For nearly the last three years, I have been doing all I can to understand, to really grok this movement that has grown around Donald Trump. Beginning with The True Believer by Eric Hoffer and They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, I realized that what was going on in this country bore alarming parallels to another movement, half a world away and nearly ninety years before. In the time since, I have immersed myself in book after book, trying to come to terms with what it is that drives this social phenomenon. What does it mean that it is happening here? What is “it”?
Fascism, as described by Robert O. Paxton, is
a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.1
But I mean not to talk of static definitions. Early on in my perusals I realized that an epiphenomenon of fascism—the jubilation, the enthusiasm—was the key indicator that the movement had arrived. Even Paxton referenced “zeal”, “passion” and “emotional lava.” I saw that fascism was a social contagion. It was a fever that induced a stupor. This fever had the capacity, given the right stimulus, to turn ordinary men into cannibalistic killers.2 It had the power to transmit madness, a rabies of the mind.
Hannah Arendt spoke to “the perpetual-motion mania of totalitarian movements which can remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them in motion.”3 She lent this to the conversation:
One should not forget that only a building can have a structure, but that a movement—if the word is to be taken as seriously and as literally as the Nazis meant it—can have only a direction . . . [one] which is being propelled with increasing speed in a certain direction.4
It has become fashionable to quote Arendt in our current times, but I turn to her because she has trenchant things to say, information that can but compel us toward enlightenment about the state of our own situation.
Another thought leader from her time was Theodor Adorno, who with three other analysts authored The Authoritarian Personality back in 1950. But four years before that, Adorno contributed a piece to Ernst Simmel’s Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, an essay entitled “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda.” It is his essay I mean to treat so as to gain a better understanding of the nature of what is transpiring around us.
Adorno wastes no time delving into the meat of the matter, describing the propaganda this way:
The material studied itself evinces a psychological approach. It is conceived in psychological rather than in objective terms. It aims at winning people over by playing upon their unconscious mechanisms rather than by presenting ideas and arguments.5
This calls to mind a quote by Wilhelm Stapel, a prominent Nazi: “For the very reason that National Socialism is an elementary movement, it cannot be gotten at with ‘arguments.’ Arguments would be effective only if the movement had gained its power by argumentation.”6
Adorno continues:
Not only is the oratorical technique of the fascist demagogues of a shrewdly illogical, pseudo-emotional nature; more than that, positive political programs, postulates, nay any concrete political ideas play but a minor role compared with the psychological stimuli applied to the audience. It is from these stimuli and from other information rather than from the vague, confused platforms of the speeches that we can identify them as fascist at all.7
We already knew that fascism doesn’t propound positive policies. This is why it was possible for the Republican National Convention to not offer up a platform during Trump’s reelection campaign, and why it has come to the point where the Texas GOP has adopted Trump’s Big Lie as conventional truth. It’s not about reality. It’s about tugging on unseen strings in the mental landscape of the follower. It’s a hidden appeal.
Precisely because these mechanisms are unconscious, the adherents—the true believers—don’t realize what is happening to them. Robert Jay Lifton spoke about this in terms of mystical manipulation, a manner of hocus-pocus that is so diffuse that the follower does not see that the ploy is top-down and purposely directed: “Initiated from above, it seeks to provoke specific patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that these will appear to have arisen spontaneously from within the environment.”8
Adorno continues with three characteristics of the American propaganda of his time. Remember, this was published in 1946. I quote at length to demonstrate the uncanniness of this material’s unchanging nature.
- It is personalized propaganda, essentially non-objective. The agitators spend a large part of their time in speaking either about themselves or about their audiences. They present themselves as lone wolves, as healthy, sound American citizens with robust instincts, as unselfish and indefatigable; and they incessantly divulge real or fictitious intimacies about their lives and those of their families. Moreover, they appear to take a warm human interest in the small daily worries of their listeners, whom they depict as poor but honest, common-sense but non-intellectual, native Christians. They identify themselves with their listeners and lay particular emphasis upon being simultaneously both modest little men and leaders of great calibre. … Another favorite scheme of personalization is to dwell upon petty financial needs and to beg for small amounts of money. [...]
