On the Subject of Far-Right-Wing Politics

Introduction

The 2016 US election cycle provides compelling evidence – if any were needed – for the utility of examining the far-right through a psychoanalytic understanding of political subjectivity. Both the popular press and fellow Republicans have commented on the narcissistic personality of the unexpected far-right GOP nominee, Donald Trump (Rove, 2016; Graves, 2016; Alford, 2015; Rosenstein, 2016). Yet Trump would not be the first or only leader of a far-right moment to be understood in such terms: Silvio Berlusconi, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Narendra Modi, to name a few, all have been observed to share that quality (Alford, 2015; Ahmad, 2016; Ghosh, 2012; Bruni, 2015). Nevertheless, the descriptions of journalists and pundits do not account fully for the popularity of such leaders, whose supporters do not seem dissuaded by such characterizations, or indeed for the specific historical and political-economic conditions of the emergence of such figures.

The issue of political identification is of course not a new one. Particularly in the neoliberal period, the shift of working and lower-middle-class voters towards the right has posed a dilemma for observers of politics. The question of how to explain the ‘Reagan Democrat’ or the ‘Thatcher factor’, i.e. those citizens who seemed to conspicuously vote against their economic interests, was posed by such works as What’s the Matter with Kansas? (Frank, 2004). Likewise, concerns with ‘charismatic leadership’ have long characterized the neoliberal period, which saw a decline in the significance of party platforms in favor of the direct appeal of individual politicians (Short, 2012; Mair, 2000). Given that conservative parties engaged successfully for several decades to some extent or another with a class politics grounded in such neoliberal ‘culture wars’, the question becomes not how to explain strategically-populist-conservative parties per se, but why they would experience a more pronounced challenge from the far-right at this particular conjuncture.

Historical-Material and Psychoanalytic Approaches to the Far-Right

To respond meaningfully to this concern, one needs an account of political subjectivity in broader historical and material perspective. As Davidson and Saull discuss in this issue, the relationship between neoliberal social relations and the far-right is particularly interesting in its (re-)articulation of right-wing politics. More explicitly, as Saull argues elsewhere: ‘The structural impact, and thus analytical (and political) significance of capitalism, as determining of the possibilities for the politics of the far right, comes from the fundamental ways in which political subjectivities are framed and conditioned by the dislocations associated with capital’ (Saull, 2016: 137, emphasis added). Such discussions draw on a Marxian tradition of reading the historical effectivity of fascism and the far-right as a question of the way in which economic crisis is articulated to a broader crisis of legitimacy of the dominant order through specific class logics and identifications (Gramsci, 1971; Poulantzas, 1974; Rosenberg, 2012). This tradition has very usefully examined the material bases for the contradictory elements of far-right ideologies.

Poulantzas argued the internally ambivalent ideological positions of the petit bourgeoisie reflected its ‘materially’ ambivalent position between the bourgeoisie and the working class: it was both resentful of its economic marginalization at the hands of the affluent and disdainful of the working classes, which it feared becoming. This explained the petite bourgeoisie’s position with regard to state and economy during times of economic crisis: at once anti-establishment and anti-state while simultaneously in favor of a strong executive and militant/militarized nationalism, it subscribes to a kind of ‘status quo anti-capitalism’, a rhetoric that both rejects (all or some forms of) capitalism but remains devoted to capitalist regimes of property relations (Poulantzas, 1974). Concerned that an emphasis on the petite bourgeoisie obscured the class antagonisms behind the emergence of fascism, Arthur Rosenberg argued that bourgeois politics were characterized by a division between liberal and illiberal projects that had long relied upon the cooptation of other classes for their realization; even before the rise of fascism, many members of the working class supported conservative governments, and imperialist interests often mobilized nationalist rhetoric that included valorization of the poor (Rosenberg, 2012: 147–9). Common to these historical materialist analyses, which may differ with regard to their readings of the specific class composition of fascist movements, is the implicit significance of questions of psychological identification in their assessments of the class dynamics.

