America’s Bullying Persona

As I look at the concerns identified in Part I of this essay, so many of them — authoritarian domination, rage and anger, cruelty, gaslighting, and cancel culture — capture the dynamics of bullying and the tools of bullies. This is both personally distressing and professionally relevant.

Since 1998, a considerable portion of my attention as a law professor and legal scholar has been devoted to understanding bullying, mobbing, and harassment in the workplace. This focus has produced a considerable body of scholarship about the legal and policy implications of workplace bullying, including the first comprehensive analysis of the need for new legal protections against severe bullying at work (Georgetown Law Journal, 2000). Furthermore, partnering with Drs. Gary and Ruth Namie of the Workplace Bullying Institute, I have drafted, and advocated for, legal responses to this destructive form of interpersonal abuse. (You may read about all of these developments on my Minding the Workplace blog, here.)

For the longest time, I regarded this work as a niche specialization, a deep dive typical of what academics do via their research and publishing. But in recent years, it has become evident that understanding bullying and related behaviors at work helps us to interpret current trends in society at large, especially civic and political life in the U.S. Now, with the return of Donald Trump to the White House, America has officially become a bullying nation. We truly have entered our Dark Age.

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It is tempting to obsess over our deterioration toward this challenging place. Doomscrolling is, after all, easy. However, ruminating over these disturbing trends will not put us in a healthier, more sustainable direction. (Believe me, I’ve tried.) We also need to foster an appealing vision for our lives and communities, as well as offer ideas for how to reach those places via our legal and political systems.

To the extent that I can contribute to this broader conversation, my thoughts are a work-in-progress. As such, what follows is a bit more personal in tone, reflecting a lot of personal and intellectual influences that have brought me to this point, as well as some plain thinking out loud. Here goes….

Notes Toward a Better Society

Envisioning the “Good Life”

What kind of lives do we want to live — in America and elsewhere? In search of this vision, I first turn to the work of a late dear friend, John Ohliger (1926-2004), a pioneering, iconoclastic adult educator, writer, and activist. I will then again reference the writings of Bertram Gross, whose important work is discussed Part I.

John Ohliger

John Ohliger enjoyed a rich life steeped in the world of adult education. At one point in his career, it appeared he might settle down into a more conventional path, having earned tenure as a professor at Ohio State University. Ever rebellious and restless, however, he would voluntarily resign his faculty position in the early 1970s and relocate to Madison, Wisconsin. There he would fashion a self-styled role as an independent intellectual and activist. (For more about Ohliger’s life and work, see this book chapter that I wrote about his unique public intellectual role.)

By the early 1980s, Ohliger anticipated deeper conflicts over wealth and material goods in American society. In a 1982 essay, “Adult Education in a World of Excessive Riches/Excessive Poverty,” he drew upon the work of fellow adult educator Phyllis Cunningham and futurist Michael Marien to sketch out two competing narratives about how we might live.

The first narrative envisioned a “technological, top-down, service society” that defined “the ‘good life’ as affluence and leisure with high-tech big technology solving problems which lead to mastery of the environment.”

The second, more desirable narrative envisioned the “good life” as embracing “useful work, peace, self-fulfillment, and appropriate technology leading to harmony with the environment.” He further elaborated upon the latter:

My picture is of a future where we live more relaxed and more modest lives with an abundance of unmeasurable and infinitely available non-material (or better, trans-material) resources. All the travail and pressure we’re going through right now may be paving the way for that future. This future could be one where we will have a choice of “goodies”; not ones requiring scarce energy, minerals, or dollars; or ones permitting some people to get rich while others go hungry, but choices that we create with our own hearts and heads and hands among people we know and care for.

Bertram Gross

Bertram Gross, whose work is discussed in Part I, offered similarly contrasting visions of how American society might unfold. In the preface to the 1982 edition of Friendly Fascism, he briefly explained them:

The first is a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership. . . .

…The other is a slower and less powerful tendency for individuals and groups to seek greater participation in decisions affecting themselves and others. . . . It is embodied in larger values of community, sharing, cooperation, service to others and basic morality as contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition.

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Both Ohliger and Gross were taking aim at a kind of technocratic, top-down society now in vogue today. It is disheartening to see how on-target they were in anticipating our current state of affairs.

