Beyond Trump: Times when there is a need to more actively reist
As to the mentioned, more hypothetical need to more actively avert submission or lasting damage to America’s democracy, we cannot make untrue statements due to exaggerations or out of fear. We cannot call Trump a dictator or an usurper. We may choose to dare to trust fate and conditionally optimistic that we can repeat the same sentence in 2029.
If we, contrary to our assumption, underestimate the bitter resentment and disregard for others in someone (no matter who), then never to have looked at what is required if that someone poses a real threat to democracy as a real autocrat equals a risk-enhancing unpreparedness for possible eventualities.
It concerns the potentiality that harder means resembling autoritarian ones may be wielded by a more loyalty-based government not in line with american tradition to make single office holders and citizens coalesque. The following is thus a depiction in which someone’s egocentric and alpha-like “I of the we” is enhanced with a mostly imaginatory account of someone also having grave disregard for others and resentful bitterness as their motivating fuel.
If undue pressure from others causes you to change your mind, you must, both to remain consistent and to preserve your self-image, attribute to the opponent – one supreme quality – that of “being right”. You were not weak and willingly prepared to be subsumed under some other, but strong – not dissimilar to the alpha; had just “been a bit mistaken”. It was the other person who had been right.
“When you have brought a person to declare himself pro a cause in public, then most often you have also brought the person to declare himself pro the same thing inwardly. One still wants to be consistent.” (Nietzsche, 1878: Human, All Too Human, Part 1, 9th Main Section, #548).
Prejudiced subjectivity, as expressed in statements such as for instance “my opponents always won over me only because they cheated” may from now on for many of those who have accepted subsumption not seem ego-centrically self-serving, paranoid or lying, but exude truth and radiate an entitled sovereignty. Paradoxically, thus, such self-serving interpretation of one’s own motives for subsuming under another; that it is not because of the other being so strong and oneself relatively weaker, but because the other turned out to be right – increases – the base for loyal admiration and aggravates the suspension of one’s own critical sense:
“The reason that person feels so sure is that he/she knows himself/herself to be ‘right’; alone more sovereign than the constitution of the United States”; a super-genious! The dynamics of such processes resemble “escalating intoxication”, where equality and individually autonomous judgments are suspended gradually, imperceptibly and self- deceivingly, for something covertly coerced and blinded. It overlaps with “charismatic leadership”, hypnosis (wearing blinkers), and brainwashing; a life-threatening momentum to democracy if it arises with strength within national politics. One may remind of the second of the ten commandments, that there is no room for idols.
“It has always been the greatest ruin of culture, when people were worshipped.” (Nietzsche, 1879: Human, All Too Human, Part 2, 1st Division, #186)
There is this saying: “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”. As an elected president with an “easily planted sense of ownership”, the person may (in the worst thinkable case) come to perceive his “I-based we-concept” as the nation of the USA’s one true “we-concept”. Criticism can become hypersensitive, the more so the more “morally unblemishable” the person holds him-/herself to be.
Those who involuntarily become anti-polar seen from the powerful person’s perspective by not subsuming under his/her subjectivity, may become morally impure in the eyes of all those who belong to his/her “we”, much more so than Taylor Swift in 2024. In behavioral biology, anyone who does not accept an alpha wolf’s pre-formal emanation of authority cannot really belong to the pack. You see that also in street-gang culture.
The ultimate end point is slandering anyone who does not allow themselves to be subsumed as morally corrupted, possibly un-American threats. An inner logic of paranoid suspiciousness is: “If you argue against my convictions, the probability is high that you are in league with those who persecute me”. The person could sense as it follows: Because they are against me as an un-american threat, they are un-american threats. I do not go after them, I only act as he must since they would go after me / after our american we (cf. my “we”).
In such situations, fellow party members with positions of some power inside the various three branches of government power can be encouraged to voluntarily “take interest in” whether they too can be targeted if they do not “acquiesce”. Will the fellow party members of the powerful person allow themselves to be subsumed under his/her we-concept? The answer may affect the political and cultural future of the nation.
Fellow party members with some degree of formal or informal power could choose to take that question seriously by exercising their offices or roles with a strictly interpreted autonomy based on loyalty directly towards the constitution and the laws, even where this would entail the risk of unpleasant adversity, almost like an experiment. That, then, will be an experiment they do in the interest of the historic and traditional, US American nation. This may show the degree of US strength.
