DEMOCRACY EATCHWhy Have Authoritarianism and Libertarianism Merged? A Political Psychologist on “the Vulnerability of the Modern Self”
Logically, authoritarianism and libertarianism are contradictory. Yet there is a history of these two outlooks being intertwined. A psychological approach can help us to understand the dynamics of this puzzling fusion. As Erich Fromm and others have shown, our ideological affinities are linked to unconscious structures of feeling. At this level, authoritarianism and libertarianism are the interchangeable products of the same underlying psychological difficulty: the vulnerability of the modern self.
Logically, authoritarianism and libertarianism are contradictory. Supporters of authoritarian leaders share a state of mind in which they take direction from an idealized figurehead and closely identify with the group which that leader represents. To be libertarian is to see the freedom of the individual as the supreme principle of politics. It is core to the economics and politics of neo-liberalism, as well as to some bohemian counter-cultures.
As a state of mind, libertarianism is superficially the opposite of authoritarianism. Identification with the leader or group is anathema and all forms of authority are regarded with suspicion. Instead the ideal is to experience oneself as a self-contained, free agent.
Yet there is a history of these two outlooks being intertwined. Consider Donald Trump, whose re-election in 2024 would be seen by many as adding to the international rise of authoritarianism.
Others might see him as insufficiently focused to be an effective authoritarian leader, but it’s not difficult to imagine him governing by executive order, and he has successfully sought an authoritarian relationship with his followers. He is an object of idealization and a source of “truth” for the community of followers he purports to represent.
Yet at the same time, in his rhetoric and his persona of predatory freewheeler, in his wealth and indifference to others, Trump offers a hyper-realization of a certain kind of individualistic freedom.
Trumpism’s fusion of the authoritarian and the libertarian was embodied in the January 6 attack in Washington DC. The insurgents who stormed the Capitol that day passionately wanted to install Trump as an autocratic leader. He had not, after all, won a democratic election.
But these people were also conducting a carnivalesque assertion of their individual rights, as they defined them, to attack the American state. Among them were followers of the bizarre conspiracy theory QAnon, who lionized Trump as the heroic authority figure secretly leading the fightback against a child-torturing cabal of elites.
Alongside them were the Proud Boys, whose misty libertarianism is paired with a proto-authoritarian commitment to politics as violence.
New Age Meets Anti-vax
Conspiracy theories are also involved in other recent examples of authoritarian-libertarian hybridity. Beliefs that COVID-19 vaccines (or lockdowns, or the virus itself) were attempts by a malevolent power to attack or control us were fueled by a growing army of conspiracists. But they were also facilitated by libertarian ideologies which rationalize suspicion of and antipathy towards authority of all sorts – and support refusals to