- All these demogogues substitute means for ends. They prate about “this great movement”, about their organization, about a general American revival they hope to bring about, but they very rarely say anything about what such a movement is supposed to lead to, what the organization is good for or what the mysterious revival is intended positively to achieve. … The glorification of action, of something going on, simultaneously obliterates and replaces the purpose of the so-called movement. The end is “that we might demonstrate to the world that there are patriots, God-fearing Christian men and women who are yet willing to give their lives to the cause of God, home and native land.”
- Since the entire weight of this propaganda is to promote the means, propaganda itself becomes the ultimate content. In other words, propaganda functions as a kind of wish-fulfillment.9
This IS the movement. The propaganda is the purpose; the propaganda is the mission.
Of course, those enthralled do not know this. All that they know is that they feel they have found purpose in life, that they have fallen in with like minds, that they feel better than they have in years (i.e., self-inflation, self-aggrandizement), and that the movement has given them a vision of what life could be. The sensation is internally revolutionary, so as to match the political fervor of the movement itself. This is why a document to overthrow democracy in the United States was titled “1776 Returns”. These people are constantly imbibing a sense of revolt, of a decisive overturning of one regime for another, one more righteous, more Godly, truer, purer, and permanent.
Adorno:
This is one of its most important patterns. People are “let in”, they are supposedly getting the inside dope, taken into confidence, treated as of the elite siders. Lust for snooping is both encouraged and satisfied. Scandal stories, mostly fictitious, particularly of sexual excesses and atrocities are constantly told; the indignation at filth and cruelty is but a very thin, purposely transparent rationalization of the pleasure these stories convey to the listener.10
This immediately calls to mind QAnon, with their lurid stories of pedophilia and grooming. The stories are not based in reality but are apparently the fetishized obsessional thoughts these people are using to gratify themselves, through displacement and projection. But beyond those odious stories, and their imaginings of infant adrenochrome, the adherents also are fed these ideas on the sly, as though the fact that the information is surreptitious means that it is also legitimate.11
“What now,” Adorno asks, “does the fascist, and in particular, the anti-Semitic propaganda speech wish to achieve?” (We may as well add that in the United States, with its somewhat muted anti-Semitism, other forms of bigotry work similarly in these speeches. Indeed, the attacks on LGBTQ+, Black people, and other minorities are interchangeable here.)12
To be sure, its goal is not “rational”, for it makes no attempt to convince people, and it always remains on a non-argumentative level. In this connection two facts deserve detailed investigation:
- Fascist propaganda attacks bogies rather than real opponents, that is to say, it builds up an imagery of the Jew, or of the Communist, and tears it to pieces, without caring much how this imagery is related to reality.
- It does not employ discursive logic but is rather, particularly in oratorical exhibitions, what might be called an organized flight of ideas. The relation between premises and inferences is replaced by a linking-up of ideas resting on mere similarity, often through association by employing the same characteristic word in two propositions which are logically quite unrelated. This method not only evades the control mechanisms of rational examination, but also makes it psychologically easier for the listener to “follow”. He has no exacting thinking to do, but can give himself up passively to a stream of words in which he swims.13
Adorno here presages Tucker Carlson, with his rhetorical juggling similar to the spiel of a used car salesman. Just as a single example, Carlson in his pitch for his testicle-tanning apparatus said, “So obviously half the viewers are now like, ‘What, testicle tanning? That’s crazy.’ But my view is, okay, testosterone levels have crashed and nobody says anything about it. That’s crazy. So why is it crazy to seek solutions?” This is clear knight’s-move thinking, the joining of two completely unrelated ideas with one common word as a hinge.
