National Psychosis, its Cure and Prevention

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The United States’ recent national psychosis is nothing unusual. Something like it has happened at least four times in just the last century, in major powers alone.

Let’s count the ways. The first and most acute example was the Nazi psychosis in Germany that triggered the Second World War. The second was brutal and murderous consolidation, mass internal deportation, and industrialization of the Soviet Union under Stalin. The Third was the similar psychosis of Communist “leadership” in China under an increasingly erratic and senile Mao Zedong. The most recent, of course, was the psychotic rule of our latest ex-president, the only man in US national history ever to have served not a single day in elective office or the military before becoming president.

We won’t even mention the cases of minor powers: Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide, or the epidemics of desaparecidos under murderous dictatorships in Argentina, Chile and even Uruguay late in the last century.

All these cases distinguish themselves from “normal” war and conquest by oppression and/or mass murder of a nation’s own people. That’s one reason why I don’t consider Japan’s role in World War II, although extraordinarily brutal and cruel, an example of national psychosis. Among the examples of psychotic atrocities against one’s own people, only German Nazism also involved a catastrophic attempt at regional conquest.

So what qualified the four major-power regimes as “psychotic”? The answer comes in two parts. First, although sometimes claiming a facade of popular will or even “democracy,” they all were essentially the product of a single man: Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and our own Demagogue. Second, that single man held views and imposed policies that, from the safety and distance of history, few would accept as effective, humane or even rational. To put it starkly, the maximum leader, in each case, was at least partially demented, and he somehow made his dementia into national policy that gravely harmed his own people.

It’s worth a bit of ink to specify how. In Hitler’s case, it was his over-the-top persecution of Germany’s own Jews and other minorities, eventually including conquered peoples. Many Soviet peoples—Ukrainians for one—welcomed the German Army and fought Russian domination alongside them. A smarter and less demented German leader might have exploited their sentiments, treated conquered people well, never opened death camps, and sued successfully for peace from a position of strength rather than insanely invading the heart of Russia in midwinter. A practical leader like General Erwin Rommel, whom Hitler had executed, might have expanded the German Empire to most or all of Eastern Europe and changed the course of Eurasian history forever.

But you don’t get to replay the tape. Instead of a shorter war and a return to traditional German practicality and rationalism, we saw the Holocaust and three-quarters of a century of painful recovery.

Stalin’s effect as the Soviet leader was similar. His historical task was to consolidate the Russian Revolution, industrialize Russia and prepare for the coming Armageddon with Germany. Yet from the day he stuffed the ballot boxes and had his rival General Kirov shot the next morning, Stalin became the worst sort of medieval despot. An ethnic Georgian suspicious of Russians and other ethnicities, he deported various ethnic minorities to Siberia by the millions, for no apparent reasons besides bigotry and paranoia. He industrialized the nation badly and painfully, by forced labor and forced deportation, rather than monetary and patriotic incentives. And after war came, his constant inexpert meddling in military affairs nearly sealed Russia’s fate, as when he removed his most competent general, Zhukov, temporarily from command.

In 1996, I found myself in Russia on a democracy-building project sponsored by USAID. Alone in my once-Soviet hotel room, I listened to a Russian radio program describing the hour of Stalin’s death in 1953. He had been lying in bed at one end of a palatial room, with his doctors and closest advisers huddled at the other. As he died, he raised his arm, as if to point at one of them. Everyone, including the doctors who had tried vainly to save his life, quaked in fear of being sent to the gulags, or executed, with a mere word or gesture from the tyrant. His caregivers and closest colleagues waited, fearful and trembling, until Stalin had breathed his last breath. This was the monster who, still today, some 70%-80% of Russians think “saved” their country.

Mao was different. At least he started out that way. As a general fighting his way from the Caves of Hunan to eventual control of his war-torn country, he had broken with Chinese warlord tradition. He actually had paid peasants for their crops and the use of their homes and barns as barracks. That’s probably why he won; he got the people on his side with fair treatment.

But after achieving absolute power Mao ruled more by whim than any tyrant in modern history. His forced collectivization of agriculture, called the “Great Leap Forward” is “credited” with a famine that killed an estimated 45 million Chinese. Among other idiocies, he ordered peasants to make steel for heavy industry by melting down their kitchenware and iron farm tools, thereby impeding their farming. Mao’s later Cultural Revolution purged educated and commerce-friendly Chinese from positions of wealth and influence, killing an estimated two million of them, and sending the rest to the fields to “learn” from peasants.

Mao had perhaps the most ironic history of all the four major powers’ psychopathic leaders. As a general, he was a stunning success. He unified a war-torn and disorganized China using methods that kept peasants’ human needs in mind. As a civilian leader in peacetime, he was a complete and catastrophic failure, delaying China’s modernization and industrialization by decades and killing tens of millions in the process.

Mao’s career may have been the greatest argument for term limits in human history, so far. Let’s hope that Xi Jinping’s does not become second “best.”