Unfortunately, though there is a tradition of examining the far-right in historical material and psychoanalytic context, the holistic theorization of these elements has not, a few possible exceptions notwithstanding, continued to be developed per se since the early interventions in this register in the post-Second World War period. Both the social relations of capitalism and psychoanalytic theory have evolved in separate literatures, while the problematic of the far-right had also until recently been largely marginalized as an object of research. Poulantzas, for example, does make limited reference to Willem Reich, whose Mass Psychology of Fascism emphasized the significance of the authoritarian personality, drawn from a ‘classical’ Freudian reading of the subject of biological drives (though, contra Freud’s ‘culturalist’ account of the role of the Oedipal complex in social relations, Reich argues the control of sexuality is originally rooted in the economic interests of marriage and inheritance; Reich, 1946: 94). In this account, the fascist emphasis on the patriarchal family served to regulate sexuality in a repressive form and to produce psychological structures of identification with authoritarian logics; Reich’s project thus involved demystifying logics of libidinal repression at work in Nazi intellectual production and propaganda. Later analysts, most notably Erich Fromm, would examine the relationship between fascism and the authoritarian personality through a psychoanalytic conception of the subject not grounded in biological drives but in inter-relational needs and desires (Fromm, 2014 [1941]: 288). In his reading, the central feature of the authoritarian personality is not sexual repression but sado-masochistic defenses against feelings of isolation and powerlessness. Fromm’s work is associated with a broader move in psycho-analytic circles in the mid-20th century that decentered sexual repression as the central source of psychopathology and that in the late 20th century involved a growing concern with the narcissistic personality.

In this period, the question of psychoanalysis was also taken up in philosophy (Marcuse, 1964; Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002), though in ways that often self-consciously sought to abstract it from clinical practice, much to Fromm’s chagrin (Fromm, 2014 [1970]). Ernesto Laclau would make the same observations of that tradition’s subsequent iteration in the work of Slavoj Žižek and the Slovenian school’s engagement with Lacan (Žižek, 1989: preface, x). Yet Fromm also noted the tension within clinical psychoanalysis between differing conceptions of its purpose – both immanent to Freud’s work – involving, on the one hand, a conservative interpretation focused on assisting individuals in adapting to their social context, or, on the other, an emphasis on the radical implications of its insights in critiquing the nature of society: its norms, morality, its overall ‘healthiness’ with respect to human self-realization (Fromm, 2014 [1970]). As Fromm anticipated, and Layton and others would confirm, in many ways psychoanalysis as clinical practice sided with the former and equally abstracted itself from politics and society (Layton et al., 2006).

Interest in what appeared to be a general societal shift towards narcissism as the socially dominant character structure emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Lasch, 1991 [1979]; Layton and Shapiro, 1986; Kernberg, 1985; Dangler and Worrell, 2009; Kovel, 1976). ¹ Layton has argued in this broad tradition that the neoliberal period produces narcissism as a ‘socially mandated’ character structure, as a result of precarious socio-economic conditions that provoke fear and insecurity while simultaneously stigmatizing such affective experiences as shameful (Layton, 2009: 109). The neoliberal historical period is read here in terms of a specific ‘ethico-political’ ideology manifest in material patterns of accumulation and social reproduction (Harvey, 2005; Gill, 1995). Ideologically, neoliberalism involves an explicit valorization of independence – understood as radical autonomy, independence from the state and from the ‘false consciousness’ of the idea of ‘society’ (cf. Thatcher, 1987) – captured in the reification of liberty as a fundamental value, and a stigmatization of dependency. Such conditions inhibit trust as a social characteristic and breed high levels of anxiety about ‘uselessness’ (Layton, 2010: 310; Sennett, 2006).

As discussed below, attention to the narcissistic subject as a ‘socially mandated’ character structure is consistent with specific social relations of late capitalism. Further, there is much to suggest that it is to a large extent compatible with Lacan’s oeuvre, which emphasizes the not-unrelated perverse character structure. The common terrain of these paradigms involves a shift from previous readings of the authoritarian personality of the far-right towards a conception of the subject vulnerable to ‘primary process’ functioning and whose defenses are characterized more by disavowal than sexual repression. These qualities, furthermore, help explain the psychodynamics of the far-right in historical context, as the final section of the paper explores. ²