Adorno continues:
In spite of these patterns of retrogression, however, anti-Semitic propaganda is by no means altogether irrational. The term, irrationality, is much too vague to describe sufficiently so complex a psychological phenomenon. We know, above all, that fascist propaganda, with all its twisted logic and fantastic distortions, is consciously planned and organized. If it is to be called irrational, then it is applied rather than spontaneous irrationality, a kind of psychotechnics reminiscent of the calculated effect conspicuous in most presentations of today’s mass culture,—such as in movies and broadcasts.14
I’ve written more about an organized flight of ideas here, where I argue that today’s propagandists are deliberately sequencing ideas so as to bring about mild thought disorder. Reference again Tucker Carlson and his ilk.
Conditions prevailing in our society tend to transform neurosis and even mild lunacy into a commodity which the afflicted can easily sell, once he has discovered that many others have an affinity for his own illness. The fascist agitator is usually a masterly salesman of his own psychological defects. This is possible only because of a general structural similarity between followers and leader, and the goal of propaganda is to establish a concord between them rather than to convey to the audience any ideas or emotions which were not their own from the very beginning.15
It is our severe misfortune that Donald Trump is both psychologically defective and an actual salesman. This schtick is now his bread and butter.
[T]his type of propaganda functions as a gratification. We may compare it with the social phenomenon of the soap opera. Just as the housewife, who has enjoyed the sufferings and the good deeds of her favorite heroine for a quarter of an hour over the air, feels impelled to buy the soap sold by the sponsor, so the listener to the fascist propaganda act, after getting pleasure from it, accepts the ideology represented by the speaker out of gratitude for the show.16
This is the very danger inherent in Donald Trump’s speeches to defend America against critical race theory (thus calling for a race war) or in, say, pastor Greg Locke’s insistence that Democrats are baby butchers and that a person cannot vote Democrat and be a Christian simultaneously.
As the saying goes, they’ve bought the ticket; now they take the ride.
This ceremony, however, is merely a symbolic revelation of the identity that he [the leader] verbalizes, an identity the listeners feel and think, but cannot express. This is what they actually want him to do, neither being convinced nor, essentially, being whipped into a frenzy, but having their own minds expressed to them. The gratification they get out of propaganda consists most likely in the demonstration of this identity[….] This act of revelation, and the temporary abandonment of responsible, self-contained seriousness is the decisive pattern of the propagandist ritual.
… This loosening of self-control, the merging of one’s impulses with a ritual scheme is closely related to the universal psychological weakening of the self-contained individual.17
In other words, this is one of the mechanisms by which a person sheds the self in order to become one with the group, the mass, or the mob, as the case may be. The relationship between the leader and the followers becomes such that the entirety of the gathering begins to sync.
The performance of the ritual as such functions to a very large extent as the ultimate content of fascist propaganda. Psychoanalysis has shown the relatedness of ritual behavior to compulsion neurosis; and it is obvious that the typical fascist ritual of revelation is a substitute for sexual gratification. Beyond this, however, some speculation may be allowed with regard to the specific symbolic meaning of the fascist ritual. It is not wide off the mark to interpret it as the offering of a sacrifice. If the assumption is correct that the overwhelming majority of accusations and atrocity stories with which the fascist propaganda speeches abound, are projections of the wishes of the orators and their followers, the whole symbolic act of revelation celebrated in each propaganda speech expresses, however much concealed, the sacramental killing of the chosen foe. At the hub of the fascist, anti-Semitic propaganda ritual is the desire for ritual murder.18
This paragraph above is the whole reason I’ve penned this diary. When I read the passage, my blood cooled in my veins. I couldn’t help but reflect upon it in light of Eric Greitens’s recent “advertisement” for his Senate run:
“Join the MAGA crew,” the spot says. “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
Or take for instance pastor Aaron Thompson, who capitalizes on hate against LGBTQ+ individuals, saying they should be summarily “shot in the back of the head.”