«The disappointed one speaks: I obeyed on reflex, and I heard only praise!” (Nietzsche, 1886: Beyond Good and Evil, fourth main section, #99)
“Actual heroism consists not in fighting under the banner of sacrifice, devotion and selflessness, but not fighting at all. ‘This is how I am’, ‘this is how I want it‘. Bring the devil here (if you want it differently).” (Nietzsche, posthumously 1901: The Will to Power, Book 2, 5A, h)
“The voice of the herd will still resonate, even in you. When you will say: I no longer have a [common] conscience with you, then there will be a complaint and a pain. But you will continue on the path of your melancholy, which is the path to yourself.” (Nietzsche, 1883: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part 1, Zarathustra’s Speeches).
If one person‘s subjectivity alone is supposed to approximate objectivity on behalf of many, and as such on behalf of a “we-concept” that turns the moral compass from loyalty towards the constitution as its north pole to personal loyalty (with one persona as the north pole), and thus alienates larger proportions of the people, it increases the chance of erroneous decisions, especially if the same subjectiveness is easily offendable, mistrustful and vengeful.
Some individuals have a formidable, laser-like, “will-pushing” subjectivity, almost like a “force” to feel; as some kind of “mental-affective strength” recognizable through a sense of an intense presence of great immediacy, maybe not yet sufficiently explained by science as to the impression people having it are capable of exerting on other people, but probably having to not only with psychological, but also with neuro-hormonal and/or neuro-electric, genetic traits.
Some “dominant criminals” have this quality to them, which means that the compass needle of others’ moral conscience is easily disoriented. Those who work closely with them day by day in prisons, the police and the judiciary, easily end up in a “stress field” where their own authority claimed with certainty of conscience, must be fought for. The Stockholm syndrome, where kidnap victims end up sympathizing with their kidnappers (on occation to the point of defending them from the police) rests on a similar principle, namely that of introjecting the strong subjectivity of another.
Having multiple average people’s subjectivity affect you in stead of one with lazer-like strength may result in similar tests of one’s true, inner freedom. People who are believed by a group of others to be liars, when defending themselves, can sometimes feel like “liars defending themselves”. They must very consciously and actively deny the subjectivity of others as something that can be introjected by them, making them nervous and as-if-ashamed, looking and maybe even feeling guilty, whilst knowing still they are not. A powerful alpha can cause the eyes of many to land on his own opponents in this same way.
Using “fake news”, they do not want opponents to be perceived as “above liability” of doing the same thing. That would weaken the advantage of using “fake news”. Hence, “fake news” must be used to weaken the reputation of political opponents on a personal level. The public must believe, due to a compromised public perception of the personal character of those political opponents, that they too are liable to use “fake news”, where “fake news” – circularly – has been the means of compromising their reputation in the first place. Trust must be lacking. Everything must be brought to their level, so they won’t be disadvantaged.
Something similar even applies in factual discussions or debates if one is faced with a “strong subjectivity” who “knows” he/she is right, especially if that person is also “verbally intense”. It becomes easy to sense that “maybe one isn’t right after all” and should “give up”. True autonomy, backed by heroism, is to offer a flimsy, yet provocatively clear “no”, even when no one else, and hardly even oneself anymore, feels the validity of the subjective reasons for that “no”. That is to resist the moral gravitational field of an ill defined “we-concept”.
“For what is freedom? That one has the will to responsibility for onseself. That one holds on to the distance that keeps us separated.” (Nietzsche, 1889: The Twilight of the Idols, skirmishes of an untimely man, #38b)
“One must learn to love oneself with a whole and healthy love, so that one perseveres with oneself and does not have to float around.” (Nietzsche, 1883: Thus spoke Zarathustra, Part 3, “about the spirit of gravity”)
“And only with reluctance did I ask for directions, it always went against my taste. Rather I tried and [rather] I asked the roads myself. That – is now my way. Where is yours? Thus, I answered those who asked me the way. The one way, namely, does not exist. » (Nietzsche, 1883: Thus spoke Zarathustra, Part 3, “about the spirit of gravity”)
If an equal validity of one’s own or others’ subjectivity is dismissed (not recognized as equally valid prior to approximation of objectivity), that should work as a clear cursor that one is not mistaken to offer up one’s own “heroic no”. That is, one must grow the ability to sense: “Something is here indefinably but decidedly wrong with the ‘frame condition’ under which I am to either change or to keep my opinion. The frame condition is not in keeping with my own reached degree of individuation, which is the same as freedom, threatening to reverse it unless I resist being subsumed”.
Choosing the opposite of what one is “being influenced” by others to embrace, is just as little autonomous (cf. just as little individualistic) as embracing it. One will then have taken position for the wrong reason as a consequence of the pressure exerted by others. Reverse reactance is not freedom. Either answer could still be the right one, but never due to either subtly covert or less subtly covert coercion. The ill frame condition, not the answer to the incidental issue, is what must be fought.