The Narcissistic/Perverse Subject of Late Capitalism

Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism may be the most widely popularized text to capture the concern with the increasing historical and sociological significance of the narcissistic personality; a text that argued a more ‘permissive’ society does not necessarily lead to psychological liberation, as critics of the repressed logics behind the authoritarian personality might suggest. Rather, the absence of secure authority structures is distressing and produces narcissistic subjects, who – to defend psychologically against the anxiety and anger provoked by such environmental failures – develop compensatory internal authority structures that may be even more punitive than those of the authoritarian patriarch (Lasch, 1991 [1979]: 11–12). Lasch’s observations were grounded in the long-dominant ‘ego-psychology’ frame that, despite claims to a socialist perspective, suffered from an inability to historicize bourgeois family structures and a related patriarchal bias (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982: 38–9). Feminists such as Layton, by contrast, have approached the question of narcissism and neoliberal late-capitalism through a framework that draws on Winnicott’s object-relations and Kohut’s self-psychology, while accepting many of Lasch’s descriptive elements of the broad societal implications of such a shift (cf. Layton and Shapiro, 1986: 19). Žižek, for his part, has offered an analogous re-reading of Lasch’s ego-psychology approach through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, re-casting the ego-psychology concern with a ‘weak ego’ unable to tolerate anxiety in terms of the movement of the subject into the register of the ‘symbolic’, i.e. its correspondence to Lacan’s perverse character structure (Žižek, 2000 [1986]).

Kohut’s narcissistic and Lacan’s perverse character structures both struggle with developing an autonomous self/subjectivity in the face of the absence of clear early childhood parental structures; against this absence each develops specific internal psychological structures to compensate. Both Lacan and Kohut found fault with ego-psychology’s conception of the ego, its understanding of ‘resistance’ and for ‘proscriptive’ practices that imposed the analyst’s conceptions of reality onto the patient’s (Malin, 2011: 58; Hamburg, 1991: 363). Yet they are often read as mutually exclusive because of their apparently diametrically opposed conceptions of the subject. Kohut characterized the mirror stage as beginning with a sense of wholeness; the impulse of human subjectivity generally as well as the goal of analysis is to restore that whole self. For Lacan, the mirror stage involves an experience of anxious fragmentation; the Lacanian subject is always ‘split’ around the limitations of what can be expressed in language, and the goal of Lacanian analysis is coming to terms with one’s ‘lack’. ³ However, as ‘mirror images’, some clinicians have questioned whether these two approaches may after all be complementary in some senses precisely because of the mutually exclusive terrain they appear to specify (Malin, 2011; Hamburg, 1991: 357–8).

The arguments for the societal shift towards the dominance of narcissistic character structures are supported by Marxian feminist analyses of the nature of neoliberal patterns of social reproduction in the commodification and class polarization of household activities (Bakker, 2003; Federici, 2012). The changing material conditions of social reproduction reconfigure the context in which children are raised and the nature and quality of the relationships they have with caregivers. To be clear, however, the dissolving of traditional forms of authority in favor of market discipline, while alienating, is a double-edged process that should not provoke a naïve romanticization of previous social patterns (Fraser, 2009). Rather, from the perspective of a historically-materially and psychoanalytically informed framework, the concern is with the (re)articulation of certain patterns of authority in new circumstances and potentially new logics. It is also worth observing that the neoliberal period did not just restructure social reproduction at the level of the household: neoliberal financialization subsumed the subaltern classes into its logics of accumulation in new ways, especially by incorporating its assets – mortgages, pensions, etc. – into speculative logics (McNally, 2009). This was achieved through ideological justifications that sought the consent and ‘identification’, even, of those classes with its logics of accumulation (Soederberg, 2014: inter alia, 60–64). The nature of class identification in the neoliberal period thus also follows a distinct logic, associated with the specific contours of ‘democratic’ neoliberal financialized accumulation.

Young-Bruehl observed (echoing Fromm’s and others’ concerns about the attenuation of clinical insights in the appropriation of psychoanalytic principles), the field’s post-Second World War emphasis on character structure, particularly when in conversation with political considerations, came at the expense of marginalizing other dimensions of the psychoanalytic subject (Young-Bruehl, 2011). Her reading of character structure and the ‘supplement’ she suggests in considering affection, love, and attachment through the ‘ego instincts’ nevertheless remain ‘traditionally’ Freudian (Layton, 2013). While the discussion below does not fully escape the problem Young-Bruehl raises, the frameworks discussed below implicitly offer a different solution, grounded in the nature of the narcissistic character structure and its propensity for ‘primary process functioning’.

