Show Notes
In 1941, a man who had just escaped Nazi Germany sat down at Columbia University and tried to answer the most important question of the twentieth century. It was not “how did Hitler take power?” Historians had already begun documenting that. The question Erich Fromm needed to answer was different. It was worse. Why did the people let him? Not the inner circle. Not the military leaders or the party functionaries or the industrialists who funded the operation. The ordinary people. The shopkeepers and teachers and factory workers and farmers who watched a democratic republic dismantle itself and did not just allow it to happen but cheered while it did. Fromm published his answer in a book called Escape from Freedom. The book argued that fascism is not imposed on a population from the outside. It is chosen from the inside. By people who are free. Who have the ability to think for themselves. And who voluntarily surrender that ability because the weight of freedom has become more than they can carry. Eighty-four years later, the book reads like a field manual for understanding the United States of America.
The Core of Fromm’s Argument Fromm identified a paradox at the center of modern life that most political theorists had missed entirely. The modern era liberated human beings from the constraints that had organized their lives for centuries. Feudalism collapsed. The authority of the church weakened. Rigid class systems loosened. People gained the freedom to choose their own beliefs, their own careers, their own identities. For the first time in history, the individual was free. But Fromm saw what that freedom actually produced in millions of people. Not confidence. Not creativity. Not self-determination. Anxiety. Isolation. A paralyzing sense of insignificance. He called this the burden of freedom. The distinction he made was between two types of freedom. Freedom from is liberation from external constraints. You are free from the king, from the church, from the rigid hierarchy that told you who you were and what your life meant. Freedom to is the capacity to use that liberation productively. To create meaning. To build relationships. To construct a life that matters on your own terms. The modern world delivered freedom from. It did not deliver freedom to. Millions of people were liberated from the structures that had oppressed them and left standing in an open field with no direction, no community, no framework for meaning, and no one to tell them what to do next. For psychologically strong individuals, this is an opportunity. For everyone else, it is a crisis. Fromm argued that when the anxiety of freedom becomes unbearable, people do not fight to preserve it. They run from it. They seek out any structure, any leader, any movement that promises to take the burden away. They surrender their autonomy in exchange for certainty. They trade self-determination for belonging. They hand their freedom to someone else and feel relief, not loss. He called this the escape from freedom. And he identified three mechanisms through which it happens. The first is authoritarianism. The person submits to a leader and allows the leader to do their thinking for them. The submission feels like strength because the leader projects power and the follower absorbs it by association. The second is destructiveness. The person attempts to destroy the world that makes them feel small. If the institutions, the experts, the systems, the cultural changes are what make freedom feel unbearable, then destroying those things feels like liberation. The third is automaton conformity. The person abandons individual thought entirely and thinks whatever the group thinks. They adopt the opinions, the language, the values, and the emotional reactions of the crowd. They experience this as thinking for themselves because the group’s thoughts have replaced their own so completely that the substitution is invisible. MAGA does all three simultaneously. And six decades of psych
More from The Lucas Bean Show
There is a particular kind of man who shows up to political rallies in body armor he bought online, drives a truck that has never hauled anything, and screams about strength while falling apart the moment someone disagrees with him. He is not hard to spot. He is the loudest person in any room he enters. He is also, according to decades of research, the most frightened. The video that accompanies this piece covers sociologist Robb Willer’s research on masculine overcompensation: the finding that men whose masculinity is threatened respond with exaggerated displays of dominance, aggression, and toughness. The effect is consistent and measurable. It shows up in attitudes toward war, attitudes toward gay people, and even in what kind of car a man wants to buy. But the research goes much deeper than one study, and the implications stretch far beyond a rally.
There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.