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The impetus to explore the nature of fascistic and populist states of mind was the surprising election of Donald Trump. Along with many fellow Americans, I also woke during the early hours of Wednesday, November 9th, 2016, the morning after the US election, to the shocking news that Donald J. Trump was elected to be the President of the United States. Upon hearing this news, I felt disoriented. Like numerous election pundits, journalists, and colleagues, I also expected Hillary Clinton to win this election. In previous months, I, along with many American urban voters, paid little attention to the election campaign of the candidate Trump, viewing him as a rather marginal and buffoonish character who is unlikely to be taken seriously by voters.
Trapped in my own social and psychic reality, regretfully, I neglected to register the external reality, that is, the deep division in contemporary American society. I was also unaware, at the time, of the universal seductive power of authoritarianism, seduction that has led to a global anti-democratic swing. I still remember, as if it happened yesterday, the heavy feelings and the disbelief I experienced that morning. It was as though the previous night there was a coup, and my adoptive country has been taken over, hijacked overnight, by unknown and ominous forces.
The idea of inviting various psychoanalytic authors to contribute to an issue exploring fascistic and populist states of mind began to germinate in my mind during the summer of 2020, toward the end of the Trump presidency. As several authors in this issue have observed, fascistic and populist states of mind contain a manic element. Fascistic and populist political regimes, likewise, often ascend as quickly as they later disappear. It took me a couple of years to reach a state of mind in which I could begin to understand what was transpiring in the US and earlier that year, during Brexit in the UK. Throughout the initial years, especially from 2016 to 2018, the rapid c