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\settitle{Politics and Economics in the Interview Material}
{T.\ W.\ Adorno}{Chapter XVII of {\em The Authoritarian Personality}}


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\subsection*{A. Introduction}

The questionnaire findings on political and economic ideology have
been analyzed in Chapter V. It is now our task to study the interview
material referring to the same topics. The purpose is, first of
all, to concretize our insight into these ideologies. If we
investigated, in Chapter V, into the responses of our subjects to
a number of set, standardized political and economic ideas and
slogans with which they are daily confronted, we shall now try to
form a picture of ``what they really think" --- with the qualification
that we shall also have to find out whether we are entitled to
expect autonomous and spontaneous opinions from the majority of
them. It is obvious that the answer to such problems, unless they
should be made the very center of research, can be given only in a
less rigorous way than was the case with the quantitative analysis
of questionnaire responses, and that the results are of a more
tentative nature. Their convincing power lies more in the consistency
of specific interpretations with facts previously established than
in any indisputable ``proof" that one or the other of the ideological
mechanisms under review prevail within a majority of subjects or
within certain groups.

Again, our interpretations of ideology will go below the realm of
surface opinion, and will be related to the psychological results
of our study. It is not our aim merely to add some padding to our
figures. As stated in the Introductory Remarks to this part, we
would rather gain insight into the links between ideological opinions
and psychological determinants. We do not pretend that psychology
is the cause and ideology the effect. But we try to interrelate
both as intimately as possible, guided by the assumption that
ideological irrationalities just as other irrationalities of overt
human behavior are concomitant with unconscious psychological
conflicts. We combed through the interview material with particular
attention to such irrationalities
%% %% %% 654 POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    655
and to statements revealing something about the dynamics of
personality. The establishment of plausible configurations involving
both dynamic motivation and ideological rationalization seems to
us the foremost means of achieving that consistency on which the
evidence of the discussions to follow largely depends. The data
discussed so far permit at least the assumption that personality
could be regarded as {\em one} determinant of ideology.

Yet it is just the area with which we are now concerned that most
strongly forbids any simple reduction to terms of personality. Our
construct of the ``potentially fascist character" was largely based
on the division between high and low scorers. Whereas this division
retains its value for numerous topics of political and economic
ideology and can be substantiated, on a deeper level, probably for
{\em all} ideological issues, there appears to be at work another determinant
which, in numerous issues, blurs the distinction between high and
low scorers and refuses to be stated unequivocally in terms of
personality. This determinant may be called our general cultural
climate, and particularly the ideological influence upon the people
of most media for molding public opinion. If our cultural climate
has been standardized under the impact of social control and
technological concentration to an extent never known before, we may
expect that the thinking habits of individuals reflect this
standardization as well as the dynamics of their own personalities.
These personalities may, indeed, be the product of this very same
standardization to a much higher degree than a na\"ive observer is
led to believe. In other words, we have to expect a kind of ideological
``over-all pattern" in our interviewees which, though by no means
indifferent to the dichotomy of high and low scorers, transcends
its boundaries. Our data afford ample evidence that such an ideological
over-all pattern exists in fact.


It is a major question for this chapter whether this over-all
ideological pattern, perhaps even more than the specific susceptibility
of our high scorers to fascist propaganda, does not entail the
danger of a large-scale following of anti-democratic movements if
they should get under way with powerful support.


The importance of this diagnosis, if it should be corroborated
sufficiently by our data, is self-evident, its most immediate
implication being that the fight against such a general potential
cannot be carried through only educationally on a purely psychological
level, but that it requires at the same time decisive changes of
that cultural climate which makes for the over-all pattern.
Methodologically, the importance of this aspect of our study lies
in the fact that it relativizes, somewhat, the distinction between
high vs. low scorers; this distinction, if taken as absolute, may
easily lead to a ``psychologizing" bias that would neglect the
objective, supra-individual social forces operating in our society.


The introduction of the concept of an over-all pattern just in this
ideological


%% 656     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY


ideological area may appear paradoxical at first glance. Since most
political and economic issues are overt and relatively simple with
reference to the blunt division between progressivism and reactionism,
one should expect the difference to be particularly marked here.
This, however, is not borne out by the facts. It is hard to escape
the impression that there is much more actual similarity between
high and low scorers in the political and economic section of the
interviews than in more remote and complicated regions. To be sure,
there are some topics which are as clearly discriminatory as some
of the more extreme anti-Semitic ideas discussed in the preceding
chapter. One hardly needs any research in order to establish that
high scorers tend to be anti- and low scorers pro-Roosevelt, that
high scorers more often want a ``strong" foreign policy and low
scorers favor reconciliation, that high scorers indignantly reject
communism and low scorers tend to discuss it on a more discursive
plane. However, there is a large number of what might be called
more formal constituents of political ideology which seem to permeate
the whole pattern while, by their own momentum, making for reactionary
and potentially fascist persuasions. Here belong, as will be discussed
in detail, general ignorance and confusion in political matters,
the habits of ``ticket thinking" and ``personalization," resentment
of unions, of government interference in business, of income
limitations, and a number of other trends.


The existence of such an over-all pattern in politics need not be
surprising, when the whole context of our study is considered. As
a matter of fact, the problem itself is derived from our quantitative
findings. After we once administered the PEC scale, no close
relation between politics and anti-Semitism could be expected.
Chapter V offered the evidence that the correlation of PEC with
either anti-Semitism or ethnocentrism was never very high. There
were some subjects high on PEC but low on E, others high on E but
middle or low on PEC. This means that in this area particularly we
cannot speak in categorical terms of high vs. low scorers. We shall
see if this is borne out by a consideration of the interviews: both
what the weakening of our basic distinction means qualitatively and
whether and how we still can differentiate successfully in this
area.


If a trend that differentiates statistically between high and low
scorers on E --- the ``highs" being higher on it --- appears very commonly
in the interviews of all subjects, then we must conclude that it
is a trend in culture itself. In this chapter we shall be particularly
concerned with these outstanding features. The evidence that they
are potentially fascistic is the fact that they ``go" statistically,
psychologically, and in every other respect with high scale scores;
if they also occur with considerable frequency in interviews of low
scorers it must be because we are living in potentially fascist
times.


If a subject is low on {\em all} scales, but still shows trends which
look potentially fascist, then one might say that the scales and
other techniques do not cover


%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    657


everything, that the potential fascism of the trend is hypothetical
as far as the statistical evidence goes, and that one might perform
an empirical study to see if it really does go with what we know
of the subject. We expect our discussion at least to shed some light
on this methodological problem.


As far as the differentiation between high and low scorers goes,
it is obvious that an over-all pattern would necessitate more
differentiated characterizations than those previously employed.
This can be hinted at only occasionally throughout this chapter.
Sometimes high and low scorers are similar in what they say in
politico-economic terms, but different in some more subtle way;
just as sometimes they are superficially different but similar with
respect to underlying trends.


Political and economic facts are subject to rapid change. This holds
particularly true for the last few years. When our material was
gathered, mainly throughout 1945, Russia was an ally; today, the
tension between this country and the Soviet Union overshadows all
other issues. Such changes make a valid interpretation of political
ideology difficult and precarious. Thus, it might well be that
anti-Russian sentiments, which were in 1945 part and parcel of a
general pattern of reactionism, largely conditioned subjectively,
would be of a much more ``realistic" nature today, or at least they
would fall to a greater extent within the ``over-all pattern," being
less differentiating {\em per se} between high and low scorers. Moreover,
in all probability the typical high scorer has become even more
articulate with regard to Russia. It is hard to imagine that Mack
would still stick to his statement that ``Joe" Stalin was all right.
Our interpretation, of course, had to stick to the situation of
1945 in order to give an adequate picture of the relationship between
ideology and personality factors. However, it should be emphasized
that the PEC scale as well as its follow-up in the interviews depends
to a much higher degree on external events than do the other scales.
This is why we never expected that the correlations of PEC with E
and F would be very high, and it is quite possible that under the
new political circumstances the direction of some of the more
superficial relationships might have changed. Ideology is so sensitive
to political dynamics that even some interpretations formulated
comparatively lately, when the bulk of the chapter had been written,
should be qualified at publication time. Yet we may claim that the
general trend of events has been entirely in accord with the general
formulations reached in the discussion to follow.


With regard to the organization of the chapter we shall deal first
with the more formal constituents of p political and economic
ideology and later with a number of specific political es. The
problem of cultural over-all pattern vs. psychological differentiation
occurs in both sections, though the presuppositions of the over-all
pattern belong mainly to the first one.


%% 658     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY


\subsection*{B. Formal Constituents Of Political Thinking}


\subsubsection*{1. Ignorance And Confusion\footnote{%
After completion of the study, the writer of this chapter
became acquainted with the pertinent article by R. H. Gundlach
(46).}}

The evaluation of the political statements contained in our interview
material has to be considered in relation to the widespread ignorance
and confusion of our subjects in political matters, a phenomenon
which might well surpass what even a skeptical observer should have
anticipated. If people do not know what they are talking about, the
concept of ``opinion," which is basic to any approach to ideology,
loses much of its meaning. This does not imply that the material
becomes insignificant but rather that it cannot be interpreted in
factual categories but must be related to the socio-psychological
structure of the subject being investigated. In other words, the
material itself calls for that personality analysis which marks the
general strategy of our research. It is in the light of this analysis
that the ideology of our subjects is now to be re-evaluated.

While ignorance and confusion marks the political statements of
both high and low scorers, it is, nevertheless, by no means ``neutral"
with regard to the problem of susceptibility to fascist propaganda.
Our general impression is that ignorance and confusion is more
widespread among high than among low scorers. This would be consistent
with our previous observations on the general ``anti-intellectual"
attitude of high scorers. In addition, the official optimism of the
high scorer tends to exclude that kind of critical analysis of
existent conditions on which rational political judgment depends.
A man who is prone to identify himself {\em a priori} with the world as
it is has little incentive to penetrate it intellectually and to
distinguish between essence and surface. The ``practical" bias of
the high scorers, their emotional detachment from everything that
is beyond their well defined range of action, is another factor
contributing to their disinterestedness in, and lack of, political
knowledge. However this may be, there is reason to believe that
ignorance itself works in favor of general reactionary trends. This
belief, based on consistent observations particularly in backward
rural areas everywhere, has been epitomized by the old German
social-democratic adage that anti-Semitism is the ``socialism of the
dolt." All modern fascist movements, including the practices of
contemporary American demagogues, have aimed at the ignorant; they
have consciously manipulated the facts in a way that could lead to
success only with those who were not acquainted with the facts.
Ignorance with respect to the complexities of contemporary society
makes for a state of general uncertainty and anxiety, which is the
ideal breeding ground for the modern type of reactionary mass
movement. Such movements are always
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    659
``populist" and maliciously anti-intellectual. It is not accidental
that fascism has never evolved any consistent social theory, but
has persistently denounced theoretical thinking and knowledge as
``alienation from the grass-roots." The existence of such ignorance
and confusion as we find in the interviews of subjects, particularly
when we consider the relatively high educational level which they
as a group represent, has to be regarded as ominous, no matter
whether the subjects in question score high or low on our scales.
The configuration of technical skill and the ``realism" of ``looking
after oneself" on the one hand, and of the stubborn refusal
intellectually to penetrate reality on the other, is the very climate
in which fascist movements can prosper. Where this outlook prevails,
a critical situation may easily lead to the general acceptance of
formulae which are today still regarded as prerogatives of the
``lunatic fringe."


Sometimes ignorance is explicitly commented upon by our interviewers.
But even if we do not regard their impression as sufficient proof,
there is evidence enough within the material, be it that the
statements betray a striking lack of information, be it that the
interviewee confesses his disinterestedness in politics or his lack
of knowledge. The latter attitude, incidentally, is particularly
frequent with women, and often it is accompanied by self-accusing
statements.


It is hard to distinguish between simple ignorance and confusedness,
that is to say, between the state of simply not knowing the facts,
and the state which exists when people without sufficient intellectual
training grow muddle-headed under the incessant attack of all kinds
of mass communication and propaganda and do not know what to make
of the facts they have. It seems as if confusion were the effect
of ignorance: as if those who do not know but feel somehow obliged
to have political opinions, because of some vague idea about the
requirements of democracy, help themselves with scurrilous ways of
thinking and sometimes with forthright bluff.


The few quotations to follow are picked at random as illustrations
of a phenomenon which is well-nigh universal, but for the very few
exceptional cases of people who take a conscious and explicit
interest in politics.


An example of ignorance, covered up by pompous phraseology, is the
following statement by {\em M117}, a low-scoring man from the
University Extension Group. He is a semi-educated sailor with
high-school background and widely read, but generally muddle-headed.


\begin{Quote}
(American political scene?) ``We have a good basis for our political
system. The majority of people are not interested or equipped enough
to understand politics, so that the biggest proportion of U. S.
politics is governed by the capitalistic system."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
To this man, the existence or nonexistence of capitalism in this
country is simply a matter of ``education."


