Beware of Sacred Leaders

Trump, Hitler, Freud, and the Future of an Illusion

I write these words on the eve a momentous presidential election. Will the next president of the United States be Donald Trump or Kamala Harris? And what consequences will there be in either case?

There is a mood of apprehension in the country. Many dread a second Trump presidency. The former (and perhaps future) president has promised mass deportations and the prosecution of his political enemies once he is in power. And many of Trump’s supporters are convinced that the continued existence of the United States will only be vouchsafed by his re-election, and fear that a deep state conspiracy will steal the election from him. With so much seemingly at stake, there is a scent of political violence in the air.

I’ve made no secret of my belief that Donald Trump is a very dangerous man. He is an example of what I call a “sacred leader.”

Political movements generally hold values that their they regard as sacred. These values are held to be inviolable and incontestable. Members of fascist movements also embrace sacred values, but what sets them apart from other political movements is that the leader is held to be sacred. Devotion to a set of inviolable and incontestable values is augmented or replaced by devotion to an inviolable and incontestable leader.

Sacred leaders are charismatic. Max Weber, defined “charisma” as “a certain quality in an individualized personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers…on the basis of the individual concerned is treated as a ‘leader.’” Because of his special status, followers’ devotion to their sacred leader exceeds mere admiration. Their devotion has a religious—or, if you prefer, quasi-religious—character.

Adolf Hitler is the paradigmatic example of a sacred leader. Many historians have noted that the Hitler cult had affinities with a religious movement. American journalist William Shirer recalled that the Nuremberg rally that he attended, “had something of the mysticism and religious fervor of an Easter or a Christmas mass in a great gothic cathedral…. I got caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics who jammed the moat in front of Hitler’s hotel…. They looked up at him as though he were a Messiah, their faces transformed.” Ian Kershaw notes in The Hitler Myth:

Eyewitnesses of…mass meetings in the presence of the Führer have testified that for those taking part the atmosphere and effect was closer to that of a religious than to that of a ‘normal’ political rally. There seems little doubt that for the millions who were already ‘Hitler believers’ or were in the process of ‘conversion,’ the ‘religious’ dimension was a powerful component of the ‘Führer myth‘….Goebbels’ own descriptions of major Hitler rallies and speeches frequently had a pronounced sacral tone, as in 1936 when he depicted Hitler’s ‘election’ speech in Cologne as ‘religion in the deepest and most mysterious sense of the word,’ in which ‘a nation professed its belief in God through its spokesman, and put its faith and life trustingly in his hands (Kershaw, 1987, p. 108).

Sacred leaders promise their followers salvation. After attending one of Hitler’s rallies, a Hamburg schoolteacher wrote, “How men look up to him with touching faith…as their savior—their deliverer from unbearable distress.” A poem commemorating Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, began, “Now has the Godhead a savior sent, Distress its end has passed.” Hermann Göring—commander in chief of the Air Force and Hitler’s designated successor—exclaimed, “There is something mystical, inexpressible, almost incomprehensible about this one man…. We love Adolf Hitler because we believe, deeply and steadfastly, that he was sent to us by God to save Germany.”

Followers of the sacred leader are prepared to make sacrifices—including human sacrifices—in his name. The day after Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide Joseph and Magda Goebbels murdered their six children and then killed themselves. A letter Magda wrote to her adult son just before she and her husband took their own lives is revealing, “The world after the Führer and National Socialism will not be worth living in, and therefore I have taken my children away…. We have now only one aim, loyalty unto death to the Führer.” Julius Streicher went even further, proclaiming Hitler’s spiritual immortality. Shortly before his execution he wrote “The Leader is not dead! He lives on in the creation of his near-divine spirit!”

How can we account for the magnetic appeal of fascist leaders? How do such leaders manage to elicit such a depth of fanaticism their followers?

I think that Sigmund Freud can help us out.

Most writers using Freudian theory to analyze fascism draw on his 1921 book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, published in 1921. Freud’s analysis fits National Socialism so well that Hitler’s biographer John Toland suggested that Hitler used Freud’s text as a handbook to craft his political trajectory. My focus here, however, is on The Future of an Illusion, published in 1927, which was Freud’s main work on the psychology of religion. Given the quasi-religious character of sacred leadership, Freud’s text is enlightening.

Freud argues that religious beliefs are illusions. He defines illusions as follows. “We call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relation to reality.” Illusions don’t have to be false. They can turn out, coincidentally, to be true. And there are plenty of false beliefs that don’t count as illusions in Freud’s sense of the word. What is crucial to illusions is their disregard for evidence.

Freud argues that religious beliefs are fueled by our awareness of helplessness in the face of the forces of nature, our inevitable mortality, and the suffering and injustice that is imposed by our fellow human beings. This awareness of helplessness evokes unconscious memories of “the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood” which “aroused the need for protection—protection through love—which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one.”

We look to an almighty father do deliver us from the terrors of helplessness. Because there is so much at stake, religious illusions are extraordinarily compelling. At the extreme, they approximate delusions in their incontestability and insensitivity to evidence. This is because they are fueled by what Freud describes as “the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind.”

The sacred leader presents himself as God’s chosen. He seems to his followers to be wrapped in an aura of sanctity. How do such unprepossessing characters as Adolf Hitler (an unemployed failed artist), Benito Mussolini (an unemployed stone mason), and now Donald Trump (a sleazy real estate magnate) manage to pull this off? As Freud’s theory predicts, such leaders cultivate this impression by eliciting feelings of helplessness in their followers and then offering them salvation—salvation, he assures them, that only he, the leader, can provide.

This pattern is abundantly clear in the kind propaganda that such leaders characteristically employ. They paint apocalyptic word pictures of doom and gloom—of failure, humiliation, and decay—and then blame this on a malevolent and degenerate enemy within. The leader then presents himself as a hero who can vanquish this enemy and herald a future paradise of triumph, abundance, and success—a veritable paradise on earth.

I do not need to belabor the point that Donald Trump has consistently used this rhetorical formula to fuel the MAGA movement. History has shown just how powerful it is. For Hitler, the enemy within consisted of Jews and Communists. For Trump it is “illegals,”and his political opponents.

Tonight, I am worried. We live in dangerous times. Tomorrow, I will vote and sit and wait to see what comes next….