Yeah Socialism. What about Fascism?

It has been the go-to for generations of Republicans: the fear of socialism and communism. It started as soon as the name Marx was known and hasn’t stopped any time some good ole fears need to be stoked.

Besides the fact that most people who are scared of socialism don't know what it means (I always hear “lazy people getting free money”) and besides the fact that most people still have absolutely no idea why Marxism is bad, or how it’s related to socialism and/or communism (or isn’t) and are very unaware of how much of Marx’s idea we actually live in the West, let’s just pretend for a second that socialism is terrible.

Let’s pretend it would just take your money and give it to all the lazy drug addicts. Let’s pretend the Soviet Union was a Marxist country (it wasn’t) or that Venezuela’s economy collapsed because of socialism (it did not).

But let’s go with that.

The thing is, there is also another very real and dangerous possibility for America: Fascism. Now, of course, I understand, we could all play the same game with Fascism - we don't understand what it means and it hasn’t actually destroyed any countries.

So, let’s just go with Hitler and Nazi Germany. We all understand what that was and what it did.

Erich Fromm is one of my new favorite authors and thank you to Isabel Wilkerson the author of Caste for introducing me to him.

(Side note: go read Caste now. It is absolutely essential reading for every American. It’s beautifully written prose that will penetrate your heart and mind and open your eyes.)

Back to Fromm. He was a social psychologist (brilliant) who also happened to be a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany so he has lots of valuable insight into Nazi Germany and Racial America (this is a lot of the book Caste along with the Indian caste system).

Fromm wrote this, as quoted by Wilkerson in Caste (along with some Sakurai). Just read these passages a few times and honestly ask yourself how scary socialism is… compared with where we are much more likely headed.

“The essence of this overestimation of one’s own position and the hate for all who differ from it is narcissism,” wrote the psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm. “He is nothing,” Fromm wrote, “but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.”

A person deeply invested in his group’s dominance “has a euphoric ‘on-top-of-the-world’ feeling, while in reality he is in a state of self-inflation,” Fromm wrote. “This leads to severe distortion of his capacity to think and to judge….He and his are over-evaluated. Everything outside is under-evaluated.” And underneath may lie the fear that he cannot live up to the constructed ideal of his own perfection.

The social theorist Takamichi Sakurai wrote bluntly: “Group narcissism leads people to fascism. An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism.”

In both instances, Fromm found the working class to be among the most susceptible, harboring an “inflated image of itself as the most admirable group in the world, and of being superior to another racial group that is singled out as inferior,” he wrote. A person in this group “feels: ‘even though I am poor and uncultured I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world—I am white’; or ‘I am Aryan.’ ”

A group whipped into narcissistic fervor “is eager to have a leader with whom it can identify,” Fromm wrote. “The leader is then admired by the group which projects its narcissism onto him.”

The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own. “The greater the leader,” Fromm wrote, “the greater the follower….The narcissism of the leader who is convinced of his greatness, and who has no doubts, is precisely what attracts the narcissism of those who submit to him.”