In this respect, Jungian analyst James Hillman goes as far as holding psychotherapy responsible for the tawdriness of American politics since the 1950s. In his reckoning, all the smart people are sitting in therapy incapacitated, their therapists having convinved them that the source of their misery is to be found within themselves. The net result is a state of near oblivion as regards the political debacles that have unfolded around them for the last half-a-century.

What is of immediate interest to me as a psychotherapist is that the dominant political trend of our time - identity politics - is profoundly psychological, being organised around the injured dignity of oppressed groups. Each group, that is, claims a misattunement between a felt group identity and an outer world that rejects it. For proponents of identity politics, therefore, the problem of dignity turns on a society that is pathologically invalidating. Human beings are first and foremost social beings, and when social formations compromise the dignity of marginalised groups as a matter of routine, the consequences are devastating, involving either self-hating shame or envious resentment.

Social ressentiment - in the terminology of Max Scheler - “must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where… formal social equality, publicly recognised, go[es] hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property and education”. For ordinary people, such a divergence can only make sense by evaluating themselves negatively. By admitting that they lack all “badges of ability”, the poor man and woman can lay to rest the question that has followed them all their lives: the question of why - despite their best efforts - they got nowhere in life. Assuming personal responsibility for a society that failed them, not only do they feel the pain of inadequacy - they resent themselves for feeling it.

That is why the influence of the middle-class ressentiment should not be underestimated. There is, of course, a substantial gap between the ivory tower and the street - but it is equally true that what happens on university campuses filters into public spaces. I mention this because research conducted in the middle of the twentieth century showed how followers of facist movements were most likely to come from the lower strata of the middle classes who, because their strivings for self-improvement were continuously blocked, were most susceptible to developing feelings of ressentiment.

Authoritarian regimes are being elected all over the world, and the present risk is that the histories of oppressed peoples will be driven further underground, despite - or dare one say, because of - the radical left.

As important as it is to build platforms on social issues, the bullying tactics of the left run the risk of alienating even fair-minded people. Imitation cannot win the day, and when intellectuals get praised for their ‘courage’ - that is, for merely saying what they think - then one realises that panic-driven pandering has become the new norm! In his inimitable style, it was Nietzsche who said, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.