At this point, with fewer than three weeks until Election Day, warning the American people that the election is an existential matter for the future of their democracy and freedom is the equivalent of telling a person who has suffered for years with a chronic illness that they may be unwell. Such words are repetitive and have long lost the impact of the initial diagnosis. Instead, the Kamala Harris campaign and news media should be explicit and direct about the pain, suffering and horror that a second Trump regime will inflict on the American people.

The corrupt right-wing justices on the Supreme Court have decided that Donald Trump cannot be held responsible for acts in office under the law. The former president has vowed to be a "dictator" on "day one" regarding deregulation.

He has promised to get revenge on his and the MAGA movement’s so-called enemies. Trump has also repeatedly threatened his “enemies” (which means anyone who dares to oppose him) with prison and death. During a Sunday interview, Trump told Fox Business News that he would use the military to crush “the leftists” and the “enemies within” the country (again, which means anyone who opposes Trump or that he does not like). Such an agenda would apply well beyond any hypothetical protests against Trump on Election Day if he were to somehow defeat Harris. Violence is a defining feature of dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes.

During a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg News at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump refused to commit to supporting or participating in a peaceful transition of power following the 2024 election. Trump also told Bloomberg News that the Jan.6 attack on the Capitol by his MAGA followers “was love and peace.”

Trump will also devastate the American economy through mass deportations of millions of “illegal aliens.” Trump has signaled that other “enemies” would likely be stripped of their citizenship rights as Americans and deported as well. In all, Trump wants to “purify” the “blood” of the nation by purging it of all “undesirables” – as defined by his corrupt personal standards and fascist political vision.

Related

Trump has many millions of followers. Public opinion and other research have shown that Trump and his propagandists have conditioned the MAGA people and other neofascists for violence against Democrats, liberals, non-white people and the other “enemies” of “real America.” CNN recently traveled to Brantley County, Georgia, which is a bastion of Trumpism. One man, who identifies as an independent voter, told CNN that his Trump-loving neighbors "[W]ould kill for him, I think.” Such a warning is much more than one Georgia man’s experience, it embodies the extreme national anxiety and the general mood of the Age of Trump and acutely so in the final weeks before Election Day.

Stephen Ducat is an author, political psychologist, psychoanalyst and former psychology professor in the School of Humanities at New College of California. His new book is “Hatreds We Love: The Psychology of Political Tribalism in Post-Truth America.” In this conversation, Ducat warns that racial fascists and authoritarians such as Donald Trump and the MAGA movement possess a deep desire to “purify” society by eliminating the Other through violence and other destructive means. He also connects Trump and the MAGA movement’s yearning for and compulsion to political and other forms of violence to white identity politics and hostile sexism and misogyny. At the end of this conversation, Ducat reflects on whether it is possible to stop the MAGA movement and American neofascism given their deep roots in the country’s history and the much larger societal problems and crises that spawned such a destructive and antihuman political vision.

This is the second part of a two-part conversation.

Your new book is titled, “Hatreds We Love.” Please elaborate on and contextual that title.

Hating outsiders can make it easier to love insiders. The putative “cuddle hormone,” oxytocin, has been found to not only facilitate group bonding but also, as a result, make killing those in enemy groups less troubling.

"He and his base live in a binary psychological world, in which all that is dirty and clean, bad and good, reviled and revered, criminal and virtuous, feminine and masculine, and non-white and white must be kept apart lest the former in these binaries contaminate the latter."

Those in out-groups can function like a psychological toilet. We attribute what we don’t want to see in ourselves to “them.” “They” come to embody pure evil, absolute filth and malicious intent. That helps us to see ourselves as containing unalloyed goodness, purity and virtue.

Killing off the complex humanity of our opponents in our minds makes it easier to kill them literally in the world. A glance at wartime propaganda posters from all nations makes that quite evident. Sam Keen gathered them in his 1991 book “Faces of the Enemy.” Warring nations depicted their opponents as vermin, insects, pathogens, monsters and predatory animals through........

© Salon