The Primal Horde

 There's something about Trump that invites Freudian metaphors. At the "No Kings" march I attended yesterday, a number of the signs made reference to Trump's military parade as perhaps an elaborate form of physical over-compensation. "Small dick-tator energy" read one of the banners. 

I was reminded of Harold Pinter's judgment on the militarism of the Bush administration: "The big pricks are out / They'll fuck everything in sight," the Nobel Laureate wrote. My fellow protesters would argue that a little prick like Trump needs to see the big pricks of America's arsenal to make up for it. 

Similarly, Trump's high-profile falling out with Musk last week caused people to wheel out the psychoanalytic couch. Comedians online likened the spat to every possible kind of domestic conflict: Musk was cast as the son killing the father; but also as a child experiencing rivalry with his sibling. 

"The girls are fighting again," read one meme. One of Musk's ex-girlfriends famously reached out to Trump to offer "break-up advice." Musk was likened to the Sith apprentice who must kill his Master in order to supplant him. In short, the Freudian, Oedipal metaphors kept rolling in. 

It could be said, of course, that people were joking. But, perhaps—as is so often the case with jokes—the comedians "builded better than they knew" (to borrow a phrase from Emerson). In depicting the Trump movement as essentially Freudian, the humorists may have been approaching the truth. 

In his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud suggested that political mass movements—and even large collective institutions such as the army and the church—are able to maintain their unity and emotional appeal through inhibiting and channeling libidinous drives. 

Thus, according to Freud, the feelings of yearning and adoration that Trump's followers seem to feel for him—and the intense emotional bonding that occurs between them in his ranks—really are sexual in origin (even if they have been displaced and redirected from their original purpose). 

Sometimes, Trump's followers make this so obvious that psychoanalysis is hardly necessary. When Tucker Carlson got up on stage during the last election and fantasized about Trump taking America over his knee and giving us all a good spanking—to bring up Wilhelm Reich in response felt almost like overkill. 

But whereas later theorists of fascist mass movements—like Reich and Erich Fromm—would trace the origin of these movements to sado-masochistic psycho-sexual urges—Freud as early as 1921 had already argued that all political movements are quasi-sexual and libidinous in nature. 

His basic argument is that all human affective ties originate from an erotic impulse (doubt that if you wish, but that's Freud). In order to transform a fleeting sensual desire into the more spiritualized and lasting "affection," Freud argues—the direct satisfaction of the sexual urge must in some way be blocked. 

He argues that one of the primordial social groupings that achieved this purpose was the "primal horde"—a group of brothers who were subject to the "despotic" rule of a single male figurehead. The male tyrant ruthlessly maintained a sexual monopoly within the group—denying any sexual outlet to his sons. 

In order to compensate for the lack of any direct sexual satisfaction of their libidinous urges—according to Freud—the oppressed "sons" in the horde channeled their inhibited desires into "affection" for one another—and into the idealized mythology that the despotic "father" loved them all equally. 

It would be unfair to interpret Trump's MAGA movement as just such a "primal horde"—if his followers didn't constantly invite the inference. I mean, Tucker's slogan coming out of his great "spanking" speech was "Daddy's Home"—which quickly found its way onto MAGA T-shirts. 

There was also the tell-tale way that rapper, antisemite, political extremist and Hitler apologist Ye responded to the Trump-Musk breakup. "Noooo, bros," he wrote online—"Stop! We love you both so much!" There is something here, to Freud's point, that goes beyond a political "community of interest." 

It's intensely pathetic that a narcissistic exhibitionist like Ye imagines that he "loves" and is "loved" in turn by two other narcissistic exhibitionists like Trump and Musk. None of these men is in fact capable of actual loyalty or mutuality. But such is typical—again—of the "primal horde." 

People in the primal horde, according to Freud, adore the tyrannical father because he represents an "ego ideal" with which they can identify. He is just like them: he has their same appetites; their same narcissism; except that he is able to gratify his desires with none of their inhibitions. 

This is of course how the Trump-worshippers always talk about the object of their affection. "He tells it like it is," or: "he finally said what we were all thinking." He is a magnified expression of their own Id, without any of the obstacles that block the gratification of their own base urges. 

But precisely because he is just an amplification of his followers' own infantile narcissism, except without any of the inhibitions of civilization, the notion that the tyrannical "father" of the primal horde loves all his children equally is forever doomed to be a falsehood. Freud writes: 

"[T]he members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader," writes Freud (Strachey trans.), "but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-confident and independent." 

And thus we get the pathetic spectacle of people abasing themselves before Trump, claiming that they "love" him, while every day he makes clear through his actions that he has no intent whatsoever to do anything other than scam them, rip them off, and gratify his own desires at their expense. 

This doesn't matter, Freud argues; the real basis of the political movement is the bond the followers form with one another through the shared suppression of their libido. Hence, in Freud's telling, "the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority." 

Thus we get the bootlicking, masochistic worship of state power on the part of all those "Proud Boys." They yearn for the despotic father of the primal horde. They want a great big bully who will impose sexual abstinence on them all equally in order to strengthen their affective ties. 

And I'm sure Trump loves it that way. I'm sure he'd feel only flattered to think of himself as a kind of primeval chieftain, maintaining a sexual monopoly over a group of slavish admirers to whom he owes no obligations whatsoever, other than to exploit them to satisfy his own impulses. 

But Trump should beware of the sequel. Freud's other point, after all, was that beneath the outward appearance of "affection" in these groups is a deep spring of resentment. The "sons" who bond together through shared denial at the hands of the father on some level hate the latter for his tyranny. 

And in the end—they band together to overthrow him. The sons who "love" the despotic father end up proving his downfall. Perhaps we're seeing it already in the form of Musk's defection. And so, I say again: all those people calling the drama "Oedipal" perhaps are even more right than they realize.