And so we come to our own American avatar of psychosis. His cult of loyalty, his psychopathy, his ability to project his own flaws and misdeeds onto others (a “stolen election”), his obsessive focus on himself, and his utter lack of stable, rational principles are now so well known as to have become incontrovertible. Today’s salient question is how he remains where he is, even after fomenting the Capitol Insurrection in what purports to be a stable democracy. So far, only our own four-year term limit has saved us.

We know how our Demagogue got to be president. He confused policy with entertainment, and he had his enablers. He had Fox and he had Rush. He had Republicans like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, who hated and resisted him yet quickly knuckled under and kissed his ring like medieval vassals. Most of all, he had our social media, who unwittingly gave the most demented among us prevalence on the Internet, the most powerful means of communicating ever invented.

The Demagogue is out of office now. But is his absence temporary? Will he come back? Can he? And can we cure our national psychosis while he sits waiting in the wings, deliberately spreading his psychosis day after day?

Others’ histories of national psychosis are hortatory and cautionary tales. Today’s Germany is once again an exemplary nation. It’s superior in a lack of aggressive forces, the strength of its democracy, its outlawing hate speech, its assimilating desperate refugees, its belated but powerful agreement to help finance its neighbors’ growth, its including labor in corporate governance, its noted economic equality, and its leadership in converting energy to renewable sources. With laws against hate speech and denying the Holocaust, today’s Germany is even making a credible attempt to root out modern Nazis from its police and armed forces. But it took this, plus 75 years of growth and struggle, for Germany to get there after its Nazi psychosis.

In comparison, Russia and China have had only partial cures. Both have leaders who’ve extended their terms in office. Putin has by amending the Russian Constitution, Xi by changing the unwritten custom of reconsidering with every second five-year plan. Both leaders seem intent on “serving” for life, making Putin the most recent Tsar and Xi the most recent emperor. Old habits of alpha-male rule are hard to break.

That said, both Putin and Xi are respectively smarter and less brutal than Stalin, or than Mao in his dotage. Putin may have killed rival pols like Boris Nemtsov, renegade spies, and journalists to stay in power, but so far there have been only a handful of each. As far as we know, nothing like the mass murder or mass famines under Stalin or Mao is ongoing in either country. Even the Uighur “genocide” in China is only cultural genocide, not actual. As far as we know, mass murder is not part of the current forced-labor regime, aka “re-education.”

The psychosis in both countries appears to be over, but the risk of recurrence is real. Absolute power can produce rule by demented whim; that’s one of the best reasons to avoid it.

Here at home, the risk is just as real. The Demagogue’s Republican enablers had two chances to convict him and remove the risk of recurrence. They flubbed both. They did so despite the fact that most of them have every reason to hate and fear him.

This sad outcome arose as much from a defect in our system as from flaws in their character, as patent as the latter may be. For it all happened once before. The white-supremacist and Southern fifth columnist Andrew Johnson became president on Lincoln’s assassination, perhaps the most consequential in our history. Johnson had vetoed the second Freedman’s Act, thereby depriving freed slaves of their “forty acres and a mule” and an economic leg up. But he survived conviction and removal (for other alleged misdeeds) by a single vote.

Andrew Johnson avoided removal after our nation’s most brutal war, in which the winning side opposed everything he stood for. So the Demagogue’s survival today was a mere corollary. We have never convicted and removed a president from office, and we probably never will. Our much-vaunted “safety valve” of impeachment just doesn’t work, at least not during times of deep division, when we need it most. (Nixon’s resignation after a credible and bipartisan threat of impeachment and removal occurred at a time of little inter-party polarization, nothing like the post-Civil-War period or today.)

So what practical measures can we take to insure our own rapid national recovery from the Demagogue’s deliberately transmitted psychosis? There are at least two.

First, we could require that every candidate for president have served at least eight years in elective public office. That would be a consummation devoutly to be wished in any event, for our existing constitutional requirements are too loose. Our nation and the world are much more complex and advanced than in the late eighteenth century, when 35 years of age, natural-born citizenship and fourteen years of US residence—but no practical experience whatsoever—seemed enough for the top job.

Imposing an experience requirement legally would take a constitutional amendment—a near-impossibility today. But the political parties themselves could impose it unilaterally.

Better yet, they could do so through the services of minor and obscure party functionaries. Unknown party officials could save the Republican Party from the Demagogue, by imposing a eight-year experience requirement for running on the party ticket, without risking anyone’s decades-long elective political career. People like Brad Raffensperger could do the job without risking the careers of pols like Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, or even Josh Hawley. Likely this approach would force a quick and clean break in a party that seems ready to split more slowly and painfully anyway.

The other option is riskier and less likely to happen, although in theory a better solution to demagoguery and national psychosis. Candidates for president, or even Congress, could be required to take and pass a battery of psychological tests designed to weed out such traits as psychopathy, sociopathy, extreme Narcissism, disordered thinking, etc. We require our airplane pilots and those who man our nuclear-missile silos to take such tests, so why not candidates for president? We could do the testing at the outset of their careers, before they gained power or a popular following.

