Love the Leader, Hate the State: Narcissistic Protests Against Democratic Rule1

Following a rapid growth in the number of democracies around the world in the closing decades of the twentieth century, we are now seeing many democratic states faltering or in crisis2, unable to prevent the break-up of their publics into bitterly opposed groups, and with their legitimacy increasingly questioned. So why is democracy3 proving so difficult to sustain?

Some answers to that question focus on forces external to the democratic nation, such as international capital ravaging domestic economies and cultures, or foreign states intervening in domestic politics for geopolitical reasons. Other explanations look inside the nation, for example at the incompetence, mendacity or corruption of the political class whose job it is to make democratic institutions work. Crucial though these factors may be in many cases, a psychoanalytic contribution to understanding the malaise of democracy has to look elsewhere. In keeping with its radically reflexive nature, psychoanalysis suggests that we also look at ourselves, the democratic citizenry, the people or demos whose power a democracy should express.

Democracy makes great demands on us, psychologically, and it seems that in many countries the voting public does not collectively have the psychic resources - what I will call the emotional capital - to be able to meet those demands in a sustained way. Key to those resources is a capacity to tolerate and resolve ambivalence. All societies must manage the human ambivalence towards authority, the ineradicable existence in all our minds of both love and hatred for leaders and for laws. This is the legacy of infantile ambivalence towards the intractable otherness of the world, and its challenge to narcissism. The primal ambivalence is focused on the parental figures who represent the world, and later on the societal authorities who in a sense are psychically in loco parentis. Like parents, states are both needed and resented, and we have floating reserves of