by Jean Stimmell
I was born in the 1940s and grew up in the 1950s. The ’50s was a strange chapter in American life: banal, antiseptic, and claustrophobically conformist: swearing or even mentioning sex was forbidden. If you questioned anything about America, you risked being called a Communist.
That’s not just my opinion.
Andrew Hartman writes that the 1950s were more coercive than before or after, exhibiting “an extraordinary degree of conformity.” “An unprecedented number of Americans got in line—or aspired to get in line—particularly white, heterosexual, Christian Americans.” 1
I rebelled: I wanted freedom!
I found it as a teenager through Sigmund Freud. Through him, I discovered—beneath my button-down, crew-cut-shorn, prudish existence—a subterranean world of primal drives, making sense of everything the ’50s considered taboo. Freud snapped the chains that confined me, changing life into an adventure rather than a gulag experience.
He also piqued my interest in psychology, leading me to Columbia, where my excitement was dashed. In true 1950s fashion, academia banished Freud in favor of experimental psychology. Rather than studying people, we conducted animal experiments with white rats. We were expected to somehow extrapolate our rat data to human beings.
I dropped out of Columbia because the chains had tightened around me again: The rats lost, Freud won. You might say that Freud greased the skids that launched me into the ’60s after a detour: a heart-rending tour in Vietnam.
The 1960s liberated not only me but our country, overthrowing the age-old conservative mandate of patriarchy, white man rule, and missionary-only sex; In its place, we advocated equal rights for all.
Unfortunately, our cultural revolution produced a vicious backlash, accelerating after the election of our first black president and coming to a head today. Unprecedented social change at whiplash speed was too much for the old guard. Conservatives called the Sixties a “crisis in democracy.” This was an Orwellian phrase that actually meant the opposite: they were livid that we had too much democracy.
Over the intervening years, Democrats contributed to the problem by overplaying their hand, ignoring 70 percent of their base, white, working folks, and instead catered too much to special interest groups, no matter how valid their claims.
Brewing inside this combustible mix, a counter-revolution was gaining steam.,
Traditionalists and increasing numbers of the working class, along with the business class, gathered under the Republican banner, asserting they were the silent majority, promoting biblical religion, punitive justice, and white supremacy while railing against homosexuals, abortions—and, god forbid, trans people. At first, Republicans hid their intentions by using dog whistles or coded language to speak to their base without promoting outrage.
That is until Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator, ditching code words to point-blank call a spade a spade: Mexicans are rapists, blacks come from shit-hole countries, Democrats are communists, and women are nasty with blood coming out of their wherever. N.Y. Times columnist Ezra Klein considers this disinhibition to be “the engine of Trump’s success.” 2
The fact that Trump is reveling in the primal dregs of his unconscious is a sure indication that Freudian psychology is back in vogue as it was in the ’60s. Then, as now, regular folks are yearning for freedom, triggered by living in a stifling, bureaucratic world where they feel invisible. Of course, Trump eggs them on, yearning to be their pied piper.
Psychoanalyst Eric Reinhart has accused liberals of ignoring the crucial importance of irrational drives to fuel mass political movements—drives first identified by Freud: “Proponents of progressive ideals must instead take the reality of aggression, racism, and sadomasochism seriously as enduring political feelings, including in their own ranks, that require constructive political redress.”
Rather than surrendering to these primal feelings, as the Republicans have done, it’s up to Democrats and Independents to promote politics that restrain and redirect these urges. The first step is “to stop vainly demanding that people be more reasonable.” That’s like Nancy Reagan’s solution to drug addiction, which was to just say no.
The truth is people aren’t always reasonable. As Freud showed us—each of us has destructive, irrational desires swirling around our cranium, always primed to pounce.
In the ’60s, we channeled our unconscious rage by breaking free of the Puritan ’50s and speaking truth to power about military overreach, patriarchy, and rampant discrimination against all who were not white. Now, Trump is doing the opposite: speaking power to truth.
Trump is channeling our primal disgust at being unmoored and over-regulated to mount a counter-revolution against the ’60s. “Make America Great Again” is code for a return to “the good old days” of slavish conformity, misogyny, and blatant discrimination aggressively enforced by rich, white men.
Personally, I prefer the Sixties. How about you?
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1 https://s-usih.org/2016/11/trump-out-of-the-shadows-of-the-sixties-social-movements/
2 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/maga-trump-psychological-appeal/680722/
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Jean Stimmell writes from Northwood. This work originally appeared at jstim.substack.com.