{"id":1346,"date":"2017-02-27T23:20:50","date_gmt":"2017-02-28T04:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1346"},"modified":"2018-10-05T07:23:57","modified_gmt":"2018-10-05T12:23:57","slug":"fulfilling-the-fascist-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/fulfilling-the-fascist-lie\/","title":{"rendered":"Fulfilling the Fascist Lie"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5>Late Reflections on\u00a0<em>The Authoritarian Personality<\/em><\/h5>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2017\/02\/Good-Night-White-Pride-e1488255528100.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1355\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2017\/02\/Good-Night-White-Pride-e1488255528100.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" \/><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\"><em>The essay that follows is a response to a seventy-year-old book. If you need a crash course on\u00a0<\/em>The Authoritarian Personality,\u00a0<em>first published by Adorno and a team of University of California psychologists in 1950<\/em><em>, you could skim <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Authoritarian_Personality\">the Wiki entry <\/a>or, better, have a look at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.boundary2.org\/2016\/06\/peter-gordon-the-authoritarian-personality-revisited-reading-adorno-in-the-age-of-trump\/\">this essay by Robert Gordon,<\/a> available on the boundary 2 website.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\"><em>The essay is scheduled to appear in\u00a0<\/em>South Atlantic Quarterly\u00a0<em>in 2018<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Authoritarian-Personality-Studies-Prejudice\/dp\/0393311120\">The Authoritarian Personality<\/a><\/em>\u2014I want to use the following paragraphs\u00a0to explain why I find this admittedly remarkable book to be unpersuasive, why, in fact, it is a matter of some urgency that we not accept its arguments. I\u2019m not sure how to come at the point directly, so permit me to note, by way of introduction, that anyone who reads widely in the history of fascism is likely to spot, sooner or later, a series of antitheses\u2014oppositions, I mean, that were native to fascism itself and that historians return to again and again. If we want to be able to think clearly about <em>The Authoritarian Personality<\/em>, it will be enough for us to know about two of them. First, historians have made the point that fascism proceeded through stages, that, in other words, it wasn\u2019t a single static position, that it was a dynamic entity, rather, tending to mutate over time. What, one might ask, were those stages? Broadly, the scholarship calls attention to fascism as an idea and an imagining, as an ideological current, therefore, cultivated by intellectuals\u2014a fascism of the book, in other words\u2014which was then succeeded by fascism as a mass movement. We need to be able to distinguish between those two. But then we also need to be able to distinguish between fascism as a movement and fascism as a regime\u2014which is to say, as a successful movement, one that had achieved power or taken hold of the state\u2014a fascism that governed. The point most commonly made is that fascism in its early stages\u2014a still ideational fascism\u2014was in certain respects more radical than what came later, or that it was more avant gardist, more likely to strike anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois poses. The fascists, this is to say, became more conventionally conservative over time, more recognizably a party of the Right, once they felt compelled to make their case to the non-bohemian many and once forced by their very success to make concessions to existing institutions and coalition partners. The stages thus yield an antithesis\u2014at one pole, fascism-as-dissident-counterculture; at the other, fascism as the mainstream run amok, the establishment\u2019s protracted revenge against its critics and rivals.<\/p>\n<p>This same antithesis now becomes available in a geographical form, via the single, uncomplicated observation that Mussolini\u2019s government, unlike Hitler\u2019s, did not attempt to monopolize the entire sphere of thought and culture. Historians are keen to point out that there was no Italian <em>Gleichschaltung<\/em>\u2014no effort to bring everyone into line. Within certain parameters, independent intellectuals continued to publish in Italy, which means not that there were still socialists or communists or liberals expressing themselves freely in Florence and Rome\u2014those people really were shut down\u2014but that there remained an outer circle of freelance fascists, the half-fascists or the merely unenrolled, the shirts not of black, but of charcoal and onyx and taupe, who continued to propose hypothetical other fascisms, in a scatterplot around the fascism that was actually being implemented. An aestheticist and nonconformist fascism thus remained more visible in Italy throughout the \u201820s and \u201830s, never wholly subsumed into fascism-as-revanchist-orthodoxy. Early vs. late; Italy vs. Germany\u2014two antitheses that are really one, a fascism with anti-bourgeois features vs. its snarlingly bourgeois rival.