"Femiphobia" motivates MAGA males: Psychologist Stephen Ducat on the gendered tribalism of Trumpism

At this point, with fewer than three weeks until Election Day, warning the American people that the election is an existential matter for the future of their democracy and freedom is the equivalent of telling a person who has suffered for years with a chronic illness that they may be unwell. Such words are repetitive and have long lost the impact of the initial diagnosis. Instead, the Kamala Harris campaign and news media should be explicit and direct about the pain, suffering and horror that a second Trump regime will inflict on the American people.

The corrupt right-wing justices on the Supreme Court have decided that Donald Trump cannot be held responsible for acts in office under the law. The former president has vowed to be a "dictator" on "day one" regarding deregulation.

He has promised to get revenge on his and the MAGA movement’s so-called enemies. Trump has also repeatedly threatened his “enemies” (which means anyone who dares to oppose him) with prison and death. During a Sunday interview, Trump told Fox Business News that he would use the military to crush “the leftists” and the “enemies within” the country (again, which means anyone who opposes Trump or that he does not like). Such an agenda would apply well beyond any hypothetical protests against Trump on Election Day if he were to somehow defeat Harris. Violence is a defining feature of dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes.

During a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg News at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump refused to commit to supporting or participating in a peaceful transition of power following the 2024 election. Trump also told Bloomberg News that the Jan.6 attack on the Capitol by his MAGA followers “was love and peace.”

Trump will also devastate the American economy through mass deportations of millions of “illegal aliens.” Trump has signaled that other “enemies” would likely be stripped of their citizenship rights as Americans and deported as well. In all, Trump wants to “purify” the “blood” of the nation by purging it of all “undesirables” – as defined by his corrupt personal standards and fascist political vision.

Trump has many millions of followers. Public opinion and other research have shown that Trump and his propagandists have conditioned the MAGA people and other neofascists for violence against Democrats, liberals, non-white people and the other “enemies” of “real America.” CNN recently traveled to Brantley County, Georgia, which is a bastion of Trumpism. One man, who identifies as an independent voter, told CNN that his Trump-loving neighbors "[W]ould kill for him, I think.” Such a warning is much more than one Georgia man’s experience, it embodies the extreme national anxiety and the general mood of the Age of Trump and acutely so in the final weeks before Election Day.

Stephen Ducat is an author, political psychologist, psychoanalyst and former psychology professor in the School of Humanities at New College of California. His new book is “Hatreds We Love: The Psychology of Political Tribalism in Post-Truth America.” In this conversation, Ducat warns that racial fascists and authoritarians such as Donald Trump and the MAGA movement possess a deep desire to “purify” society by eliminating the Other through violence and other destructive means. He also connects Trump and the MAGA movement’s yearning for and compulsion to political and other forms of violence to white identity politics and hostile sexism and misogyny. At the end of this conversation, Ducat reflects on whether it is possible to stop the MAGA movement and American neofascism given their deep roots in the country’s history and the much larger societal problems and crises that spawned such a destructive and antihuman political vision.

This is the second part of a two-part conversation.

Your new book is titled, “Hatreds We Love.” Please elaborate on and contextual that title.

Hating outsiders can make it easier to love insiders. The putative “cuddle hormone,” oxytocin, has been found to not only facilitate group bonding but also, as a result, make killing those in enemy groups less troubling.

Those in out-groups can function like a psychological toilet. We attribute what we don’t want to see in ourselves to “them.” “They” come to embody pure evil, absolute filth and malicious intent. That helps us to see ourselves as containing unalloyed goodness, purity and virtue.

Killing off the complex humanity of our opponents in our minds makes it easier to kill them literally in the world. A glance at wartime propaganda posters from all nations makes that quite evident. Sam Keen gathered them in his 1991 book “Faces of the Enemy.” Warring nations depicted their opponents as vermin, insects, pathogens, monsters and predatory animals through those images.

