This essay is a lot more personal than any of my previous postings on this blog—or, indeed, any my writing anywhere else. It’s personal because it concerns a topic that is so important to me that I cannot bear to shroud it in a pretense of academic detachment and so overwhelmingly significant that the thought of writing about anything else seems grotesque.

2015年6月16日，唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)走下扶梯，来到以他名字命名的大厦的大堂，宣布他将参加总统竞选。这一声明让我的左倾学术朋友们感到非常有趣，他们认为他是一个小丑，他会为注定黯淡无光的共和党初选注入一些娱乐元素，尽管时间很短暂。听了特朗普的声明，以及他随后的演讲和辩论，我有了不同的感觉。焦虑开始折磨我的胃。“这个人真厉害，”我心里想。“他很危险，而且很有可能成为下一任美国总统。”我的朋友和同事们都很开心地取笑他——嘲笑他的头发，他独特的橙色，以及他喜欢用“巨大”来形容事物的习惯。但我在心里找不到加入这个聚会的理由。我不认为唐纳德·特朗普是一件可笑的事情。

As some readers may be aware, my research is mostly focused on the phenomenon of dehumanization. I look at how human beings come to conceive of other human beings as less than human. Consequently, I spend a great deal of time immersed in the study of some of the most hideous aspects of the human story—genocide, war, and oppression. I study the forms of political speech that make these horrors possible, and the psychological features that give this sort of rhetoric its purchase on human behavior. And as I listened to Trump’s announcement on that evening that now seems so long ago, his verbal choreography was all too familiar. He repeated, with remarkable fidelity, a rhetorical pattern that was used by Hitler and Goebbels during the 1930s.

The British psychoanalyst/philosopher Roger Money-Kyrle described and analyzed this pattern in a remarkable article entitled “The psychology of propaganda” published in 1941, and his analysis fit Trump’s speech like a glove. One reason why Money-Kyrle’s paper is so powerful is the fact that he was there. He attended Nazi rallies, listened to the speakers, and watched the behavior of the crowd. And while listening and watching he used his Freudian sensibilities to try and make sense of the horrible spectacle that was unfolding before his eyes. I described all of this, and a bit more, in a blog posting that was published here called,“The Politics of Illusion: From Socrates, Through Psychoanalysis, to Donald Trump.”This was in January 2016. A couple of months later, I was contacted by the journalist Gwynn Guilford, who told me that she was writing an article on the snowballing Trump phenomenon, and that she was interested in my perspective on it. Guilford attended three Trump rallies in Ohio, and wanted to test my claims against what she witnessed there. In her article“Inside the Trump machine: the bizarre psychology of America’s newest political movement,”which was published in Quartz on April 1, she commented “To test Smith’s case, I went through the many reams of observations I scribbled down reflecting on the Trump rallies. Nearly every paragraph fit Money-Kyrle’s sequence.” In the article, she explained exactly how.

As the months rolled by, my worries became more and more acute. I was losing sleep and had difficulty concentrating on my teaching. I was distracted and depressed. In the evenings I self-medicated with scotch.

让情况变得更奇怪的是，我的大多数学术朋友——主要是哲学家——似乎没有看到特朗普列车在轨道上疾驰带来的危险。我在社交媒体上发了越来越紧急的消息，有人向我保证，特朗普永远不会获得大量粉丝。当他的竞选声势壮大时，有人信心十足地告诉我，他永远不会获得共和党提名。在他每一次越来越离谱、越来越无礼的言论之后，我都试图向我的朋友们解释，这些情节——包括他关于抓女人生殖器的言论——只会让他的人气更加高涨。特朗普赢得提名后，有人向我保证，特朗普根本不可能赢得选举，甚至还有一位哲学家告诉我，从数学上讲，他不可能做到这一点(先验推理就到此为止了)。

这种否认的模式一直持续到11月9日晚上，那些该死的数字滚滚而来。至此，我对末日的预言为我赢得了“卡西”的绰号——“卡珊德拉”的缩写，她是被判做出预言的女祭司，虽然准确，但没有人相信。

But that wasn’t the end of it.