It may be apt to reccomend the old milgram experiment (an experiment turned irreplicable in an american context, since now deemed unethical). Test subjects were told to administer electroshocks to others they did not see because they were behind a wall, and gradually increase the voltage despite more and more screaming and begging from the other side of the wall. Most test subjects went beyond moral/ethical boundaries, probably because of the authority radiation of the formal experiment setting and because of perpetual orders from the research leader to continue.
The experiment is deemed unethical although noone actually were given shocks, because the test subjects were left it with blows to their sense of self-worth afterwards. Autocrats who have gained power can also use the authority radiation of formal governmental power and give perpetual orders. The most evil autocrats want others to make themselves guilty of something, as leverage if those others would later want to break their bond of loyalty. Favors are also risky to accept, like in criminal settings.
Another important concept is that of so called “groupthink” and its fallacies. One must train oneself to be vigilant and notice settings where diverging opinions are no longer interesting to listen to because it threatens a foreclosed consensus – and sometimes – even so that silence is made to be seen as something suspicious, as if it would potentially cloaking disloyalty (cf. because healthy dissent is interpreted as disloyalty).
“One must beware of surroundings where one neither gets to come forward with one’s deepest concern nor to remain silent with dignity“. (Nietzsche, 1881: The Dawn of Day, book 4, #364)
If the executive branch of federal government has become such a surrounding, it is a sign that democracy (rule by the people, for the people) is in grave danger, at best. Only one political party commands the loyalty of the military, at a time. They always also represent those who did not vote for them, however, and those who voted for them would never want them in power indefinitely. If the voters did, power would not have changed hands almost routinely. It may be right to remind Americans of some things which would have been typical for them to remind the big outside world of 40 years ago.
“One rules because of the desire to rule, the others not to be ruled: – for these it is only the lesser of two evils.” (Nietzsche, 1881: The Dawn of Day, Book 3, #181)
“I have found strength where one does not look, in simple, gentle and pleasant people, without the slightest desire to rule – and conversely, the desire to rule and dominate has often appeared to me as a sign of inner weakness. They fear their own enslaved soul and cover it in a royal robe (in the end they will still be enslaved by their followers, their fame, etc).” (Nietzsche, posthumously: note from 1881)
“Immodest greatness wants to experience its power by hurting, treating others as if it were master, and seeing how much they tolerate this. Usually this even proves a lack of sure belief in one’s own power and therefore causes people to doubt their greatness.” (Nietzsche, 1878, Human, All Too Human, part 1, ninth main section, #588)
Unlike marxism (revolutionary communism), extreme right wing autocracy is often not born as an ideology but can be an expression of “powerful interest” with a readiness to put their own interest above democracy “if necessary”. This can apply to any direction of interest which sees itself as benefiting from the perceived “freedom” of the collectively defined ingroup (a “we”) being secured by the subordination of others via more authoritarian management principles provided those others are perceived as a threat to it. This does not seem unjust – to them. There is, after all, a free and inclusive “we” offered equally openly to all. In reality, it is a bid to make the culture more collectivist, for the benefit over the mere outer image of super-individuation (cf. over-autonomy) of some.
The introduction of more authoritarian management principles is achieved the easiest if an image is drawn up for the public (for instance with fake news / state propaganda) in which the ingroup’s (cf. the “we’s”) freedom is seen as being under a grave and potentially lasting threat if they themselves do not permit a more authoritarian form of control over everything that resists their power and their aptly offered inclusion in the one “we-concept”. There is a sense of an inclusicve “we” and an excluding “them” created on the base of a fully or partially arbitrary premis.
It may be apt to reccomend also the old stanford prison experiment (yet another experiment turned irreplicable in an american context, now deemed unethical). Here, test persons were divided into two groups; inmates and prison guards. After a short time, the “prison guards” startet to treat the prisoners with reduced empathy and abusiveness, although their individual assignment as either inmate or prison guards had been purely random. Within few days, the test leaders had to call the experiment off prematurely, because it had become ethically unjustified to continue it.
The standford prison experiment shows the danger in making an arbitrary pro-american “we” and anti-american “them” out of the public through propaganda-like means. Autocrats like to portray changes towards the use of autoritarian means as a justified “state of emergency”, but often it is a coerced public image created with the help of the spreading of counterfactual information or information consequently twisting/stretching the truth in one direction. Some monarchies may have arisen in similar ways, with hierarchies of loyalty as “the first nobility”. “You have to be a killer if you want to be a king”, maybe not a killer of people, but of truth. The others, having been calumniated, aren’t moral or honest or honorable enough to deserve better anyway.
