Why Freedom Keeps Choosing Its Own Destruction

Or, What Erich Fromm Understood in 1941 That We Have Spent Eighty-Four Years Pretending Not to Know

There is a question that polite liberal democracy has never satisfactorily answered, because asking it properly would require the comfortable classes to admit something unbearable about themselves: why do people choose authoritarianism? Not tricked, not bullied into it by some clever demagogue — but genuinely, even enthusiastically, chosen. Walk into a voting booth in Pennsylvania or Doncaster or Dresden and mark the cross that says: I want someone to tell me what to do. I want the borders closed, the foreigners gone, the women back in their places, the old certainties restored, the unbearable weight of choosing my own life lifted from my shoulders forever. Millions do this. They do it repeatedly. They do it with a kind of desperate relief.

Erich Fromm gave us the answer in 1941, in a book written in exile, in the shadow of the catastrophe he had seen coming. Escape from Freedom is not a difficult text. It is, in fact, an almost uncomfortably readable one, because it tells us things about ourselves that we have spent eight decades trying not to hear. The central argument is this: modern human beings, having wrested freedom from the religious, monarchical, and feudal structures that once gave their lives shape and meaning, found themselves suddenly, terrifyingly alone. Not liberated — alone. The burden of constructing one's own meaning, making one's own choices, bearing responsibility for one's own failures, was not the joyful emancipation that Enlightenment philosophers promised. It was, for most people, an unbearable anxiety. And so they began, in their millions, to flee from it.

The flight took predictable forms. Some retreated into conformism (Fromm called this the "authoritarian syndrome," the simultaneous longing for a strong leader and identification with the powerful that Adorno would later systematize into his famous F-scale research on the authoritarian personality). Others retreated into what Fromm called "mechanical conformity": the person who ceases to be a self at all, who becomes a function of the market, who experiences themselves not as a human being but as a commodity to be sold. This is the "marketing orientation," and if Fromm could see the twenty-first century, if he could watch the great algorithmic platforms auctioning human attention to the highest bidder, watch people contort their personalities into brands, watch the gig economy dissolve the last remnants of stable worker identity — he would recognize it immediately, amplified to a scale he could scarcely have imagined.

This is the soil in which Donald Trump grew. Not as a cause, but as a symptom. Trump did not manufacture the hunger for authoritarian submission. He identified it, named it, and promised to satiate it. And the promise worked. It worked not despite its grotesqueness but because of it, because the sheer, shameless brazenness of the man was itself the point. He did not need to be plausible. He needed to be strong. Every lie, every contradiction, every humiliation of a subordinate, every attack on an institution. These were not failures of rhetoric. They were the rhetoric. They said, to the millions watching: I am not like you. I do not need to be consistent. I do not need to be honest. I have the power. And if you give me yours, I will use it on your behalf against your enemies.

The enemies, of course, were always clearly delineated: immigrants, the press, the judiciary, the expert class, anyone who had the impertinence to say that what the strongman was doing was wrong. This is the architecture of authoritarian legitimation, and it has not changed since Fromm wrote about it. The authoritarian leader is always simultaneously the voice of the people against an entrenched elite and the embodiment of strength against a dehumanised other. Both claims are made simultaneously, without any apparent contradiction, because they are not rational arguments. They are psychological operations on populations who have been trained, by decades of material deprivation and cultural dislocation, to want exactly this.

Trump's second term, beginning in January 2025, has confirmed everything that serious observers warned about and everything that his supporters either denied or celebrated. The mass deportation machinery — sweeping, brutal, constitutionally dubious — was not a negotiating position. It was the point. Human beings, many of them with legal claims to remain, many of them contributors to the communities that are now gutted of their farmworkers, their meatpackers, their caregivers, are being loaded onto planes and flown to countries many of them have never seen, on the say-so of a single executive order. The cruelty is not incidental. It is the message. It says: we are drawing a line. The world will be smaller, and we will be safe in it, and the people who made you feel small and dispensable and replaceable — they will be gone.

And then there is DOGE. The "Department of Government Efficiency" — a name that is its own confession — has set about dismantling the administrative state with the zeal of a fourteen-year-old let loose in a government's backend. Federal agencies that took decades to build, that represent the institutional memory of the world's most powerful nation, that exist precisely to prevent the kind of concentrated, unaccountable executive power that Trump is now amassing — these are being gutted from within. Career civil servants are being fired, replaced with loyalists, or simply rendered inoperative through budget starvation. The Department of Education is a skeleton. The EPA is a joke. The State Department's institutional expertise on human rights, on arms control, on the delicate architecture of international cooperation — gone. The message is not that government should be smaller in some philosophically defensible sense. The message is: government exists at the pleasure of the executive, and the executive is me.