Nevertheless, their idealized visions of what life in America (and elsewhere) could look like remain enormously appealing. To get there, we must substantially reverse course, rejecting authoritarians like Trump and heartless high-tech moguls like Elon Musk. I don’t believe, however, that we must necessarily pursue a radically opposite extreme. Some five years ago, with the pandemic bearing down on our lives, I wrote this about the kind of changes we need:

OK, I confess, as far as pathways to change go, I’m not a revolutionary or a creative destruction guy. I believe in a mixed economy with strong private, public, and non-profit sectors, offering opportunities for enterprise, efficient public services, humane social safety nets, and protections in the form of checks & balances. My politics are that of an old-fashioned liberal, holding that government can and should serve the common good. My views on law and public policy are critically informed by the school of therapeutic jurisprudence, which calls upon us to view our laws and legal institutions through a lens of human dignity and societal well-being.

That said, I do believe that our world needs some dramatic changes. Indeed, for over a decade, I’ve…urge[d] that our workplace laws and policies should advance human dignity. Our obsessions with short-term profits and excesses of managerial power have led to a lot of innocent people paying the price. More broadly, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted serious, pre-existing fault lines in our health care and economic systems. Global climate change is an existential threat to humanity.

As an overlay to what I wrote in 2020, I would strongly add a psychologized understanding of these core perspectives. Some examples include:

Therapeutic jurisprudence

Therapeutic jurisprudence (“TJ”) is a multidisciplinary field of legal theory and practice that examines the therapeutic and anti-therapeutic properties of law, legal procedures, and legal institutions. TJ promotes the use and design of law to affirm human dignity and achieve psychologically healthy outcomes in legal proceedings. It is the most comprehensive framework for applying psychological insights to law and policy.

[My note: In 2017, I served as the founding board chair of the International Society for Therapeutic Jurisprudence, a non-profit, learned society established to support TJ-related public education, scholarly work, and best practices in the legal profession and judiciary. For a thorough explanation of therapeutic jurisprudence, see my 2021 law review article, published in the University of Miami Law Review.]

Trauma-informed law and policy

The practice of law, the administration of justice, and the processes of enacting laws would all benefit by being more trauma-informed. Fortunately, insights about trauma and traumatization are entering the mainstream of the legal profession, especially via trauma-informed legal practice, problem-solving courts, and restorative justice approaches. All of these threads are, by the way, completely compatible with therapeutic jurisprudence.

[My note: I have written about trauma-informed law and policy here. I soon will be publishing a law review article on the design of trauma-informed legislation, using as an example a new model statute I have written, the Workplace Bullying Accountability Act.]

Positive psychology and public policy

Positive psychology, the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology (2009) tells us, is an “approach to clinical, social and personality issues that emphasizes mental health and well-being rather than pathology.” I can think of no better example of applying positive psychology to public policy making than the 2019 “Wellbeing Budget” adopted by New Zealand’s coalition government, led by prime minister Jacinda Ardern. The budget expressly asserted that the well‑being of its citizens should be the nation’s top policy priority, identifying categories such as mental health, childhood well-being, indigenous populations, and economic transformation.

[My note: To read more about the New Zealand Wellbeing Budget, see my 2020 essay, “Should Public Policy Center on Society’s Well-Being?“]

Understanding political pathologies

The 2024 U.S. election had major psychological dimensions, especially concerning Donald Trump. Thankfully, fresh, smart voices entered the public intellectual sphere to enlighten us. To wit:

• Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee took the lead in raising alarms about how Trump’s mental state posed a significant danger to the nation and the world.
• Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat shed light on Trump’s tactics by drawing on her grasp of authoritarian leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler conducted themselves in office.
• Cult psychology expert Steven Hassan explained how Trump’s hold over a wide swath of voters resembled cult control.
• Historian Heather Cox Richardson provided a deep, historically contextualized understanding for the 2024 election, helping us to distinguish between normal and abnormal political developments.
• Political writer Sarah Kendzior spotted the Trump contagion early, well before the 2016 election, demonstrating a sixth sense for anticipating his appeal to a large share of the electorate.

The grim importance of these wise perspectives continues, as Trump and other authoritarian leaders continue to exert and claim power over their respective nations. We are paying a terribly heavy price for the elevation to power of such damaged, raging individuals. In the U.S., the very rule of law is under attack by the Trump Administration, stoking enormous fear and anxiety. Against this backdrop, the insights of these experts and others will help to clarify our choices and decisions.

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As I see it, the evolution we need is fundamentally relational in nature, both between individuals and among groups. It is about how we relate to each other, our communities in general, and our systems of governance and law. In light of the ugly and hostile directions America and other nations are pursuing, reversing course and repairing the extraordinary damage will not be easy. But we certainly must give it a try. I hope that this blog, however modestly, can contribute to that effort and stoke the much-needed underlying conversations.

