Demons and Demagogues

How did it get this bad, this quickly?

My new video essay is now up on Youtube. It would mean a lot to me if you would check it out and take a second to like, subscribe, and perhaps share it. I explore the new wave of techno-authoritarian Christianity: How it is being used to justify hierarchy, ecological destruction, and social injustice, rather than authentic awakening and spiritual initiation. I propose analytic idealism as a path forward, resolving the dichotomy between scientific materialism and religious faith, and potentially restoring ethical coherence.

I’m writing this today as a kind of journal entry, to allow various ideas to flow freely, to meld together contradictory thought streams.

I want to reflect on the return of the authoritarian personality in the U.S.: How did this happen? How did this cult-like psychological complex take over so many and burst into public prominence so quickly? How could such a regression happen only a few generations after it seemed our society had changed for the better, settling into progressivism, accepting difference and celebrating multiculturalism, no longer demonizing the “other?” We now know the new multiculturalism was, for many, a thin veneer over the old racism and hatred.

The spread of the authoritarian or Fascist mindset is something like a disease, a virus or cancer that takes over the psychology of a people or a nation. Once it has passed a tipping point, the whole society crosses over into the abyss. Is there any way to reverse this virus or cancer, now that it has already spread so far and wide, supported by massive wealth, massive media, and religious fanaticism? The historical precedents are not good.

In retrospect, Barack Obama’s Presidency was like a psychic strike, a knife plunging into the unconscious wound of White America. Obama awakened the country’s racist, genocidal legacy. The barely suppressed “bad parts” (in Internal Family Systems) of our collective Psyche, the demonic forces — racism, cruelty, intolerance, and so on — were waiting for their chance to erupt back into public life.

Trump gave himself over to those unconscious forces. He made himself a vehicle for them. As an avatar, Trump gave permission for the long-suppressed bigotry, hatred, frustration and rage to appear, again, in the public square. This virus passed on to other powerful people who wanted the same freedom to be cruel, misogynist, and racist in public, such as Elon Musk, a beneficiary of South African apartheid, and the army of Right Wing influencers he supports on X.

We are now learning Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” from the wrong side, when it seems too late to hold its contradictions. We made the fatal mistake of going too far in tolerating the intolerant. Now they have taken over our politics, economics, and media sphere. They are destroying a familiar world — at the very least, a world where we all accepted empirical evidence and believed in a baseline of empathy — we thought we shared.

We have learned that our shared world was not built on solid, unshakable foundations. It was wobbly. It was corrupt, hypocritical. We had a level of personal freedom and freedom of speech in the U.S., but we denied it for others. We never had anything like a true democracy here. We had a duopoly where both sides protected privilege, wealth, and the empire. All the masks have been stripped away now. And many were susceptible to the allure of the irrational and the demagogue.

Trump’s re-election is a historical tragedy of great magnitude. But Obama’s presidency was, also, a tragic failure that set us on this inevitable path toward ruin. In fact, the fifty-year capitulation of the liberal, Democratic establishment to corporate and Wall Street money, the Israeli lobby, and the military-industrial complex, is the historic catastrophe that has now unleashed this deeper catastrophe: Something we may not recover from during our lifetimes, if we manage to survive at all.

To a certain extent, I feel sorry for many people in the technology world as well as influencers and “intellectuals,” the comedians with large podcasts, and so on, who pandered to the Right and then supported Trump, either tacitly or openly.