One objection is that, with so much at stake in selecting our supreme leader, the pressure for corruption of and undue influence over the testers would be much more intense. Nevertheless, a rational society with the scientific means to weed out those unfit for vital jobs ought to have measures to do so. Here again, the political parties could avoid the delay and difficulty of a constitutional amendment by adopting these measures internally for their own candidates. One advantage of psychological testing is that it might not eliminate relatively inexperienced candidates with sound minds, like Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, or Michael Bloomberg.

As hated as he is from all sides, Mitch McConnell is today the best avatar of our democracy. Asked to balance power for his party and ideology against the fundamentals of democracy, he predictably chose power. He tried to have things both ways by excoriating the Demagogue afterward, but his choice was clear. You can maintain power for its sake alone despite democracy, or you can have democracy. You can’t do both.

Decades ago, the two political parties together made a seemingly different choice. They abandoned their selection of candidates for office in the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms” of party elders. Instead, they wholeheartedly adopted popular primary elections.

That choice, in my view, was a big mistake. Not only do party elders know candidates far better than the average voter can, especially when fed incessant thirty-second lies on TV or the Internet. Party elders also tend to select pols whom they respect for good reason and who know the rules of democracy from having held public office or from prior campaigns.

Note that I am not suggesting letting elders choose our leaders, only the short list from which the people choose. That way they can use their accumulated experience and wisdom to weed out demagogues with no experience but skill at showmanship.

In our case, the Demagogue bypassed all that. With no experience and no knowledge of the rules, he went straight to the people, with his jokes, hate, crude boasts and rough entertainment, and with the help of self-serving for-profit propagandists like Fox and Rush. The advent of his ilk was predictable from the moment the parties changed their rules.

The supreme irony is that most Republicans hate and fear the Demagogue and his “base.” Why wouldn’t they? They spent decades working their ways up the political ladder, only to see him eclipse them with fanciful stories, conspiracy theories, rough insults, and popular showmanship. But having seen him garner so easily the power and office they’ve craved for their entire careers, they can’t seem to break his spell, at least not publicly.

The Democrats’ story is just as instructive. They were about to lose a clear chance to take the presidency due to internecine warfare between the Sanders-Warren wing and the so-called “moderates.” Who saved them from that sad fate? A relatively obscure party elder from a reliably “red” Southern state: Jim Clyburn. Without Clyburn’s decisive intervention, we might be facing a second term of the Demagogue and the end of our democracy.

There is value in the complex rules and procedures of democracy. There is value in party elders’ experience, wisdom and internalization of the rules. The rest of it can degenerate into mob rule at any time. Popular primaries create a carte blanche for propaganda and media manipulation. (Open all-party primaries with ranked-choice voting might be different, but that’s another discussion.)

With their lax rules, the parties made the Demagogue and his presidency. Now they can unmake him and prevent the recurrence of his psychosis. All they have to do is revert to elder-influenced or elder-made primary selections, or add an experience requirement or psychological testing as a prerequisite to running for higher office. And they can do it all internally, through their internal party procedures and their obscure rank and file, without jeopardizing the reputation or career of any major office holder. They ought to start now.

Endnote on Japan: Some readers may wonder why I didn’t include Imperial Japan’s brutal role in World War II as an example of national psychosis. There are two reasons.

First, Japan’s extraordinary brutality—including the Rape of Nanking and the Death March on Bataan—was quite self-consciously directed against foreigners, not its own people. Even genocide against foreigners had been part of human warfare, and often celebrated as “victory,” from as early as Rome’s obliteration of Carthage, which arose from squalid commercial competition.

Only recently, with the maturation of human civilization, has genocide been recognized as a crime. And criminal behavior is not necessarily an indicator of psychosis. Self-harm, it seems to me, is the best indicator of psychosis, and all of the examples discussed here share it. That’s also why I didn’t include the Turks’ genocide of Armenians.

The second reason to exclude Japan is more subtle. Like Germany, Japan came late to the colonialism party. Indeed, there is evidence that Admiral Perry’s Black Ships opened Japan to, and English influence trained Japan in, the arts of military imperialism using modern Western weapons.

When you compare the atrocities and near-genocides that British and European military colonialism perpetrated on native peoples throughout the world, the most you can say is that Japan’s atrocities came later and were more compressed in time. They lacked the key indicator of psychosis: self-evident craziness from the perspectives of a group’s own interests.

In contrast, Nazi Germany deliberately attempted genocide of its own Jewish and other minorities, most of whom—like Einstein and the other Jewish refugees who helped us invent the Bomb—had been enthusiastic participants in advanced German culture during the two-prewar generations. Contravention of the interests of Germany itself, which might otherwise have had the Bomb first, is clear. [Search for “curiously” in linked source.] I won’t even mention the diaspora of talented musicians, writers, actors and producers, including Billy Wilder, who had made pre-war Berlin and Vienna meccas for music, film and the dramatic arts.

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