%% 660     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY


A ``bluffer" is the veteran {\em M732c}, a high-scoring man with
high-school education, who always starts with sentences which sound
up-to-date but rarely finishes them:


\begin{Quote}
(What does he think of political trends today?) ``I would say that
now we're in a very sad case. Worse off than two years ago --- well, the
situation with Russia in Iran --- and these strikes that are coming
on --- quite a deal of good statesmanship to fix the world up\ldots ."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
The subject's statements abound with qualifications and evasions:

\begin{Quote}
``I feel somehow that they (i.e., the unions) are progressing in a
way but in other ways they are not. I think all things will work
out for the best. But I really think they should not go into politics.
\ldots\ I am not very well versed on\ldots "
\end{Quote}
\noindent
Asked about the most dangerous threats to present form of government:
\begin{Quote}
``Well, let's see \ldots\ well, we might have another war in the 
USA. Since the US itself is a huge melting pot\ldots\ . I imagine
in the US there are a lot of people who hated to see Hitler die
and are pro-German --- and maybe one of these little groups
will\ldots\  catch on."
\end{Quote}

A San Quentin prisoner,{\em M621A}, who scores low on the E and PEC
scales and middle on F, regards Russia as the most dangerous threat.
When asked what ought to be done, he answers:

\begin{Quote}
``Well, people should limit political parties to at least two groups
and not have all these socialists and communists, etc. (What to do
with socialists and communists?) Well, they could still believe in
their own ideal \ldots\ let them have a voice in the election but
should not be allowed to have any power. (You mean they should not
be allowed to put up any candidates?) No, unless they get a majority."
\end{Quote}

One of the most extreme examples is the high-scoring woman {\em
F121}, who was never good at school work and apparently had very
little general education.

\begin{Quote}
Not interested, not informed. Thinks Roosevelt has been good and
should see us through the war. Otherwise has no opinions. She had
written on the side of the questionnaire, asking about political
parties: ``Don't know these parties."
\end{Quote}

Again, {\em 5016}, a housewife, graduated from high school, high on F and
E but middle on PEC, referred to by the interviewer as ``being of
moderately high intelligence," says

\begin{Quote}
``I hear that communists and socialists are both bad."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
By contrast, {\em 5052}, the Spanish-Negro entertainer, high on F and
PEC, middle on E, has an opinion of his own on communism and
apparently some sympathy with communists, but his opinion is no
less startling:


\begin{Quote}
``All of the people in the entertainment world who are communists
are good guys."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
On further questioning it comes out that according to his opinion
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    661
\begin{Quote}
Communism seems to be a sort of social club which holds meetings
and raises money for worthy causes.
\end{Quote}

Somewhat exceptional is the statement of the moderately low-scoring
call-house girl, {\em 5035}, who, before she chose the profession of
prostitute, was a graduate of the University of California. She is
strongly interested in union activities and actually lost her former
job as a dancing teacher because of such activities, but refused
on the questionnaire to mark any questions with regard to political
groups, for which she gives the following explanation:

\begin{Quote}
``I am very confused about politics because I talk about them a great
deal with our clients here and they all have different opinions.
It was a struggle for me to get through economics in college."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
In practical issues, however, her views are very liberal and even
radical.

The self-accusing attitude of women with regard to political matters
seems to be most common among medium and low scorers; this is
consistent with the latter's general introspective and self-critical
attitude.

An example is the 17-year-old student of social work, {\em F128},
who is middle on E and F but high on PEC:

\begin{Quote}
``I am a little ashamed about this subject. I hate to be ignorant
about anything but frankly, I don't know anything about politics.
I am for Roosevelt, of course, but I don't think I have developed
any ideas of my own. Mother and Jim talk about things, but it is
mostly social work shop. I intend to read a lot and think a lot
about things because I believe all intelligent people should have
ideas."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
Interesting also is the low scorer, {\em F517}, a 20-year-old
freshman student majoring in music, who accuses herself of ignorance
and dependence, though her general attitude, particularly with
regard to minority questions, shows that she is rather articulate
and outspoken and that she differs from her parents.


\begin{Quote}
``I don't know much about it. I'm quite dependent --- I get my opinions
from my father. He is a die-hard Republican. He did not like Roosevelt
but I think he did some good things (such as making things better
for the poor people)."
\end{Quote}

It would go beyond the scope of the present study to attempt a full
explanation of political ignorance so strikingly in contrast to the
level of information in many other matters and to the highly rational
way in which most of our subjects decide about the means and ends
of their own lives. The ultimate reason for this ignorance might
well be the opaqueness of the social, economic, and political
situation to all those who are not in full command of all the
resources of stored knowledge and theoretical thinking. In its
present phase, our social system tends objectively and automatically
to produce ``curtains" which make it impossible for the na\"ive person
really to see what it is all about. These objective conditions are
enhanced by powerful economic and social forces which, purposely
or automatically, keep the people ignorant. The very fact that our
social system is on the defense, as it were, that
%% 662     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
capitalism, instead of expanding the old way and opening up innumerable
opportunities to the people, has to maintain itself somewhat
precariously and to block critical insights which were regarded as
``progressive" one hundred years ago but are viewed as potentially
dangerous today, makes for a one-sided presentation of the facts,
for manipulated information, and for certain shifts of emphasis
which tend to check the universal enlightenment otherwise furthered
by the technological development of communications. Once again, as
in the era of the transition from feudalism to middle-class society,
knowing too much has assumed a subversive touch, as it were. This
tendency is met halfway by the ``authoritarian" frame of mind of
large sections of the population. The transformation of our social
system from something dynamic into something conservative, a {\em status
quo}, struggling for its perpetuation, is reflected by the attitudes
and opinions of all those who, for reasons of vested interests or
psychological conditions, identify themselves with the existing
setup. In order not to undermine their own pattern of identification,
they unconsciously do not {\em want} to know too much and are ready to
accept superficial or distorted information as long as it confirms
the world in which they want to go on living. It would be erroneous
to ascribe the general state of ignorance and confusion in political
matters to natural stupidity or to the mythological ``immaturity"
of the people. Stupidity may be due to psychological repressions
more than to a basic lack of the capacity for thinking. Only in
this way, it seems, can the low level of political intelligence
even among our college sample be understood. They find it difficult
to think and even to learn because they are afraid they might think
the wrong thoughts or learn the wrong things. It may be added that
this fear, probably often due to the father's refusal to tell the
child more than he is supposedly capable of understanding, is
continuously reinforced by an educational system which tends to
discourage anything supposedly ``speculative," or which cannot be
corroborated by surface findings, and stated in terms of ``facts and
figures."

The discrepancy brought about by the absence of political training
and the abundance of political news with which the population is
flooded and which actually or fictitiously presupposes such training,
is only one among many aspects of this general condition. With
reference to the specific focus of our research, two aspects of
political ignorance may be emphasized. One is that being ``intelligent"
today means largely to look after one's self, to take care of one's
advantages whereas, to use Veblen's words, ``idle curiosity" is
discouraged. Since the pertinence of economic and political matters
to private existence, however, is largely obscured to the population
even now, they do not bother about things which apparently have
little bearing on their fate and upon which they have, as they are
dimly aware, not too much influence.

The second aspect of ignorance which has to be stressed here, is
of a more psychological nature. Political news and comment like all
other information poured out by the radio, the press, and the
newsreels, is generally absorbed during leisure time and falls, in
a certain way, within the framework of ``entertainment." Politics
is viewed in much the same way as sport or the movies, not as
something directly involved with one's own participation in the
process of production. Viewed within this frame of reference,
however, politics is necessarily ``disappointing." It appears to
people conditioned by an industrial culture and its specific kinds
of ``entertainment values" as drab, cold, dry --- as boring. This may
be enhanced by that undercurrent of American tradition which regards
politics somehow as a dirty business with which a respectable person
should have but little to do.  Disappointment in politics as a
leisure-time activity which pays no quick returns probably makes
for indifference, and it is quite possible that the prevailing
ignorance is due not merely to unfamiliarity with the facts but
also a kind of resistance against what is supposed to serve as a
pastime and mostly tends to be disagreeable. A pattern most often
to be observed, perhaps, among women, namely, skipping the political
sections of newspapers, where information is available, and turning
immediately to gossip columns, crime stories, the woman's page, and
so forth, may be an extreme expression of something more general.

To sum up, political ignorance would seem to be specifically
determined by the fact that political knowledge as a rule does not
primarily help to further individual aims in reality, whereas, on
the other hand, it does not help the individual to evade reality
either.

\subsubsection*{2. Ticket Thinking And Personalization In Politics}

The frame of mind concomitant with ignorance and confusion may be
called one of lack of political experience in the sense that the
whole sphere of politics and economics is ``aloof" from the subject,
that he does not reach it with concrete innervations,\footnote{{\em
innervate}: to stimulate (a nerve, muscle, or body part) to action.}
insights, and
reactions but has to contend with it in an indirect, alienated way.
Yet, politics and economics, alien as they may be from individual
life, and largely beyond the reach of individual decision and action,
decisively affect the individual's fate. In our present society,
in the era of all-comprising social organization and total war,
even the most na\"ive person becomes aware of the impact of the
politico-economic sphere. Here belongs, of course, primarily the
war situation, where literally life and death of the individual
depend on apparently far-away political dynamics. But also issues
such as the role of unionism in American economy, strikes, the
development of free enterprise toward monopolism and therewith the
question of state control, make themselves felt apparently down to
the most private and intimate realms of the individual.

This, against the background of ignorance and confusion, makes for
anxiety on the ego level that ties in only too well with childhood
anxieties. The individual has to cope with problems which he actually
does not understand, and he has to develop certain techniques of
orientation, however crude
%% 664     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
and fallacious they may be, which help him to find his way through
the dark, as it were.\footnote{%
This has been pointed out with regard to the imagery of the Jews.
See Chapter XVI, p.\ 618f. (Note by Adorno).} 
These means fulfill a dual function:
on the one hand, they provide the individual with a kind of knowledge,
or with substitutes for knowledge, which makes it possible for him
to take a stand where it is expected of him, whilst he is actually
not equipped to do so. On the other hand, by themselves they alleviate
psychologically the feeling of anxiety and uncertainty and provide
the individual with the illusion of some kind of intellectual
security, of something he can stick to even if he feels, underneath,
the inadequacy of his opinions.

The task of how to understand the ``un-understandable," paradoxical
in itself, leads toward a paradoxical solution, that is to say, the
subjects tend to employ two devices which contradict each other, a
contradiction that expresses the impasse in which many people find
themselves. These two devices are {\em stereotypy}\footnote{{\em
stereotypy}: the persistent repetition of an act for no obvious purpose.} 
and {\em personalization}.
It is easy to see that these ``devices" are repetitions of infantile
patterns. The specific interaction of stereotypy and prejudice has
been discussed in detail in the preceding chapter. It may now be
appropriate to review ideological stereotypy and its counterpart,
personalization, in a broader context, and to relate it to more
fundamental principles long established by psychology. Rigid
dichotomies, such as that between ``good and bad," ``we and the
others," ``I and the world" date back to our earliest developmental
phases. While serving as necessary constructs in order to enable
us to cope, by mental anticipation and rough organization, with an
otherwise chaotic reality, even the stereotypes of the child bear
the hallmark of stunted experience and anxiety. They point back to
the ``chaotic" nature of reality, and its clash with the omnipotence
fantasies of earliest infancy. Our stereotypes are both tools and
scars: the ``bad man" is the stereotype par excellence. At the same
time, the psychological ambiguity inherent in the use of stereotypes,
which are both necessary and constricting forces, stimulate regularly
a countertendency. We try, by a kind of ritual, to soften the
otherwise rigid, to make human, close, part of ourselves (or the
family) that which appears, because of its very alienness, threatening.
The child who is afraid of the bad man is at the same time tempted
to call every stranger ``uncle." The traumatic element in both these
attitudes continuously serves as an obstacle to the reality principle,
although both also function as means of adjustment. When transformed
into character traits, the mechanisms involved make more and more
for irrationality. The opaqueness of the present political and
economic situation for the average person provides an ideal opportunity
for retrogression to the infantile level of stereotypy and
personalization. The political rationalizations used by the uninformed
and confused are compulsive revivals of irrational mechanisms never
overcome during the
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    665
individual's growth. This seems to be one of the main links between
opinions and psychological determinants.

Once again, stereotypy helps to organize what appears to the ignorant
as chaotic: the less he is able to enter into a really cognitive
process, the more stubbornly he clings to certain patterns, belief
in which saves him the trouble of really going into the matter.

Where the rigidly compulsive nature of the stereotype cuts off the
dialectics of trial and error, stultification enters the picture.
Stereotypy becomes --- to use J.\ F.\ Brown's term ---
stereopathy.\footnote{{\em stereopathy}: persistent stereotyped
thinking.} 
This is the
case in the political area where a firm bulk of ignorance and lack
of any relation to the objective material forbids any real experience.
In addition, industrial standardization of innumerable phenomena
of modern life enhances stereotypical thinking. The more stereotyped
life itself becomes, the more the stereopath feels in the right,
sees his frame of thinking vindicated by reality. Modern mass
communications, molded after industrial production, spread a whole
system of stereotypes which, while still being fundamentally
``un-understandable" to the individual, allow him at any moment to
appear as being up to date and ``knowing all about it." Thus,
stereotyped thinking in political matters is almost inescapable.

However, the adult individual, like the child, has to pay a heavy
price for the comfort he draws from stereotypy. The stereotype,
while being a means of translating reality in a kind of multiple-choice
questionnaire where every issue is subsumed and can be decided by
a plus or minus mark, keeps the world as aloof, abstract,
``non-experienced" as it was before. Moreover, since it is above all
the alienness and coldness of political reality which causes the
individual's anxieties, these anxieties are not fully remedied by
a device which itself reflects the threatening, streamlining process
of the real social world. Thus, stereotypy calls again for its very
opposite: personalization. Here, the term assumes a very definite
meaning: the tendency to describe objective social and economic
processes, political programs, internal and external tensions in
terms of some person identified with the case in question rather
than taking the trouble to perform the impersonal intellectual
operations required by the abstractness of the social processes
themselves.