<\/p>\n<p>This compounded antithesis matters because there are a hundred different claims you might wish to make about fascism that will run aground upon it. Arguments about fascism routinely invert or negate themselves, and the reason for this is surprisingly easy to identify. Histories of fascism often posit an A fascism and a B fascism, and even if you think that \u201cA vs. B\u201d sounds too schematic, as it doubtless does, that second term will suffice to undermine one\u2019s accustomed sense that fascism was a uniform position\u2014or indeed that it was, to a singular degree, a politics of uniformity, a uniform movement in the pursuit of uniformity. The problem for those of us needing to theorize fascism is that a great many things we will want to say about the B fascism will not be true of the A fascism. Worse, if we mean to fashion our historical analysis into a politics, then we run the permanent risk of pegging our anti-fascism to one pole or another of the fascist antithesis, such that by opposing one fascism, we will end up endorsing the other, if only unwittingly, because we have failed to so much as recognize this latter as fascist. Our anti-fascism will be stalked by its fascist twin.<\/p>\n<p>Anyone wanting to come to grips with <em>The Authoritarian Personality<\/em>, then, will need to understand first how basic these transpositions are to the study of fascism. The movement\u2019s nearest synonym has always been \u201cnational socialism,\u201d in a manner that predates the renaming of the German Workers\u2019 Party in 1920. So was national socialism national? Manifestly, you say, nothing is better established than that. Theorists of fascism are fond of the term \u201cultranationalism\u201d\u2014that\u2019s a nationalism made super- and hyper- and arch-. But then what do we say about the swastika, that most recognizable of fascist emblems, incomparably more iconic than any bundle of wooden rods?\u2014the swastika, this hermetic counter-crucifix, which, as of 1917, was still associated above all with sites in India and Baluchistan and western Turkey. The point that overfamiliarity makes hard to grasp is that every official building in Nazi Germany was adorned with an Orientalist hex sign. German troops marched under an ankh or dream-catcher, an Aryavartic pentacle that derived its talismanic charisma not from its Germanness\u2014not, that is, from its being indigenous to Silesia or Brandenburg, which it wasn\u2019t\u2014but from its near-ubiquity across four continents.<a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2017\/02\/Screenshot-2017-02-27-22.35.35-e1488253018687.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1348\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2017\/02\/Screenshot-2017-02-27-22.35.35-e1488253018687.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"420\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The word \u201cAryan,\u201d meanwhile, is not and never was an apt equivalent for \u201cTeutonic\u201d or \u201cNordic.\u201d Even as a white-supremacist term of art, the word has always meant something like \u201cIndo-Germanic.\u201d It\u2019s that hyphen we\u2019ll want to pay attention to, informing us as it does that doctrines of the Aryan were not premised on yet another nineteenth-century sundering of the West from the non-West, but precisely on their fusing. Of all the ways of naming white people, \u201cAryan\u201d has got to be the most peculiar\u2014though \u201cCaucasian\u201d is plenty strange and \u201cwhite\u201d itself mere misdescription. Aryan, however, is the only entry on that list that could be suspected of negating whiteness even while exalting it. Aryan\u2014the Eur-asian or Occi-oriental.<\/p>\n<p>National socialism, then, was not straightforwardly nationalist. But was it socialist? The historians have a ready answer for that one, which is that even though some Nazi officials were willing to deploy a modified socialist rhetoric, the Nazi regime was quick to dismantle the institutions of the independent and organized working classes; to round up Leftists; and to close ranks with IG Farben and Siemens and IBM. National socialism was a capitalism dreaming of two continents.<\/p>\n<p>At this point, there is a question that any anti-fascist is going to have to ask: What claims can we make about fascism that will escape transposition of this kind? That challenge gives us a few good reasons for endorsing the approach taken by Adorno and his colleagues in <em>The Authoritarian Personality<\/em>. The f-scale, in particular, could be grasped as a solution to this problem. But it\u2019s more than that. Anyone still needing to be convinced of the achievements of Freudianism as a mode of political analysis could do worse than read this book, which turns to psychoanalysis in order to overcome the difficulties that have always weakened other theories, and especially to fix what has been least convincing about attempts to explain fascism in intellectual or ideological terms. To turn to psychoanalysis is to insist that there is no philosophical or merely doctrinal path to fascism\u2014that fascism has never been a matter of the <em>substance<\/em> of one\u2019s beliefs. It is akin to a syndrome, hence a way of inhabiting whatever creed or identification a person might have cathected to. There may not be a Protestant path to fascism, which is simply to say that some Protestants turned fascist and some didn\u2019t, but there is a fascist way of inhabiting your Protestantism. There may not even be a nationalist path to fascism, but there is a fascist way of libidinizing your nationalism. If that point seems plausible, then the next step is simply to extend it to social history, whose results are similarly inconclusive about such matters. There is no particular social path to fascism, no economic or demographic niche that opens chute-like onto the far Right\u2014the National Socialists were a mass party and recruited successfully from across the regions and classes and professions\u2014but there might be a fascist way of being attached to your social position, <em>any<\/em> social position.<\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s the achievement of the f-scale, and it\u2019s worth sticking up for. And yet the theory fails to convinces all the same. The f-scale, too, comes apart upon the fascist antitheses. Maybe the problem is already apparent: Adorno and his colleagues have proposed a series of fixed attributes that they think makes up the fascist personality. Here\u2019s Adorno summarizing the book\u2019s findings at a YMCA in 1948: The proto-fascist personality type involves \u201cmechanical acceptance of conventional values, blind submission to authority combined with a violently aggressive attitude towards all those who don\u2019t belong, anti-introspectiveness, rigid stereotypical thinking, a penchant for superstition, a vilification of human nature, and the habit to ascribe to the out-group the wishes and behavior patterns which one has to deny in oneself.\u201d Anyone alerted to the reversals that occur in the passage from fascism to fascism prime has got to suspect that we could just as well flip each of these character traits\u2014name its opposite\u2014and still find ourselves sitting across from a fascist. The f-scale describes the personality of a fascist, but then so does the anti-f scale. Handed an anti-fascist checklist by the Californians, we should be able to go through and negate each of its terms and thereby find not a non-fascism (the low scorers!), but an alternate path to fascism. Shall we just do it?<\/p>\n<p>1. Conventionalism: Fascists, Adorno tells us, are deeply conformist, the prim creatures of conventional morality, quick to punish anyone who offends against a stupid decency\u2014Victorians in leather trenchcoats. This observation might be right as far as it goes, but what it omits is that the Babbit-Nazis of Adorno\u2019s description shared the movement with fascist revolutionaries and world remakers and proclaimers of a New Europe, with those who wanted to de-Christianize Germany, to revive a pre-Frankish religion of runes and Wotan or to forge a <em>grossdeutscher <\/em>Buddhism. Here\u2019s Robert Brasillach, writing near the end of the war, not long before he was executed for being one of the most outspoken French Nazis: \u201cFascism was a spirit. For us it was not a political doctrine, nor was it an economic doctrine\u2026. It was first of all an anticonformist, antibourgeois spirit, in which disrespect played its part.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>2. Authoritarian submission: The notion that fascists are typically submissive and obedient, meanwhile, is difficult to square with the movement\u2019s reliance on mass mobilization\u2014its determination to agitate and unleash the public rather than pacify it. This is often taken to be the characteristic that most obviously distinguishes fascism from a generic authoritarianism. Energy and the deed counter docility and ductility. Enthusiasm counts for as much as compliance.<\/p>\n<p>3. Authoritarian aggression: The troubling sentence is this one: In fascist societies, \u201chostility that was originally aroused by and directed toward ingroup authorities is displaced onto outgroups.\u201d The claim that fascists are aggressive or violence-prone is as close to a consensus position as one is likely to find. And yet to say additionally that fascists are the ones who channel their aggression towards an outgroup is drastically to understate the vehemence of their attack on existing institutions (and to skip over the very minor role that anti-Semitism played in fascist Italy for most of its duration). The problem is best grasped as a conceptual one: The fascists came to power only by declaring illegitimate the up-and-sort-of-running institutions of government and by anathematizing entire sectors of German and Italian society hitherto regarded as normal. They were wholly capable of waging war on the ingroup\u2014or of reclassifying in- as out-. To say that aggression targets the outgroup is to skip all the urgent questions about how the social field gets cleaved and re-cleaved. Here\u2019s another French fascist, Drieu la Rochelle, writing in 1934: \u201cWe are against everyone. We fight against everyone. That is what fascism is.