The Contemporary Far-Right in Historical-Material and Psychoanalytic Perspective

The narcissistic/perverse subject of late capitalism offers a number of tools for understanding the far-right in historical-material and psychoanalytic perspective. This approach implicitly involves an understanding of both character structure and its related defenses: the shift towards primary process functioning, grandiosity and disavowal. Within this character structure, following Kohut, there is a distinction between the ‘formal’ dimension of rage associated with the response to a loss of control and the defenses associated with a specific fear or anxiety (Kohut, 2011: 648). ⁵ This could be framed in terms of a heuristic distinction between the ‘imaginary’ logics of rage and aggressivity and the ‘symbolic’ nature of perversity and sado-masochism. These two dimensions of the narcissistic/perverse character structure can shed light on the paradox of how the ‘molecular’ shift towards the right in the neoliberal period nevertheless appeared to provoke a backlash from the far-right.

The increased political effectivity of the far-right in times of economic crisis helps to illuminate the ways in which its politics are articulated to a crisis of legitimacy, though that sense of crisis exists for the far-right in general, immanent to its rhetoric and aesthetics. Far-right movements are both anti-state/anti-establishment and extremely militant in their nationalism. They are anti-elitist but against any actual systemic alternatives. In other words, to connect historical materialist to psychoanalytic approaches, the far-right is at once highly critical of and highly invested in the dominant order, a posture that can be read as a defense against perceptions of exclusion and marginalization deployed in the face of a deep longing for belonging. Its politics could be characterized as a rage-filled reaction to the failings of the status quo that nevertheless involves protecting the fantasy behind that social order through disavowal.

As historical materialist analyses suggest, fundamental to the politics of the far-right is the scapegoating and persecution of ‘foreign’ or corrupted social groups who are held responsible for undermining an otherwise natural, national grandiosity. Put another way, the far-right sustains the fantasy of a stable, holistic community in which the ‘true’ members are always provided for by blaming an other for any failures to realize that ideal. On this level, the crisis-prone nature of capitalist accumulation and the alienated nature of market social relations are denied. Beneath this, however, there is the deeper psychological attachment to the social order: one that for the narcissistic character structure involves a highly vulnerable subject who experiences society through a profound fear of exclusion and a sense of powerlessness which is defended against through rage against the other and ‘primary’ identifications with grandiose, powerful figures. Thus there is another order of denial having to do with the subject’s sense of vulnerability and marginalization with respect to the economic and the political. (It should perhaps be clarified that the argument here is not that all narcissistic/perverse character structures should be read as belonging to the far-right: rather, the politics of the far-right, marked by personal and nationalistic expressions of grandiosity, sado-masochistic hierarchies, and rage/aggressivity can be understood through the narcissistic/perverse subject. ⁶ The factors that determine who identifies with the far-right are related to how the subject experiences narcissistic injury and understands him/herself: a site of where the psychological is articulated to the social.)

Neoliberal social relations function as a ‘war of position’ (in Gramsci’s parlance) in (re)constructing the narcissistic subject. In a material sense, they erode the conditions for social reproduction. Ideologically (both discursively and performatively), neoliberalism constructs dependency as a source of shame. In so doing, it also intensifies the sado-masochistic dimension of social hierarchies on which narcissistic character structures rely to sustain their fragile/grandiose sense of self. Neoliberalism is ambivalent vis-à-vis race and gender (to a degree that cannot be fully explored here): despite claims of transcending historical patterns of racism and sexism immanent to its appeal to market logics, the neoliberal state was in fact explicitly reconstructed by appealing to racialized and gendered tropes that constructed dependency on the state as shameful through the stigmatizing of welfare recipients, above all single mothers of color (Schram et al., 2003; Žižek, 1997).

The role of charismatic leadership in addressing political-economic crises has been a long-standing object of historical materialist theorizing and research, from Marx’s 18th Brumaire through Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (Marx, 1852; Gramsci, 1971). Observers of electoral politics would recognize, in fact, an increasing emphasis on charismatic leadership in the neoliberal period, which involves a logic of political alienation by design (Short, 2012). To the extent that charismatic leadership relies on ‘primary’ identifications, it can also be read as evidence of a shift towards more narcissistic social relations (cf: Lasch, 1991 [1979]: ch. 4).