Applying My Historical Lens (or, Trying to do So…)

As a lifelong amateur student of history and the son of parents who lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, I have wrestled over where to place our current condition on a spectrum of peril or concern. I find myself asking questions such as:

Here in the U.S., could we repeat anything as horrific as the Civil War, fought between 1861 and 1865?

On a global scale, could we ever provoke, or stumble our way into, a more cataclysmic and terrifying era than what occurred between 1914 and 1945?

My first response is a brisk “of course not” to both questions.

And yet, here we are, living in an angry world stoked by authoritarian leaders who hold great contempt towards the rule of law, democratic institutions, diversity and difference, and the sharing of wealth and resources. A large chunk of the populace has been persuaded to buy into their corruption, scapegoating, and twisted sense of victimhood. Their presence dovetails with, and contributes to, existential climate change, manipulation and control by online technology, and the continuing risks of deadly pandemics.

In the U.S., the return of Donald Trump to the White House has accelerated all of these trends with great speed and brutality. At this writing — barely a month into his Administration — it is hard to exaggerate the civic destruction and lawlessness already wrought by this deeply damaged man and his deputies.

These enormously challenging times have prompted me to start this new blog, Psychologizing Law, Policy, and Politics, and a new research & public education initiative of the same name. I’d like to use this and the next entry to explain my rationale in some detail.

A New, Fascistic Dark Age?

We can’t claim that no one saw it coming. Some 40 years ago, for example, social science professor and former senior public official Bertram Gross authored a remarkably prescient book, Friendly Fascism, in which he eerily anticipated the state of America circa 2025.

I see at present members of the Establishment or people on its fringes who, in the name of Americanism, betray the interests of most Americans by fomenting militarism, applauding rat-race individualism, protecting undeserved privilege, or stirring up nationalistic and ethnic hatreds.

These circumstances are hardly limited to the U.S. They are increasingly global in scale. At times, I lament that we have been “exporting” our most undesirable qualities to other nations. Among other things, many of the political, policy, and legal structures that are central to safeguarding the public and maintaining the rule of law are severely damaged and perhaps broken for the long term.

In her final book published in 2004, Dark Age Ahead, social observer, writer, and activist Jane Jacobs explained her fears that the world was entering a new “Dark Age,” signaled by a sharp decline in core societal institutions and values. Jacobs identified these five key markers in support of her claim, with each one followed by my own short parenthetical observations relating to the U.S. situation:

• Family and community — Consumerism, debt, and private wealth supplanting the overall welfare of family and community. [My note: Think enormous consumer and student debt, and the predatory growth of private equity.]
• Higher education – Degrees and credentials overshadowing the processes and benefits of learning. [My note: Think of the decline of the liberal arts in the modern academy.]
• Scientific knowledge — Economics becoming the main “science” shaping public policy, while hard scientific knowledge is denigrated and dismissed. [My note: Think trickle-down economics, anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers.]
• Government and taxation — Government acting on behalf of powerful interests, at the expense of the common good, especially in its taxing and spending capacities. [My note: Think from Reagan to Trump and Musk. Need I say more?]
• Professional ethics — Learned professions experiencing a significant breakdown in self-regulating ethical standards. [My note: Think of the current U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to adopt an enforceable ethics code, and of the many attorneys who supported Donald Trump’s attempt to undermine the 2020 election results.]

Jacobs gained widespread recognition via her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which prompted a major shift of beliefs about urban planning and spawned numerous grassroots activist movements. By contrast, Dark Age Ahead sparked few conversations, with most reviewers greeting it politely, at best. Now, however, it’s clear that Jacobs was merely a decade or two ahead of her time in seeing these disturbing trends.

Unfortunately, There’s a Lot More

To the five markers identified by Jacobs, we can add a bevy of interrelated, major trends that have manifested since then:

Authoritarian Strongmen

Authoritarian strongmen leaders like Trump, Putin, and Orbán, are attacking democratic governance and the rule of law around the world. Unsurprisingly, their behaviors suggest the presence of extreme narcissism or antisocial personality disorder (i.e., psychopathy or sociopathy).

They also embrace ugly gender dynamics. Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, NYU historian and a leading scholar on authoritarian rulers, explains that “the gender politics of authoritarianism has relied on the toxic triad of hypermasculinity, misogyny, and homophobia, which have worked together to devastating effect.”

Raging Against Diversity and Difference

As leading Indian public intellectual Pankaj Mishra wrote as 2016 drew to a close, we live in an “age of anger, with authoritarian leaders manipulating the cynicism and discontent of furious majorities.”