Americans have never wanted any king, many of their forefathers emigrated from countries with kings and subsequently expressed contentness with the change of environment. Monarchy is a historical form of autocracy, nothing like today’s merely ceremonial remnants of it in some countries of modern Europe.
Autocratic minded people will, due to egocentrism, never accept having acted immorally. They sense: “My own subjectivity can not be bad; I was born of innocence’ freedom and I will not tolerate being labeled as bad or invalidated” (which during early psycho-development, is exactly what someone may have done to them). Their sensation is: If I sense something as worth doing, others are wrong if they claim it to be inappropriate, or they simply try to win power relative to me through a technique of influence by moralizing”.
“The judgment ‘good’ does not come from those who are shown ‘goodness’. Instead, they were ‘the good’ themselves, that is, the distinguished; powerful, higher-ranking and higher-ranking and higher-minded, who perceived themselves and their actions as ‘good’; specifically as first class. (Nietzsche, 1887: On the Origin of Morality, 1st thesis, #2)
That attitude, thus far described, they hence share with a subset of liberals with lowly developed autonomous ethical consciousness, who misuse liberal ideals to promote their own purely egoic interests. To be sustainable over centuries, liberalistic moral freedom should be understood as a freedom under responsibility, as the right to be an ethically responsible individual on an individualistically autonomous basis (a responsibility one may grow to embrace for own individual reasons, not for others’ reasons).
If you act more or less in line with what autonomous ethical responsibility would look like only because of a beneficial set of societal moral codes, you are still not above liability of throwing away your moral if someone convinces you a different (less benefitial) moral is more right. Autonomous ethical responsibility is post-moral. For the autocratic mindset, however, morality is not something others should define for it – because – it lessens its power.
They are themselves free of all moral, but without having developed the individualistically autonomous ethical responsibility which may hatch after fullended, healthy individuation, and which development all healthily modest, societal moral in the best case protects like an eggshell. “The we” (cf. “the I”) thus determines its own morality, as a means to influence others. There is a fight over power, through moral as means to attain loyalty.
Autocrats often seem to have in common that they are strength oriented and that gives rise to a strength-based moral. They often do not to tolerate weakness in themselves or in others. Those others whose autonomous ethical responsibility brings them to accept only strength of themselves (for own reasons), may have to fight them, because of the way they deny others that same, freely chosen freedom and reward.
For one-sidedly strength oriented persons (who cannot live well with themselves if not shining to others as strong – even strong enough to morally “sharpen up” others to act out of either fear or misplaced sensations of loyalty-based honor as if strong as well), expectations of intersubjectivity as a cultural norm may be sensed as presumptive, boundary-overstepping, not as respectful, genuine or as compatible with character strength.
Given the ranking of “strength” above “weakness” as an unspoken and sometimes even subconscious premis, “weakness-embracing” persons’ presumption of equality with themselves albeit them being strong, may be sensed as rude somewhat in the same way most people find it rude if others presume they are somehow above themself.
That may correspond to a subjective “moral sensation” they have, also constituting a “congruent justification” of their private formation history, and it may be a psychological defense against shameful contact with their underdeveloped, softer and more vulnerable sides. Mutually respectful people who expect intersubjectivity may offer people with a compensatory strong I-concept an affront. They make their inclusion in the only “we-concept” they understand (their extended “I-concept”), and which may be “generously” offered, “unreasonably complicated”.
Mutually respectful people who assume an equality-based, intersubjective relating style may appear, on the one hand, as if they want to be part of the “we-concept” (cf. potentially willing to subsume the “I-based we”) if they are polite and thus seem accommodating. On the other hand, they appear as if they still do not want to, if they too often end up having a downstriking objection.
On the “interpersonal roads” between the private spheres of multiple subjectivities, there is, ideally, regulated order (no one has a driver’s license). There are those who do not understand that an orderliness they themselves do not master (cf. an intersubjective “we” in stead of a unilaterally “I-based we” is comparatively progressed. They only understand either subsumption or conflict between different “I-based we’s”. They might not even realize that their own we-concept is one-sidedly “I-based” (egocentrism is not introspective).
