Welcome to the Mass Psychology of Violence American Style
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“There are days—this is one of them—when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. …I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they … have become in themselves moral monsters.”
– James Baldwin
The United States has slid into a form of political, economic, cultural, and social psychosis, evident in its cruel, neoliberal, democracy-hating policies unleashed since the 1970s. At the heart of its authoritarian and rogue state practices is a systemic war on workers, youth, Blacks, and immigrants, increasingly defined by the rise of mass violence and a punishing state both at home and abroad. The U.S. has morphed into an empire run by a callous, greedy, billionaire class that has destroyed all remnants of democracy, while embracing the fascistic ideology of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Fascism now wraps itself not only in the flag but the sordid embrace of the Christian cross. America has transitioned from the old-style celebration of unchecked individualism depicted by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged to the glorified greed advocated by Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street, and the inhumane, psychotic avarice of Patrick Bateman, dressed up in high fashion in American Psycho. This evolution of barbarity is further exemplified in the criminogenic images of right-wing Texas Christian preachers calling for gay people to “be shot in the back of the head.”[2] Welcome to Trump’s America.
With the death of the social contract emerged what Guy Debord called “a society of the spectacle,” characterized by death-dealing rituals, mass spectacles, and a psychotic infatuation with weapons of death. What is new here is a cultural sphere where irrationality functions as cultural glamour, and politics is dressed up in the ether of violence–a much-embraced ethical tranquilizer. The spectacle of the outrageous celebrates violence with a smirk. Remember those MAGA politicians wearing AR-15 pins after reports emerged of children’s bodies being blown apart in Uvalde, Texas. This spectacularizing of weapons of death adorned in family and distorted religious values was evident when right-wing politicians recently posed with AR-style rifles for Christmas card portraits, and churches in conservative states gave them away in raffles.
An ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action. Crimes against humanity now become fodder for video games and the Hollywood disimagination machine. All of which creates an ecology of cruelty and sadism that promotes a “symbiosis of suffering and spectacle.”[3]
Reuters reports that conservatives are pushing a bill in Congress to designate the AR-15 style rifle as “the National Gun of the United States.” Recently, an image surfaced of four elderly women in a church holding AR-15 rifles as part of a blessing ceremony. The staunch of death and moral vacuity oozes from these narratives. Some of the deadliest mass shootings in American history took place with these assault rifles. Against this mass psychology of fascism and ethicide is a history of children’s bodies blown apart by these weapons: 20 children killed in Newtown, Connecticut; 19 children killed in Uvalde, Texas; 17 students and educators killed in Parkland, Florida; 58 people killed and over 500 wounded in Las Vegas with assault weapons. Rather than mourn the deaths of children and others, the right-wing celebrates the weapons that killed them.
Even the widely condemned assassination attempt on former President Trump was turned into a promotional gimmick by the MAGA crowd, who sold sneakers featuring an image from the incident. Additionally, mindless conservative pundits and the MAGA propaganda machine leveraged the assassination attempt to portray Trump, once again, as a messianic figure, blending cultism, thoughtless loyalty and fanatical religious devotion into a toxic mix of fascist politics.
A culture that celebrates not just violence but the weapons that support it has lost its hold on humanity and celebrates itself through the rituals of barbarism. Violence is all that seems left for a large segment of society to feel anything, whether it be a sense of community or the weak pulse in the collective corpse-like body. In a society that turns AR-15 weapons into icons of violent masculinity and the adoration of death, all that is left are the screams of children and others who have embraced symbols of the bloodlust of a dark fascist present and future.
Violence is once again in the news with the assassination attempt on Trump. But rather than provoke a national conversation about violence as the most important mode of communication, commodification, and national identity, it is removed from the pathology of state-sponsored violence, a cultural mode of entertainment, a valued commodity, and any sense of responsibility or social and ethical consequences.
In light of the assassination attempt on Trump, the term “assassination” blazes across the front pages of the mainstream press and social media, serving more as a political ad and tool of propaganda than as a warning about a society mired in violence. What seems to have gone unnoticed in the mainstream media is a certain irony surrounding the attempt on Trump’s life, given his repeated false claims that the Feds and Biden were trying to assassinate him. In this case, politically motivated, hollow talk about falsely alleged assassination attempts on Trump moved from the spectacularized realm of fear-mongering and fictional victimhood to a potentially deadly reality. Make no mistake the visceral and dangerous reality of such violence—unadorned by lies and political opportunism–has taught Trump nothing. Trump has a long history of mocking violence against others, such as the near-fatal attack against Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a deranged right-winger. As a target of such violence, Trump reworks the language of violence into a “narcissistic public performance” of victimhood and the enduring strongman.
The horror here is unbelievable, wrapped in an arrogant blend of economic, political, and religious fundamentalism that does not merely cover up violence but is complicit in it. Violence and the AR-15 assault rifle have become the new symbols of this true assassination, emblematic of a culture of predatory carnage and cruelty reminiscent of the horrors of a fascist past. This is a violence that has more cultural currency than justice, compassion, care, and the radical values of a true democracy. It is a violence wedded to the celebration of the death of historical consciousness, the assassination of truth, an indifference if not emotional investment in the suffering and death of millions of children from poverty, war, and disease.
The clickbait image of the day shouldn’t be Trump raising his hand defiantly after an assassination attempt. Instead, it should be a powerful visual of the American flag and the Constitution, both riddled with bullet holes.
Notes.
[1] The title highlights Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). The U.S. government prohibited their sale and the sale of all of Reich’s books including The Mass Psychology of Fascism. He was imprisoned in a federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania where he died in 1957.
[2] Minyvonne Burke, “Texas pastor says gay people should be ‘shot in the back of the head’ in shocking sermon,” NBC News (June 9, 2022). Online: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/texas-pastor-says-gay-people-shot-back-head-shocking-sermon-rcna32748
[3] Mark Reinhardt and Holly Edwards, “Traffic in Pain,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 9.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
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