Morality in the Age of Narcissistic Authoritarianism
Bending the Knee and Kissing the Ring
First published in Brussels Morning Newspaper. Concerning Narcissism is based in the U.S.
Brussels Morning is a daily newspaper out of Brussels, Belgium, that publishes unique and independent coverage of international and European affairs online and in print magazine. With a Europe-wide perspective, Brussels Morning covers policies and politics of the EU, significant Member State developments, and examines the international agenda from a European perspective.
With the backdrop referendum on wokeism that was the recent United States presidential election, voters overwhelmingly pushed back against moralizing woke ideology. For an ideology that ostensibly is post-judgment with its moral relativism and “anything-goes (but all that)” ethos, the electorate felt judged for their only crime of having reality-based standards, and therefore, they rendered a verdict in the court of popular opinion and the ballot box, judging wokeism to be ironically, judgmental.
The Premature Normalization of Trump
The subversion process per Yuri Bezmenov of America’s democracy into narcissistic authoritarianism involves four successive stages: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and finally, normalization.
Demoralization and destabilization have been well underway for years in America. Inaugurating Trump on January 20th, 2025, will be the inception of the crisis phase (if it’s not already underway with Trump’s administration picks), and then comes the settling in of normalization. When and how normalization sets in is dependent on individuals and institutions, though it is possible to prematurely normalize and go down without a fight.
The “Kiss the Ring” Scandal
Moralizing critics of broadcast journalists Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s program, Morning Joe castigate the pair for their over-the-weekend jaunt to Mar-A-Lago to “bend the knee” and “kiss the ring” in an obeisant act of submission to Trump. This out-of-the-blue visit with Trump has ignited a firestorm of backlash that they are “obeying in advance” and “cowardly.” Public figures are shaming Joe and Mika as buckling under and failing to hold Trump to account in a cynical ploy of access journalism.
In his defense, Scarborough said, “Don’t be mistaken. We’re not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump. We’re here to report on him and hopefully provide you insights that are going to better equip all of us in understanding these deeply unsettling times.”
Critical media presences include but are not limited to Steve Schmidt, David Pakman, Keith Olbermann, Megyn Kelly, Jeff Tiedrich, The Daily Show, The View, Jared Yates Sexton, and Andy Borowitz, to name but a few from both the right and the left. MSNBC host Katie Phang posted on X an apparent reference to Joe and Mika’s visiting Trump, “Normalizing Trump is a bad idea. Period.”
Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
— Oscar Wilde
Bombastic Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer attorney who did time, including solitary confinement, as collateral damage of Trump’s, was surprisingly even-handed in his appraisal of the Joe and Mika’s “Kiss the Ring” scandal, reminding Americans that Donald Trump will be president for all Americans and all journalists should keep open lines of communication.
Critics may rightly see the Morning Joe heads as the first significant dominos to fall into line with authoritarianism rather than providing a bulwark against it. The two have an extensive history of criticizing Trump as a fascist and a Hitler-esque figure. The trip was announced this past Monday, the 18th, as having taken place over the weekend of November 16th. After stabilizing from the tumult Tuesday, the program continued on track Wednesday, November 20th, reporting unease in Trump’s dangerous administration picks.
A more charitable take on this trip to meet with Trump to “restart communications” is that it was prudent both professionally and personally for Joe and Mika to resist being charged as an “enemy from within” and, with this charge, potential jail time. “According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Scarborough and Brzezinski have been credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration,” reports Brian Stelter for CNN. A sympathetic view would be that Joe and Mika are effectively corporate and political hostages and harbingers of more “sellouts” to come in a narcissistically authoritarian regime under Trump.
Journalism and its extension, mainstream media, have long served as the Fourth Estate in America’s Democratic Republic by mediating influential institutions in culture and politics. Corporate media dominance has been eroded in recent years by the ascent of online “news influencers,” the majority of whom are men (63%) who are more likely to be Republican Trump supporters (27% as opposed to 21% for Democratic Kamala). Nearly half of Americans under the age of 30 regularly get their news from influencers (4 in 10).
Professor, writer, and former research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), Renée DiResta reports, “News influencers often produce commentary built on traditional news reporting. The two ecosystems are deeply integrated, even as news influencers often frame themselves as some kind of oppositional alternative, i.e., the “independent” David vs. mainstream “Goliath.”
Commenting on the lack of trust in journalists and news, author and public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari recently stated that democracy is on the brink of collapse: “Democracy relies on trust. Dictatorship relies on terror. When you distrust, when you destroy trust in all institutions, the only way a society can keep functioning is by becoming a dictatorship because dictators don’t need trust. They use terror. If you don’t believe any journalist, if you don’t believe any scientist, if you don’t believe the people in the election committee, then no democratic institution can function.
And either you have anarchy, which most people don’t like, so they say, “Okay, let’s have a strongman that will just use terror to bring back order.” People sometimes think that when they start distrusting all these institutions, they are liberating themselves. In fact, they are paving the way for a dictatorship.”
Over the years, Trump has proven himself to be a menace to major networks, though the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which operates independently of the presidency, has been holding steady against Trump’s onslaughts.
