Letting Rip and Letting Go

A Brief Note on Psychological Reactions to Donald Trump

For those of us who do not get emotionally involved in politics (in this respect I am ‘normal’ as far as the general population is concerned), the outpouring of hysteria and mental pain coming from the losing side in the US Presidential Election is not a little embarrassing. Compassion suggests that the losers be cut some slack - that they should be permitted to work through something in which they had invested their very selves - but the rest of us have to retain our grip and continue to analyse the situation with more discipline, based on the facts. We must hope that (eventually) the depressed and anxious will be able to face those facts and then decide on a course of action that results in the outcome they wish for. The point of politics should be to effect change (for example, stopping children being eviscerated in Gaza or improving living conditions for working people) and not to express oneself emotionally and narcissistically as if that in itself could change anything. Politics should not be psychotherapy.

Perhaps one of the most embarrasing claims is that Donald Trump is a ‘fascist’ which, like Elon Musk’s equally idiotic claim that Harris was a ‘communist’, simply indicates that whoever says such a thing is ignorant of what a term actually means. They are replacing thought, once again, with primitive emotion - fine if you want to mobilise poorly educated people to vote one way or another but it is a total waste of time and a mere expression of a failed imagination once the vote has taken place. Get over it!

If you watch Trump's victory speech for the first ten minutes (before he does one of his strange discursive anecdotal shaggy dog stories about Musk’s rocket), there is no sign of 'fascism' but rather a fundamental change of tone from liberal politics. Trump's team presented as a very human crew with much talk of family and all clearly getting along in a relaxed way whereas the Harris camp was positioned as humans playing roles within a pre-existing machine that was bigger than her. His machine reflected him. She was a reflection of her machine.

Once you strip out the special interests and issues which dictate votes for most if not all people, this difference becomes significant ... the vote on Tuesday was a partial revolt against being ruled by political machinery rather than by recognisable 'human beings' (with all their flaws) perhaps in anticipation of actual rule by machines that will be cognitively superior to any human role-centred political machinery. We will deal with this further below.

This is not only not 'fascism' but potentially it is a liberation, allowing people to be who they are rather than be defined by the expectations and demands of ideology, in this case 'progressive' ideology but equally any other form of ideology, or by identities that are mere attributes dictated by 'activists'. Tucker Carlson’s contribution at the Madison Square Gardens Rally gave a strong and persuasive message about this perceived liberatory aspect of MAGA populism.

Uncomfortable Progressives

The discomfit of progressives here is two-fold. First, they have ideologically lived by the creed that it is they that are liberatory and that the Right is to be associated with control and conformity. Historically there is a lot of truth in this - American liberals and global progressives have played an important role (though they are not the only cause of change) in giving women more equality of choice, ending discrimination against minorities, halting petty oppressions against the ‘different’ and (very much less successfully) redistributing economic resources.

But somewhere along the line this liberatory achievement became sclerotic. What should have been an equalisation directed at the whole person became a coalition of activist interests seeking not general equality but cultural and economic advantage for themselves as governors of identity groups. The liberators, along classic master/slave dialectical lines, became cultural tyrants over their former ‘oppressors’, that is, ordinary people who were positioned as malicious and ‘deplorable’ or ‘garbage’ rather than what they actually had been - a bit ignorant and equally trapped by their circumstances - but were as likely not to be now.

Second, American liberals and, indeed, progressives globally, tend to treat ideology as a comfort blanket against independent thought which means a fearful group-think sets in where conformity becomes prized. A progressive coalition demands that each element in it accepts the demands of every other element to create a rainbow of policy demands that no one can question and remain within the coalition.

If you are Green you have to not question LGBTQ+ policies and if you support these you must be performatively radical feminist and anti-racist. This is despite the fact that some of those demands are deeply alienating to people who feel their identity lies not in some attribute (like gender or sexual orientation or physical aspect like skin colour or brain structure) but in a ‘wholeness’ as Americans or British or working class connected to a community of others like themselves.

