The World-Wide Regression Toward Fascism and Infantilism
(How the Trumpers, the street hoods they hate, and the world at large are increasingly Fascistic and Infantile)
By
David Gottfried
Sometimes it appears as if the whole globe were behaving badly. More specifically, it appears as if fascists, with the personality structures of infants, are more pervasive and insistent than at any time since the end of World War Two.
Of course, generally we don’t think of fascists and infants as terms belonging in the same sentence. Fascists are brutish bastards, and infants are foolish, flippant and soft. But in this odd world in which we find ourselves, a mass of brutish little babies has been seizing power.
Their fascism is evident in their yen for authoritarianism, their romantic attraction to violence, their fierce tribalism, racism and anti Semitism and the way they dump on all things democratic. Their infantilism is evident in their delusional thought, their severe egocentrism, and their delusions of reference (Everybody is talking about me all the time), grandeur (I’m the greatest), and persecution (everybody is against me.)
Infantilism and Fascism Among the Trump Crowd
Their authoritarianism does not require much discussion. Their ethos: If a strongman does not like an election result, he simply disregards it and manufactures any lie that might serve to discredit the returns. Their love affair with violence is so pronounced that they would stain Heaven and the Garden of Eden a bloody, searing scarlet as evidenced by Trump’s remark that he can kill people at random on 5th Avenue and get away with it, that protestors at his rallies should be beaten, bruised and bloodied, and that the Nazi demonstrators at Charlottesville, who chanted “The Jews will not replace us,” were “good people.”
The latest example of their infantilism is Donald Trump Junior’s message revealing his Halloween costume: A hammer and a piece of underwear. This no doubt is his way of expressing good old fashioned German Schadenfreude about the pain inflicted on Paul Pelosi.
The piece of underwear demonstrates his infantilism. Paul Pelosi was in bed when attacked and he was reputedly wearing boxer shorts. (The only adult men who wear pajamas are, I suppose, overgrown infants like the imbecilic Trump boys). Little boys, of course, make much ado about nothing about going to the bathroom, urinating, defecating, and the nature of one’s underwear. The very act of wearing certain types of underwear gives them a sort of infantile, semi-homosexual thrill.
And Donald Junior, who I thought was an adult male, has all the sadism of a storm trooper and all of the immaturity of a seven-year-old boy, wearing pajamas with pictures of teddy bears, who finds it uproariously funny that a man is wearing boxer shorts to bed.
Of course, this infantilism is also evident in their propensity toward delusional and magical thinking. Since Marjorie Taylor Greene does not like Jews, her warped and lame brain has decided that Jews are using lasers beams, originating in outer space, to ignite fires in the Western part of the United States.
Their delusional thinking also uses the same faulty logic that schizophrenics use. The psychiatrist Silvano Arietti said that schizophrenics use paleologic, or old and warped logic, when they perceive the world.
According to Arietti, a schizophrenic will say that two things are the same if they have a common attribute. For example, a nurse in a psychiatric ward might have a cap on her head. Queen Elizabeth also has something on her head, a Tierra. The schizophrenic reasons as follows: Both my nurse and Queen Elizabeth have something on their head. Ergo, my nurse is really Queen Elizabeth.
Trump supporters evince the same illogical logic. In 2016, I heard a Trump supporter allege that since Hillary Clinton’s middle name was Rodham, and since Rodham begins with an R, and since a famous Jewish banking house belonged to the Rothschild family (a name beginning with the letter R), Hillary Clinton was part of conspiracy of Jewish bankers to harm gentiles.
Fascistic Infantilism Among Street Thugs
In the old days, crooks, while vicious, at least had a certain reasonableness. Just take a look at the first “Godfather” movie. Marlon Brando’s role may have been that of a criminal and an unqualified son of a bitch, but he was not a practitioner of gratuitous, showy sadism. He would rather get some good Cannolis or Lasagna. By contrast, the lunatic criminals of today remind me of an Old David Bowie song which alludes to dramatic, diva murderers with the lyric, “My head is filled with murders where only killers scream.”
Old fashioned crooks followed the counsel of deep throat and “followed the money.” Today’s crooks are fiends who follow their fabulous and fickle demented desires. Today, people are throwing people in front of speeding hundred-ton subway trains. Today, they are punching airline stewards who ask them to wear a mask.
They have but one god before them. Themselves. Anything that rains on their splendidly psychotic parade must be blown to bits. Like Donald Trump who could not accept the 2020 election, they cannot accept not making their high school sports team and they will shoot up their school.
In their self-deification, they exhibit the solipsism and autism (I am using autism as an adjective; I am not referring to the noun referring to a diagnostic condition) of infants and schizophrenics. In their steadfast belief that violence will be their means of redemption, they betray their Hitlerian Weltangschaung. (German for worldview. This is my favorite pseudo intellectual five dollar word. When properly uttered by a morose and misanthropic grad student in poli sci in Columbia, one will see images of strikes, smokestacks and Stalingrad.)
Fascism and Infantilism in the World at Large
Until modern times, people were resolutely tribal and paranoid. They lauded their own kind, and they saw the balance of humanity as a sea of vipers, virulent and vile, sadistic in victory and without any mercy.
This militaristic and paranoid notion was undermined, first by the enlightenment and the revolutions it bequeathed, the French and American revolutions, and later by Marxism.
Vladimir Lenin put it most succinctly in a letter to his landlady during World War One. French workers and German workers should not be killing one another. Rather, Frenchmen should rebel against their masters, and Germans should topple their war-loving lords and masters, and the workers of the world should live in peace freedom.
But there is no Soviet Union anymore. It has been replaced by its predecessor, a nationalistic, xenophobic state of Tzarist tyranny.
The entire world has been regressing toward the point of view more common in the days of the Pharaohs.
In India, a fiercely pro Hindu party has spat on the humanist aspirations of Mahatma Gandhi.
In Hungary, Victor Orban, a big favorite of the Trump crowd, seems intent on making us hurtle back in time to the “ancien regime,” when royal jewels gleamed with all the strength of the sun and human rights were relegated to the deepest depths of a monarch’s dungeon.
In England, the greatest inspiration for liberty-loving people the world over, the populace has forgotten their poetry and philosophy and prostrates itself before the grave of Elizabeth the Second like Catholic peasants groveling before the relics of the Saints.
In Poland, a nation which had pogroms in 1945, the government recently enacted a statute which criminalized the publication of unflattering comments about the Polish people and their predilection toward anti Semitism.
In Israel, religious parties want to criminalize intermarriage between Jews and Muslims. I am all for Jews marrying Jews, but I am not in favor of statutes that resemble the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany.
This worldwide regression toward primitive tribalism and hatred of the other is yet another example of the world wide death-drive toward fascism and infantilism. Sometimes I wonder if there might be some toxin in the environment which is warping our judgment and political predilections. In an earlier essay I suggested that certain problems, in the French diet, abetted France’s fall in 1940 and its formation of the collaborationist Vichy government. (Footnote 1).
The future of this planet is at stake. We must find-out why the world is going crazy. Of course, it is quite possible that we know the cause: The slimy vector that is Social Media and its ugly algorithms that have bisected this country into two armed camps no less at loggerheads than the North and South in 1860.
Footnote 1: https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/what-the-delusions-of-trumpers-and
I appreciated your post, as I just published an article on Substack on extremism, and Ken Burns recently released PBS series on America and the Holocaust. Your articles and social commentary are well-informed, and I value your thoughts and candor. I likewise feel that mass media and its algorithms are the significant underlying issues with the growth of extremism.
Tiara, David ! Tiara not tierra - on the Nurse Queen's head. Proof !