Trump is continuing to escalate his Hitler-Nazi talk and threats. The mainstream media continues to treat this as mere hyperbole. Trump and his agents and followers are very serious. Why is the mainstream news media afraid to tell the obvious truth about Trump and his movement’s extreme danger to American society?

Mainstream journalism has long been grounded in two core values: non-partisan neutrality and objectivity. As we know, it has often failed to live up to those principles. It is common for partisan passions and selective fact-telling to shape reporting, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. However, in the era of MAGA post-truth, those two values have come into inexorable conflict.

Now that lying has become the default mode of public communication for the new Trumpian GOP, it is no longer possible for journalists to be both politically neutral and tell the truth. While the “both sides” notion was always false, it is less tenable than ever to argue that the truth lies somewhere in the fictitious middle between partisan polarities. If journalism's “bias” is to report what is factual, that kind of “neutrality” in the age of Trump is rapidly becoming an anachronism of false equivalence. Real neutrality means calling out every party’s lies, even if they mostly come from one side.

Journalists sometimes try to manage that dilemma and stay above the partisan fray by limiting their role to stenography: “Today, Donald Trump announced to a cheering crowd that dark-skinned migrants are genetically predisposed to crimes like rape and murder, eat your cats and dogs and take all the hospital beds. In other news, the 2024 college football rankings are now in. Back to you, Bob, for the full story on that….”

Trump is obsessed with Hannibal Lecter and telling the lie that Black and brown "illegal aliens” are cannibalistic serial killers. He recently held a rally in Aurora, Colorado where he pledged an even more aggressive deportation and concentration camp plan by invoking the Alien Enemies Act. This law was used to put Japanese Americans in concentration camps. His other enemies will likely be deported or worse as well. Trump has also fantasized about a "bloody story" of mass deportations of non-white “illegal aliens.” He also expressed a desire to unleash violent police enforcers to rampage and kill at will. This is right out of the framework and argument of your book ‘Hatreds We Love.”

One of the key moral intuitions of right-wingers is “purity.” A moral intuition is a value that is not fully conscious and is the unexamined foundation of many seemingly distinct issues, such as immigration, gender and sexual beliefs and the need to censor. Trump is both embedded in that concern and effectively exploits it in his followers. According to reporting the Washington Post, when traveling, Trump prefers staying in Holiday Inns because they have light-color floors. Similarly, as noted on NBC News, the former president’s private plane is covered in a pale carpet. Both outlets note that those preferences are because they enable him to detect dirt. He is a well-known germophobe, which is also reflected in his dietary preferences. Prepackaged fast food seems cleaner to him, toxic industrial chemicals notwithstanding.

He and his base live in a binary psychological world, in which all that is dirty and clean, bad and good, reviled and revered, criminal and virtuous, feminine and masculine, and non-white and white must be kept apart lest the former in these binaries contaminate the latter. All that is repellent in oneself and one’s tribe is projected onto a devalued other. That is the mental correlate of Trump’s literal wall and the one he actually helped build. It is the fantasy of an impermeable barrier that allows one’s purity to remain unsullied. It is not hard to see a link between this psychological preoccupation and the eliminationists and other mass murder policies of genocidal leaders, including, for example, Hitler, Milosevic, ISIS, Putin and should he regain power, Trump. It is no accident that the term ethnic cleansing has endured as a descriptor of those atrocities. As crucial as purification is, the sadistic violence necessary to achieve it is just as gratifying.

The MAGA vision of mass deportation, along with migrant and dissident internment camps, share the end goal of the wall. But instead of a barrier to keep out the impure, they are means of removing it, of excreting all that “poisons the blood,” to use Trump’s Hitlerian metaphor.

Trumpism like today’s version of “conservatism”, is a form of white identity politics. Gender and a particular type of white masculinity are also central to Trumpism and “conservatism.”

