Confronting the Death Drive in Trump’s America
Liberalism cannot beat back threats of political violence, nihilism, or fascism by appealing to reason alone.
Jacob Chansley, also known as the "QAnon Shaman," screams "Freedom" inside the US Senate chamber after the US Capitol was breached by a mob during a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)
Mass feeling is essential to political life. But following its uses by violent fascist and communist regimes of the twentieth century, liberal-democratic parties in Europe and the United States have increasingly shied away from affectively rousing politics. In its place, they have embraced dignified performances of an elite managerial class displaying businesslike competence. Since the 1980s, this anesthetization of liberal politics has gone hand in hand with the ascent of “the free market” as the ruling ideology, with its hollowing out of the state via privatization, intensification of economic inequality, and dismantling of a collective public vision for a shared future.
As far-right politicians gain power in the United States and around the world, and as polls suggest the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris remains a toss-up, we are reaping the consequences of this disenchanted and disenchanting liberalism. Not only do its uninspiring politics refuse to leverage mass feeling toward progressive policies, but it also frequently condemns collective affect and associated popular appeal as intrinsically right-wing, leaving it available for uncontested manipulation by proto-fascist demagogues.
Consider, for example, Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” whose irrationality, discontent, and anger did not merit engagement, or her criticism of Bernie Sanders as a deluded populist for believing otherwise. We can see a similar approach in the efforts of many prominent liberal public intellectuals with close ties to Democratic Party leadership today, like the historians Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder, who attempt to counter the threat of fascism they associate with Trump by asking questions like “What can we do to create a more reasonable present?”
Despite a wish to believe otherwise, liberals are far from the rationalists they often imagine themselves to be. Commonplace statements like Clinton’s are suffused with aggression even as they disavow it, directing an intensely moralizing condescension bordering on hatred toward those labeled as agents of unreason (e.g., Trump supporters, Palestinians and student protesters, “radical leftists,” etc.).
But the political problem we face is not irrationality; it is what we do — or fail to do — with the energy behind it. If liberals continue to disavow, dismiss, or simply use the force of unreason and feeling to vilify right-wing political opponents and left-wing critics in attempts to cling to the neoliberal status quo of extreme inequality and violent imperialism, then they will continue to undermine democracy from within and fuel the appeal of authoritarian alternatives.
Proponents of progressive ideals must instead take the reality of aggression, racism, and sadomasochism seriously as enduring political feelings, including in their own ranks, that require constructive political redress. To craft an effective liberal or left politics, we must stop vainly demanding that people be more reasonable and own up to the persistent reality of destructive human tendencies that manifest not only around Trump but also in countless contexts throughout history.
The fundamental political task upon which democracy depends is the creation of structures capable of turning the fact of irrationality and mass feeling into an ally of the common good rather than its enemy. To do this, we must move beyond limpid liberalisms that appeal to civility, personal virtue, and rational discourse alone. We must also move beyond naive Marxisms that ignore sources of aggression and solidarity other than property relations. What we need is a politics oriented around a continuous task of drive-redirection — that is, a politics that reroutes unconscious human drives away from violence and into constructive collective projects, rather than acting as if they could simply be wished away.
The Politics of Sublimation
Alongside his “discovery” of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud’s notion of the death drive offered an elemental contribution to political theory. The concept of the drive posits a psychic pressure toward destruction and stasis (i.e., the elimination of tension) that propels each human being. The drive is not a biological instinct but rather, as Freud put it, a limit concept at “the frontier between the mental and the somatic . . . the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body.”
Freud observed that to protect the self from the death drive’s self-destructive expressions, the psyche turns its energy outward and transforms it into aggression. But, Freud noted, drive energy can also be sublimated — that is, unconsciously transformed — in myriad other ways. As Anna Kornbluh writes, despite its misleading name, “the death drive is not a program” with a predetermined end and, in the words of Joan Copjec, “sublimation is not something that happens to the drive under special circumstances; it is the proper destiny of the drive.” For example, the drive’s trajectory toward the obliteration of one’s individual existence or violence against others can, under the right conditions, instead be turned toward rapturous practices of solidarity, beauty, and creativity.
