by Michael Lind
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THE VILLAINS OF the transatlantic establishment’s antipopulist narrative are new, but the rhetoric of elite antipopulism itself is more than half a century old. Those who explain populism in politics as nothing more than the manipulation of individual bigotry or status anxiety by Hitlerian demagogues are recycling journalistic clichés and dubious scholarship from the mid-twentieth century.
The origins of today’s antipopulist propaganda can be traced to The Authoritarian Personality, a book published in 1950 by a team of scholars including Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School, a group of émigré intellectuals from Nazi Germany. Having lived through the rise of National Socialism, these thinkers, many of them Jewish as well as Marxist, sought to understand how some members of the German proletariat, instead of behaving as Marxist theory predicted, had been susceptible to Hitler’s anti-Semitism.
Even as an explanation of the Nazi phenomenon, this approach was misguided. Overall the German working class was one of the groups that supported the Nazis the least. Hitler’s biographer Volker Ullrich observes: “The NSDAP was thus essentially a middle-class movement, and the proportion of university graduates, students and professors in Munich was striking. Conversely, despite the fact that their propaganda was explicitly directed at blue-collar workers, the Nazis did not do well with that demographic group.”25 The urban working class, which favored social democrats and communists, like Catholic Germans, was consistently underrepresented among Hitler’s supporters, who were disproportionately university graduates, civil servants, small business owners, inhabitants of small towns, and Protestants. Unpopular with the German working class, Hitler quickly crushed labor unions and rounded up their leaders upon seizing power.
Influenced by then-fashionable Freudian psychology, which few psychologists in our own time take seriously, Adorno and his colleagues tried to explain the appeal of fascism in terms of individual psychopathology. To test the susceptibility of individuals to fascist demagogy, Adorno and colleagues devised a personality test in 1947, including a measure called the California F Scale (“F” standing for Fascism). The test was supposed to measure latent fascist propensities along multiple vague dimensions, many of which were connected with fascism only in the minds of mid-twentieth century Marxists, like “Conventionalism. Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values” and “Sex. Exaggerated concern with sexual ‘goings on.’”26
The test has generated a number of imitations, each as amateurish and pseudoscientific as the original. In 1996, the Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer warned that the US and Canada were ripe for fascism: “If my findings have shown me anything, they have revealed that what happened in Germany in 1933 can happen in North America too. Many people are already disposed to support a fascist overthrow of democracy.”27 Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) test devised in 1981 purports to identify authoritarian tendencies on the basis of responses to questions that include these: “The ‘old-fashioned ways’ and the ‘old-fashioned values’ still show the best way to live” and “There is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps.”28 Those who prefer old-fashioned values to fads and nudist camps are defined as “authoritarians.”
The C-Scale test, purporting to measure conservatism, created by Glenn Wilson and John Patterson in the 1960s, used attitudes toward jazz as a touchstone.29 Combining the work of Altemeyer, Wilson, and Patterson, we may conclude that individuals who dislike both jazz and nudist camps are authoritarian conservatives. (Ironically, Adorno himself wrote a number of essays expressing his deep loathing of jazz music, declaring that “jazz can be easily adapted for use by fascism.”)30 Equally tendentious is the “rigidity of the right” model, which purports to prove that, in the words of one critic, liberals are “open and tolerant,” while conservatives are “close-minded and intolerant and scared of everything.”31
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THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY theory was first weaponized in American partisan politics in the 1950s. In The New American Right (1955), Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Peter Viereck, and others explained McCarthyism as an anti-intellectual revolt of working-class Americans afflicted by status anxiety.32 One of the contributors to The New American Right was the historian Richard Hofstadter, who adopted the term “pseudo-conservative” from the Adorno school.33
In several influential books and essays, Hofstadter tried to rewrite the history of the New Deal by downplaying the importance of organized farmers and organized industrial workers in order to make college-educated professional reformers the heroes of twentieth-century American history. To put it another way, Hofstadter sought to define the New Deal as a system based not on democratic pluralism under a broker state, but on top-down technocracy. Nils Gilman observes: “If populism as a general political phenomenon was a byword for the wrong sort of politics, anti-Communist liberals at the apogee of their mid-century technocratic self-confidence believed that ‘the right kind of revolution’ would be elite-led and technocratic—precisely what Hofstadter believed he saw foreshadowed in the Progressive movement, with its commitment to scientific management, evidence-based public policy, credentialing and professionalization, education as a mode of social control, and the idea of best practices (then called ‘one best system’).”34