The attacks on the judiciary are perhaps the most naked. Federal judges who rule against executive overreach are "activists." The courts are "obstacles." The Justice Department — which should be an independent check on executive power — has been turned into an instrument of personal loyalty. When the Supreme Court, in a moment of genuine institutional courage, ruled against some of the most egregious exercises of executive authority, the response from the White House was not legal argument. It was threat. It was the language of intimidation that you use against someone you plan to punish. This is what the erosion of judicial independence looks like: not a single dramatic coup, but a thousand small acts of delegitimization until the courts are afraid to act, and the public has been taught not to believe them when they do.

The cabinet — filled with billionaires, technocrats of capital, people whose personal fortunes depend on regulatory capture and the subordination of the state to private profit — is not an accident. It is the logical endpoint of the merger between political authority and market power that has been underway since at least the 1980s. When Elon Musk can walk into federal agencies and fire people by decree, when the Secretary of Commerce is a shipping magnate who wants to gut the agencies that regulate shipping, when the Secretary of the Treasury is a former hedge fund manager who regards the public debt as an opportunity for private extraction — we are not seeing governance. We are seeing the final stage of a long campaign to demonstrate that the state is nothing but an instrument, and the only question is: instrument of whom?

And the global cascade has been, to those of us who study these things, both terrifying and entirely predictable. When the United States — the world's largest economy, the guarantor of a certain kind of international order, the nation that lectured the world on democratic norms for eighty years — elects an authoritarian and then accelerates into one, the signal to every petty fascist, every far-right provocateur, every desperate politician who has discovered that immigration is the dog whistle that always works, is: the permission structure is gone. You can do this. Others have done it. It worked for them.

So we have seen it. In Germany, the AfD has broken through every barrier that was supposed to contain it. In France, the National Rally has normalized what was, a decade ago, considered beyond the pale. In Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Italy — the far right has not simply gained power; it has redefined the terms of debate, so that even those who oppose it are compelled to argue on its terrain. The Overton window does not drift toward authoritarianism gradually. It jumps. And it jumps fastest when the center-left, in its dThe burden of constructing one's own meaning, making one's own choices, bearing responsibility for one's own failures, was not the joyful emancipation that Enlightenment philosophers promised. It was, for most people, an unbearable anxiety. And so they began, in their millions, to flee from itesperation to recover the voters it has lost, adopts the language and some of the policies of the far right, thereby confirming to those voters that the far right was right about those issues all along.

In this country — our country, Britain, that green and pleasant island of stiff upper lips and procedural democracy and a political culture that has always congratulated itself on its civility — we have watched all of this with a mixture of horror and smugness that we can no longer afford. Reform UK, Nigel Farage's latest vehicle for the politics of grievance and scapegoating, has become a genuine electoral force, not because it has a coherent economic programme but because it has correctly identified the wound and keeps pressing on it. The Labour government, scarred by its 2024 defeat, governs with the timidity of a party that is terrified of its own base and has no idea what to do about immigration, about inequality, about the housing crisis, about the NHS, about any of the material conditions that make people susceptible to the authoritarian siren song. The Conservative Party, that historic vessel of sober parliamentary management, has been captured from within by a faction that openly admires what Trump is doing and wants to do the same thing here, more quietly.

And our media — our broadcasters, our newspapers, our social media platforms — have done what they always do, which is follow the attention economy into whatever direction generates the most heat. Serious journalism about the structural conditions that produce authoritarianism, about the material interests that are served by its advance, about the specific mechanisms by which democratic institutions can be hollowed out from within — this is expensive, difficult, and does not generate the engagement that a good culture war does. So the culture war continues, and the infrastructure of democratic legitimacy crumbles, and the people who should be sounding the alarm are too busy performing their own political identities to notice that the building is on fire.

Fromm distinguished, famously, between "negative freedom" — freedom from external constraint, the absence of an external authority telling you what to do — and "positive freedom" — the capacity to act autonomously, to realize your powers as a human being, to participate meaningfully in the decisions that shape your life. Negative freedom is relatively easy to destroy. You install a strongman, and the negative freedoms disappear. Positive freedom is harder to destroy but is exactly what modern capitalism, in its liquid, deregulated, insecurity-producing form, has been dismantling for decades. When you have no stable job, no stable community, no stable identity, no stable future — when everything is contingent, when the ground beneath you keeps shifting, when you are atomized and isolated and made to feel that your predicament is your own individual failure — the longing for a strong leader who will make the anxiety stop is not irrational. It is, in a terrible and real sense, understandable.