{\em Both stereotypy and personalization are inadequate to reality}. Their
interpretation may therefore be regarded as a first step in the
direction of understanding the complex of ``psychotic" thinking
which appears to be a crucial characteristic of the fascist character.
It is obvious, however, that this subjective failure to grasp reality
is not primarily and exclusively a matter of the psychological
dynamics of the individuals involved, but is in some part due to
reality itself, to the relationship or lack of relationship between
this reality and the individual. Stereotypy misses reality in so
far as it dodges the concrete and contents itself with preconceived,
rigid, and overgeneralized
%% 666     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
ideas to which the individual attributes a kind of magical omnipotence.
Conversely, personalization dodges the real abstractness, that is
to say, the ``reification" of a social reality which is determined
by property relations and in which the human beings themselves are,
as it were, mere appendages. Stereotypy and personalization are two
divergent parts of an actually non-experienced world, parts which
are not only irreconcilable with each other, but which also do not
allow for any addition which would reconstruct the picture of the
real.

\paragraph{a. {\sc Cases Of Political Ticket Thinking}.} 
We limit ourselves to describing a few cases of political stereotypy.

{\em M359} from the University Extension Testing Class is departmental
manager for a leather company. He is high on E and PEC but middle
on F. While imbued with authoritarian ideas he shows a certain
imaginativeness and general disposition to discursive argumentation
somewhat different from the typical high scorer's mentality. It is
thus the more striking to find that the political section of his
interview is completely abstract and clich\'e-like. Just because this
subject is by no means a fanatic, his statements serve well to
illustrate how ignorance is covered up by phraseology, and how the
stereotypes, borrowed from the vernacular of current newspaper
editorials, make for the acceptance of reactionary trends. In order
to give a concrete picture of how this mechanism works, his political
statements are given in full. This may also supply us with an example
of how the various topics with which we shall have to deal in detail
afterwords form a kind of ideological unit once a person is under
the sway of political semi-information:

\begin{Quote}
(Political trends?) ``I am not very happy by the outward aspect of
things, too much politics instead of a basis of equality and justice
for all men. Running of the entire country is determined by the
party in power, not very optimistic outlook. Under Roosevelt, the
people were willing to turn entire schedule of living over to the
government, wanted everything done for them. (Main problem?) No
question but the problem of placing our servicemen back into
employment, giving them a degree of happiness is a major problem.
If not handled soon, may produce a serious danger. More firm
organization of servicemen."

(What might do?) ``Boycott the politicians and establish the old-time
government that we should have had all along. (What is this?)
Government of, by, and for the people." Subject emphasizes the
moderate, average man is the serviceman. (Unions?) ``Not satisfied
with them. One characteristic is especially unsatisfactory. Theory
is wonderful and would hate to see them abolished, but too much
tendency to level all men, all standards of workmanship and effort
by equalizing pay. Other objection is not enough democratic attitude
by the membership, generally controlled by minority group." Subject
emphasizes the compulsion imposed upon men to join but not to
participate with the results of ignorant union leaders. He emphasizes
the need to raise the standards of voting by members and to require
rotation of office and high qualifications for officers. He compares
these adversely with business leaders.

(Government control?) ``There is too much tendency to level everything,
doesn't give man opportunity to excel." Subject emphasizes the
mediocrity of government
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    667
workers, pay is insufficient to attract the best caliber of men and
no incentive plans, etc.

(Threats to present government?) ``Probably most dangerous threat
to o government today, and that also applies to union organization,
and life in general is disinterest, the tendency to let the other
fellow do it on the part of great numbers of people so that things
go on the way a few selfish men determine."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
The decisive twist is achieved by jumping from the very abstract
idea ``equality and justice for all men" to the equally formalistic
condemnation of ``running the country by the party in power" --- which
happens to be the party of the New Deal. The vague clich\'e of an
all-comprising democrat serves as an instrument against any specific
democratic contents. It should not be overlooked, however, that
some of his statements on unions --- where he has some experience --- make
sense.

{\em M1225a}, a medium scorer who has been eighteen months at sea
and strongly interested in engineering, is a good example of
stereotypy in politics employed by otherwise moderate people, and
of its intimate relationship to ignorance. To this man one of the
greatest political problems today is ``the unions." Describing them,
he applies indiscriminately and without entering into the matter
three current clich\'es --- that of the social danger, that of government
interference, and that of the luxurious life of union leaders --- simply
by repeating certain formulae without caring much about their
interconnection or their consistency:

\begin{Quote}
``For one thing they have too much power. Cross between the socialistic
part of the union and the government \ldots\ seems to go to the other
extreme. Government investigation \ldots\ (subject seems rather
confused in his ideas here). The unions \ldots\  socialistic form in
there. I know, I belonged to a few unions. They get up there and
then call you brother and then drive off in a Cadillac\ldots\ . Nine
times out ten the heads of the unions don't know anything of the
trade. It's a good racket \ldots "
\end{Quote}

Most of his subsequent answers are closely in line with a general
patter of reactionism, formulated mostly in terms of ``I don't believe
in it" without discussing the issue itself. The following passages
may suffice as an illustration.

\begin{Quote}
(\$25,000 limit on salaries?) \footnote{About \$200,000 in 2005.}
``I don't believe in that."

(Most dangerous threats to present form of government?) ``I believe
it's in the government itself. Too many powers of its own."

(What ought to be done?) ``Going to have to solve a lot of other
problems first. Get goods back on the market."

(What about this conflict between Russia on the one hand and England
and this country on the other?) ``I don't particularly care for
Russia and I don't particularly care for England."
\end{Quote}

In this case, clich\'es are manifestly used in order to cover up lack
of information. It is as if each question to which he does not know
any specific answer conjures up the carry-overs of innumerable press
slogans which he repeats in order to demonstrate that he is one of
those who do not like to be
%%%
told and do like to think. Underlying is only a rigid pattern of
yeas and nays. He is aware of how a man of his general political
outlook should react to each political issue but he is not aware
of the issues themselves. He therefore supplements his plus and
minus marks by phrases which more often than not are mere gaucheries.


{\em F139} belongs to the type which is to be characterized in Chapter
XIX as
``rigid low." Her most outstanding trait is her violent hatred of
alcohol --- which suggests deeper-lying ``high" trends. Liquors are her
Jews, as it were. She regards herself as a Christian Socialist and
solves most problems not by discussing them but referring to what
the religious socialist should think.

The break between her opinions and any kind of substantial experience
is evidenced by the following statement:

\begin{Quote}
``My favorite world statesman is Litvinov.\footnote{Maxim Litvinov
(1876--1951). Russian revolutionary and prominent Soviet diplomat.} 
I think the most dramatic
speech of modern times is the one he made at the Geneva Conference
when he pleaded for collective security. It has made us very happy
to see the fog of ignorance and distrust surrounding the Soviet
Union clearing away during this war. Things are not settled yet,
though. There are many fascists in this country who would fight
Roosevelt if they could."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
She has a ready-made formula for the problem of nonviolence in
international affairs:

\begin{Quote}
``Of course, I am an internationalist. Would I be a true Christian
if I weren't? And I have always been a pacifist. Wars are completely
unnecessary. This one was. That is, it could have been avoided if
the democratic people had recognized their own interest early enough
and taken the proper steps. But they did not. And now we ask
ourselves: would the interests of the people of the world be advanced
by a fascist victory? Obviously they would not. So we must support
this war completely because we are faced with a clear choice and
cannot avoid it."
\end{Quote}

She offers a clear example of the association of stereotypy and
personalization. Whereas her political persuasion should induce her
to think in objective socio-economic terms, she actually thinks in
terms of favorite people, preferably 
famous ones, of humans who are public institutions as it were --- of
``human stereotypes."

\begin{Quote}
``My second favorite world statesman is our own President although,
perhaps, I should say Mrs.\ Roosevelt. I don't think he would have
been anything without her. She really made him what he is. I believe
the Roosevelts have a very sincere interest in people and their
welfare. There is one thing that bothers me about them though ---
specially Mrs.\ Roosevelt --- that is --- liquor. She is not against
it and it seems to me she should know how much we would be improved
as a people without it."
\end{Quote}

She exhibits a significant characteristic of the low scorers'
political stereotypy: a kind of mechanical belief in the triumph
of progress, the counterpart to the high scorers' frequent references
to impending doom which is also a keynote of the above-quoted
political statements of {\em M359}.

\begin{Quote}
``All one has to do is look backward to feel optimistic. I would
not be a true Christian if I did not believe that man's progress
is upward. We are so much farther along than we were a century ago.
Social legislation that was only a dream is an accomplished fact."
\end{Quote}

\paragraph{b. {\sc Examples Of Personalization.}}
The tendency towards personalization
feeds on the American tradition of personal democracy as expressed
most strikingly by the power delegated to the executive branch of
the government by our Constitution, and also on that aspect of
traditional American liberalism which regards competition as a
contest between men, where the better man is likely to conquer.
Cause and effect seem to be somewhat reversed: whereas in market
economy the supposedly ``better man" is defined by competitive
success, people have come to think that success falls to the better
man. Consistent with this is the highly personalized character of
political propaganda, particularly in electioneering where the
objective issues at stake are mostly hidden behind the exaltation
of the individuals involved, often in categories which have but
very little to do with the functions those individuals are supposed
to fulfill. The ideal of a democracy, where the people have their
immediate say, is frequently misused under conditions of today's
mass society, as an ideology which covers up the omnipotence of
objective social tendencies and, more specifically, the control
exercised by the party machines.

The material on personalization is both abundant and monotonous. A
few examples may suffice.

The low-scoring man, {\em M116}, prefers Wallace to
Dewey\footnote{Henry A.\ Wallace (1888--1965): Vice-President of US
under Roosevelt, Progressive Party candidate for President in 1948.
Thomas E.\ Dewey (1902--1971): Governor of New York (1943--54) and
Republican party candidate for President in 1944 and 1948.} 
because

\begin{Quote}
``Wallace is the better man and I usually vote for the better man."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
Here personalization is the more striking since these two figures
are actually defined by objectively antagonistic platforms, whereas
it is more than doubtful whether the interviewee, or, for that
matter, the great majority of the American people, is in any position
to say what they are like ``as men."

The high-scoring man, {\em M102}, employs almost literally the same
expression as {\em M116}:

\begin{Quote}
``\ldots\  put down Democratic, but I never thought much about the party.
I don't vote for the party but for the best man."
\end{Quote}

Professed belief in political theories is no antidote for
personalization. {\em M117}, another ``low" man, regards himself as a
``scientific socialist" and is full of confidence in sociological
psychology. But when asked about American parties, he comes out
with the following statement:

\begin{Quote}
``I don't know about that. I'm only interested in the man and his
abilities. I don't care what party he belongs to. (What man do you
like?) F.D.R.\ is one of the greatest. I did not like him when he
was elected but I admit I was wrong. He did a marvelous job. He was
concerned with the benefit of the country. Truman is doing a good
job so far. The senators and congressmen are run-of-the-mill. Dewey
%% 670     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
is outstanding, I think; he has potentialities. He is apparently
sincere and honest and concerned with the whole country. He did a
good job as District Attorney."
\end{Quote}

More aspects of personalization will be described when our interviewees'
attitudes towards Roosevelt are under consideration. Here, we content
ourselves with suggesting two qualities which seem to play a great
role in the personalization complex and which recur regularly in
our high scorers' statements about Dewey: Honesty and Sincerity.

{\em F114}, a high-scoring woman, knows that Dewey ``is strong,
young, courageous, honest. He may have faults, but they're useful
faults. I felt he was a strong, young person." Obviously, this
statement is linked to the adulation of strength that plays so large
a role in the psychology of our high scorers (cf.\ Chapter VII). The
honesty of the former D.A.\ is derived from his much-advertised drive
against political racketeering and corruption. He is supposed to
be honest because he has exterminated, according to his propagandist
build-up, the dishonest. Honesty seems largely to be a rationalization
for vindictiveness. Speaking psychologically, the image of Dewey
is a projection of the punitive superego, or rather one of those
collective images which replace the superego in an externalized,
rigid form. The praise of his honesty, together with the repeated
emphasis on his strength and youth, fall within the ``strong man"
pattern.

{\em F117}, another high scorer, of the Professional Women group,
has a maximal score on A--S and is generally extremely conservative.
Her similarly personalized appraisal of Dewey strikes a slightly
different note but fits within the same pattern:

\begin{Quote}
She feels that Dewey knows the value of money better than Roosevelt,
because he came from a family that did not have too much.
\end{Quote}
\noindent
The punitiveness behind the praise of the honest man shows itself
in this example as hatred against comfortable living, against the
``snobbish upper class" who supposedly enjoy the things which one
has to deny to oneself. Dewey, {\em per contra}, is the symbol of one's
own frustrations and is unconsciously, i.e., sadomasochistically,
expected to perpetuate frustration. What he seems to stand for
within the minds of the high-scoring subjects is a state of affairs
in which everybody has ``learned the value of a dollar." Identification
with him is easy because as a prospective President he has the halo
of power whereas his frugality is that of the middle-class subject
herself.

Perhaps it is not accidental that infatuation with honesty is
particularly frequent among women. They see life from the consumer's
side; they do not want to be cheated, and therefore the noisy promise
of honesty has some appeal to them.

As to the differentiation between high and low scorers with regard
to personalization, an impression may tentatively be formulated
which is hard to substantiate but consistent with our clinical
findings. The element of 
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    671
personalization that counts most heavily with the low scorers seems
to be confidence, the idea that public figures are good, friendly
fathers who take care of one, or of the ``underdog." It seems to be
derived from an actual life relationship to one's parents, from
unblocked positive transference. This observation will be given
relief when the attitude of our subjects towards Roosevelt is
discussed. Conversely, the personal trait most appreciated by the
high scorer seems to be strength. Social power and control, the
ultimate focus of their identification, is translated by the
personalization mechanism into a quality inherent in certain
individuals. The symbols of the powers that be are drawn from the
imagery of a stern father to whom one ``looks up."