As part of his project of rewriting America as a story of rational technocratic reform threatened by dangerous democracy, Hofstadter misled a generation of readers into thinking that the American agrarian populist crusade of the 1890s had been an essentially anti-Semitic and protofascist movement.35 Jon Wiener writes that Hofstadter “saw Joe McCarthy as a potential American Hitler and believed he had found the roots of American fascism among rural Protestants in the Midwest. It was history by analogy—but the analogy didn’t work.”36 The erroneous thesis that McCarthyism was the rebirth of agrarian populism was refuted by a number of historians, including C. Vann Woodward in his 1959 essay “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual.”37 In 1967, the fatal blow to Hofstadter’s application of Adorno’s status anxiety theory was delivered by Michael Paul Rogin, who showed in The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter that McCarthy’s major supporters were suburban upper-middle-class Republicans, not rural populists.38
Although he was a poor historian, Hofstadter was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes for telling complacent, affluent elites in metropolitan enclaves what they wanted to hear about the alleged menace posed by the less-educated rabble. In a 1966 essay, Hofstadter coined a phrase, “the paranoid style in American politics,” which to this day is invoked by lazy journalists and thinly educated pundits, most of them neoliberals or establishment conservatives, to delegitimate leftists as well as populists or conservatives with working-class or rural constituents.39
In the 1960s, the rhetoric of “pseudo-conservatism” and “status anxiety” and “the authoritarian personality” was revived again by centrist Democrats and some moderate Republicans to smear the followers of the conservative Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 as potential fascists. So many academic American psychologists and psychiatrists declared the Republican candidate for president mentally unstable that the American Psychological Association in 1973 was compelled to enact a “Goldwater Rule” forbidding members from diagnosing politicians they did not like from a distance.
Like Trump in 2016, Goldwater in 1964 was viewed by many not only as mentally unbalanced but also as a dangerous potential tyrant who threatened American democracy. Ironically, Goldwater—a libertarian who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though he had voted for previous civil rights laws—ended his long career as a pariah in the Republican Party, denounced by many conservatives because of his support for gay rights and environmentalism and his denunciation of the religious right. Recent historians have shown that Goldwater Republicanism owed more to the interests and values of the rising Sun Belt professional class and business elite
than to working-class populists.40
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IN 2001 IN The International Journal of Political Psychology, John Levi Martin concluded that “The Authoritarian Personality is probably the most deeply flawed work of prominence in political psychology” and should be regarded “as a cautionary example of bias.”41
Unfortunately, instead of being ridiculed and forgotten, this long-discredited pseudoscience is endlessly recycled and dumped into the stream of public discourse. In an essay entitled “Trump’s Fascist Efforts to Demolish Democracy,” Professor Henry Giroux of the Department of English and Cultural Studies of McMaster University stitched together all of the clichés: “Trump has unleashed what Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno once called an ‘authoritarian personality,’ the dark and menacing underside of a racist and totalitarian psychology and politics. Trump may not be Adolf Hitler, but there are disturbing similarities in his language and reactionary policies.”42 In January 2016, Politico published an essay by a PhD candidate in political science, Matthew MacWilliams, entitled “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter”: “That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations.”43
According to Pippa Norris, a Harvard political scientist: “Authoritarian values are those which uphold belief in a strong leader, in a strong state, and in robust law and order. These are traditional values like the family, home, religion, and then a variety of other values like nativism, the importance of national unity, the national community versus outsiders whether defined by nationality or ethnicity or race.”44
It is worth pausing to reflect on how bizarre it is to call attitudes shared by most people in every society “authoritarian.” Even in the most liberal and democratic of liberal democracies, most citizens prefer strong leaders to weak leaders, a strong state to a feeble government, and “robust law and order” to—what? Weak and ineffective law and order? Rampant crime?