Those people can sense other people’s distance-taking reactions to themselves as systematically devaluing. They may attribute the devaluing to a corresponding attitude or trait of the other. They may think: “I won’t be a victim of it”. If an initially forthcoming attitude is eventually interpreted only as “too weak to fight”, the strength oriented person who wields actual power might interpret subsequent objections from such seemingly forthcoming people as “weak characters’” self-tormented and quarrelsome ambivalence, a cursor for low trustworthiness. At some point, sooner or later, “boardings” will be necessary.
Autocracy in its earliest seed stage can be when an alpha mentality with a latent “will to power” says to itself on a unilateral, subjective basis: “I don’t understand why I am persistently rejected; discriminatory. If you are covertly against me, I will show you that I can actually beat you. That, then, gives better premises for freedom in my head; he who is not with me is against ‘our’ (cf. ‘my’) freedom“. They may think: “I am unspokenly being the victim of som subtle and covert form of suppression, but power will grant me and others like me freedom from it”.
However, when the term “strength” implies an exclusion of crucially important aspects of the spectrum of human experience in both oneself and in others (for instance the lack of ability to empathize with a physically disabled reporter’s involuntary symptoms and with his inner strength), this is rather an observable expression of such a decisive skewed development – in those poeple.
Whether those who suffer from such skewed development are “alphas” or “betas”, they may become envious of – the benefitial consequences of – other people’s more vulnerable inner qualities. They cannot see authenticity in something they do not themselves feel to exist within themselves and believe that all “appearance” that gives others “advantages” is pure facade.
Not rarely envious, they want to “own” what others can have by virtue of inner qualities they themselves do not have and therefore do not grasp or understand. That which they themselves do not know in themselves, but only see the outward consequences of in others (falsely believing it to be pure façade), they do not feel as belonging to the others’ private sphere.
Façade cannot be something belonging to the private sphere, can it? I feel nothing behind my façade, so your advanagous façade probably masks nothing but the same emptiness. If I am wrong, I will be disadvantaged and I can’t have that. Lack of ability to establish rapport with the opposite sex may easily turn into boundaryless behaviours and attitudes, cheauvenism and voyeurism. Money, status, and success as external signs of self-worth become important, as means of compensation.
A powerful alpha with actual power can “liberate” everyone who wants to be “strong” in this same way but lacks an own power or force to achieve the “means of compensation”. They can, then, invoke power by allowing themselves to be subsumed under an alpha’s “I-based we-concept “, to the exclusion of everyone who resists the “we’s” right to co-definition. These too, with their powerful alpha’s “support in the back”, can stand on the roads over which they, thanks to their subsumption under the road-owning alpha, now share ownership of and stare into the window of any house.
It is possible to suspect that some among those who vote for such a person (a share among them, which nevertheless can make up “the difference” in elections) embrace his/her “I-based we-concept” with great pleasure because for them, it is experienced as a mutually mirroring salvation from all the disadvantages of halfway individuation on “the roads between private spheres”. The nation as a saving, inclusive “we”; self-mirroring; I-affirmative, by making it more collectivist than it used to be.
As great as the nation is, however, such a half-individuated, alpha-based “we” is not synonymous with national unity, but an extremely sad substitute for it. Historical examples from other countries illustrate this. The land of freedom and individualism would seem to benefit from proving to themselves that they love “the individual self” highly enough to “exist well” even without a “we”. That can be seen as the litmus test for true individualism – as a prerequisite of freedom.
Marxists – are honest about being excited by violent overthrow and revolution. Right wing autocrats – often, quite simply, commit their equivelant of revolution. There is some sort of often less overt and sudden overthrow. They are dishonest (maybe dishonest towards themselves as the first), as if they protect the “will of the people” more than anyone else, often with a sense or a state of emergency as both means and as prior justification for introducing more authoritarian government principles. They must not sail under any ideological flag, so democracies must “learn” something new; to see through “what is going on”.
However, one has to be honest and it is worth repeating: Trump as of 2024 has not been an autocrat. That, he will only be if he affronted/vindictive uses renewed presidential power to damage America‘s democracy. Some, however, honestly think he has already entered onto such a road at least once, without giving any later amends for it, through the storming of Congress.
When Trump’s «most faithful» stormed Congress after what the bipartisan investigative comittee later concluded was part of Trump’s plan to undo the result of the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s own vice president Mike Pence had to take cover. The mob, whereof some were dressed up like stone age cave men, looked for him and wanted to hang him as though he was a traitor.
A traitor to whose subjectivity? A traitor to whose moral? Mike Pence was put at life‘s risk by his own former boss and closest, personal colleague in the most honorable service of the nation and the constitution, because he proved fullfledged individuation, and stood firmly behind a truly individualistic stance of his (we do not want to slander Pence as anything but a staunch republican).