Do White Supremacy and Male Superiority Explain ‘the Goldwater Rule’?

If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize. - Voltaire

The Connecticut Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology was one of the first organizations to form a “psychoanalysis in society” group in response to the exceptional presidency of Donald Trump. After speaking there a couple years ago, I was invited back with my esteemed colleague, Dr. Kevin Washington, former president of the Association of Black Psychologists, which remains to this day the only mental health association that issued a direct statement about the psychological dangers of this presidency. This time the invitation was for a “Black Lives, In Mind” series, under the title: “Healing Begins Where the Wound Was Made,” echoing the words of renowned author Alice Walker.

Reflecting on the entirety of American history, its legacy of slavery that contradicts its democratic identity, and the desire for nativism that defies the immigrant status — indeed, invasion — of its founders, our ongoing crisis came into perspective.

When we as psychiatrists held our first conference at Yale School of Medicine in April 2017, we felt we had a professional obligation to inform the public of our critical concerns about the new American president. A few months later, we rushed publication of our public-service book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, in which we tried to warn the nation of the extreme dangers of entrusting such an unstable man with presidential powers and responsibilities. The book was an unprecedented New York Times bestseller of its kind, and we donated all proceeds from it to remove conflicts of interest.

When we held our major conference at the National Press Club in Washington in March 2019, we stressed over and over the dangers our country was facing with such a president. When in March 2020 we issued our first “Prescription for Survival,” we foresaw and predicted what was coming with the pandemic and how urgent it was to take authority out of the hands of a mentally impaired president.

Our warnings all proved valid. But since they were not acted upon, the United States came to have by far the greatest death toll of any nation of the world, in fact nearly of most other countries combined.

We were extremely careful to keep with all professional and ethical standards, including “the Goldwater rule,” and we made sure our assessments…