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>4. Superstition and stereotypy: Superstition and stereotyping have been paired by the Berkeley authors because they both point to the inability of proto-fascists to think clearly about what is happening in the world at large and why it is happening. People susceptible to fascism are alienated in some properly Left Hegelian sense of the term\u2014unsure of how events and institutions are produced, mired in the opacity of the social, cognitively thwarted by the complexity of networked causes. But then we have names for people who have been trained, contrariwise, to think carefully about such causes. Some of them we call \u201chistorians\u201d; others we call \u201cscientists.\u201d To say that fascism thrives where causal understanding collapses is to suggest that there was no proto-fascist history-writing, in the manner, for instance, of Ernst Kantorowicz\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/fredericktheseco000027mbp\">biography of <em>Frederick the Second<\/em><\/a>, and no fascist science either. But then, of course, we now have decades of scholarship, much of it Adornian in spirit, documenting the scientific orientation of National Socialism. That fascism requires superstition as its provender can only be maintained by someone who has never heard the term \u201cbiopolitics.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>5. Anti-intraception: The Berkeley authors make it hard to so much as register the existence of a fascist science\u2014and then they do the same thing for fascist poetry. Proto-fascists, we are told, are uncomfortable with inwardness. They would gladly put a taboo on reflection or on the display of inner life or on psychoanalysis itself. But then are we to say nothing about Stefan George and Ezra Pound and D\u2019Annunzio and Yeats? Was there no such thing as a fascist lyric, hence a fascist inwardness? Were the fascist and near-fascist poets not fascist <em>when they wrote poetry<\/em>? Did they only become fascist again upon putting down their pens? Are lyric poems written by fascists less lyric than ones written by liberals or socialists? Less inward? Not at all inward? But then what makes them lyric? Did Yeats not write lyric?<\/p>\n<p>6 &amp; 7. Power and \u201cToughness\u201d + Sex: Then of course there\u2019s the idea that proto-fascists are tough guys with hang-ups about sex. That idea can be dismissed by pointing to a particular person. One of Stefan George\u2019s closest associates for a time was Alfred Schuler, a freak classicist of sub-Nietzschean caliber, who wanted nothing more than to resurrect a pagan antiquity and who thought he could do this mostly by throwing toga parties. Schuler wrote almost nothing; he was more of a counter-culture guru than an intellectual; but his central idea seems to have been that European culture was all-but permanently rent by a conflict between the male principle and the female principle, to be understood, presumably, along orthodox lines as rationality vs. irrationality, <em>logos <\/em>vs desire, activity vs. passivity, &amp;c. Schuler thought that Europe might yet be redeemed if Westerners could agree collectively to abandon settled gender roles and embrace instead a universal androgyny. The Greeks and Romans would point the way in this regard, because they had practiced boy-love; they had been wise enough to worship the she-male. Schuler thought, in other words, that pederasty, by offering a fragile synthesis of male and female or mind and body, might just keep Europe\u2019s primal gender conflict in check. This idea had as its extension the idea that everyday life in Europe had been thrown permanently off kilter when Roman culture went into eclipse; the Roman world had promoted androgyny; the early medieval world had reestablished rigid gender roles. And the culprits behind this almost millennial crime were, of course, the Jews, since they were one of the very few eastern Mediterranean cultures to prohibit male love, which makes of any Christianity that will not spill its seed nothing but a generalized and evangelical Judaism. Christianity, in other words, had merely propagated and enforced the homophobia of the ancient Jews. When love between men thus became taboo, so this line of reasoning ran, the Jewish spirit and its gender orthodoxies went into the ascendancy, and it was this world-historical shift that a sibylline and modernist poetry might yet undo. It matters, then, that Schuler is known to historians mostly as the person who re-introduced into modern European culture the swastika, which was to be the emblem of the Future and Genderless Age. Indeed, Schuler for a time wanted to change his name to the <em>Hakenkreuz<\/em>, a symbol with no spoken equivalent. His reasoning here was roughly like Prince\u2019s: The dingbat under which \u201890s-era Prince released his CDs combined the classic, bathroom-door sign for Mars\u2014hard-on north-north-east\u2014with the classic, incongruously dangling sign for Venus, which makes his just one of several recent transgender riffs on those old gender symbols. The revived swastika, in this sense, was one of the earliest instances of the typesetter\u2019s hermaphroditic astrology.