Dispatches Mailbag: The Authoritarian Personality and Forecasting Future Politics

As I’ve already said a few times, I’m heading out to the middle of nowhere to get a little rest in order to prepare for the run-up to what is surely going to be a contentious and dangerous election season. I wanted to make sure you got some things from me, so in addition to the most recent part of the ongoing special series A Crisis of Meaning and Purpose (due out Thursday), I’ve scheduled this edition of Dispatches Mailbag a few days in advance. So, this is Past Me (on August 13th) just letting you know that, for all I know, a lot of things have changed in the meantime and I don’t have access to wi-fi. If something has happened and it’s not addressed here, or if one of my answers is completely rendered obsolete, well, chances are I’m listening to some birds somewhere and am completely unaware.

Anyway, as always, Dispatches Mailbag is one of my favorite things here because I get to wrestle with questions from my subscribers and get into things I might not otherwise comment on or that will eventually make their way into larger pieces and analysis. This edition is a good one. I get asked about my personal interactions / perceptions of MAGA supporters, my feelings on Marxism and Communism, what is driving the centrist/moderate freakout over Leftist candidates and growing popular support, and, finally, for a theoretical forecast for politics all the way into 2032 and possibly beyond.

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Linda: Does this that you just posted explain how you manage to not “hate” MAGA? Because you seem to be able to avoid hating them, which is something I struggle mightily with every day, while we watch what they do.

Here’s the post in question from Bluesky -

When trying to understand the Right Wing, it helps to realize they have spent their lives pretending to be someone they aren't and sublimating parts of themselves they hate and that they have to project that pain and hatred onto others because the tension is so unbearable it will destroy them.

For the past ten years I’ve been getting questions in interviews about how I avoided falling into the MAGA and Right Wing trap. Having grown up poor and white in a rural town in a so-called Red State, and having been raised in the evangelical tradition, it makes sense. I was lucky to become who I am, but it took a lot of work. Deconstructing a sense of self and all the associated trappings, including notions of identity and belonging and even instilled worldview is a hell of a thing.

I hate MAGA, the political project. I see it as an existential threat not just to our politics but to the people I care about, to people I don’t know, and humanity in general. The cruelty and corruption and violence and the relentless attempt to destroy democracy and the progress that people have fought and died for is indefensible and atrocious. The world will be a much better place when MAGA is a distant memory and nothing more than a warning from the past about what can happen if greed and avarice are left unchecked. There are days, admittedly when I am tired and struggling, when my hatred for MAGA is what keeps me going long enough to rediscover joy.

My feelings regarding supporters of MAGA are more complicated. I’m furious with them. I don’t like how they treat people and what they’re cheering on. I see them enjoying people’s pain and every time I see it I find myself growing angrier and angrier. In quiet moments, I pity them. I know the psychological underpinnings of the authoritarian personality. That it stems from a background surrounded by abuse and exploitation. The future authoritarian, as a child, is taught to suppress parts of themselves that are consider unacceptable by their families and communities, creating a festering wound that can only heal with, once again, a lot of work. This can be sexuality, sensitivity, you name it. The child is faced with an unconscious choice to either conform to the expectations or face violence and abandonment. The brain knows that to be abandoned as a child would likely lead to death and so the choice is a hard one.

Eventually, the tension between the person they pretend to be and the person they are deep down must be released and projected outward. This is why there is such a jittery, sweaty, angry nature to the Right: they are constantly on the verge of self-collapse because the sublimated self is right there ready to crash against their fictional persona and worldview. When they see someone living their true self, it angers them and they feel a need to try and force that person to conform. In case it wasn’t obvious, the adult authoritarians went through this same process themselves and are then, as adults, projecting that self-loathing onto others, creating a cycle of abuse and trauma. This doesn’t mean they aren’t responsible for their actions, because they are and there’s always a choice, no matter how unthinkable it might be in the moment, to heal from the cycle of trauma. Instead, they continually buy into the enabling bullshit MAGA and the Right and corporate media and all the conspiracy theorists sell them because believing an increasingly incoherent and contradictory set of lies that reaffirm their preconceived reality is “easier” than sorting through actual cognitive dissonance and facing the reality of who they are and, ultimately, what they’ve done.

All of this is to say, I hate all of this. Learning the true nature of it has helped me to understand, but I know too many people who are being targeted and hurt, friends and family members and former students, who are being forced to live through truly heinous conditions and I’m tired as hell of it. I hold onto perspective as much as possible, but this crisis enrages me. It doesn’t have to be this way.