One last aspect of personalization may be mentioned. To know something
about a person helps one to seem ``informed" without actually going
into the matter: it is easier to talk about names than about issues,
while at the same time the names are recognized identification marks
for all current topics. Thus, spurious personalization is an ideal
behavior pattern for the semi-erudite, a device somewhere in the
middle between complete ignorance and that kind of ``knowledge" which
is being promoted by mass communication and industrialized culture.

To sum up: ever more anonymous and opaque social processes make it
increasingly difficult to integrate the limited sphere of one's
personal life experience with objective social dynamics. Social
alienation is hidden by a surface phenomenon in which the very
opposite is being stressed: personalization of political attitudes
and habits offers compensation for the dehumanization of the social
sphere which is at the bottom of most of today's grievances. As
less and less actually depends on individual spontaneity in our
political and social organization, the more people are likely to
cling to the idea that the man is everything and to seek a substitute
for their own social impotence in the supposed omnipotence of great
personalities.

\subsubsection*{3. Surface Ideology And Real Opinion}

The alienation between the political sphere and the life experience
of the individual, which the latter often tries to master by
psychologically determined intellectual makeshifts such as stereotypy
and personalization, sometimes results in a gap between what the
subject professes to think about politics and economy and what he
really thinks. His ``official" ideology conforms to what he supposes
he {\em has} to think; his real ideas are an expression of his more
immediate personal needs as well as of his psychological urges. The
``official" ideology pertains to the objectified, alienated sphere
of the political, the ``real opinion" to the subject's own sphere,
and the contradiction between the two expresses their irreconcilability.

Since this formal structure of political thinking has an immediate
bearing upon one of the key phenomena of susceptibility to fascism,
namely upon pseudo-conservatism, it may be appropriate to offer a
few examples here.

%% 672     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

{\em F116}, a prejudiced woman of the University Extension Group,
offers an example of a conflict between surface ideology and real
attitude through her
somewhat deviate pattern of scale scores: she is middle on E and F
but low on PEC. In her case, the deeper determinants are doubtless
potentially fascist as evidenced particularly by her strong racial
prejudice against both Negroes and Jews. In other political issues
the picture is highly ambivalent. Characteristically,
she classes herself as a Democrat, but voted for Willkie and then
for Dewey. She ``wasn't against Roosevelt," but her statement that
``no man is indispensable" thinly veils her underlying hostility. She

\begin{Quote}
\noindent
``knew what Hoover stood for, and I had no use for him. But that
didn't mean I had to worship Roosevelt. He was a good man, but when
I heard people weeping and wailing over his death, I was just
disgusted. As though he were indispensable."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
The amazing irregularity is an emphatically pro-Russian statement
and an outspokenly antifascist attitude in international politics:

\begin{Quote}
``Now, I am a great admirer of Russia. Perhaps I shouldn't say it
out loud, but I am. I think they are really trying to do something
for all the people. Of course there was a lot of suffering and
bloodshed but think of what they had to struggle against. My husband
really gets disturbed about this. He says I ought to go to Russia
if I like communism so much. He says that to admire communism is
to want a change and he thinks it is very wrong for me to even sound
as though I wanted any change when we have enough and are comfortable
and are getting along all right. I tell him that is very selfish
and also that some people under the Czar might have felt that way
but when the situation got so bad there was a revolution they got
wiped out too. (American Communists?) Well, I couldn't say because
I don't really know anything about them.

``I don't hold the United States blameless. I think we have lots of
faults. We talk now as though we had always hated war and tried to
stop this one. That isn't true. There were ways to stop this war
if they had wanted to. I remember when Mussolini moved on Ethiopia.
I always think of that as the real beginning of this war. And we
were not interested in stopping that. My husband doesn't like me
to criticize the United States."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
The frequent interspersion of this statement with reference to
disagreements with her husband, from whom she is ``very much different
politically" and with whom she has ``terrible arguments" leads us
to assume that her ``progressive" political views in areas apparently
not highly affect-laden by her are rationalizations of her strong
resentment of the man of whom she says ``I don't think we can live
for ourselves alone." One is tempted to hypothesize that she wants
him to get mad at her when she speaks in favor of Russia. In her
case, the broadmindedness and rationality of surface opinion seems
to be conditioned by strong underlying, repressed irrationalities:

\begin{Quote}
Interviewer did not have much success with very personal data. She
turned aside questions that came close to her deeper feelings. There
was no depth to the discussion of her husband.
\end{Quote}

\noindent
When it comes, however, to political topics which, for some reason
unexplored in the interview, really mean something to this subject,
she forgets all about her own rationality and gives vent to her
vindictiveness though with a bad conscience, as evidenced by her
previously quoted statement (Chapter XVI) that ``she is not very
proud of her anti-Semitic bias."

{\em M320}, of the University Extension Testing Class, is a low-scoring
man, hesitant, apologetic, shy, and unaggressive. He wants to become
a landscape architect. His political views are consciously liberal
and definitely non-prejudiced. He struggles to maintain his liberalism
continuously, but this is not easy for him with regard to certain
political matters, his impulses in many instances disavowing what
he states. He begins with the typical low scorer's statement:

\begin{Quote}
``I am afraid I don't have as many ideas about politics and government
as I should, but I think --- a lot of people are more liberal now than
they have been recently. Possibly some like the change that is
taking place in England --- I don't know."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
He first takes a mildly anti-strike attitude:

\begin{Quote}
``I don't know, I cannot see that, as just a straight demand, without
taking into consideration the company and its ties and all that. I
have not read much about that but \ldots\ in a large company\ldots\  
maybe they might be able to take it, all right, but in little shops
\ldots\ and if it did go through, and even if it did not have disastrous
(effects) on business closing \ldots\ price rises would make it come
out even anyway. I guess I am really not in favor of strikes but I
can see it just about\ldots\ ."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
Then he talks himself into a more definite stand against strikes,
introduced by the still democratic ``getting together" formula.

\begin{Quote}
``They ought to get together and give, maybe, a 20 per cent or 30
per cent raise, then maybe kinda split it \ldots\ and these strikes
\ldots\ just start at the wrong end \ldots\  because if the strike is
settled \ldots\ they still have to come to some sort of 
agreement \ldots\
and it's gonna be forced and men'll be driven \ldots\ I guess
human nature just is not that way but\ldots\ ."
\end{Quote}

The last statement, rather confused, actually belongs to the
high-scorer pattern concerning the inherent badness of human nature
(cf.\ Chapter VII).

After he has made this turn, he goes on with the usual high scorer's
condemnation of PAC, government control, etc., and ends up with an
ambivalent statement about minimum wage-hour legislation:

\begin{Quote}
``Well, things like that I guess if --- I guess they are necessary --- I guess
maybe I am an idealist --- I don't think there should have been a minimum
wage law because I think the employer should pay his employee a
living wage and if he cannot pay that, well, the person does not
have to work there but if the employer cannot pay that, he is not
going to stay in business\ldots\ ."
\end{Quote}

It is the general trend rather than any specific statement which
bears witness to the wish to be politically progressive and the
very definite changes of mind as soon as concrete issues are raised.
This man's ``political instincts" --- if this term is allowed --- are against
his official progressiveness. One might
%% 674     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
well infer from this observation that one can differentiate better
between political potentials by looking at deeper psychological
impulses than by looking at avowed ideology.

Something similar can be observed with the medium-scoring man {\em
M118}, of the Extension Psychology Class group, a registered Democrat.
He was middle on A--S but low on F and low-middle on E. It is the
interviewer's impression that he is potentially ``low" but that
certain personality factors prevent him from going all the way. The
exceptional aspect about him may well be explained through the
conflict between different opinional layers. In terms of ``big" and
comparatively abstract political issues, he comes out with a
``progressive" statement.

\begin{Quote}
``There is a trend toward socialism, I don't know how modified. The
conflict between labor and business will probably be mediated by
the government. The government will probably hold the balance of
power in labor-business conflicts. The emphasis now is on free
enterprise but that often results in monopoly, the big concerns
squeezing the little guys to death. There is too much of a gap
between the rich and the poor. People climb up by pushing others
down, with no regulation. For this reason, government should have
more influence, economically, whether or not it goes as far as
socialism."
\end{Quote}

The interviewer happened to ride with the subject from Berkeley to
San Francisco and continued the discussion in a more informal,
unofficial way, touching the subject matter of unionism. In this
context a classic example of the gap between official ideology and
political thinking in terms of one's own immediate interests occurred:

\begin{Quote}
He thinks the C.I.O.\ is better than the A.F.\ of L.\ and he thinks
that unions ought to extend their functions even more in political
and educational and higher management brackets, but he himself won't
join the Federal Workers Union which he would be eligible to join
because he feels they are not enough concerned with the problems
of the higher level incomes, that they are too much interested in
keeping the wages of the poorer groups above a certain minimum. He
wishes they would be concerned with promotions and upgrading and
developing good criteria by which people could be promoted.
\end{Quote}

The Canadian {\em M934}, again a ``medium" of the Public Speaking Class,
is studying to become a minister. He calls himself ``very far over
on the left wing" but qualifies this immediately by the statement:

\begin{Quote}
``\ldots\ I'm of a practical nature and I would not vote for the
socialists \ldots\ especially if I thought they would get in."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
To him, the practical is irreconcilable with socialism. The latter
is all right as an idea, as a stimulant, as it were, but heaven
forbid that it should materialize.

\begin{Quote}
``I would vote \ldots\ only to maintain socialist opposition \ldots\ to
keep the existing government from going too far to the right \ldots\  
but don't think they have the
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    675
experience to \ldots\ put their socialist program into effect \ldots\  
and I think their program has to be modified."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
He praises the British Labour Government but actually only because
it has not carried through a socialist program, an abstinence
interpreted by the interviewee as a sign of ``political experience."

\begin{Quote}
``Well \ldots\ I think they were ready for the job \ldots\ aren't trying
to change social order in one fell swoop \ldots\ I think that is an
evidence of their maturity."
\end{Quote}

\noindent
This subject wants to be endowed with the prestige of a left-wing
intellectual while at the same time, as an empirical being, he is
manifestly afraid of a concrete materialization of ideas to which
he subscribes in the abstract.

It is hardly accidental that in these cases the overt ideology is
always progressive, the real opinion of an opposite character. This
would seem to have something to do with established democracy in
this country, which makes the expression of democratic ideas the
thing to be done, while the opposite is, in a certain way, unorthodox.
There is reason to believe that the fascist potential today shows
itself largely in the maintenance of traditional ideas which may
be called either liberal or conservative, whereas the underlying
``political instinct," fed largely by unconscious forces of the
personality, is completely different. This will be elaborated in
the following section.

%%% arun
\subsubsection*{4. Pseudo-conservatism}

Our analysis of the questionnaire findings on PEC (Chapter V) has
led to a differentiation between those who are high on PEC but low
on E, and those who are high on both. This distinction was interpreted
in terms of genuine and pseudo-conservatives, the former supporting
not only capitalism in its liberal, individualistic form but also
those tenets of traditional Americanism which are definitely
anti-repressive and sincerely democratic, as indicated by an unqualified
rejection of anti-minority prejudices. Our interview material allows
us to give more relief to this construct and also to qualify it in
certain respects. Before we go into some details of the
pseudo-conservative's ideology, we should stress that our assumption
of a pseudo-conservative pattern of ideology is in agreement with
the total trend of our psychological findings. The idea is that the
potentially fascist character, in the specific sense given to this
concept through our studies, is not only on the overt level but
throughout the make-up of his personality a pseudo-conservative
rather than a genuine conservative. The psychological structure
that corresponds to pseudo-conservativm is conventionality and
authoritarian submissiveness on the ego level, with violence,
anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious
sphere. These contradictory trends are borne out particularly in
those sections of our study where the range between the two poles
of the unconscious and the conscious is widest, above all, where
the T.A.T.\ is considered in relation to the clinical parts of the
interviews. Traits such as 
%% 676     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
authoritarian aggressiveness and vindictiveness may be regarded as
intermediary between these antagonistic trends of the prejudiced
personality. When turning to ideology which belongs in the context
of psychological determinants here under discussion, to the realm
of rationalization, it should be remembered that rationalizations
of ``forbidden" impulses, such as the drive for destruction, never
completely succeed. While rationalization emasculates those urges
which are subject to taboos, it does not make them disappear
completely but allows them to express themselves in a ``tolerable,"
modified, indirect way, conforming to the social requirements which
the ego is ready to accept. Hence even the overt ideology of
pseudo-conservative persons is by no means unambiguously conservative,
as they would have us believe, not a mere reaction-formation against
underlying rebelliousness; rather, it indirectly admits the very
same destructive tendencies which are held at bay by the individual's
rigid identification with an externalized super-ego. This break-through
of the nonconservative element is enhanced by certain supra-individual
changes in today's ideology in which traditional values, such as
the inalienable rights of each human being, are subject to a rarely
articulate but nevertheless very severe attack by ascendant forces
of crude repression, of virtual condemnation of anything that is
deemed weak. There is reason to believe that those developmental
tendencies of our society which point into the direction of some
more or less fascist, state capitalist organization bring to the
fore formerly hidden tendencies of violence and discrimination in
ideology. All fascist movements officially employ traditional ideas
and values but actually give them an entirely different, anti-humanistic
meaning. The reason that the pseudo-conservative seems to be such a
characteristically modern phenomenon is not that any new psychological
element has been added to this particular syndrome, which was
probably established during the last four centuries, but that
objective social conditions make it easier for the character structure
in question to express itself in its avowed opinions. It is one of
the unpleasant results of our studies, which has to be faced squarely,
that this process of social acceptance of pseudo-conservatism has
gone a long way --- that it has secured an indubitable mass basis. In
the opinions of a number of representative high scorers, ideas both
of political conservatism and traditional liberalism are frequently
neutralized and used as a mere cloak for repressive and ultimately
destructive wishes. The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the
name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and
defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously
or unconsciously aims at their abolition.