This is the paradox of the death drive: it is at once antithetical to life while at the same time — via its mobilization through art making, love, sex, caregiving, and so on — it is also the wellspring of life’s energetic force and motivating desire. As Jacques Lacan characterized the death drive, it is “the will to create from zero, to begin again.”
Just over a century after Freud’s elaboration of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (and 172 years after The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which Karl Marx struggles to explain the self-harming reactionary irrationality of the French peasantry), many liberals and leftists still resist confronting the truth that history has repeatedly laid bare: a compulsion toward destructive repetition is a basic force in not just psychic life but also politics. The persistence of human attachments to hatred of sexual and racial others, war and xenophobia, and violent policing and prisons, for example, are symptomatic expressions of this underlying truth.
Although it is rooted in a certain fatalistic realism, Freud’s concept of the death drive does not diminish the importance of political struggle nor of historical contingency. On the contrary, his attention to the death drive coincided with an increasing prioritization of political redress of the psychic dynamics he encountered in his patients. From the time of his earliest writings on hysteria, Freud had understood his patients’ ailments as largely symptomatic of repressive cultural norms. But after World War I, he increasingly argued that the society-scaffolding structures of law, culture, group formation, and government must be addressed not just on the couch but also at the level of what he called “civilization.”
Freud published Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930, when Nazism had already begun its ascent. His concerns in Civilization, which he reiterated in his 1932 letters with Albert Einstein published as Why War?, address the need for political management of humans’ destructive impulses. Noting the impossibility of their eradication, Freud stressed the importance of collective projects that could continuously reroute the drive away from death-making violence into sublimatory forms of life-making invention. To foster such projects is the task of effective governance.
The aim of psychoanalysis — both in its individual clinical and collective political applications — is not triumph. It does not vanquish an enemy nor cure one of being oneself. Instead, it pursues the task of redirecting the drive such that we might learn to live together, love, create, and enjoy while minimizing violence against ourselves and others. Freud observed that this goal is not achievable through repressive institutions nor punitive law and order. And it cannot be achieved by simply directing aggression toward an enemy or political opponent. All of these strategies risk intensifying the negative sublimations of the death drive and, at best, postponing a boomeranging return of its violence.
We cannot just subdue the drive; we must provide it with alternate means for productive expression. Because contemporary liberal politics refuses to take on this fundamental political obligation, its insistence on reasonability alone sustains a governing strategy that only bottles up destructive effervescence and compounds its eventual explosive expression.
The drive internal to each of us, not the rise of any particular fascist leader, is democracy’s greatest threat. But through its perpetual transformations — particularly those that mobilize the power of irrational collective feeling — it is also our greatest resource for forging shared projects of making it possible to live together.
Toward a Progressive Grandeur
It is difficult to compete with the intense feeling of drive satisfaction delivered by war against a supposed enemy, violence against political opponents, defiant lawbreaking, sovereign decisionism, or nearness to death — so intense that it can move us even vicariously (and often unconsciously) through a screen or via a political strongman. From classic literary examples and popular films to military rituals and violent video games, we know well the seductions of murderous destruction that stand out in a desiccated social world devoid of more positive charismatic charge.
It is against such a background that Trump has leveraged rampant racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and trans- and homophobia to excite large swaths of an aesthetically starved American public suffering from historic levels of social isolation, alienation, nihilism, despair, overdoses, and suicide.
To attempt to counter Trump’s widespread resonance at the level of primal aggression by simply appealing to moderation and respect for the status quo, as both the Joe Biden and now Kamala Harris campaigns have so far attempted to do, is not likely to sway disaffected segments of the electorate. To truly defeat Trump and the violence he represents, the Democratic Party would instead need to mount a campaign capable of connecting with voters of all stripes on the same plane of irrational charge at which Trump operates — and to channel that energy toward constructive democratic ends, rather than destructive authoritarian ones. To make such a strategy durable, this energy must be conjoined with materially meaningful policy visions and action.