The political effectivity of the far-right is thus often articulated to a more broadly registered political-economic crisis, including an ‘intra-elite’ crisis of direction and legitimacy (Gramsci, 1971; Sohn-Rethel, 1987; Short, 2015). Indeed, much of the far-right’s anti-establishment critique can be shared by the left. In the current conjuncture, to the extent that these have involved concerns with free-trade, the loss of democratic oversight over monetary policy, elite-capture of the political process (cf: Blaine, 2016; Economist, 2015) and, especially in the US, the expense and inconsistency of an imperialist foreign policy (Kinzer, 2016), there is common critique. Such a political landscape is symptomatic of the policy convergence of political parties around a common, highly classed agenda of market-oriented restructuring during the neoliberal period, though such political convergence is not historically unique, as Gramsci illustrated. The central distinction between the far-right and the left, of course, is in the attribution of the causes of such crises to scapegoat the powerless and in the deeper, disavowed, systemic sympathies. ⁷

The perverse/narcissistic character structure can illuminate the nature of the far-right’s attraction to overtly narcissistic, grandiose leaders. As a ‘primary’/‘imaginary’ identification, supporters respond to such leaders as direct representations of themselves. Rather than a ‘secondary’/‘symbolic’ identification with certain qualities or ideas represented by an other, they identify affectively with such ‘selfobjects’, relying upon their grandiosity, indignation and rage to directly represent their primary-process-related response to politics. Supporters experience criticism of such leaders as direct criticisms of themselves, and are not concerned per se by questions about the viability or inconsistency of a candidate’s position: contradictions are not experienced as such (‘and’ thinking prevails over ‘or’ thinking to avoid confronting unwanted information), while there is sympathy and identification with the ‘persecutory’ experience of having such contradictions questioned (cf. Kesling, 2016). In the neoliberal period, indeed, the articulation between individual grandiosity and claims to political independence through economic independence and acumen can be observed in a number of far-right leaders, e.g. Trump and Modi (Ahmad, 2016: 176). Such figures offer a clear representation of the psychodynamics of the far-right: a strong investment in the neoliberal fantasy of market-based individual autonomy that is rhetorically hostile to establishment elites while disavowing any dependency on state support for their achievements.

The violent, racist and xenophobic dimensions of the far-right conception of political community can be understood in terms of the sado-masochistic nature of the far-right-wing narcissistic/perverse character structure’s attachments to the status quo. The masochistic dimension may function ‘purely’ at the affective level – it is a social order that provokes anxiety and insecurity – but it is even more conspicuous when it functions both affectively and materially, i.e. when the working or lower middle classes identify with a regime of accumulation predicated on their own economic subordination. The disavowed frustration that such subordination provokes is manifest in a sadistic relationship with the ‘self-object’. The overt content of right-wing fantasies – ‘the threatening immigrant’ – covers the deeper anxieties of personal inadequacy and of abandonment by the state and economic system (cf. Southern Poverty Law Center, 2012). Right-wing ideologies defend against the individual’s sense of inadequacy by projecting the cause of failure onto a ‘persecutory’ other, who robs us of what was otherwise rightfully ours (expressed in Lacanian terms as a fantasy that the other has stolen our ‘jouissance’; Žižek, 2006: 19).

Recent work on racism, particularly as expressed in the neoliberal period, has observed the re-emergence of racialized codes articulated predominantly in cultural rather than biological terms (Davidson and Saull in this issue, Short and Kambouri, 2010; Balibar, 1992). In this sense, much of what might be noted about the psychodynamics of race within the far-right follows the discussion above vis-à-vis xenophobic nationalism. Miller and Josephs (drawing on an ego-psychology reading of narcissism) suggest that ‘whiteness’ in the United States can be read through the lens of narcissistic grandiosity, a defense against fears of failure in an intensely competitive and class-stratified society (Miller and Josephs, 2009: 96). Racialization is often characterized in terms of the defense of splitting, distinguishing ‘good’ and ‘bad’ qualities and projecting the latter onto an other, a psychological mechanism that is inherently fragile, creating vulnerability ‘to states of narcissistic decompensation characterized by white shame and rage’ (Miller and Josephs, 2009: 95; see also: Layton, 2006).