The pattern of pseudo-conservatism is unfolded in the interviewer's
description of {\em M109}, another high-scoring man, a semi-fascist
parole officer:

\begin{Quote}
On his questionnaire, this man writes down ``Republican" as the
political party of his preference, and then scratches it out. He
agrees with the anti-New Deal Democrats and the Willkie-type
Republicans and disagrees with the New Deal
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    677
Democrats and the traditional Republicans. This is cleared up in
his interview when he says that the party does not mean anything,
the candidate is the thing.\footnote{%
Personalization, as indicated by these sentences, has an obvious
fascist potential. It enhances the individual as against any objective
anonymous system of checks and balances, against democratic control.
Behind the adulation of the ``great man" looms, in the present
situation, the readiness to ``follow the leader." (Note by Adorno).}

Asked what is his conception of the Willkie-type Republican, he
says he thinks of the Willkie supporters as the same as the Dewey
supporters. Big business favored both Willkie and Dewey.

The score 67 on PEC is high-middle. An examination of the individual
items seems to show that he is not a true conservative in the sense
of the rugged individual. True, he agrees with most of the PEC
items, going to plus 3 on the Child-should-learn-the-value-of-the-dollar
and the Morgan and Ford items, but marking most of the others plus
1 or plus 2, but, be it noted, he does not agree that depressions
are like headaches, that businessmen are more important than artists
and professors; and he believes the government should guarantee
everybody an income, that there should be increased taxes on
corporations and wealthy individuals, and that socialized medicine
would be a good thing. He goes to plus 3 on the last item. Thus,
it appears that he favors some kind of social function on the part
of the government, but believes that the control should be in the
proper hands. This is cleared up by the interview. Before becoming
a policeman 6 1/2 years ago, this man was in the hospital insurance
business. He says he had first to battle with the
A.M.A.,\footnote{{\em A.M.A.}: American Medical Association} 
who did
not favor any kind of medical insurance; and later he thought it
wise to give up the business because state medicine was in the
offing.
\end{Quote}
\noindent
In summing up his position concerning medical insurance, he says:

\begin{Quote}
``I like the collectiveness of it, but believe private business could
do it better than the government. The doctors have butchered the
thing and the politicians would do worse. People need this sort of
thing and I like it in theory if it is run right."
\end{Quote}

Thus it becomes clear, according to the interviewer, that he has
some kind of collectivistic value system but believes that the
control should be in the hands of the group with whom he can identify
himself. This is clearly the Ford and Morgan sort of group rather
than labor unions which he opposes.

The decisive thing about this man is that he has, in spite of his
general reactionism and his all-pervasive ideas of power --- which are
evidenced by most of the other sections of the interview --- socialistic
leanings. This, however, does not refer to socialism in the sense
of nationalizing the means of production but to his outspoken though
inarticulate wish that the system of free enterprise and competition
should be replaced by a state-capitalist integration where the
economically strongest group, that is to say, heavy industry, takes
control and organizes the whole life process of society without
further interference by democratic dissension or by groups whom he
regards as being in control only on account of the process of formal
democracy, but not on the basis of the ``legitimate" real economic
power behind them.

This ``socialist," or rather, pseudo-socialist, element of
pseudo-conservatism, actually defined only by anti-liberalism, serves
as the democratic cloak for anti-democratic wishes. Formal democracy
seems to this kind of thinking to
%% 678     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
be too far away from ``the people," and the people will have their
right only if the ``inefficient" democratic processes are substituted
by some rather ill-defined strong-arm system.

{\em M651A}, another high-scoring man, a San Quentin prisoner,
convicted of
first-degree murder, is a good example of pseudo-democratism as a
particular aspect of pseudo-conservatism.

\begin{Quote}
(What do you think of political trends today?) ``We have got a
persecutor in California for governor \ldots\ don't put that in. They
call it a democracy \ldots\ democracy is the best type of government
but (inefficient)\ldots\ ."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
Subject criticizes President Roosevelt strongly, especially his
NRA.\footnote{{\em NRA}: National Recovery Adminstration.  Part of the
``New Deal" under Roosevelt.  Instituted minimum wages and maximum
weekly hours for workers.}
He mentions his father's being pushed out of a job partly
because of NRA, but he appears to be a little confused in this
reference:

\begin{Quote}
``Democracy is good when it is used right. I believe that too few
people control the money in the country. I don't believe in communism
\ldots\ but there is so many {\em little} people who never have
anything\ldots\ ."

Subject mentioned his grandmother's only receiving \$30 a month
pension\footnote{About \$250 in 2005.}  
which, he says, she cannot live on \ldots\ law ought to be
changed in that respect \ldots\ subject emphasizes the need of extending
old-age insurance to people too old to benefit by recent 
legislation.\ldots\footnote{%
This case is described in detail in Chapter XXI under the name
of ``Ronald." (Note by Adorno)}
\end{Quote}

An exceedingly serious dynamics is involved here. It cannot be
disputed that formal democracy, under the present economic system,
does not suffice to guarantee permanently, to the bulk of the
population, satisfaction of the most elementary wants and needs,
whereas at the same time the democratic form of government is
presented as if --- to use a favorite phrase of our subjects --- it were as
close to an ideal society as it could be. The resentment caused by
this contradiction is turned by those who fail to recognize its
economic roots against the form of democracy itself. Because it
does not fulfill what it promises, they regard it as a ``swindle"
and are ready to exchange it for a system which sacrifices all
claims to human dignity and justice, but of which they expect vaguely
some kind of a guarantee of their lives by better planning and
organization. Even the most extreme concept of the tradition of
American democracy is summoned by the pseudo-conservative way of
political thinking: the concept of revolution. However, it has
become emasculated. There is only a vague idea of violent change,
without any concrete reference to the people's aims involved --- moreover,
of a change which has in common with revolution only the aspect of
a sudden and violent break but otherwise looks rather like an
administrative measure. This is the spiteful, rebellious yet
intrinsically passive idea which became famous after the former
Prince of Wales visited the distressed areas of North England: the
idea that ``something should be done about it." It occurs literally
in the interview of the high-scoring woman, {\em F105}, a 37-year-old
crippled, frustrated housewife with
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL       679
strong paranoid traits. She had voted for Roosevelt every time
because ``I just decided I'd be a Democrat." Asked why, she continues
as follows:

\begin{Quote}
``I don't know. I'm just primarily against capitalism, and the
Republicans are capitalistic. The Democrats have tried to give the
working class a break. Father has voted for Thomas\footnote{Norman
Thomas, six-time candidate for President for the Socialist Party of
America.}
for years. He
thinks eventually the world will come to that. But he's never made
an issue of it. (Are your ideals a reflection of his attitude?) Oh,
it could be. I'm not conscious of it. I voted as soon as I was able
to. (What do you think will happen after the war?) Probably the
Republicans will be in again. I think the American public is a very
changing type. Probably I'll change too. The world's in such a
chaotic mess, something should be done. We're going to have to learn
to live with one another, the whole world."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
The phoniness of this subject's supposed progressiveness comes out
in the section on minorities where she proves to be a rabid
anti-Semite.

In order to guess the significance of the dull wish of this woman
for a radical change it has to be confronted with the stand another
pseudo-conservative takes, the violently anti-Semitic San Quentin
inmate, {\em M661A}, a robber. He plays, according to the interviewer,
the bored decadent satiated with ``too much experience" and derives
from this attitude a fake aristocratic ideology which serves as a
pretext for violent oppression of those whom he deems weak. He pays
``very little attention to politics, except that I think we are
headed for communism, and I am thumbs down on it." Asked why, he
comes forward with the following confession:

\begin{Quote}
``For one thing, I have never forgiven the Russians for the revolution.
\ldots\ I consider them murders and not assassinations and I haven't
forgiven Russia any more than I have forgiven France for her
revolution, or Mexico \ldots\ in other words, I still believe in the
Old Order and I believe we were happiest under Hoover and should
have kept him. I think I would have had more money under him too
and I don't believe in inheritance taxes. If I earn \$100,000 by
the sweat of my brow,\footnote{About \$800,000 in 2005.} 
I ought to be able to leave it to whomever I
please. I guess I really don't believe that all men are created
free and equal."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
While he still accepts the traditional critique of government
interference in the name of rugged individualism, he would favor
such government control if it were exercised by the strong. Here
the criminal is in complete agreement with the aforementioned 
(p.\  676) parole officer, {\em M109}:

\begin{Quote}
(What about government controls over business?) ``I half-approve. I
certainly think that somebody should be over\ldots\ . I believe in
government control because it makes it less of --- I really don't believe
in democracy; if we know somebody's at the helm, we can't have
revolutions and things. But I have never read much on politics and
I don't think I have a right to say much."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
That the idea of the ``right people" is actually behind {\em M661A's}
political philosophy is shown by his explanation of why he objects
to all revolutions:

\begin{Quote}
``They overthrow the established order \ldots\ and they are always
made by people who never had anything \ldots\  I've never seen a communist
who came from the right strata of society \ldots\  I did read George
Bernard Shaw's (book on socialism)."\footnote{Bernard Shaw {\em The
Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism}.}
\end{Quote}
%% 68o     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

One may differentiate between two kinds of pseudo-conservatives:
those who profess to believe in democracy and are actually
anti-democratic, and those who call themselves conservative while
surreptitiously indulging in subversive wishes. This differentiation,
however, is somewhat rationalistic. It does not amount to much,
either in terms of psychological motivations or of actual political
decision. It seems to pertain merely to thin rationalizations: the
core of the phenomenon is both times identical. The just-quoted
{\em 661A} belongs to the pseudo-conservative group in the narrower
sense and so does {\em M105}, a prelaw student high on all scales,
who stresses his conservative background while admitting overt
fascist leanings:

\begin{Quote}
``Naturally, I get my Republican sentiments from my parents. But
recently I have read more for myself, and I agree with them\ldots\ .
We are a conservative family. We hate anything to do with socialism.
My father regretted that he voted for F.D.R.\ in 1932. Father wrote
to Senator Reynolds of South Carolina about the Nationalist
Party.\footnote{Senator Bob Reynolds (1884--1963) outspoken defender
of fascism. Senator from 1932--44.}
It's not America First, it's not really isolationist, but we believe
that our country is being sold down the river."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
The overt link between father-fixation as discussed in the clinical
chapters (Part II) and authoritarian persuasions in politics should
be stressed. He uses a phrase familiar with fascists when they were
faced with the defeat of Germany and the German system and yet
somehow wished to cling to their negative Utopia.

\begin{Quote}
``America is fighting the war but we will lose the peace if we win
the war. I can't see what I can possibly get out of it."
\end{Quote}

Conversely, a striking example of pseudo-democratism in the narrower
sense is offered at the beginning of the political section of the
interview of the high-scoring man {\em M108}, a strongly fascistic
student of insect toxicology, discussed in the chapter on typology
as representative of the extreme ``manipulative" syndrome. He is
against Roosevelt, against the New Deal, and against practically
any social humanitarian idea. At the next moment, however, he says
he did feel that he was ``somewhat of a socialist."

This is literally the pattern by which the German Nazis denounced
the Weimar Republic in the name of authority unchecked by democratic
control, exalted the sacredness of private property, and simultaneously
inserted the word socialist into the vernacular of their own party.
It is obvious that this kind of ``socialism," which actually amounts
merely to the curtailment of individual liberties in the name of
some ill-defined collectivity, blends very well with the desire for
authoritarian control as expressed by those who style themselves
as conservatives. Here the overt incompatibility between private
interests (what he ``gets out of it") and objective political logic
(the certainty of an Allied victory) is by hook and crook put into
the service of pro-fascist postwar defeatism. No matter how it goes,
democracy must lose. Psychologically, the destructive ``impending
doom" pattern is involved.

%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    681

This defeatism is characteristic of another trait of pseudo-conservative
political philosophy: sympathy with the fascist enemy, Hitler's
Germany. This is easily rationalized as humane magnanimity and even
as the democratic wish to give everybody a fair deal. It is the
fifth-column mentality on which Hitlerian propaganda in democratic
countries drew heavily before the war and which has by no means
been uprooted.