<\/p>\n<p>This leaves (8) projectivity, as the one item from the f-scale we still need to consider. I would offer that its status is special for us. It will require extra attention. The claim that Adorno and colleagues make is fairly straightforward: that anyone \u201cready to think about and to believe in the existence of such phenomena as wild erotic excesses, plots and conspiracies, and danger from natural catastrophes\u201d must have a rowdy Id\u2014they have to believe such things are likely, they must themselves feel the pull of sex and destruction.\u00a0Proto-fascists are the ones ready to see in the world their own most malign impulses. The theory of projection has always been of particular interest because it is psychoanalysis\u2019s most obviously dialectical figure, this parody of Hegelian reconciliation, in which the subject rediscovers himself in some other and then, offered the chance for self-communion, declares war on this Other-Self instead, trading in the <em>bei sich <\/em>for a fatuous <em>gegen sich<\/em>. Projection matters to us because it is via its mechanisms that fascism and anti-fascism are most directly conjoined. The American anti-democrat is alarmed by how anti-democratic everything has become. The Tea Partier circa 2011 attacks Obama by drawing a Hitler mustache on his portrait. It is at this moment, upon discovering that the people we were pretty sure were proto-fascists have adopted an anti-fascist accent, that caution recommends itself. We will want to pause, to at least wonder about the possibility of projection in our own anti-fascism, and not just in theirs. Are we sure that projection isn\u2019t involved in our willingness to believe that other people are fascists, our finding that plausible? Is there projection in the f-scale itself? Couldn\u2019t our diagnosis that other people are given to projection itself involve projection? And if not, why not? Under what conditions can anti-fascism itself carry a fascism?<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s at this moment that we\u2019ll need to look up from <em>The Authoritarian Personality <\/em>and go back to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sup.org\/books\/title\/?id=1103\"><em>The Dialectic of Enlightenment<\/em><\/a>. It used to be taken as given that fascism was a movement of the counter-enlightenment; no book has done more to alter that perception than Adorno and Horkheimer\u2019s. It can come as a surprise, then, to realize that Adorno and Horkheimer weren\u2019t actually disagreeing with that earlier claim. New readers are going to understand <em>The Dialectic of Enlightenment <\/em>better if they can see that it takes that other, prior point as read. The word that we usually omit when summarizing the book is \u201calso.\u201d Adorno and Horkheimer thought they could show that fascism was <em>also <\/em>an Enlightenment project, that fascism had a disastrous way of getting the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment to coincide\u2014or that any organized enlightenment eventually reached a point where it could no longer be distinguished from counter-enlightenment. That\u2019s the dialectic in the title\u2014without the word <em>also<\/em> there is no dialectic. The title always has to be heard as <em>The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment<\/em>, which they mostly call myth.<\/p>\n<p>The problem, then, is that the\u00a0book almost only gets read as \u201cEnlightenment critique\u201d\u2014indeed, it is often held out as the twentieth century\u2019s single greatest entry in that genre. But maybe it\u2019s time to admit that \u201cEnlightenment critique\u201d is an intemperate simplification and pretty much a mistake, in which most of Adorno and Horkheimer\u2019s argument gets shorn away. Enlightenment critique is <em>The Dialectic of Enlightenment <\/em>de-dialecticized. One forgets the starting point, which was that fascism had presented itself above all as counter-enlightenment. Not in the <em>Dialectic of Enlightenment <\/em>itself, but among its readers, and on the syllabi in which it is excerpted, the counter-enlightenment that is the closest thing that fascism had to an official ideology gets held out as the authentically anti-fascist option. In this form, the <em>Dialectic of Enlightenment<\/em>, far from being the centerpiece of anti-fascist philosophy that we need it to be, becomes the vehicle by which a certain proto-fascist sensibility has been kept alive in the extended postwar era, in which one important version of the fascist temptation survives because <a href=\"https:\/\/www.upress.umn.edu\/book-division\/books\/anti-oedipus\">disguised as its opposite<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Recognizing as much should help us see at last why it is important that we not accept the framework offered by the Berkeley team in <em>The Authoritarian Personality<\/em>\u2014because it is in the pages on the f-scale that Adorno signs his name to the non-dialectical version of his own dialectical argument. It is in this volume that dialectic gets truncated back to diagnosis. It is finally hard to agree with the West Coast Adorno if we accept that the f-scale was meant to identify