The narcissism of racial privilege is manifest in racialized reactions to economic crisis: according to a recent survey in the US, whites were more likely than blacks to experience the economic downturn as a decline in expected fortune and more likely to be angered by current events (Chalabi, 2016). Right-wing concerns about ‘reverse racism’ reflect racialized anxieties articulated to the ‘zero-sum’ logic of competitive, alienated society, as well as the disavowal and projection of racism onto its victims (Norton and Sommers, 2011). Chalabi reports that ‘10% of white Americans think white Americans are racist. But 38% of those white Americans think black people are racist’ (Chalabi, 2016).

Examining misogyny in far-right politics through the lens of a psychoanalytical and historical-material understanding of the subject is challenging for several related reasons, among them the complex role gender plays in psychoanalysis itself. Furthermore, the far-right’s treatment of women is frequently marked by an ambivalent aesthetic – under fascism women were both venerated (motherhood in particular was ‘idealized and deified’) and repressed, politically, economically and sexually (Reich, 1946: 105) – while women have also been active participants in far-right movements, identifying with its representations (Harvey, 2004). There are serious limitations to the data on violence against women – though it is clearly a commonplace, affecting roughly one in three globally with only modest variation in that figure between regions (World Health Organization, 2013) – which is perhaps why there is so little information on gender-specific violence of the far-right. Furthermore, narcissism itself is often read as gendered in its articulation to patriarchal social relations: male narcissists are associated to a greater extent with its grandiose, exhibitionist qualities, which are in fact often defenses related precisely to deep self-doubt with respect to their own masculinity, while female narcissists may be more likely to seek gratification through an investment and identification with an other’s grandiosity, the basis for some identifications with far-right movements (O’Leary and Wright, 1986: 333).

In some quarters of the contemporary far-right, there has been a recent emergence of a number of women leaders and greater openness towards women’s and LGBT rights. ⁸ These cases may be read as paralleling the logics of neo-racism in articulating women’s rights and gay rights to claims of cultural superiority in sustaining an anti-immigrant politics (Fekete, 2006). However, much of the contemporary right and the far-right both remain predicated on misogynist politics, often focused quite directly on controlling women’s bodies through the restriction of reproductive rights (e.g. in the US, Italy’s Lega Nord, and the True Finns (Trivett, 2011). Fundamentally, from the perspective of the narcissistic/perverse character structure, right-wing misogyny can be read at its deepest level in terms of anger against dependency, which is experienced as humiliating by the grandiose subject. This is reflected in a politics of controlling women’s autonomy, which has taken increasingly perverse forms in the neoliberal culture wars and as a reaction to progress in women’s rights (e.g. medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds; Kopsa, 2012). The coinage and popularization of the word ‘feminazi’ also offers an example of sado-masochistic social relations in which the rhetoric of equality is experienced as persecutory by a socially privileged group that projects its anger and hostility onto the more marginalized (Cohen, 2015).

Conclusions

This discussion has tried to show the ways in which the narcissistic/perverse character structure provides a useful lens through which to consider the political subject to the far-right in a historical-material context. Such an approach is consistent with the stress that neoliberal social relations place materially on social reproduction as well as ideologically on individual autonomy. It offers a way of understanding the manner in which conservative politics in the neoliberal period promotes the conditions for the political effectivity of a far-right response to crisis, in its support for the ‘molecular’ instantiation of the sado-masochistic social relations that push the narcissistic subject towards primary process functioning.

This framework, however, while underscoring the importance of a historical materialist reading of politics, also poses significant praxeological challenges. As the discussion above suggests, attempts to ‘demystify’ far-right narcissistic leaders in the spirit of a recent representation of Senator Warren’s approach, to call Trump a loser rather than a bully, because that might effectively expose his ‘raging insecurity’ (Rosenstein, 2016), do not fully appreciate the nature of perverse/narcissistic defenses, nor how the supporters of right-wing leaders identify with them. The ‘decline of symbolic efficiency’ this approach implies unfortunately extends much deeper; at the same time, however, in extending attention beyond character structure alone to the socio-historical conditions of defensive reaction and retreat into primary process functioning, it offers a place to begin in addressing the material and psychological factors that support the politics of the far-right.