Donald Trump and his followers who never waiver stand at 41.5% of the US population (Fivethirtyeight.com), the embodiment of a lust for power and fame and the minions who crave fulfillment through his arrogant and belligerent antics. Speaking from the mid-Twentieth century, Fromm offers a starting point for our discussion of the present day, centered on the social-psychological intersection where everyday people recreate the systems upon which they both depend, and which may very well destroy them.
To resurrect and revalorize the tradition of the early Frankfurt School, whose of Marxist-Hegelian dialectical approach to understanding the societal conditions of its emergence -- post WWI Germany, the rise of fascism, New Deal politics, the defeat of fascism and the subsequent rise of consumer society – remains relevant to studying present circumstances, stressing the cultural dimension of capitalism, the proliferation of alienation, ideology and mass media, and, finally, the nature of the society-character/subjectivity nexus.