Just this month, on November 1st, Trump filed a lawsuit against CBS Broadcasting Inc. and CBS Interactive Inc. to the tune of $10B. This lawsuit aims to revoke CBS’s broadcasting license over the standard editing of Kamala Harris for the program 60 Minutes.
The lawsuit alleges that CBS deliberately edited the interview to present her in a more favorable light in order to mislead the public and interfere with the 2024 presidential election. He contends that the edits were designed to obscure what he described as a “word salad” response, thereby misrepresenting her actual statements and making her appear more articulate and competent than she is.
MSNBC’s ratings have been tanking since Kamala’s defeat and, more pointedly, in the aftermath of Joe and Mika’s “Kiss the Ring” scandal, down 20% between the announcement of the trip to meet with Trump on Monday, November 18th, and the following day. Maintaining open lines of communication with the President of the United States could be a rating booster going forward, even for this liberal network. Also at stake is a $8M annual contract for each broadcast journalist, as Joe and Mika face some degree of career uncertainty with the post-election announcement of Comcast’s $7B spinning off of MSNBC along with other cable networks.
At root for the public’s diminishing trust in legacy media are conflicts of interests inherent to the agendas of big-moneyed corporate behemoths such as Comcast (e.g., the “Kiss the Ring” scandal) or Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post. WashPo has recently experienced a rash of unsubscribers in the wake of Bezos’ blocking his editorial board’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris before election day while simultaneously claiming on the paper’s masthead, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
When victimhood and narcissism become the organizing principle of your life and your civilization, you're bound to end up with totalitarianism and autocracy, not with democracy.
It’s likely during Trump 2.0 that Americans can anticipate friends and family to fold and become garden variety opportunists in our post-truth, post-values, post-modern world where Western, Judeo-Christian values have become antiquated and set you up for failure in a narcissistic and increasingly psychopathic world.
With an eye to the future beyond this age of narcissism is the oncoming age of psychopathy. Narcissists are amoral and see morality as an obstacle to their goal orientation in a culture that increasingly values as a positive adaptation narcissistic traits. Psychopathy is a shade darker than narcissism in that, unlike narcissism with its impaired reality testing, psychopaths are firmly rooted in reality — they just don’t care about your values, mores, and norms.
Psychopaths are not just amoral like narcissists, but anti-morality; thus, they are antisocial, hence antisocial personality disorder, the clinical term for psychopathy. Psychology is culture-bound, and people will begin to expect that not only are other people transactional, but they are exploitative, dressed up in a pro-social palatable veneer. America cast its vote for interpersonal exploitativeness in Trump. Even though 74 million Americans voted for Kamala, the bottom line is that the candidate who wins — the president — represents and comes to represent the fundamental values of the culture.
During the Renaissance, there was no negotiation of morality; morality was fixed and eternal. Narcissism expert, Prof. Vaknin has argued that we are returning to the dark ages of the Renaissance. It was the Enlightenment that encouraged healthy debate and gave rise to concepts such as free speech. A future with Renaissance characteristics would not brook dissent, which would be in keeping with our narcissistic age.
Democracy requires the recognition that everyone is equal to everyone, which a narcissist would never countenance or accept. And this entitled victimhood, which leads to narcissism and totalitarianism, undermines very important principles of civilization and organization, for example, meritocracy and free speech.
When being narcissistically abused, one is constantly asking oneself who one should be to secure loving acceptance from the narcissist, and this era is no different in a climate of political narcissistic abuse. In the quicksand of the abusive normalization process, the cultural imperative is towards everything to do with authoritarianism — fascistic dominance and submission. Anyone with good values is now a fuddy-duddy conservative and, worse yet, a loser. Reason is out, and brute force is in — the hallmarks of a regressed society and a failed civilization. The bar was set too high with logical, rational Enlightenment values. Now we are virtue signaling, value-less barbarians with tech’s multiplicities of “values,” stripped and laid bare of a common charter.
Character is really who you are. Character reflects the totality of your social, moral, religious attributes and your personality traits — behaviors, physique, body, and characteristics. When you put all these together, you get your character.
The word ‘character’ captures a person’s totality, quiddity, and essence.
There are too many incisive points in your writing to "amen." This one though was the least comprehensible to me and now is most telling. "Even though 74 million Americans voted for Kamala, the bottom line is that the candidate who wins — the president — represents and comes to represent the fundamental values of the culture." Of course. Duh, on my part.
I will say that folks who think of these days as a new development in the social, economic and political landscape of our country have too rosy and blinkered view of our past American experience - the parts that were also turbulent, contradictory, bloody and paranoid or mre benignly authoritarian. Just pick any decade.
For a standard text book when I was a kid in the 60's see "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter or even earlier see Henry L. Mencken or Mark Twain.
Your writing and thoughts are worthy additions to these trenchant observers and seers.
Thanks again, Ginger and good luck to us all..
Democracy is not about saving the institutions of government that are rotten to the core and do not serve the citizens, it is about the citizens having a say in who governs and how they are governed. We are in a HUGE shift in political landscape. If you trust the establishment, there are hundreds of examples in history where that doesn’t end well. Ask Louis XVI and Robespierre.