After a brief hiatus, many of my friends and colleagues found a way back to the comforting realm of denial. They started suggesting that maybe the Trump presidency won’t be all that bad after all. Surely, they said, he was just indulging in empty talk to garner support from the Republican base. He won’t really do those things. Even if it turns out that he means to put these crazy policies into effect, the Republican establishment won’t let him follow through. And even if Congress gives Trump the green light, our time-honored democratic institutions will keep things in check.

Really?

Trump is now making good on his promises. The deportations haven’t started yet, but they likely will soon. The Republicans have largely fallen into line, and Democratic opposition has been lukewarm. The Nazis had a word for what is going on right now. They called it Gleichschaltung, a word that referred to the process of falling into line with Nazi ideology. As Claudia Koonz points out in her book The Nazi Conscience, this word “has no equivalent in other languages.” “Gleich, “ she explains, “means both ‘equal’ and ‘the same.’ Schalten means ‘to shift.’ The conversion of A/C to D/C electrical current is a Gleichschaltung.” Koonz points out that many Germans did not need to be pushed or threatened. Instead, they brought themselves into line (in the lingo of the day, they engaged in Selbstgleichschaltung) and this insidious process “occurred so steadily, that most people hardly noticed” (Koonz, 2003, pp. 73-74).

特朗普的魅力和对其视而不见的倾向都源于同一个心理根源。为了理解这一根源，我们有必要转向西格蒙德·弗洛伊德(Sigmund Freud)的思想，他强调，我们与现实保持联系的能力既来之不易，也很脆弱。我们很难维持它，很容易陷入幻想。在日常生活中，“幻觉”被用来描述一种错误的信念。这些通常是感性的信念——例如，视觉错觉骗我们看到不存在的东西，或者是舞台魔术师故意制造的幻觉——但它们也可以是概念性的——例如，世界将在某一天结束的错误信念。然而，弗洛伊德所指的“幻觉”却完全不同。他认为幻觉是由愿望驱动的信念。换句话说，如果我们仅仅因为希望某件事是这样而相信它是这样，我们就会患上错觉。

Freudian illusions don’t have to be false (although they are likely to be false). It’s possible to believe something because you wish it to be true and—coincidentally—for that belief to turn out to be true. Whether a belief is true or not is irrelevant to its status as a Freudian illusion. What matters is what motivates the belief. Freud’s notion of wishing also departs from the everyday meaning of the word. In ordinary speech, wishes are deliberate and explicit states of mind: the things that we make just before blowing out the candles on the birthday cake. But for Freud, wishing is an automatic, unconscious process. It is the deep and ineradicable tendency to misapprehend the world—to picture it in a way that seamlessly accords with our desires

如果弗洛伊德是对的(我认为他是对的)，那么在人性的核心中就存在着蔑视和破坏政治理性的东西。毕竟，政治关系到人类的基本需求以及如何满足这些需求。因此，它为幻想提供了肥沃的土壤。在我之前的帖子中，我引用了Money-Kyrle的文章，描述了特朗普如何操纵错觉倾向，首先让他的听众感到无助和受到威胁，然后为他们提供拯救，使他们摆脱这种可怕的状况。正是人类对幻觉的倾向让特朗普当选，也正是这种倾向让许多思维正常的人——包括许多对理性霸权过分自信的哲学家——对真正发生的事情视而不见。

That this country is moving down the road towards fascism is now difficult to deny. Every day seems to bring new and more disturbing news about the priorities and activities of the men and women in whose hands we have placed the future of our nation. Whereas comparisons between Trump and Hitler (or Mussolini) were once routinely shrugged off as hyperbolic, they are rapidly gaining credibility, while references to “the resistance” are increasingly commonplace. Women and men have taken to the streets, turning out in record numbers to protest against the new regime. These are all important developments, but it is also important not to overestimate them. Once the euphoria generated by the magnificent protests has worn off, and resistance becomes more and more costly, we will be inclined to close our eyes, get on with our lives, and yield to the enticements of Selbstgleichschaltung.

Let’s remain vigilant. Please.