proto-fascists and not just company men. The mind pauses and reflects. Does anyone really think that the fascists were right-thinking squares who always did what they were told and wanted to punch queers in the face? The German catastrophe was an awful lot weirder than that\u2014uncomfortably weird if weird is what you like. A critical theory that preemptively declares itself a <em>Zona Antifa <\/em>gullibly deeds over its stances to the very movement it opposes. Two American thinkers share credit for coining the term <em>alternative right<\/em>: 1) the elderly intellectual historian who gave a speech in 2008 commending a movement less egalitarian than Fox News, the Republican Party, and the Heritage Foundation, welcoming a conservatism willing once again to embrace scientific racism and to stop pretending it admires Martin Luther King; and 2) the young intellectual historian who edited that speech for <a href=\"http:\/\/takimag.com\/article\/the_decline_and_rise_of_the_alternative_right\/print#axzz4ZoqxSxpB\">publication online<\/a>. In the 1980s, the older man <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Search-Historical-Meaning-Postwar-American\/dp\/0875806317\">wrote a book<\/a> cataloging all the philosophical prizes that Hegelian-Marxist apostates bring with them when they convert to anti-communism. Twenty years later, his fond reminiscences of taking a class with Herbert Marcuse in the early 1960s are matched by the tributes he writes to Jared Taylor\u2019s American Renaissance. First one reads <a href=\"https:\/\/isistatic.org\/journal-archive\/ma\/47_02\/gottfried.pdf\">this<\/a>: \u201cThere were \u2026 Frankfurt School texts that I found instructive, particularly <em>Dialectic of Enlightenment <\/em>and <em>Negative Dialectics<\/em>.\u201d And then one reads <a href=\"http:\/\/takimag.com\/article\/right_but_doomed#axzz4ZoqxSxpB\">this<\/a>: \u201cWhich American party stands for the white counterinsurgency? \u2026 Significantly, the white solidarity that Jared advocates has never really developed in Western history outside of colonial settlements and in the American South.\u201d At least <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Karl_August_Wittfogel\">one early member<\/a> of the Frankfurt School spent his later career refunctioning a concept of Marx\u2019s, the Asiatic mode of production, into a bludgeon with which to thump the Reds. Frankfurt School accounts of the administered society are joined by neo-Confederates who define the enemy as \u201cthe managerial society\u201d or borderline fascists who can tell you all about the \u201ctherapeutic managerial state.\u201d The day you first read Guy Debord was the day you should have realized not only that you could practice d\u00e9tournement, but also that it could be practiced upon you, that the cultures susceptible to jamming include your anti-fascist own. In November 2016, that younger intellectual historian addressed a room full of white nationalists. \u201cHail our people!\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/11\/21\/us\/alt-right-salutes-donald-trump.html\">he said<\/a>. \u201cHail victory!\u201d He wrote his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2016\/10\/richard-spencer-trump-alt-right-white-nationalist\">master\u2019s thesis <\/a>on Adorno.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2017\/02\/antifa-1220x560-e1488254165528.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1352\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2017\/02\/antifa-1220x560-e1488254165528.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"275\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h5>A few notes:<\/h5>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u2022The book that argues most openly for fascism-as-process-and-sequence (idea, movement, regime) is Robert Paxton&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Anatomy of Fascism<\/em>. The French fascists are quoted in Zeev Sternhell&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Birth of Fascist Ideology<\/em>. Jack Jacobs quotes Adorno speaking at the YMCA in his\u00a0<em>Frankfurt School<\/em><em>,\u00a0Jewish Lives, and Anti-Semitism<\/em>. The material on Schuler I owe to Robert Norton&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>\u2022I talked this argument through with friends and co-thinkers at a roundtable at Hunter College in November 2016. Special thanks are due Robyn Marasco for organizing &#8220;<em>The Authoritarian Personality<\/em>, Revisited.&#8221;\u00a0Thanks, too, to Eric Kurlander.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Late Reflections on\u00a0The Authoritarian Personality &nbsp; The essay that follows is a response to a seventy-year-old book. If you need a crash course on\u00a0The Authoritarian Personality,\u00a0first published by Adorno and a team of University of California psychologists in 1950, you &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/fulfilling-the-fascist-lie\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1346"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1423,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions\/1423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}