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I was born in the 1940s and grew up in the 1950s. The ‘50s was a strange chapter in American life: banal, antiseptic, and claustrophobically conformist: swearing or even mentioning sex was forbidden. If you questioned anything about America, you risked being called a Communist.
That’s not just my opinion.
Andrew Hartman writes that the 1950s were more coercive than before or after, exhibiting “an extraordinary degree of conformity.“ “An unprecedented number of Americans got in line—or aspired to get in line—particularly white, heterosexual, Christian Americans.”1
I rebelled: I wanted freedom!
I found it as a teenager through Sigmund Freud. Through him, I discovered – beneath my button-down, crew-cut-shorn, prudish existence – a subterranean world of primal drives, clarifying everything the ’50s considered taboo. Freud snapped the chains that confined me, changing life into an adventure rather than a gulag experience.
He also piqued my interest in psychology, leading me to Columbia, where my excitement was dashed. In true 1950s fashion, academia banished Freud in favor of experimental psychology. Rather than studying people, we conducted animal experiments with white rats and then expected to magically extrapolate our rat data to humans.
I dropped out of Columbia because the chains had tightened around me again: The rats lost, Freud won. You might say that Freud greased the skids that launched me into the ‘60s, but only after a heart-rending detour to Vietnam.
The 1960s liberated not only me but our country, overthrowing the age-old conservative mandate of patriarchy, white man rule, and missionary-only sex; In its place, we advocated equal rights for all.
Unfortunately, our cultural revolution produced a vicious backlash, accelerating after the election of our first black president and coming to a head today. Unprecedented social change at whiplash speed was too much for the old guard. Conservatives called the 1960s a “crisis in democracy.” This was an Orwellian phrase that meant the opposite: they were livid because we had too much democracy.
Over the intervening years, Democrats contributed to the problem by overplaying their hand, ignoring 70% of their base, white, working folks, and instead catered too much to special interest groups, no matter how valid their claims.
Brewing inside this combustible mix, a counter-revolution was gaining momentum.
Traditionalists and increasing numbers of the working class, along with the business class, gathered under the Republican banner, asserting they were the silent majority, promoting biblical religion, punitive justice, and white supremacy while railing against homosexuals, abortions – and, god forbid, trans people. At first, Republicans hid their intentions by using dog whistles or coded language to speak to their base without promoting outrage.
That is until Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator, ditching code words to point-blank call a spade a spade: Mexicans are rapists, blacks come from shit-hole countries, democrats are communists, and women are nasty with blood coming out of their wherever. NY Times columnist Ezra Klein considers this disinhibition to be “the engine of Trump’s success.”2
The fact that Trump is reveling in the primal dregs of his unconscious is a sure indication that Freud’s concept of the irrational unconscious is back in vogue. Then, as now, regular folks are yearning for freedom, triggered by existing in a stifling, bureaucratic world with no agency. Of course, Trump eggs them on, yearning to be their pied piper.
Psychoanalyst Eric Reinhart has accused liberals of ignoring the crucial importance of irrational drives to fuel mass political movements – drives first identified by Freud: “Proponents of progressive ideals must instead take the reality of aggression, racism, and sadomasochism seriously as enduring political feelings, including in their own ranks, that require constructive political redress,”
Rather than surrendering to these primal feelings, as the Republicans have done, it’s up to Democrats and Independents to promote politics that restrain and redirect these urges. The first step is “to stop vainly demanding that people be more reasonable.” That’s like Nancy Reagan’s solution to drug addiction, which was to just say no.
The truth is people aren’t always reasonable. As Freud showed us – each of us has destructive, irrational desires swirling around our cranium, always primed to pounce.
In the ‘60s, we channeled our unconscious rage by breaking free of the Puritan ‘50s and speaking truth to power about military overreach, patriarchy, and rampant discrimination against all who were not white. Now, Trump is doing the opposite by speaking power to truth.
Trump is channeling our primal distress at being unmoored and over-regulated to mount a counter-revolution against the ’60s. ‘Make America Great Again’ is a code word for a return to ‘the good old days’ of slavish conformity, misogyny, and blatant discrimination aggressively enforced by rich, white men.
Personally, I prefer the Sixties. How about you?
xxx
1 https://s-usih.org/2016/11/trump-out-of-the-shadows-of-the-sixties-social-movements/
2 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/maga-trump-psychological-appeal/680722/
1 comment:
Something to think about. Maybe the response ws non-rational not irrational The work of a manager includes making decisions (or participating in their making), communicating them to others, and monitoring how they are carried out. A manager can make rational decisions, nonrational decisions and irrational decisions.
The term rational (or logical) is applied to decision making that is consciously analytic, the term nonrational to decision making that is intuitive and judgmental, and the term irrational to decision making and behavior that responds to the emotions or that deviates from action chosen “rationally.”
In rational decision making, goals and alternatives are made explicit, the consequences of pursuing different alternatives are calculated, and these consequences are evaluated in terms of how close they are to the goals.
In nonrational (judgmental) decision making, the response to the need for a decision is usually rapid, too rapid to allow for an orderly sequential analysis of the situation, and the decision maker cannot usually give a veridical account of either the process by which the decision was reached or the grounds for judging it correct. Nevertheless, decision makers may have great confidence in the correctness of their intuitive decisions and are likely to attribute their ability to make them rapidly to their experience.
This nonlogical processes of decision making aren’t magical in any sense. On the contrary, they lie in physiological conditions or factors, or in the physical and social environment, mostly impressed upon us unconsciously or without conscious effort on our part. They also consist of the mass of facts, patterns, concepts, techniques, abstractions, and generally what we call formal knowledge or beliefs, which are impressed upon our minds more or less by conscious effort and study.
Irrational means poorly adapted to goals. Rational and nonrational decisions are thought out with common sense, irrational are not. An irrational decision is a decision that goes against or counter to logic.
Summing-up: Rational decisions are carefully considered and negative outcomes are weighed. Nonrational decisions are based on intuitive judgment. Irrational decisions are made in haste and no outcomes are considered.
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