{\em M106}, a college student high on all scales, fairly rational
in many respects, seems at first sight to be critical of Germany.
By tracing grandiloquently the sources of German fascism to supposedly
profound historical roots, largely invented themselves by fascist
propaganda, however, he slips into an apologetic attitude:

\begin{Quote}
``German people have always been aggressive, have loved parades,
have always had a big army. They received an unfair peace after the
last war. The treaty of Versailles was obviously unfair to them,
and because they were hard up, they were willing to listen to a
young man like Hitler when he came along. If there had been a better
peace, there'd be no trouble now. Hitler came along with promises,
and people were willing to go for him. They had huge unemployment,
inflation, and so on."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
The legend of the ``unjust" treaty of Versailles must feed on
tremendous psychological resources --- unconscious guilt feelings against
the established symbol of prowess --- in non-German countries: otherwise
it could not have survived the Hitlerian war. That this subject's
explanations of Hitler really mean sympathy is evidenced by a
subsequent statement on Hitler's policy of exterminating the Jews,
already quoted in Chapter XVI:

\begin{Quote}
``Well, Hitler, carried things just a little too far. There was some
justification --- some are bad, but not all. But Hitler went on the idea
that a rotten apple in the barrel will spoil all the rest of them."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
Still, even this subject clings to the democratic cloak and refrains
from overt fascism. Asked about the Jews in this country he answers:

\begin{Quote}
``Same problem but it's handled much better, because we're a democratic
country."
\end{Quote}

While pseudo-conservatism is, of course, predominantly a trait of
high scorers, it is by no means lacking among low scorers. This
pertains particularly to the apologetic attitude toward the Nazis.
Thus, {\em F133}, a woman low on prejudice though high on F, a young
student of mathematics, calls herself ``rather conservative." Her
``official" ideology is set against bigotry. But referring to her
Irish descent, she resents the English and this leads her to
pro-German statements which, in harmony with her F score, more than
merely hint at underlying fascist leanings:

\begin{Quote}
``I am prejudiced against England. England gave a dirty deal to the
Irish people. England says the Nazis are black and Russia is white,
but I think England is black. She goes around conquering people and
is not just at all; and I am opposed to
%% 682     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
Russia. It is true that they took up the cause of the people, but
on the whole they are not right, and their type of government is
inferior to ours. (What about the Nazis?) The Germans lost everything;
they just got hopeless. I don't believe in dividing Germany just
in order to make Russia and England richer. It isn't true that
Germany started the war --- for war two people are necessary. It is not
fair to put all the burden on one nation. The Germans will only
feel more persecuted and fight more. One should leave the Germans
to themselves. There is much too much emphasis on how cruel the
Nazis are. The Germans did not have a just peace. We can't put our
own Nazi regime in to run the Germans. The Russians will cause the
next war. The devastation in Germany has been just too great. I am
pessimistic because people believe that everybody is bad who is
down, and those are good who are strong, and the strong ones cut
in pieces the one who is down, and they are just
practical and not just."
\end{Quote}

The decisive shift occurs when the subject, after demanding ``fairness"
with regard to the problem of war guilt, protests against ``too much
emphasis" on Nazi atrocities.

\paragraph{\sc Excursus On The Meaning Of Pseudo-conservatism.}
The introduction of
the term pseudo-conservative which may often be replaced by pseudo-liberal
and even pseudo-progressive, necessitates a brief theoretical
discussion of what is ``pseudo" about the subjects in question and
whether and to what extent the notion of genuine political ideologies
can be upheld. All these terms have to be handled with the utmost
caution and should never be hypostatized.\footnote{{\em hypostatize}:
treat or represent (something abstract) as a concrete reality.}
The distinction between
pseudo and genuine political ideologies has been introduced mainly
in order to avoid the pitfall of oversimplification, of identifying
the prejudiced person, and the prospective fascist in general, with
``reactionism." It has been established beyond any doubt that fascism
in terms of efficient organization and technological achievement
has many ``progressive" features. Moreover, it has been recognized
long before our study that the general idea of ``preserving the
American way of living," as soon as it assumes the features of
vigilantism, hides violently aggressive and destructive tendencies
which pertain both to overt political manifestations and to character
traits. However, it has to be emphasized that the idea of the
genuineness of an attitude or of behavior set against its ``overplaying,"
is somehow as problematic as that of, say, normality. Whether a
person is a genuine or a pseudo-conservative in overt political terms
can be decided only in critical situations when he has to decide
on his actions. As far as the distinction pertains to psychological
determinants, it has to be relativized. Since all our psychological
urges are permeated by identifications of all levels and types, it
is impossible ever completely to sever the ``genuine" from what is
``imitation." It would be obviously nonsensical to call ungenuine
those traits of a person which are based on the identification with
his father. The idea of an absolute individual {\em per se}, completely
identical with itself and with nothing else, is an empty abstraction.
There is no psychological borderline between the genuine and the
``assumed." Nor can the relation between the two ever
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    683
be regarded as a static one. Today's pseudo-conservative may become
the genuine conservative of tomorrow.

In the light of these considerations, it will be of some methodological
importance to formulate the distinction between ``genuine" and
``pseudo" with care. The simplest procedure, of course, would be to
define both concepts operationally in terms of cluster relationships
of the questionnaire and also of the interviews. One would have to
call roughly pseudo-conservative those who show blatant contradictions
between their acceptance of all kinds of conventional and traditional
values --- by no means only in the political sphere --- and their simultaneous
acceptance of the more destructive clusters of the F scale, such
as cynicism, punitiveness, and violent anti-Semitism. Yet, this
procedure is somewhat arbitrary and mechanical. At its best, it
would define the terms but never help to understand their implicit
etiology.\footnote{{\em etiology}: the cause, or set of causes, or
manner of causation of a disease or condition.}
It would be more satisfactory to base the distinction on
a psychological hypothesis that makes sense. An hypothesis that
might serve is one that takes as its point of departure the
differentiation between {\em successful or unsuccessful
identification}.
This would imply that the ``genuine" conservative characters would
be those who essentially or at least temporarily succeeded in their
identification with authoritarian patterns without considerable
carry-overs of their emotional conflicts --- without strong ambivalence
and destructive counter-tendencies. Conversely, the ``pseudo" traits
are characteristic of those whose authoritarian identification
succeeded only on a superficial level. They are forced to overdo
it continuously in order to convince themselves and the others that
they belong, to quote the revolution-hater of San Quentin, to the
right strata of society. The stubborn energy which they employ in
order to accept conformist values constantly threatens to shatter
these values themselves, to make them turn into their opposite,
just as their ``fanatical" eagerness to defend God and Country makes
them join lunatic fringe rackets and sympathize with the enemies
of their country.

Even this distinction, however, can claim only limited validity and
is subject to psychological dynamics. We know from Freud that the
identification with the father is always of a precarious nature and
even in the ```genuine" cases, where it seems to be well established,
it may break down under the impact of a situation which substitutes
the paternal superego by collectivized authority of the fascist
brand.

Yet, with all these qualifications, the distinction still can claim
some justification under present conditions. It may be permissible
to contrast the pseudo-conservatives so far discussed with a ``genuine"
conservative taken from the Los Angeles sample which, as pointed
out in Chapter I, included --- in contrast to the Berkeley sample --- a number
of actual or self-styled members of the upper class.

{\em F5008} is low on E, middle on F, and high on PEC. She is a
woman of old American stock, a direct descendant of Jefferson. She
is apparently free of
%% 684     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
any vindictive sense of her social status and lays no emphasis on
her good family or on her being a real member of the ``right strata
of society." She is definitely non-prejudiced. Her T.A.T.\ shows
traits of a somewhat neurotic overoptimism which may or may not be
a product of reaction-formation. One might venture that the ``genuine"
conservatives who still survive and whose number is probably
shrinking, may develop an increasingly bad conscience because they
become aware of the rapid development of important conservative
layers of American society into the direction of labor baiting and
race hatred. The more this tendency increases, the more the ``genuine"
conservative seems to feel compelled to profess democratic ideals,
even if they are somewhat incompatible with his own upbringing and
psychological patterns. If this observation could be generalized,
it would imply that the ``genuine" conservatives are more and more
driven into the liberal camp by today's social dynamics. This may
help to explain why it is so hard to find any striking examples for
genuine conservatism among high scorers.

If our assumption is correct, that pseudo-conservatism is based --- as
far as its psychological aspect is concerned --- on incomplete identification,
it becomes understandable why it is linked to a trait which also
plays a considerable role within the pattern of conventionality:
identification with higher social groups. The identification that
failed is probably in most cases that with the father. Those people
in whom this failure does not result in any real antagonism to
authority, who accept the authoritarian pattern without, however,
internalizing it, are likely to be those who identify themselves
sociologically with higher social groups. This would be in harmony
with the fact that the fascist movement in Germany drew heavily on
frustrated middle-class people of all kinds: of those who had lost
their economic basis without being ready to admit their being {\em
d\'eclass\'e}; of those who did not see any chances for themselves
but the shortcut of joining a powerful movement which promised them
jobs and ultimately a successful war. This socioeconomic aspect of
pseudo-conservatism is often hard to distinguish from the psychological
one. To the prospective fascist his social identification is as
precarious as that with the father. At the social root of this
phenomenon is probably the fact that to rise by the means of ``normal"
economic competition becomes increasingly difficult, so that people
who want to ``make it" --- which leads back to the psychological
situation --- are
forced to seek other ways in order to be admitted into the ruling
group. They must look for a kind of ``co-optation," somewhat after
the fashion of those who want to be admitted to a smart club.
Snobbery, so violently denounced by the fascist, probably for reasons
of projection, has been democratized and is part and parcel of their
own mental make-up: who wants to make a ``career" must really rely
on ``pull and climbing" rather than on individual merit in business
or the professions. Identification with higher groups is the
presupposition for climbing, or at least appears so to the outsider,
whereas the ``genuine" conservative group is utterly 
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    685
allergic to it. However, the man who often, in accordance with the
old Horatio Alger ideology, maintains his own ``upward social mobility"
draws from it at least some narcissistic gratifications and
felicitously anticipates internally a status which he ultimately
hopes to attain in reality.

Here two examples of high scorers may be quoted, both again taken
from the Los Angeles group.

{\em 5006}, an extreme high scorer on all scales, one of the few of our
interviewees who actually admitted that they want to kill the Jews
(see his interview in Chapter XVI, p.\ 636), is the grandson of a
dentist, whereas his father failed to become one, and he hopes
fervently to regain the grandfather's social status. As to the
problem of failure in identification, it is significant in this
case that the image of the father is replaced by that of the
grandfather --- just as the idea of ``having seen better times," of a
good family background clouded over by recent economic developments,
played a large role with the pre-fascist, post-inflation generation
in Germany.

{\em 5013}, who is also extremely high on all scales, describes her father
as a doctor, whereas he is actually a chiropractor --- a habit which
seems to be largely shared by the chiropractors themselves. If the
German example teaches anything and if our concept of semi-erudition
proves to be correct, one may expect that nonacademic ``scientists"
and ``doctors" are strongly attracted by the fascist
platform.\footnote{%
The role played by shady pseudo-medicine in Nazi Germany is
sociologically linked to the ascendence of {\em d\'eclass\'e}
intellectuals under National Socialism, psychologically to the
paranoid twist of Nazi ideology as well as of the personalities of
many leaders. There is a direct interconnection between the doctrine
of ``purity of blood" and the glorification of sundry purifiers of
the body. The first academic chair created by Hitler was one for
``natural healing." His own physician was a quack, Himmler's a
chiropractor, and Rudolf Hess encouraged all kinds of superstitious
approaches to medicine. It should be noted that analogous tendencies
make themselves felt in the American ``lunatic fringe." One of our
native crackpot agitators combines Jew-baiting with a ``health food"
campaign, directed against the {\em delikatessen} which are not
only denounced as being Jewish but also as unwholesome. The imagery
of Jewish food throughout the fascist ideology deserves careful
examination. (Note by Adorno)}

\subsubsection*{5. The Usurpation Complex}

The goal toward which the pseudo-conservative mentality strives --- diffusedly
and semi-consciously --- is to establish a dictatorship of the economically
strongest group. This is to be achieved by means of a mass movement,
one which promises security and privileges to the so-called ``little
man" (that is to say, worried members of the middle and lower middle
class who still cling to their status and their supposed independence),
if they join with the right people at the right time. This wish
appears throughout pseudo-conservative ideology in mirrored reflection.
Government by representation is accused of perverting democracy.
Roosevelt and the New Deal particularly are said to have usurped
power and to have entrenched themselves dictatorially. Thus
%% 686     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
pseudo-conservatives accuse the progressives of the very thing which
they would like to do, and they utilize their indictment as a pretext
for ``throwing the rascals out." They call for a defense of democracy
against its ``abuses" and would, through attacking the ``abuses,"
ultimately abolish democracy altogether. Pseudo-conservative ideology
harmonizes completely with psychological projectivity.

One may well ask why people so concerned with power, if they really
see the Roosevelt policy as a strong-armed dictatorship, do not
endorse it and feel happy about it. The reasons, it would seem, are
several. First, the social types representative of pseudo-conservatism
are not or do not regard themselves as beneficiaries of the New
Deal. It appears to them as a government for the unemployed and for
labor; and even if they themselves received some benefits from 
WPA\footnote{{\em WPA}: Works Progress Administration (1935--40).
Largest New Deal agency, employing millions of people and affecting
every locality.}
or the closed shop, they are resentful about it because this
demonstrates to them what they are least willing to admit: that
their belonging to the middle classes has lost its economic foundation.
Second, to them, the Roosevelt administration never was really
strong enough. They sense very well the degree to which the New
Deal was handicapped by the Supreme Court and by Congress; they
know or have an inkling of the concessions Roosevelt had to make ---
he had to give conspicuous jobs to several men opposed to his
political line, e.g., Jesse Jones\footnote{Jesse Jones, US Secretary
of Commerce (1940--45)}; 
they cry ``dictator" because they
realize that the New Deal was no dictatorship at all and that it
did not fit within the authoritarian pattern of their over-all
ideology. Thirdly, their idea of the strong man, no matter in what
glowing personalized terms it may be expressed, is colored by an
image of real strength: the backing of the most powerful industrial
groups. To them, progressives in the government are real usurpers,
not so much because they have acquired by shrewd and illegal
manipulation rights incompatible with American democracy, but rather
because they assume a power position which should be reserved for
the ``right people." Pseudo-conservatives have an underlying sense
of ``legitimacy": legitimate rulers are those who are actually in
command of the machinery of production --- not those who owe their
ephemeral power to formal political processes. This last motif,
which also plays a heavy role in the prehistory of German fascism,
is to be taken the more seriously because it does not altogether
contradict social reality. As long as democracy is really a formal
system of political government which made, under Roosevelt, certain
inroads into economic fields but never touched upon the economic
fundamentals, it is true that the life of the people depends on the
economic organization of the country and, in the last analysis, on
those who control American industry, more than on the chosen
representatives of the people. Pseudo-conservatives sense an element
of untruth in the idea of ``their" democratic government, and realize
that they do not really determine their fate as social beings by
going to the polls. Resentment of this state of affairs, however,
is not directed against the dangerous contradiction between economic
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    687
inequality and formal political equality but against the democratic
form as such. Instead of trying to give to this form its adequate
content, they want to do away with the form of democracy itself and
to bring about the direct control of those whom they deem the most
powerful anyway.

