible to any psychiatrist trained in psychodynamics or any good student of English literature:

"Fascist ideology can have particular appeal for the survivor self fighting off disintegration because it holds out, at all levels, a promise of unity, oneness, fusion.  It deals with death anxiety, moreover by glorifying death, even worshiping it.  While one's own death as a warrior is idealized, the self mostly escapes death - achieves the death of death - by killing others.  There can readily follow a vicious circle in which one kills, needs to go on killing to maintain one's cure, and seeks a continuous process of murderous, deathless, therapeutic survival.  One can then reach the state of requiring a sense of perpetual survival through the killing of others in order to re-experience endlessly what Elias Canetti has called the "moment of power" - that is the moment of cure."  p. 499.

Lifton knows full well that the fascist thought process that he describes is not a diagnosis,  but it is the way that large groups of people can think.  It has been present since the time of ancient man.  You can find theories about how it is "hardwired" into the human brain with suggestions that it is adaptive.  The only real way we can combat it is through educating people about what is really going on, improving critical thinking and changing popular culture.  Teach them how to recognize biases and overcome them.  A basic skill would seem to be able to recognize a death cult and realize why participation may not be in your best interest.  It goes without saying that it could not be in the best interest of civilized society, but the philosophy behind that probably needs teaching.

When I turned off my TV set the other day, I was not seeing it as a protest.  But if media producers realize that abhorrent violent content is less interesting that may be an important cultural change.      


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA




References:


1:  Media Violence Commission, International Society for Research on Aggression(ISRA). Report of the Media Violence Commission. Aggress Behav. 2012 Sep-Oct;38(5):335-41. doi: 10.1002/ab.21443. Epub 2012 Aug 10. Review. PubMed PMID: 22886500 (full text available online).

2:  Jerrold Post, MD.  Personality and Political Behavior.  Door County Summer Institute July 21-25, 2003.

3:  Alan J. Kuperman.  The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention - Genocide in Rwanda.  Brooking Institution Press.  Washington, DC (2001) p. 12.

4:  Jeffrey Goldberg.  Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?  The Atlantic.  April 2015.

5:  Robert Jay Lifton.  The Nazi Doctors.  Basic Books, New York (1986) p. 499.




Supplementary 1:    I would not encourage anyone to watch the television program in question that I mention in paragraph 1.  I have seen plenty of media violence, but consider this depiction to be the worst.