Populism and the Embarrassing Problem of General Intelligence

Populism is not ideological in quite that progressive way: it is revolt against a perceived de-humanisation of the ordinary by the educated. It requires no conformity except as revolt. It also lends itself to charismatic leadership which is not necessarily fascist but which progressives necessarily interpret as fascist because it is not cognitively rational (within their pre-set framework of assumptions about the world or 'values') as they see it.  Populism ‘includes’ the different. It just does not allow them to dominate cultural discourse.

Progressivism is unlikely to recover ground until it can comprehend this point - that technological innovation has been liberating people without power and even of perceived lower intellect to assert their desire for respect through individuals that they can relate to as people rather than as elective functionaries of a system.  That actually means 'democracy' rather than intellectual oligarchy.

The Left often cannot cope with the reality of cognitive difference but general intelligence is an issue here and we have to face it. The first point to make is that general intelligence is not all that intelligence is in society. Theorists reasonably suggest at least eight types of intelligence which appear differentially across the species.

Functioning general intelligence is far from always the most important in any human society and certainly not the most important in decent human relations. Whether the theory of multiple intelligences is scientifically true or not, we all observe something like this all the time … an evening watching Strictly Come Dancing is an observation of bodily intelligence. I am personally at ‘idiot’ level in that regard.

Nevertheless some form of general intelligence is linked to roles and function in society. This may be an indictment of how society has become organised or it could mean that this is just how it is under any advanced system. This applied to the Soviet Union as much as to our society so socialism does not remove the necessity for the right person in the right job.

The Political Implications of General Intelligence Today

The average measure of such general intelligence is 100. Democrats and liberals are a bit up themselves here. They over-privilege the ‘above 100’ culturally because they are the ones who tend to be the managers and administrators of society. They often think that they are much more worthy than they are simply because of this. This group also includes a huge class of policy wonks and intellectuals who are also rarely as clever as they think they are.

This is where it gets interesting because the virtue of democracy is that it does not privilege anyone. Much to the consternation of many managerialist liberals and technocrats, equal worth is given to every individual (as it is by Christianity). Managerialists and technocrats have got used to atomising, manipulating and eventually despising the ‘below 100’ communities despite all the latter’s other equally productive and personal attributes.

Now, the latter have discovered an ideology (populism) that respects them for who they are and gives them a voice. Of course, the liberal response is that they are being manipulated but that is merely part of a patronising definition of the ‘other half’ (we oversimplify, of course) as implicitly inferior.

Just as there is a point of dysfunctionality at the lowest level of general intelligence (these are the people who any decent society will care and even love for who they are despite their cognitive difficulties), there is a point of super-functionality at a level above the managerialists, technocrats and policy wonks.

What is most intriguing about the current election is the number of very high functioning individuals (Musk is merely the tip of the iceberg) who have finally got fed up with the self-evident incompetence and lack of imagination of the liberal managerialist class and taken matters into their own hands by striking what is a highly respectful alliance with the neglected less educated half of the population whose worth morally is recognised as no less than theirs.

Populism and the Ideology of Worth

Functional social value as something separate from equal moral and political worth is something that no liberal dare to discuss because it is, well, embarrassing. First, it obligates the liberal to recognise a difference they cannot recognise and remain ideologically united - that is, that functionality as more important than identity in the practical running of society. Second, it would force them to recognise that they have developed a master-slave relationship to a wider population that they patronise and that would work against their claim to be liberatory. Third, they find it difficult to recognise that they are not the apex of the human species but merely another stepping stone to its cognitive apex … which is going to bring us in a moment to the problem of artificial intelligence.

J. D. Vance is incredibly important here symbolically. He represents a profound truth that the liberal elite refuses to recognise - that actual high functionality is not a matter of connections and educational conformity (although education is vitally important in making best social use of talent: ultimately Vance is where he is because of it) but of brain structure, opportunity and adaptive training.

There is a huge waste of high functionality lying deep within the working class which is discouraged, humiliated and ignored in order to maintain the privileges of the educated graduate class and to enforce ideological conformity. This includes the constraining rules of ‘human resources’, ‘high culture’ and ‘teacher training’.

