The Return of Obscurantism
Political Personality, Psychometric Power, and the American Collapse of Rationality
This article argues that the Trump phenomenon is not a historical anomaly but the mature expression of a long process of decomposition in the American cultural and political subject. Drawing, on the one hand, on Aubrey Immelman’s psychodiagnostic framework of political personality, and, on the other, on the contemporary research of Zarouali et al. on psychometric political manipulation, the article situates Trump’s rise within a broader critical-theoretical lineage: that of the Frankfurt School. It contends that the shift from postwar rational internationalism to a new political obscurantism is not merely a political realignment but a psychological and cultural mutation, in which the leader’s personality, algorithmic technology, and the mass co-constitute a post-democratic regime of affective power.
The postwar international order was not simply a system of geopolitical equilibrium. It was the institutional attempt to embody the core promises of the Enlightenment: the primacy of rules over arbitrariness, of law over force, and of institutions over persons (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947/2002). Post-1945 rational internationalism presupposed not only institutions but a specific type of political subject: citizens and leaders capable of accepting constraints, thinking in abstract terms, and restraining their primary narcissistic and aggressive impulses.
At this point, Immelman’s analysis of political personality becomes crucial. Within Millon’s model, political personality is not a set of superficial traits but a deep, stable structure that organizes the leader’s self-image, cognitive style, perceptions, and defense mechanisms (Immelman, 1993). The postwar order required personalities marked by high cognitive complexity and internalized limits. The historical irony is that the very society that led this order began producing, already from the mid-twentieth century onward, the opposite psychological substrate.
From 1940 on, American society was shaped by a structural anticommunism that functioned not only as a foreign-policy strategy but as an internal worldview. Every form of collective thought, theoretical complexity, or intellectual ambiguity was treated as a threat. Extreme individualism, reinforced by neoliberalism, severed the individual from any notion of collective rationality, while religious and cultural conservatism operated as an anti-intellectual defensive mechanism. The result was the production of a subject that does not trust thought but emotion, does not seek explanation but identification, and cannot tolerate complexity, instead requiring enemies.
This diagnosis speaks directly to the Frankfurt School’s analysis of the authoritarian personality. For Adorno and his collaborators, the authoritarian personality is not a fringe pathology but a socially produced psychic schema—one capable of obeying force, attacking the weak, and rejecting ambiguity (Adorno et al., 1950). Trump, in this light, is not a political deviation but a form of normality: the clearest expression of a society that has already lost the capacity for critical self-relation.
His personality is organized around an inflated self-image, low cognitive complexity, and a systematic inability to accept institutional limits—features that Immelman’s model allows us to analyze not as idiosyncrasy but as a structural political phenomenon (Immelman, 1993). Yet Trump’s historical power does not derive from his individual psychology alone, but from his synchronized identification with a society living through fear, humiliation, and anger.
We are no longer operating within the field of ideological conflict in the classical sense. The confrontation of programs, value systems, or worldviews has receded in favor of a new form of political practice, in which the central stake is not persuasion through argument but the activation of affective predispositions. Political communication no longer addresses citizens as agents of judgment, but subjects whose psychological vulnerabilities can be mapped, predicted, and strategically exploited.
Research on personality profiling and political microtargeting shows that affective mobilization is neither accidental nor uniform. Fear, anxiety, and a sense of threat are systematically triggered in subjects with introverted traits, where heightened sensitivity to negative stimuli and a tendency toward internal processing make threat messages especially effective. Conversely, enthusiasm, aggressiveness, and a sense of collective power are activated in extraverted subjects, for whom political experience is transformed into a spectacle of action, conflict, and identification.
This differentiation is not merely an improvement in communication techniques. It constitutes a qualitative change in the nature of political power. The citizen is no longer treated as a political being—i.e., as a subject capable of rational judgment, reflection, and moral weighing—but is transformed into a psychological profile to be managed. Political action shifts from the level of the public sphere to the level of private psychic structure.
From this perspective, we are not dealing simply with manipulation in the traditional sense of propaganda. We are dealing with something deeper and more disturbing: the dismantling of the very precondition of democracy as a practice of thought. When political effectiveness is measured in terms of affective attunement rather than understanding, critical capacity is not violently suppressed; it is rendered unnecessary. Democracy is not institutionally abolished, but hollowed out from within, as rational discourse is replaced by algorithmically optimized forms of emotional obedience.
Here, instrumental reason—as described by Horkheimer and Adorno—reaches its apex. Knowledge no longer aims at emancipation but at management and prediction. The culture industry is transformed into an algorithmic psycho-power, in which thought is systematically bypassed through affective synchronization. Democracy is not dismantled institutionally; it is emptied existentially.
The collapse of the postwar international order cannot be understood independently of this psychological mutation. The institutions of international law presuppose subjects capable of accepting abstract rules and constraints. When the authoritarian psychic structure prevails, every rule is experienced as an affront. Foreign policy becomes an extension of a wounded collective ego.
The undoing of international law, the contempt for alliances, and the personalization of power are not strategic choices; they are cultural symptoms. The leader’s political personality, the psychometric governance of the masses, and the collapse of rational discourse converge into a new regime: post-democratic, post-rational, and deeply authoritarian.
Immelman shows us what political personality looks like under conditions of crisis. Zarouali et al. show us how mass obedience is manufactured without violence. The Frankfurt School had already warned that the Enlightenment, if it does not subject itself to critique, will turn into its opposite.
Trump is the synthesis of these three.
Not as an exception.
But as a warning.
Bibliography
Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Row.
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. John Cumming). Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1947)
Immelman, A. (1993). The assessment of political personality: A psychodiagnostically relevant conceptualization and methodology. Political Psychology, 14(4), 725–741.
Millon, T. (1990). Toward a New Personology: An Evolutionary Model. New York: Wiley.
Zarouali, B., Dobber, T., De Pauw, G., & de Vreese, C. H. (2020). Using a personality-profiling algorithm to investigate political microtargeting. Communication Research, 47(6), 1–26.
Text: Aristonikos_