This background of the dictatorship idea, that democracy is no
reality under prevailing conditions, may be evidenced by two
quotations from medium-scoring men. {\em M1223h} follows up his
statement that the Democrats are going communistic and that the
unions should be curbed, by the statement, ``The people aren't running
the country."

{\em M1225a} speaks cautiously about democracy: ``It's supposed to
be a government of the people by representation."

Asked whether we had it in this country he answers bluntly: No, but
qualifies this immediately with the statement --- a pretty standardized
one --- ``We have as close to it as there is."

Similarly, {\em M1223h} qualifies his critique by the contention
that ``America is still fairly democratic but going away from democracy
too fast."

The contradictory utterances of these two men, apart from wishful
thinking, indicate that they are perturbed by the antagonism between
formal political democracy and actual social control. They just
reach the point where they see this antagonism. They did not dare,
however, to explain it but rather retract their own opinions in
order not to become ``unrealistic." Conformism works as a brake on
their political thinking.

A few examples of the usurpation fantasy proper follow.

{\em M208}, who obtained a middle score on E and F and a high score on
PEC, insists, according to his interviewer,

\begin{Quote}
that President Roosevelt lost the popular vote by several thousand
votes, according to counts he and his father made following the
news reports over the radio, implying that the official count had
been incorrect.
\end{Quote}
\noindent
While this man is for ``initiative and competition, against government
bungling and inefficiencies," he has boundless confidence in social
control exercised by the proper organization:
\begin{Quote}
``The best organizations for a citizen to belong to in order to
influence the conditions in his community are local Chambers of
Commerce. By improving your city, you make it attractive and create
wealth." He said the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce was something
he belonged to and his organization would send out postcards very
soon to every single individual in the city in a huge membership
drive.
\end{Quote}

{\em M656}, a high-scoring prison inmate (grand theft and forgery), was
interviewed shortly after President Roosevelt's death and when
asked what he regarded as the greatest danger facing this country,
said

\begin{Quote}
``the government we just had, the one that brought on the war, the
Nazi-dictatorship."
\end{Quote}

%% 688     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

The high-scoring man {\em M108}, the aforementioned insect toxicologist,
is convinced that Roosevelt only carried out Hoover's ideas, a
statement not infrequent among prejudiced subjects who regard the
New Deal as usurpation in so far as it has ``stolen" its ideas from
its opponents. Asked further about Roosevelt, he goes on:
\begin{Quote}
``he usurped power that was necessary to do something --- he took a lot
more power than a lot\ldots\ . He has been in too long, and there
were deals on the fire that we don't know about with Churchill or
Stalin."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
In the end the usurper idea coincides with that of the conspirator
who makes ``secret deals" detrimental to his country.

The frequency and intensity of the usurper idea, together with the
fantastic nature of many of the pertinent assertions in our material
justifies our calling it a ``complex," that is to say, looking for
a widespread and stable psychological configuration on which this
idea feeds. As far as we know, no attention has been given to this
complex in psychological literature, though the frequency of
usurpation conflicts throughout occidental drama warrants the
assumption that there must be some deep-rooted basis in instinctual
dynamics for it. Suffice it to recollect that Shakespeare's most
famous tragedies: {\em Hamlet}, {\em King Lear}, {\em Macbeth}, {\em
Julius Caesar}, and
{\em Richard III} deal in one way or the other with usurpation, and that
the usurper theme runs as a red thread through the whole dramatic
work of Schiller, from Franz Moor in {\em The Robbers} to Demetrius.
On a socio-psychological level, that is to say comparatively abstractly
and superficially, an explanation is easy at hand. The existence
of power and privilege, demanding sacrifices of all those who do
not share in its advantages, provokes resentment and hurts deeply
the longing for equality and justice evolved throughout the history
of our culture. In the depth of his heart, everyone regards any
privilege as illegitimate. Yet one is forced continuously, in order
to get along in the world as it is, to adjust himself to the system
of power relationships that actually defines this world. This process
has been going on over the ages, and its results have become part
and parcel of today's personalities. This means that people have
learned to repress their resentment of privilege and to accept as
legitimate just that which is suspected of being illegitimate. But
since human sufferings from the survival of privilege have never
ceased, adjustment to it has never become complete. Hence the
prevailing attitude towards privileges is essentially ambivalent.
While it is being accepted consciously, the underlying resentment
is displaced unconsciously. This is done in such a way that a kind
of emotional compromise between our forced acceptance of the existence
of power, and resistance against it, is reached. Resentment is
shifted from the ``legitimate" representatives of power to those who
want to take it away from them, who identify themselves, in their
aims, with power but violate, at the same time, the code of existent
power relations. The ideal object of this
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    689
shift is the political usurper in whom one can denounce ``greed for
power" while at the same time taking a positive stand with regard
to established power. Still, sympathy with the usurper survives at
the bottom. It is the conflict between this sympathy and our displaced
aggressiveness which qualifies him for dramatic conflict.

There is reason to believe, however, that this line of thought does
not fully explain the usurper complex. Much more deep-lying, archaic
mechanisms seem to be involved. As a rule, the usurper complex is
linked with the problem of the family. The usurper is he who claims
to be the member of a family to which he does not belong, or at
least to pretend to rights due to another family. It may be noted
that even in the Oedipus legend, the usurper complex is involved
in so far as Oedipus believes himself to be the real child of his
foster-parents, and this error accounts for his tragic entanglement.
We venture, with all due reservation, the hypothesis that this has
something to do with an observation that can be made not infrequently:
that people are afraid of not really being the children of their
parents. This fear may be based on the dim awareness that the order
of the family, which stands for civilization in the form in which
we know it, is not identical with ``nature" that our biological
origin does not coincide with the institutional framework of marriage
and monogamy, that ``the stork brings us from the pond." We sense
that the shelter of civilization is not safe, that the house of the
family is built on shaky ground. We project our uneasiness upon the
usurper, the image of him who is not his parents' child, who becomes
psychologically a kind of ritualized, institutional ``victim" whose
annihilation is unconsciously supposed to bring us rest and security.
It may very well be that our tendency to ``look for the usurper" has
its origin in psychological resources as deep as those here suggested.

\subsubsection*{6. F.D.R.}

The usurpation complex is focused on Roosevelt, whose name evokes
the sharpest differences between high and low scorers that are to
be found in the interview material on politico-economic topics.

It hardly needs to be said that all the statements touching upon
the late president are personalized. The political issues involved
appear mainly as qualities of the man himself. He is criticized and
praised because he is this or that, not because he stands for this
or that. The most drastic accusation is that of war-monger. This
accusation often assumes the form of those conspiracy fantasies
which are so highly characteristic of the usurper complex.

The high-scoring man {\em M664c}, serving a San Quentin term of one
year for forgery and check writing, professes to have been originally
pro-Roosevelt.

\begin{Quote}
``Hell, at that (election) I was strong for Roosevelt, we had an
awful depression, one thing he'd done for that state he put that
dam there\ldots\ . We didn't need the war
%% 690     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
though. (Why did we get into it?) Started sending that iron over
to Japan and then helping England\ldots\ ."
\end{Quote}

The idea of the ``red Roosevelt" belongs to the same class of
objections and paranoid exaggerations of political antipathies.
Though much more common among subjects who score high on E and PEC,
it can sometimes be found in the statements of low scorers. Note
the remarks of {\em F140}, a young nursery school helper, rated
according to her questionnaire score as low on E but high on A--S
and PEC. She first refers to her father.

\begin{Quote}
(Is your father anti-Roosevelt?) ``Oh, sure he is. He just don't
have any use for Roosevelt. It's all communism that is what he says.
(And what do you think about it?) Oh, I don't know. I guess he's
right. He ought to know. That's all he thinks about --- politics --- politics."
\end{Quote}

Sometimes the suspicion that Roosevelt was a Russophile war-monger
is cloaked by legalistic argumentations, such as the statement that
he left the country illegally during the war.

{\em F101}, a woman who stands high on all scales, a somewhat
frustrated young college student, relates that her father is
``extremely anti-Roosevelt," and, when asked why, answers:

\begin{Quote}
``No president is supposed to leave the country without the consent
of Congress, and he goes whenever he feels like it. He is being a
little too dictatorial."
\end{Quote}

With regard to domestic politics, F359, the accountant in a government
department who was quoted before (Chapter XVI, p.\ 616), states quite
clearly and in fairly objective terms the contradiction which seems
at the hub of anti-Roosevelt sentiment:

\begin{Quote}
Subject did not like Roosevelt because of WPA. It creates a class
of lazy people who would rather get \$20 
a week\footnote{About \$160 in 2005.} 
than work. She feels
that Roosevelt did not accomplish what he set out to do --- raise the
standard of the poorer classes.
\end{Quote}

The conceptions of communist, internationalist, and war-monger are
close to another one previously mentioned --- that of the snob.
Just as the fascist agitator persistently mixes up radicals and
bankers, claiming that the latter financed the revolution and that
the former seek financial gains, the contradictory ideas of an
ultra-leftist and an exclusive person alienated from the people are
brought together by anti-Roosevelt sentiment. One may venture the
hypothesis that the ultimate content of both objections is the same:
the resentment of the frustrated middle-class person against those
who represent the idea of happiness, be it by wanting other people
--- even the ``lazy ones" --- to be happy, be it that they are
enjoying life themselves. This irrationality can be grasped better
on the level of personality than on that of ideology.


{\em M1223h}, of the Maritime School, with medium scores on E and
PEC, but high on F, does not like Roosevelt --- ``a socialite; got too
much power." 
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    691
Similarly, the high-scoring married woman {\em F117}, 37 years old,
employed in a Public Health Department,

\begin{Quote}
feels that Roosevelt does not know how to handle money; he was born
with a great deal. Now he throws it around --- ``millions here and millions
there."
\end{Quote}

This is the exact opposite of the praise of Dewey, whose more humble
origin is supposed to guarantee thriftiness. The ``democratic cloak"
of the pseudo-conservative consists, in cases like these, in the
assertion that measures taken for the benefit of the people cannot
be approved because the one who carried them out is not one of the
people and therefore, in a way, has no right to act in their behalf
--- he is a usurper. Really folksy men, one might suppose, would
rather let them starve.

The idea that the late President was too old and too ill, and that
the New Deal was decrepit plays a particular role among anti-Roosevelt
arguments. The dark forebodings about Roosevelt's death have come
true. Yet, one may suspect here a psychological element: the fear
of his death often rationalizes the wish for it. Moreover, the idea
of his supposed old age pertains to the illegitimacy complex: he
should give way to others, to the ``young generation," to fresh
blood. This is in keeping with the fact that German Nazism often
denounced the over-age of the representatives of the Weimar Republic,
and that Italian fascism heavily emphasized the idea of youth {\em per
se}. Ultimately, some light is shed on the whole complex of the
President's age and illness by our clinical findings, pertaining
to the tendency of our high scorers to praise physical health and
vigor as the outstanding quality of their parents, particularly of
the mother (pp.\ 340 ff.). This is due to the general ``externalization"
of values, the anti-intraceptiveness of the prejudiced personalities
who seem to be continuously afraid of illnesses. If there is an
interconnection between at least some syndromes of high scorers and
psychotic dispositions, one may also think of the disproportionate
role played by the concern with one's own body in many schizophrenics
--- a
phenomenon linked to the mechanisms of ``depersonalization"\footnote{%
Cf.\ Otto Fenichel (27). (Note by Adorno)}
which represents the extreme of the ``ego-alienness" of the id
characteristic of the high scoring subject. It should be remembered
once again how large a role was played by ideas such as physical
health, purity of the blood, and syphilophobia\footnote{{\em
syphilophobia}: fear of syphylis.} 
throughout fascist ideology.

{\em M104}, a high scoring young man of the Public Speaking Class,
who changed from studying engineering to law is an example:

\begin{Quote}
Subject would have voted for Dewey. The whole New Deal has become
very stagnant, old, and decrepit. He feels Roosevelt has done some
fine things, some of his experiments were about as good a cure as
you could get for the depression, but it is now time for a change
in party, a new President, younger blood.
\end{Quote}

As in most cases, the argument has, of course, a ``rational" aspect
too --- the Roosevelt government held office for a longer period than
any other
%% 692     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
one in American history. However, the complaints about ``too long"
are uttered only in the name of ``changing the guard," not in the
name of concrete progressive ideas which could be brought about by
younger people.

Resentment against old people has a psychological aspect by which
it seems to be linked to anti-Semitism. There is reason to believe
that some subjects displace their hostility against the father upon
aged persons and the notion of old age as such. Old people are, as
it were, earmarked for death. In accordance with this pattern, the
image of the Jew often bears features of the old man, thus allowing
for the discharge of repressed hostility against the father. Judaism
is regarded, not incidentally, as the religion of the father and
Christianity that of the son. The most emphatic stereotype of the
Jew, that of the inhabitant of the Eastern ghetto, bears attributes
of the old, such as the beard or worn and obsolete clothes.

Hostility for the aged has, to be sure, a sociological as well as
a psychological aspect: old people who cannot work any more are regarded
as useless and are, therefore, rejected. But this idea, like those
just discussed, has little immediate bearing upon the person of
Roosevelt; rather, they are transferred to him after aggression has
turned against him. The universally ambivalent role of the President
as a father figure thus makes itself felt.