Scapegoating is a huge part of this rage. Hitler targeted the Jews as Nazi Germany’s enemy. Trump and his supporters blame DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) for many of the nation’s ills, while holding a virulent hatred towards the transgender population.

Post-Truth and Gaslighting

“Fake news” and “alternative facts” are used to describe some of the more toxic and dysfunctional aspects of our public discourse. Many scholars are using the Orwellian term “post-truth” to describe this alarming state.

Piggybacking onto post-truth is the practice of gaslighting, which Dr. Robin Stern, in her book The Gaslight Effect (2018 ed.), defines as:

…a type of emotional manipulation in which a gaslighter tries to convince you that you’re misremembering, misunderstanding, or misinterpreting your own behavior or motivations, thus creating doubt in your mind that leaves you vulnerable and confused. Gaslighters might be men or women, spouses or lovers, bosses or colleagues, parents or siblings, but what they all have in common is their ability to make you question your own perceptions of reality.

Casual, Easy Cruelty

In the U.S., a casual, easy cruelty and a delight in the suffering of others have become ugly parts of our national persona. For example, how else to explain people cheering and laughing over a scenario where someone might die for lack of affordable health care, as we saw during a debate among Republican presidential hopefuls back in 2011?

More recently, Russell Vought, the current director of the federal Office of Management and Budget called for mass firings of long-time federal employees, expressing his desire that these public servants would feel demonized and traumatized by being targeted:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. . . . We want to put them in trauma.”

Cancel Culture

Cancel culture has become a part of our culture. It knows no ideological boundaries. It is most frequently practiced by extremists who share an eliminationist instinct that has historical roots in purgings of ideas and people, and literary roots in Orwell’s 1984.

Whether in the form of banning books (or, even worse, burning books), shouting down speakers, eliminating access to information, denying people their personal identity, or prohibiting specific words or ideas, cancel culture tramples over freedom and civil liberties.

Technology Running Amok

We have been fast approaching a point where, instead of technology existing to serve humans and our best interests, humans exist to serve technology and its biggest financial benefactors. With the advent of generative artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT, we have reached that sad tipping point. Human-designed technology now supplants human reasoning, judgment, creativity, and – someday, perhaps — at least the appearance of heart quality. It is also inherently kleptocratic, drawing upon content produced by humans, mostly without our permission.

Stay tuned, for this awful misadventure is only beginning.

Global Climate Change

Global climate change may render all other threats moot. Extreme weather events, floods and droughts, and devastating wildfires are more frequent and widespread. And the Trump administration is gleefully rolling back regulations designed to reduce America’s carbon footprint and pulling out of global agreements meant to save current and future generations from experiencing an environmental hellscape that cannot be reversed.

Call for Psychologizing Law, Policy, and Politics

Especially in the U.S., we are facing terrible civic, economic, and social upheaval, fueled by greed, intolerance, cruelty, and a perverse sense of grievance. The initial onslaught has felt overwhelming, as if we’re defending ourselves in a civil war launched with a blitzkrieg of outlandish, destructive policy directives and extremist political pronouncements.

Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, who organized a conference on the mental health of Donald Trump in 2017 and continues to sound alarms about the danger he presents as America’s top elected official, recently assessed the dismantling of democracy just weeks into his new administration:

…Democracy is the very embodiment of collective mental health. It denotes a “wholeness” that is a conscious union of hearts and minds, which holds together diversity and distribution of justice, in a striving for equity for all. But what we face now is the slow dismantling of this very foundation, by the very nation that brought this gift to humanity in our time.

…By the time fascism is in full bloom, and fascism experts and political scientists are called upon, it is often too late for effective intervention. Clinicians, trained to intervene with the measure that the situation requires, have been bypassed, and we are at the stage of merely observing and recording a festering disease.

A reactive resistance is emerging through lawsuits, protests, and other forms of pushback. Hopefully it will grow in numbers and power.

However, we need more. We need guide stars to clarify our focus and to imagine a healthier norm. Among other things, we need to develop an interconnected understanding of law, public policy, and politics, infused with insights from psychology and related disciplines such as psychiatry and sociology. This understanding must embrace a deep commitment to human dignity and a healthier relationship with technology and with our planet.

Hence, the title of this blog, i.e., psychologizing law, policy, and politics.

Coming Up Next…

In Part II of this opening essay, I will explain this psychologizing perspective in more detail, first by offering some visions for a healthier society, then by sharing examples and ideas of how to point us in that direction.

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Thank you for reading this far. Please go here to read Part II of this essay.