On Tuesday, May 19, incumbent Congressman Thomas Massie—the congressman who helped lead the charge to force the release of the Epstein Files to the American public—was defeated in the Republican primary by former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. The race became the highest-spending House primary in American history, and many immediately interpreted the result as yet another demonstration of Donald Trump’s overwhelming political power.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung celebrated the result bluntly: “Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power. Fuck around, find out.”

But I think the deeper story is more complex than this, and I feel uniquely positioned to comment on this election, not only as a constituent of Northern Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District and someone who has interacted personally with Thomas Massie, but also as someone involved in ongoing anti-corruption and civic reconstruction efforts in the region.

In April 2016, when I was a college student, I attended a luncheon hosted, if I recall correctly, by the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. At the time, I was studying conflict and security in my political science program while interning on research related to the Syrian conflict. I had noticed something that was not yet being widely discussed publicly: Pentagon-backed militias and CIA-backed militias in Syria were reportedly engaging in firefights with one another—different arms of the same American security apparatus, literally shooting at each other through proxies.

I brought this up with Massie privately afterward. To my surprise, he confirmed the reality of the situation to me directly, when much of the press still barely acknowledged it. As we walked toward his car, we both shook our heads at the absurdity of it all: an empire increasingly at war with itself while the public drifted deeper into spectacle and apathy. That moment stayed with me because it was one of the few times I saw a federal politician speak candidly and honestly without rehearsed talking points.

Ten years later, Massie is now effectively gone from Congress. How does someone widely regarded as unusually principled, intellectually independent, and personally honest lose in such dramatic fashion? Especially after helping push one of the largest public accountability stories in recent American politics with the Epstein affair?

To understand how someone like Massie could lose in this environment, I think we first need to step back and examine the broader social psychology at work—not only in Northern Kentucky, but increasingly in the United States itself. Erich Fromm, drawing on psychoanalytic concepts originally developed by Freud and later expanded within social psychology, argued in The Sane Society that individuals under prolonged conditions of fear, alienation, instability, and social fragmentation can psychologically regress into more primitive modes of thought and behavior.

Mature forms of reasoning and moral responsibility begin to weaken, and people increasingly retreat into dependency, tribalism, spectacle, aggression, and irrationality as defense mechanisms. Fromm’s contribution was extending these dynamics beyond the individual and into the social sphere, arguing that entire societies can regress under conditions of deep political, economic, and spiritual dislocation, producing cultures driven less by reasoned civic life than by fear, conformity, resentment, and authoritarian impulses.

In many ways, the history of Northern Kentucky........

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