Erich Fromm and Contemporary American Politics

The last few years have witnessed a general movement toward more conservative if indeed, extremist, reactionary, perhaps neo-fascist governments in Europe, Asia, South America and even the United States, along with growing trends toward authoritarian populisms, ethnic nationalisms, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. The current wave of these movements tends toward authoritarian, anti-democratic politics and especially both punitive and sadistic aggression toward “Others” who lay outside the “policed boundaries” of the socially constructed “we.” When society allocates vast resources to a military that produces mass death and destruction and leaves few resources for the enhancement of personal and social life, such societies not only thwart human fulfillment, but might very well be considered “sick societies” as Erich Fromm described them, societies in which the typical character structure distorts the self into commodity-centered nihilism, a quest for empty pleasures that serves the accumulation of profit and also thwarts genuine human fulfillment. This “pathological normality” often shades into intolerance for difference and dissention, sometimes into hatred and the quest for death and destruction. Today we face major economic dislocations, environmental despoliation, and the possible collapse of civilization, yet we avidly persist in practices that hasten our collective demise.

Consequently, we argue that the social and political polarization today constitutes a fundamentally new conflict that far transcends conservative versus liberal dynamics and rises to a much more profound battle between those who continue to worship white male nationalism, wealth, and violence on one side, and those who seek a sense of community and inclusive relationships that cross racial, religious, ethnic, and gender lines—progressive lifestyles that provide meaning rather than wealth and American Empire. Does the future hold bleak and authoritarian dystopias, or more joyous and