That’s the whole point. The entire movement is geared toward generating that sense of agitation, motion, kinetic energy. It means to stir emotions and loosen self-restraint enough so that, when the time is right or the signal given, the followers will be eager to participate in this movement with their feet, just as they were on January 6. The movement drives bloodthirstiness.
But notice that these people are not calling for retribution against the Uvalde Police Department who let an armed man rampage against small children; or against leaders of the Southern Baptist Church recently and publicly acknowledged to have sexually abused congregants, some of which were very young. For the wish-fulfillment to work, the calls must be against those designated as enemy outsiders, even (or especially) if those outsiders are within the national borders.
What these adherents do not realize is that there’s nothing waiting out there for them at the end of the road. “[A] certain vagueness with regard to political aims is inherent in Fascism itself,” Adorno tells us. “This is partly due to its intrinsically untheoretical nature, partly to the fact that its followers will be cheated in the end[.]”19 Hannah Arendt, too, unveils this about fascism: “It invariably turns out that the mere sympathizers never realize what is happening.”20
Recently on MSNBC one of the contributors (whose name unfortunately escapes me) stated in no uncertain terms that the MAGA movement threatens the stability of the nation’s future, and he implored Democrats and liberals to form a movement, I suppose as a counterbalance. This will not reduce the danger and in fact has the great chance of simply escalating the temperature until the cold civil war turns hot. Authoritarians take any hint of escalation as an impending threat; in fact, they are known to attack even when they have no chance of winning, just to show that they will not assume a submissive posture.21 Let’s not try to artificially create something and in so doing inadvertently set off a chain reaction that we mean to forestall.
Other things we should not attempt are trying to reason with the other side (recall Stapel’s quote from earlier) or appealing to a sense of fair play. According to the psychoanalysts who contributed to Ernst Simmel’s volume, that will not work.
What we should do, according to Adorno, is emphasize how much the fascist followers themselves have to lose if the movement comes to fruition. “The strongest hope for effectively countering this whole type of propaganda lies in pointing out its self-destructive implications. The unconscious psychological desire for self-annihilation faithfully reproduces the structure of a political movement which ultimately transforms its followers into victims.”22
1 Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 218.
2 ”By precept and example, the German has shown us that anti-Semitism can reverse the process of civilization and reduce the anti-Semitic personality to the original stage of primitive cannibalism.” Ernst Simmel, “Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, p. 34.
3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 306.
4 Ibid., p. 398.
5 Theodor Adorno, “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, p. 125.
6 As quoted by Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 34.
7 Adorno, op. cit., pp. 125-126, bolding mine.
8 Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, p. 422.
9 Adorno, op. cit., pp. 126-127, bolding mine.
10 Ibid., p. 127.
11 “[M]any arguments are based on the question of what is possible rather than on what is probable. The difference between these two modes of thinking is precisely the difference beween paranoid and sane thinking. The paranoiac’s unshakable conviction in the validity of his delusion rests upon the fact that it is logically possible, and, so, unassailable. … [T]he paranoid position can satisfy itself with the possibility alone.” Erich Fromm, “The Case for Unilateral Disarmament,” in On Disobedience and Other Essays, p. 114.
12 Anti-Semitism is dangerous in its own right, which I mean not to diminish. At the same time, as Simmel says, “the mental mechanisms operative are not specific to anti-Semitism alone. The same mechanisms are to be found in any pathological group formation precipitated by the need of individuals to associate for the dual purpose of finding a common escape from reality and of attaining a collective discharge of aggressive energies. I refer to the pathological group formations that are responsible for race riots or lynchings.” Simmel, op. cit., p. 66.
13 Adorno, op. cit., pp. 129-130.
14 Ibid., p. 130, bolding mine.
15 Ibid., pp. 130-131.
16 Ibid., p. 131, bolding mine.
17 Ibid., pp. 132-133.
18 Ibid., p.136.
19 Ibid., p. 128.
20 Arendt, op. cit., p. 414.
21 Robert Altemeyer, The Authoritarians, p. 135, footnote 15.
22 Adorno, op. cit., p. 137.