Abraham Maslow, in “The Authoritarian Character Structure” (1943), said:
The authoritarian person tends to have a strong drive for power, status, external prestige[.] In extreme cases it can be said that he has a psychological need for power which may actually be overtly observed . . . . Furthermore, this power is defined characteristically in terms of power over people. [...]
It is, furthermore, characteristic of the authoritarian individual that if he does have power, he tends to use it primarily to assuage his own psychological needs, that is, in a selfish way, and secondarily he tends, especially when challenged, to use it in a hard, cruel, or even sadistic fashion.1
Kathleen Taylor, in Cruelty (2009), described the broad outlines of sadism, especially in terms of it being, as Maslow stated, a psychological need:
[Marquis de] Sade, however, is not only interested in describing cruelty as inherently rewarding (sadism). He also argues for a nihilistic vision in which indifference to suffering is a fact of nature and compassion a learned and debilitating convention. In doing so he explicitly emphasizes callousness, the imperative for the Sadeian protagonists [of his novels] to disregard the victim as a person . . . .2
Indifference to suffering, however, is not equivalent to enjoyment of it. Only when suffering itself becomes the primary goal do we move from callousness to sadism.3
When viewed in light of Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941), which was a forerunner in terms of most of our current guides to authoritarianism and totalitarianism, we get an even better idea:
We find three kinds of sadistic tendencies, more or less closely knit together. One is to make others dependent on oneself and to have absolute and unrestricted power over them, so as to make of them nothing but instruments, “clay in the potter’s hand.”
Another consists of the impulse of not only to rule over others in this absolute fashion, but to exploit them, to use them, to steal from them, to disembowel them, and, so to speak, to incorporate anything eatable in them. This desire can refer to material things as well as to immaterial ones, such as the emotional or intellectual qualities a person has to offer.
A third kind of sadistic tendency is the wish to make others suffer or to see them suffer. This suffering can be physical, but more often it is mental suffering. Its aim is to hurt actively, to humiliate, embarrass others, or to see them in embarrassing and humiliating situations.4
Again looking to Fromm, it becomes clear, by way of interpreting a passage from The Heart of Man (1964), that authoritarianism is a system of organized sadism.
This drive is the essence of sadism . . . . All the different forms of sadism which we can observe go back to one essential impulse, namely, to have complete mastery over another person, to make of him a helpless object of our will, to become his god, to do with him as one pleases. To humiliate him, to enslave him, are means toward this end, and the most radical aim is to make him suffer, since there is no greater power over another person than that of forcing him to undergo suffering without his being able to defend himself.5
Another way of formulating the same thought is to say the aim of sadism is to transform a man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate[.]5
Moreover, as authoritarianism enacts a transformation in its followers through the mechanism of strict verbal manipulation, that system seems to be one of speech sadism. Robert Tucker, in “Stalin and the Uses of Psychology” (1956), said,
The passages of Stalin's work on linguistics which are quoted most frequently by the psychologists are those in which he stresses the enormous significance of language in all departments of social activity, and the inseparability of language and thought. With reference to the first point, he writes that language is directly linked with every activity of man "in all areas of his work." It "embraces all the spheres of activity of man" and is "virtually unlimited." Moreover, Stalin equates language with word-language, rejecting the notions about gesture-language and wordless thought which had been emphasized by the founder of Soviet linguistics, N. Ya. Marr. Thus, language to Stalin means word-language exclusively, it is inseparable from thought, and it penetrates and pervades every aspect of the social behavior of man. These propositions formed a starting point for constructing the new Pavlovian model of personality, which pictures man as a creature whose behavior is controlled and regulated by verbal signals.6
The goal was to treat language as an instrument of social control. For this purpose it was imperative that words should always be signals which touch off responses appropriate to their meaning. Here was the needed link between semantics and politics. As Smirnov expressed it, the Pavlovian teaching reveals the conditions under which stimuli, including verbal stimuli, become signals "and by virtue of this fact regulate the behavior of man".7
Such a system substitutes a total verbal environment as the subject’s external reality, which may provoke change due to cognitive dissonance or even through psychological disintegration or fragmentation. Sadism removes from the victim—the person—his or her personality. It thingifies.
So that is the purpose of authoritarianism. It satisfies needs; it reduces people.
And lest you think the forties and fifties are too far removed, consider the language-control memo issued by Newt Gingrich to his caucus in 1996 as he moved the House of Representatives and the GOP away from a cooperative partner in the institution of governance toward its current posture of ideological bombthrowers. Words reserved for Republicans, according to Gingrich’s dictum, are all words that evoke positive feelings, whereas those to be directed at Democrats were all sinister, meant to engender disdain and contempt.
Over time, this form of card-stacking would take its toll on its intended audience, bringing about a predictable antipathy in Republican voters toward their Democratic counterparts. The routinization of this use of language, the fact that it was implemented by fiat meant for dissemination to the public, indicates its potential for a conditioning nature on behavior.
Whether or not Gingrich intended to inflict this ultimate result on the electorate, the long, extended exposure to this type of black-and-white thinking absolutely helped shape attitudes on that side of the aisle.8
Newt’s legacy can be seen in nearly every one of Donald Trump’s posts to social media. Trump doesn’t do it because of any direction by party leadership or because he’s beholden to party strategy—he does it because it’s his nature. This is who he is. He enjoys using that language. He enjoys seeing what he can get his crowd to do.
Thus the GOP electorate has been steeped in this verbal button-pushing for decades, all toward cultivating an environment that provokes reaction, and all in ways predictable by the language used. This is new-wave authoritarianism, invited into one’s own hands, brought up on one’s cell phone to beam into one’s own eyes. It’s a participatory sadism, distributed for entertainment value. And, like many other addictions, it will never satisfy those who consume it. It will never be enough.
1 Maslow, “The Authoritarian Character Structure,” The Journal of Social Psychology (1943), Vol. 18, No., 2, p. 405. Paragraph breaks added.
2 Taylor, Cruelty, p. 54.
3 Taylor, ibid., p. 56.
4 Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 165. Paragraph breaks added.
5 Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil, p. 32.
6 Robert Tucker, “Stalin and the Uses of Psychology,” World Politics (1955), Vol. 8, No. 4, p. 473. Paragraph breaks added.
7 Tucker, ibid., p. 477. Emphasis Tucker’s.
8 “One technique in the new manipulation of anti-Semitism to which I would like to draw your attention, so that you can perhaps study it a little more closely and resist it, is cumulative effect. A publication like the Soldaten-Zeitung, that is, the National-Zeitung, has developed a remarkable virtuosity in never writing anything in one issue that is extreme enough to warrant intervention based on the current, quite firm laws against anti-Semitism or neo-Nazism. On the other hand, if one looks at a number of issues in succession, one must truly be stricken with the spirit of formalism not to see what they mean.” Theodor Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (1967/2020), p. 23. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK. Emphasis added.