To understand MAGA males, we must take a bit of a detour into the psychology of conservative men more generally. In 2005, I wrote a book examining how men's fear of the feminine, inside and outside the self – what I called "femiphobia" – shapes their political attitudes and behavior. Titled “The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity,” it revealed how this femiphobia is a driving force in men’s choice of candidates, stances on a wide variety of political issues, their embrace of fundamentalist religions and support for wars of conquest. This fear has a profound negative impact on men's mental and physical health. In general, that anxiety shows up in the defenses against it through a wide variety of hypermasculine poses, declarations and enactments. To the extent that all males share similar socialization in mainstream masculinity to some degree, every man tends to struggle with it. However, my research found that femiphobia in conservative men has more of an impact on their social and political behavior than in liberal men.

In “Hatreds We Love,” I update my earlier analysis in light of the much starker partisan divisions that have emerged in the past decade and a half and show the increased role of femiphobia in forming and consolidating contemporary political tribalism. For example, the gender gap in candidate support and issue stances has grown significantly since my last book was published. Contemporary femiphobia is not confined to the answers people give to pollster questions but is also readily visible in the behavior of right-wing males. The defensive hypermasculinity on display among today's Republican men, especially at MAGA rallies and emanating from nearly every one of Trump's public communications and displays of body language, have been obvious and cringe-inducing for many observers.

The former president's unintentionally comical strutting, boasting and chest-beating have been emulated ad absurdum by his male followers and right-wing militia supporters. MAGA males seem to oscillate between shame and hubris. Shame is felt over the mortifying parts of the self that are experienced as feminine. Hubris is the defensive arrogance designed to eclipse, disavow and compensate for any perceived “feminine” weakness.

A major aim of conservative elites has always been to diminish class as a salient aspect of political identity. This goes back to America’s strata of wealthy enslavers who used white privilege as an incentive to squelch labor unrest among white males by giving them a group to dominate. Their message was essentially, “You may be a class bottom in relative to us, but your status as white and male makes you a top in the world of zero-sum power relations.”

Trump went back to Butler, Pennsylvania, to hold a return rally. There was opera music. He was deified again. He is now presenting himself as some type of God King and Chosen One. His followers see him in those terms. This is especially true for the Christian authoritarians. How did you read Trump's second Butler rally?

Trump consistently frames his own murderous aggression as simple retaliation against being victimized by liberal persecutors. Trump seizes every opportunity to play the crucified Christ but one that will never turn the other cheek. His followers intuitively attached panty liners to their ears, donning the new MAGA crucifix to honor their savior’s survival of an attempted assassination. So, of course, Trump’s return to Springfield was his version of the resurrection – a demonstration of God’s intervention and preference for the GOP candidate. It was also designed as political theater to show his indestructibility.

Will mocking and making fun of Trump and his MAGA people and other followers have any constructive impact on stopping them and saving American democracy?

As challenging as it might be to communicate compassion for members of a racist and misogynist national lynch mob, it is vital to create a welcoming psychological pathway for cult followers to break their fusion with the cult leader and reenter a world not animated by contempt, bitterness and delusion. While they are victims, they are also agents. In my book, I discuss some possible strategies for speaking to that agency in a way that can shift their identity.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Malignant but fragile cult leaders, like Trump, are another matter. Mockery has often been a useful tool among the many needed to deflate the posture of omnipotence that actual and aspiring autocrats like to adopt. For example, in the 1930s, we saw this put to effective use in the subversive anti-Nazi photomontage posters of the German resistance artist John Heartfield. Hitler had fits of rage over those comically deflating memes. Authoritarian, narcissistic leaders like Trump are profoundly brittle. This is why it is such a mistake to call them “strongmen,” which is how they long to be seen. Playful humiliation does not roll off their backs but can produce a defensive response that reveals their weakness. It is something Kamala Harris and her campaign have understood and deployed skillfully.

How do the white supremacist attacks by Trump and his agents on the Black Haitian community in Springfield fit with the “Hatreds We Love”?

