God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich believed that fascism is the result of bad parenting.
Parental abuse, neglect and repression combine, Reich said, to produce fascists, deeply warped individuals who are "apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, and good and adjusted, in the authoritarian sense."
Fascists are, in addition, incapable of finding love and sexual satisfaction. Today we call such frustrated people incels.
Donald Trump and his followers are proof of Reich's beliefs.
Sadly, there's little, if anything, we can do to change the minds of Trump's followers. Their parents shaped them years ago to fall into line behind authoritarians. They may deserve pity; but not tolerance. They're helpless, loveless, diabolical, and—for the most part—beyond our reach. Our best course it to cede them that bleak corner of the playground where the civilized rest of us never wish to tread. Alaska comes to mind.
"The more helpless the 'mass-individual' has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the Führer," Reich said.
"The reactionary lower middle-class man perceives himself in the Führer, in the authoritarian state. On the basis of this identification he feels himself to be a defender of the 'national heritage,' of the 'nation,' which does not prevent him, likewise on the basis of this identification, from simultaneously despising 'the masses' and confronting them as an individual.
"The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant Führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance."
God help us, and grant us the serenity to accept what we cannot change.