Democrats have done this before. After the Great Depression provoked widespread discontent that could easily have sent the country into a right-wing spiral, as parallel circumstances did in Germany, the American New Deal used large-scale public employment and public arts initiatives that directly connected millions of people with financial opportunities, meaningful roles in which to provide care for their neighbors and communities, and a sense of shared purpose within the Civilian Conservation Corps, Works Progress Administration, Civil Works Administration, and other collective efforts.
Many of the most ambitious and grandest public projects in the nation’s history were undertaken at this time. They supplied much of the physical infrastructure upon which we still rely and, no less importantly, generated a vital boost in morale through inspiring visions of a shared future into which millions of people poured their energy, artistry, belief, and labor.
At the core of the New Deal’s success was its emphasis on beauty, care for one another, and scale, all of which fueled its mass appeal and subjective effects at a level beyond reason or materiality alone. It was as much a collective aesthetic project — that is, an undertaking to build a shared feeling of community and inventive possibility — as it was an infrastructural or economic program. As a result, the New Deal had the effect of eclipsing a reactionary alternative, which could have instead channeled people’s desire to believe in something and to feel something into mass rancor and hatred.
What could public projects of this kind look like today? In a period characterized by widespread despair, social isolation, violence, and obstructions to care, there is ample opportunity to leverage the power of beauty, community, and a hunger for feeling and belief for progressive purposes. Against a backdrop of abysmally poor public health and health care systems defined by exploitation and exclusion, an agenda for building a community care worker program as the centerpiece of a new national health system organized around reciprocal, participatory care could be one way to do so. Amid profound inequalities in wealth and opportunity, bold programs for student and medical debt forgiveness, rights to housing, and universal basic income could also help galvanize disillusioned young people and those who are presently drawn to Trump. We might also look to mass public investment in culture and the arts at the neighborhood level, or the rejuvenation of America’s public education systems supported by tuition-free college and lifelong learning opportunities for everyone.
To make effective use of such policies, it is essential to understand that they are not just economic or technical programs; they are means for inciting, inculcating, and actually realizing an inspiring vision for a society in which everyone can unlock their unique potential and actively participate. They would allow for a departure from empty platitudes and enable in their place a sincere embrace of a progressive populist rhetoric — the kind that riles people up and unnerves Democratic politicians more devoted to the existing social order than to genuine justice or democracy — backed by meaningful material plans to give it legs.
Several existing progressive policy platforms have such potential to provoke mass affect and put it to constructive use, but they remain neglected and often suppressed by the Democratic Party, including by the Harris campaign that has studiously avoided aligning itself with any substantive policy agenda. A major component of the appeal of the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, the People’s Response Act to build nonpolice safety and mental health response systems, a wealth tax on the ultrarich, or student debt forgiveness, for example, inheres not just in their economic and ethical rationales but also in their potential as bold, ambitious projects to excite mass feeling and direct it into supportive community rather than destructive division.
Alongside these key policies, the most glaring missed opportunity for the Harris campaign rests in its refusal to align itself with a profoundly affectively charged, youth-led, and ethically principled antiwar movement. The millions of Americans protesting against US participation in and support for Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza and now widespread bombing of civilians in Lebanon would readily embrace Harris were she to commit to following legal obligations to end US support for war crimes and enforce an arms embargo on Israel. In return, the influx of supporters this would earn would powerfully reanimate a floundering Harris campaign that, at present, has little vision or purpose other than opposition to Trump.
The vital affective work that progressive policies can achieve is not like that of the massifying, homogenizing effects of fascism; it instead revolves around the beauty of our collective power to care for each singular individual among us and to provide each one of us with the resources to realize our own unique potential. It is only with visionary collective projects that we can address the discontent and disillusionment that Trump feeds with division and false promises.
Numbed and disaffected, Americans are desperate to feel something, believe someone, and rally behind a cause. Trump and the Republicans are filling this void with anger, hatred of difference, and sadistic fantasies of harm on an ever-proliferating cast of enemies. For those who seek to protect the possibility of democracy and a society organized around its ideals, we must provide a genuine alternative, before it’s too late.