Norris’s list of “authoritarian values” continues. It includes “the family, home, religion” and “the importance of national unity” and “national community, whether defined by nationality or ethnicity or race.” For Norris and like-minded scholars, ordinary patriots who are committed to their nation-states, even if their national patriotism is anti-racist and liberal and democratic, are “authoritarians” along with far-right white supremacists who dream of racially pure “ethnostates” created by ethnic cleansing or genocide. Norris’s nonauthoritarian citizen, who is unpatriotic and indifferent to national unity, tolerant of lawlessness and disorder, and puts little value on family, would strike most people as an amoral sociopath.
Noting the immortality of “Richard Hofstadter’s famous catchphrase, the ‘paranoid style in American politics,’” the historian Leo P. Ribuffo wrote in 2017: “As someone who has tried to hammer in the stake for several decades, I can’t help noticing that the term has again risen from the grave as in a horror movie populated not by vampires, zombies and terrified teenagers, but by Donald Trump, superficial pundits, and terrified liberals and radicals.”45 As it has done since World War II, the overclass intelligentsia in the future is likely to continue to portray critics of technocratic neoliberalism as irrational and maladjusted, for the reason explained by the historian Norman Pollack in a critique of Richard Hofstadter’s work in 1960:
Basically, psychology imposes a static model of society (in effect, the consensus framework) upon the study of social movements because it requires a standard or reference point by which to judge what is or is not irrational. Thus, all behavior not conforming to the model is categorized as irrational, with the result that the analysis is biased in favor of the status quo and places all protest movements by definition at a disadvantage.46
The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized.47 Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”48
A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are “homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders.
In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane.49 If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.
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IN REALITY, POLITICS does not imitate sensational thriller fiction. US president Donald Trump and British prime minister Boris Johnson and Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn are not Russian agents of influence installed by Moscow in pursuit of a sinister grand design to overthrow liberal democracy in the West and the world. Even so, the Russian government, like all major countries, employs intelligence operatives whose actions should be monitored and thwarted when they go beyond the low-level activities tolerated by both sides in modern great power relations.
The United States and the established democracies of Western Europe in the twenty-first century do not resemble in any significant way the unstable Weimar Republic that was overthrown by Hitler and replaced by a militaristic, genocidal, totalitarian state. Even so, there are genuine neo-Nazis and other white supremacists in the West, including the American mass murderers Timothy McVeigh, Dylann Roof, and Patrick Crusius. Police and intelligence agencies in the US and Europe should do their best to identify genuine potential domestic and foreign terrorists and prevent them from doing harm.
Liberal democracy in the West today is not endangered by Russian machinations or resurgent fascism. But liberalism and democracy alike are endangered when irrational moral panics like today’s Russia Scare and Brown Scare in the
West lead hysterical elites to redefine “extremism” or “fascism” or “white nationalism” to include ordinary populists, conservatives, libertarians, and heterodox leftists. What the historian Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America wrote of McCarthyite conservatives in the 1950s who feared that many of their fellow citizens were Russian dupes or dangerous communists who needed to be censored and blacklisted applies with equal force to today’s paranoid establishmentarians who fear that many of their fellow citizens are Russian dupes or dangerous fascists: “What must be accounted one of the tamest, mildest and most unimaginative majorities in modern political history has been bound down by a set of restrictions that betray fanatical terror.”50
My purpose is not to defend populist demagogy, which can be harmful and destructive without being totalitarian or traitorous. Contemporary populism is a kind of convulsive autoimmune response by the body politic to the chronic degenerative disease of oligarchy. The greatest threat to liberal democracy on both sides of the Atlantic is not its imminent overthrow by meme-manipulating masterminds in Moscow or by white nationalists who seek to create a Fourth Reich. The greatest threat to Western democracy is the gradual decay of North America and Europe under well-educated, well-mannered, and well-funded centrist neoliberal politicians into something like the regimes that have long been familiar in many Latin American countries and the American South, in which oppressive oligarchic rule provokes destructive populist revolts.