Member-only story
Critical Theory in the Age of Trump
“By becoming part of a power which is felt as unshakably strong, eternal, and glamorous, one participates in its strength and glory. One surrenders one’s own self and renounces all strength and pride connected with it, one loses one’s integrity as an individual and surrenders freedom; but one gains a new security and a new pride in the participation in the power in which one submerges. One gains also security against the torture of doubt.”
–Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
In the early 1930s, a maverick group of academics anticipated the rise of demagogues such as Trump: at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. They were living through the horrific rise of Hitler, who rose from the ashes of the Reichstag, who promised to put an end to the corruption, moral bankruptcy, and the national humiliation and weakness of the short-lived Weimar Republic. Many of these researchers and their friends need no introduction: Adorno, Horkheimer, Arendt, Benjamin.
Of course, Trump is no Hitler, and history does not repeat, but it does rhyme, as Twain said. Trump is our own Berlusconi, a small-minded bigot, kleptocrat and tax evader, a narcissist, a world class womanizer and misogynist. At the same time, they both have the Teflon man condition: none of their brazen criminality and deviance seems to stick.