This is the cruelest thing about the authoritarian temptation: it is a response to real suffering, real dislocation, real loss of meaning and security. The Trump supporter in a deindustrialized town in Ohio, the Reform voter in a post-industrial town in the Midlands, the AfD supporter in an East German city hollowed out by reunification — these people are not imagining their pain. They are correctly identifying its sources, and then following the wrong map to its resolution. The enemy they are pointed toward — immigrants, elites, Brussels, the deep state — is not the cause of their suffering. The cause is the system that rendered them disposable, that extracted their labor and their loyalty and gave them, in return, the anxiety of infinite choice in a world that offers no stable ground on which to stand. But that system is too big, too diffuse, too powerful to fight directly. So the anger finds a smaller target, a human face, a body to blame.

This is why democratic process alone cannot stop authoritarianism. Democracy is a set of procedures, not a psychological immune system. Procedures can be followed — elections can be held, votes can be counted — and the outcome can still be the destruction of democracy itself. The system is designed to register preferences, not to interrogate them. It cannot stop people from choosing their own enslavement because, in a meaningful sense, it was never designed to. Liberal democracy assumed a citizenry that had the material conditions and the psychological resources to exercise freedom responsibly. It did not plan for — it could not plan for — a capitalism so successful at its own logic that it would dissolve the foundations on which democratic citizenship depends.

What, then, can be done?

First: build counter-institutions. Not as a reactive, defensive posture, but as a deliberate project of reconstruction. Mutual aid networks, tenants' unions, credit unions, cooperative enterprises, community land trusts — the infrastructure that gives people genuine power over the conditions of their own lives, not as clients of the state or consumers of the market, but as participants in a genuine community. These are unfashionable. They do not generate viral moments. They are slow, unglamorous, and deeply necessary. Fromm understood that freedom cannot be abstract — it must be lived, practiced, experienced in the daily conditions of one's existence. We need to build the material conditions within which autonomous life is actually possible.

Second: the labor movement. Whatever its current enfeeblement, it remains the only mass organization in society that is structurally opposed to the logic of authoritarianism, because authoritarianism requires atomized individuals who are dependent on the state and the boss, and trade unionism requires collective solidarity that neither the state nor the boss can provide. Every percentage point of union density is a percentage point of democratic resilience. This means organizing the unorganized — the gig workers, the warehouse laborers, the care workers, the immigrants who are currently being deported while we wring our hands about their status. It means supporting the strikes that are already happening, even when they are inconvenient.

Third: take the media seriously as a site of political struggle. Not by demanding that the existing platforms be fairer — they will not be, and the demand is naive — but by building genuinely independent, collectively owned alternatives. Local newspapers. Community radio. Worker-run digital platforms. The algorithmic attention economy is not neutral; it is structurally biased toward outrage and tribalism, and we cannot win a war inside an architecture designed by our enemies. We need our own architecture.

Fourth: political education, in the oldest and most literal sense. Fromm, Adorno, Bauman, Gramsci, Luxembourg — these are not academic curiosities. They are maps of the terrain we are navigating. The authoritarian personality is not an abstraction; it is a real psychological configuration produced by real social conditions, and understanding those conditions is the precondition for changing them. This means reading groups, study circles, the slow and patient work of developing a political consciousness that can see through the sleight of hand that turns economic grievance into cultural war.

Fifth: act locally and concretely. The federal level may be lost, for now. The international order may be fracturing. But cities can declare themselves sanctuaries. Local authorities can refuse cooperation with deportation machinery. Professional bodies can refuse to legitimate the destruction of expertise. Individual acts of solidarity — standing with the immigrant worker, the trans person, the disabled person who is being made the scapegoat — are not gestures. They are the substance from which a counter-culture is made.

None of this is enough. None of this guarantees anything. The forces arrayed against human freedom, human dignity, human solidarity are vast, well-funded, ruthlessly organized, and extraordinarily patient. They have been building this for fifty years, and they are not going to stop because we have written a good essay or organized a good meeting.

But we must begin anyway. Fromm ended Escape from Freedom with a call for what he called "spontaneous activity" — action that arises from the full, integrated self, action that is an expression of freedom rather than an escape from it. He did not pretend to know exactly what institutional forms this would take. He knew that the answer would be worked out in practice, collectively, by people who had chosen not to flee.

The choice is always the same: to face the anxiety of freedom, or to surrender the self for the comfort of submission. We know which choice the Trumps and the Farages and the Musks of this world want us to make. They need our fear, our obedience, our atomization. They cannot survive our solidarity, our refusal, our stubborn insistence on the possibility — the reality — of a world organized around human need rather than private profit.

So the question we must ask ourselves is not whether we can stop what's coming. It's whether we're willing to try.

We are. The only question left is whether we begin now, while there is still ground to stand on, or later, when there isn't.

Choose.