There are two ways of dealing with this problem of untapped working class and underprivileged talent. Neither is a continuation of the present system. To be fair, progressivism served African-American and minority talent well, albeit only by sucking this talent into its own confomity. Similarly, Britain saw a brief period of nurturing high functioning working class talent through the educational system before ideology took over and then expanded to the point where all should have prizes. The old system was not bad in itself, it just became self-regarding and sclerotic with the rise of neo-liberalism and the ‘third way’.

The first way is the libertarian classless entrepreneurial approach of Vance and Musk which harks back to the pioneer days of America … the disadvantage of this is that only a few can break out even under this system. It deludes itself about actual opportunity. It is extremely hard to break out in closed middle class societies like that of Britain which kills off entrepeneurialism at the level of the local coffee shop if someone is not ‘connected’.

The second way is a socialism that has fully disconnected from middle class elite ideology. This is extremely difficult to do if only because early generations who are drawn out of the working class tend to pull the ladder up after themselves from self interest, recreating the very class conditions that triggered any original ‘revolutionary’ change. We saw this emerge under Thatcherism and something similar emerged under Brezhnev’s sclerotic rule in the Soviet Union.

And it is true that society will always need a managerial, professional and administrative class of some kind but perhaps not the narcissistic and rule-bound (vaguely psychopathic) one we seem to have now. The point here is not that there is an easy answer to the problem but that American populism has at least disrupted the system sufficiently to allow questions to be posed.

In particular, how can the managerial and ‘intellectual’ classes be made to appreciate that they are not quite as clever as they think they are, how can untapped constructively disruptive capacity be drawn out of the working clases without the beneficiaries becoming like the current middle class and how can those who recognise the problem as high functioning ‘manipulators’ and can mobilise the mass be made to realise that they serve the whole and not themselves. The obvious risk is that new elites having learned to manipulate the mass become what liberals accuse them of being.

All of this is asking a lot of human nature but it might explain why some of us retain a commitment to some form of socialism but find populism more attractive than the deadly conformity and dysfunctionality of centrism and progressivism. Certainly, the main losers in this election are the mainstream media and the intellectual class which may be no bad thing if only because they are the mouthpeces for the failed order that I have described. The average mainstream journalist epitomises the second rate cognition of the ‘above 100s’.

Populism and Artificial Intelligence

The signal being sent by Trump whether he intends it or not is that the technocratic and managerial classes need to re-humanise themselves just at the point where machines are ready to take over from the defeated class. In other words the notional advantage of the ‘above 100’ is about to be wiped out by the emergence of new cognitive tools developed by very high functioning humans. These will remove their fundamental claim to higher status and the ‘right to rule’ over the other half of humanity.

This is a moment of huge danger for Western society because this class has just lost control of the State machinery that would preserve their ability to resist change for at least four years in the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. No wonder they are getting emotional. By the end of the next four years, we may have an angry proletarianised class of former middle class functionaries displaced by artificial intelligence looking for vengeance. History has shown us that there is very little more dangerous to ordinary people’s livelihoods and lives than the excitable deracinated functionless intellectual.

This is why Musk is important because he sits at the apex of the new structure where his autistic 'all-too-human" genius meets the new machine age and from where his avowed intent is to ensure human control of advanced AI. This has nothing to do with his money and everything to do with his ideology. He has proposed maximal human freedom as a defence mechanism where the entire species provides data for cognition but this will cut no ice with any future deracinated ‘bourgeoisie’ - the irony of liberal claims of fascism against Trump is that it is their own class whose ultimate revenge might be cast in just those terms out of desperation.

Having destroyed 'patriarchy" (such as it was and to the benefit of all), we seem to have seen a revolt against the prospect of a regulatory 'matriarchy" that wants to preserve an old order that totters along as a regulatory machine but where the machine no longer works for the people. It will be interesting to see if the Democrats can persuade voters in 2028 that a re-built and well-oiled ‘above 100’ machine will work for those who shifted to populism this year.

In the meantime, Trump has the Presidency, Congress and (with caveats) Supreme Court but this has only happened because the wisdom of crowds decided on change within existing constitutional frameworks despite massive and often unhinged lawfare, media attacks and propaganda. If this has happened for good reason from an American perspective, lessons need to be learned elsewhere but, however we look at it, populism is not fascism. It is a democratic revolt against failed oligarchies.