JD Vance is undoubtedly far more educated and culturally sophisticated than Trump. During the debate, as with his xenophobic fantasies about Springfield’s Haitian immigrants, he has shown himself particularly adept at what Republicans have long turned into an art form – lying with conviction. More broadly, Vance has demonstrated the requisite moral squishiness, flexible principles and mercenary instincts to be the former president’s running mate. Politically, he raised himself up by billionaire Peter Thiele’s bootstraps. It is hard to divine Trump’s thinking in selecting Vance. I suppose he thought Vance would somehow capture younger conservatives, function as Thiele-donation bait, be the loyal soldier Pence failed to be when it came to ending democracy and play the role of MAGA mini-me that would gratify the former president’s narcissism.

Whatever Trump’s calculus, Vance turned out to be simply Trump times two – another misogynist, another contemptuous culture warrior, another opponent of democracy, another xenophobic and racist vilifier of immigrants,and another isolationist willing to surrender to Putin. One source of optimism for the pro-democracy coalition is that Vance’s old and tired ideas nullify any “youthfulness” his age was intended to represent. As a result, he has become the natural target of mercilessly satirizing memes by a newly empowered and enthusiastic Gen Z.

Can Trumpism, American neofascism and the deep cultural problems that birthed such a horrible machine be turned off? If so, how?

While the psychology of MAGA conservatives can’t be turned off, it may be possible to redirect it to different ends. In the book's final chapter, I show how bridges might be built between the moral intuitions of conservatives (purity, loyalty and sanctity) and those of liberals (fairness, equity and care). If those on the Left can present their concerns in the moral metaphors of the Right, addressing conditions that affect us all, like the rapidly worsening climate emergency, may be possible. In other words, we can present an appeal to reduce global warming in the moral categories that are meaningful to those on the Right. We can talk about reducing CO2 as a path to creating a purer world, one in which the sanctity of the environment is preserved and through which we can express love and loyalty toward our families and communities.

Trump has repeatedly said he will be a dictator on "day one." What will this mean for the "average American" and their day-to-day lives?

In our tribally bisected nation, there is no longer an average American. There are those who comprise the broad multi-ethnic pro-democracy coalition and those who are either passively or actively aligned with the theocratic, ethnonationalist and authoritarian MAGA faction. It is pretty likely that if Trump manages to ascend to the White House for a second time, the former – folks like you and I – will have to watch what we say and to whom. Criticism of the regime will be met with brutal repression.

And it won’t be just a newly politicized police and military that will go after us; ordinary citizens of the MAGA “street” will, like in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s and now Putin’s Russia, feel compelled to rout out the liberal rabble and report the “crimes” of their neighbors. It could be a thoughtless joke, reading a banned book, harboring migrants marked for deportation, impeding untrammeled “drill-baby-drill” resource extraction, or attending an underground reproductive health clinic that sends us to the new Trump gulag. (My dystopian imaginings are based chiefly on what Trump has already promised to do.)

For nearly half the country that wants to see Trump crowned God-King, his assumption of absolute power will be felt as a glorious achievement, at least initially. It will mean the swarthy, rapacious, thieving, murderous, pedophilic, drug-addled, job-stealing filth of the planet will be kept out of their all-good, virtuous and White Christian nation. And those who have managed to infect the country will be removed or eliminated. The family will be restored to what God intended. The moral purity of children will be ensured by Bible lessons taught in public school, supplemented with whatever corporal punishment juvenile misbehavior mandates. Women will be returned to their rightful place on the honorable pedestals of motherhood and wifely servitude. Men will be granted the privileges to which their sex entitles them. Of course, Trump and his collaborators will be exempted from all religious proscriptions and mandates because whatever he does is, by definition, divinely ordained, which has always been the case for his followers.

Elections will be regarded as a relic of the bad old days since they were always stolen by those who didn’t deserve power. Lastly, there will be little nostalgia for democracy, at least until the endless pursuit of purity marks even devout MAGA adherents as vectors of political or spiritual contamination, just like in the witch hunts of earlier times.

I do think there are two experiences both groups of ordinary Americans will share. First, the wealthy will be even more exempt from taxation, forcing the working and middle classes to endure more economic strain. Second, environmental deregulation, coupled with the transformation of health care into a luxury commodity, will have devastating health consequences for everyone.