As to those who are {\em in favor} of Roosevelt, there are two clear-cut
main motifs which are almost the reverse of those found in the
Roosevelt haters. The man ``who thinks too much of himself and assumes
dictatorial powers" is now praised as a great personality; the
leftist and initiator of the New Deal is loved as a friend of the underdog.

The ``great personality" motif appears in the statement of the
low-scoring
man, {\em M711}, an interviewer in government employment, with many
of the typical ``low" characteristics of mildness, gentleness, and
indecision.

\begin{Quote}
(Roosevelt) ``seemed to be the only man the country had produced
that seemed to have the qualifications for the assignment (of war).
\ldots\ I'd say his ability to get along with other people \ldots\ had
been pretty responsible in the unification of our country."
\end{Quote}

The young woman, {\em F726}, scores low on A--S and E, middle on F, and
high on PEC. She is studying journalism but actually is interested
in ``creative writing." She states

\begin{Quote}
that her brother-in-law can find so many things to criticize and,
of course, there are plenty. ``But I think the President is for the
underdog, and I've always been for the underdog."
\end{Quote}

The high-scoring man, {\em M102}, a student of seismology who went
to college
because he did not want to be ``lined up as just an electrician,"
praises Roosevelt's ``talent":

\begin{Quote}
``Well, if another candidate had approached Roosevelt, I'd have voted
for him. But, no other candidate approached his talent."
\end{Quote}

%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    693

{\em M106}, another high-scoring man, again characterized by upward
social mobility, is pro-Roosevelt for reasons that are just the
opposite of those given by one group of his critics for disliking
him, although he too suffers from the ``old age" complex.

\begin{Quote}
``Roosevelt has done a wonderful job but we should have a young man.
Roosevelt stabilized the nation's currency, helped on unemployment,
has handled foreign relations marvelously. He is a common man, goes
fishing, takes time for relaxation --- that's what I like. Mrs.\ Roosevelt
has been active in political and social affairs."
\end{Quote}

The explanation of the deviation of this highly prejudiced man, who
is beset by power ideas and objects to the Jews because they
supposedly strive for power, is that he himself

\begin{Quote}
``had infantile paralysis, and you appreciate what Roosevelt has
done."
\end{Quote}

The inference may be allowed that if the same man is praised by
some people as a ``common man" and by others blamed as a ``socialite,"
these judgments express subjective value scales rather than objective
facts.

The established status of a President of the United States, the
irrefutable success of Roosevelt, and, one may add, his tremendous
impact as a symbolic father figure on the unconscious, seem in more
cases than this particular one to check the usurper complex of the
pseudo-conservative and allow only for vague attacks about which
there is something half-hearted, as if they were being made with a
bad conscience.

\subsubsection*{7. Bureaucrats And Politicians}

There is no mercy, however, for those to whom Roosevelt is supposed
to have delegated power. They are usurpers, parasites, know nothing
about the people, and should, one may well assume, be replaced by
the ``right men." The wealth of statements against bureaucrats and
politicians in our interview material is tremendous. Although it
comes mostly from high scorers, it is by no means confined to them,
and may again be regarded as one of those patterns of political
ideology which spread over the well-defined border lines of right
vs.\ left.

It is beyond the scope of the present study to analyze the amount
of truth inherent in American distrust of professional politics.
Nor should it be denied that a tremendously swollen bureaucratic
apparatus, such as that which was necessitated by war conditions
and which was, to a certain extent, safe from public criticism,
develops unpleasant features, and that the machinery has an inbound
tendency to entrench itself and to perpetuate itself for its own
sake. However, as one analyzes carefully the standard criticism of
the bureaucrats and politicians, he finds very little evidence of
such observations, very few specific indictments of bureaucratic
institutions which prove them to be incompetent. It is impossible
to escape the impression that ``the bureaucrat," with the help of
some sections of the press, and some radio commentators,
%% 694     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
has become a magic word, that he functions as a scapegoat to
be blamed indiscriminately for all kinds of unsatisfactory conditions,
somewhat reminiscent of the anti-Semitic imagery of the Jew with
which that of the bureaucrat is often enough merged. At any rate,
the frequency and intensity of anti-bureaucratic and anti-politician
invectives is quite out of proportion with any possible experience.
Resentment about the ``alienation" of the political sphere as a
whole, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, is turned
against those who represent the political sphere. The bureaucrat
is the personalization of un-understandable politics, of a depersonalized
world.

Striking examples of this general attitude of high scorers are
provided by the above-quoted political statements of Mack (p.\ 34)
and of the markedly anti-Semitic manager of a leather factory, {\em
M359} (p.\ 666 of this chapter).

Sometimes the invectives against politics terminate in tautologies:
politics is blamed for being too political.

{\em M1230a} is a young welder who wanted to study engineering. He
scores high on E but low on F and PEC.

\begin{Quote}
(What thinking of political trends today?) ``Well, they're very
disrupted. We discussed them a lot, and a lot of things we don't
like. The administration seems to be so tied up in politics\ldots\ .
Statesmanship is gone completely\ldots\ . Can't believe anything you
read in the newspapers. We read the newspapers mainly to 
laugh. \ldots "
\end{Quote}

The last passage is characteristic of the alienation from politics
which expresses itself in a complete, and by no means altogether
unjustified, distrust of the reliability of any news which has gone
through the filter of a system of communications controlled by
vested interests. This distrust, however, is shifted to the scapegoat,
the bureaucrat and the politician, usually attacked by the same
press which is this subject's laughing stock.

{\em F120}, a high-scoring woman, differentiates between Roosevelt
and the bureaucracy.\footnote{%
This observation is in accordance with experience in Nazi Germany
where all kinds of criticism and jokes about the party hierarchy
were whispered everywhere, whilst Hitler seems to have been largely
exempted from this kind of criticism. One heard frequently
the remark: The F\"uhrer does not know about these things" --- even when
concentration camps were concerned. (Note by Adorno)}

\begin{Quote}
(Roosevelt and the New Deal?) ``I admired him, in fact I voted for
him, although I did not approve of a lot of things about the New
Deal. All the bureaus. I would not have minded the spending if it
had gone to help people. But I resented all the wasted motion --- professional
people digging ditches --- and especially the expensive agencies stuffed
with do-nothings, bureaucrats."
\end{Quote}

{\em M1214b}, a medium scorer of the Maritime School, is anti-political
in a traditionalistic way, the ultimate direction of which is still
undetermined.

\begin{Quote}
``No respect for politicians: bunch of windbags. They try to sound
people out and follow along." (This is just the opposite of the
usual argument according to which
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    695
the politicians are too independent. This particular twist may
indicate the underlying awareness of the {\em weakness} of the representatives
of formal democracy.) ``They are not sincere public servants.
Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Bryan are exceptions. Wilson was
also sincere." Subject has no respect for Harding or Coolidge.
\end{Quote}
\noindent
Finally, an example from a low scorer. {\em M112}, asked about
politics, simply states:

\begin{Quote}
``I don't like it. We can get along without it. Don't think that
people should be just politicians. Should have an ordinary life,
just hold office at times. Not be trained for politics and nothing
else, should know what people want and do it. Not control things
for themselves or others."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
The tone of this accusation is markedly different from the phraseology
of the high scorers. This man seems really to be worried lest
bureaucracy should become reified, an end in itself, rather than
democratically expressing the wishes of the people.

The motivation of the low scorers' criticism of bureaucrats and
politicians seems largely to vary from that of the high scorers;
phenomenologically, however, it reminds so much of the latter that
one is led to fear that in a critical situation quite a few
anti-political low scorers may be caught by a fascist movement.

\subsubsection*{8. There Will Be No Utopia}

The political thinking of high scorers is consummated by the way
they approach the ultimate political problem: their attitude toward
the concept of an ``ideal society." Their opinional pattern not only
concerns the means but also the ultimate social ends.

According to the frame of mind which is being analyzed here, there
is no utopia and, one may add, there should be no utopia. One has
to be ``realistic." This notion of realism, however, does not refer
to the necessity of judging and accounting on the basis of objective,
factual insight, but rather to the postulate that one recognizes
from the very beginning the overwhelming superiority of the existent
over the individual and his intentions, that one advocates an
adjustment implying resignation with regard to any kind of basic
improvements, that one gives up anything that may be called a
day-dream, and reshapes oneself into an appendage of the social
machinery.

This is reflected by political opinion in so far as any kind of
utopian idea in politics is excluded altogether.

It must be pointed out that an anti-utopia complex seems to occur
in the interviews of low scorers even more frequently than in those
of high scorers, perhaps because the former are more ready to admit
their own worries and are less under the impact of ``official
optimism." This differentiation between the stand taken by high and
low scorers ,against utopia seems to be corroborated by the study
``Psychological Determinants of Optimism regarding the
%% 696     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
Consequences of the War" by Sanford, Conrad, and Franck (108).
Official optimism, the ``keep smiling" attitude, goes with underlying
traits of contempt for human nature, as expressed by the cynicism
cluster of the F scale, which differentiates clearly between high
and low scorers. Conversely, low scorers are much more ready to
admit negative facts in general, and particularly with regard to
themselves, on a surface level, being less spellbound by the
conventional clich\'e that ``everything is fine," but they show, on a
deeper level of their opinions, much greater confidence in the
innate potentialities of the human race. One may epitomize the
difference dynamically by stating that the high scorers deny utopia
because they ultimately do not {\em want} it to materialize, whereas
anti-utopian statements of the low scorers are derived from a
rejection of the official ideology of ``God's own country." The
latter are skeptical about utopia, because they take its realization
seriously and therefore take a critical view of the existent, even
up to the point where they acknowledge the threat exercised by the
impact of prevailing conditions against just those human potentialities
in which they trust in the depth of their hearts.

{\em M345} is a high-scoring man of the University Extension Testing Class
group. He scores high on E and PEC but low on F. When asked about
what he thinks of an ideal society, his answer reads:

\begin{Quote}
``I don't think there is such a thing without changing everything,
including the people in it. Always some people unusually wealthy,
always some unusually miserable economically."
\end{Quote}

This answer is significant in many respects. The denial of the
possibility of an ideal society is based on the assumption that
otherwise everything ought to be changed --- an idea apparently unbearable
to the subject. Rather than change everything, that is to say, to
disobey ultimate respect for the existent, the world should be left
as bad as it is. The argument that first the people should be changed
before the world can be changed belongs to the old anti-utopian
armory. It leads to a vicious circle, since, under prevailing
external conditions, no such internal change can ever be expected,
and, actually, those who speak in this way do not even admit its
possibility, but rather assume the eternal and intrinsic badness
of human nature, following the pattern of cynicism discussed in the
chapter on the F scale. Simultaneously wealth and poverty which are
obviously the products of social conditions are hypostatized by the
subject as if they were inborn, natural qualities. This both
exonerates society and helps to establish the idea of unchangeability
on which the denunciation of utopia feeds. We venture the hypothesis
that the brief statement of this subject bares a pattern of thinking
which is exceedingly widespread, but which few people would epitomize
as overtly as he does.

To the aforementioned {\em M105}, who comes as close to overt fascism
as any
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL 697 of our subjects,
the idea of natural qualities excluding an ideal society is related
immediately to the most pressing issue: the abolition of war.

\begin{Quote}
``Naturally, I like America best. The question is, is it worth while
to give up what we have in order to have world trade? The Japs make
cheap products and can undersell us. What I'm afraid of is a perpetual
lend-lease. If we do trade with other nations we should have the
cash. World trade would not prevent war. The fighting instinct is
there."
\end{Quote}

The significant fact about his statement is that the assumption of
a ``fighting instinct," which apparently is never supposed to
disappear, is related in an overrealistic manner to economic
advantages, cash, sticking to what one has, and so on. Incidentally,
this is the same man who speaks against the present war because he
``can't see what he can possibly get out of it."

Self-contradictory is a statement by the executive secretary, {\em
F340B}, a medium-scoring woman, whose personality as a whole, as
well as her ready-made political opinions, come closer to the type
of the high scorer than her questionnaire leads us to believe. In
terms of surface opinion she wants to be ``idealistic," in terms of
her specific reactions she is under the spell of ``realism," the
cult of the existent.

\begin{Quote}
``I'm not happy about our foreign policy here --- it's not definite enough,
and not idealistic enough. (What are your specific criticisms?) It
is not much of anything: seems we haven't got any foreign policy.
(What kind of foreign policy would you like to see?) I would like
to see the four freedoms,\footnote{{\em The Four Freedoms}: Goals
articulated by FDR in his State of the Union address (1941): (1)
Freedom of speech and expression; (2) Freedom of every person to
worship God in his own way; (3) Freedom from want; (4) Freedom from
fear.} 
the Atlantic Charter\footnote{{\em The Atlantic Charter}: Agreement
signed in 1941 between FDR and Churchill, with regard to post-war
relationships between nations.  Became one of the first steps towards
the formation of the United Nations.}
actually applied in
other countries. Then we also have to be realistic about it, but
we have to strive to be idealistic --- to realize the ideals eventually."
\end{Quote}

There is something pathetic about this statement. For the contention
that one has to be ``realistic" in order ultimately to realize the
ideals is certainly true. Taken {\em in abstracto}, however, and
without specific concepts as to how this could be achieved, the
truth becomes perverted into a lie, denoting only that ``it cannot
be done" while the individual still maintains the good conscience
that she would be only too happy if it were possible.

Psychologically, the anti-utopian pattern of political thinking is
related to sadomasochistic traits. They manifest themselves strikingly
in the statement of the high-scoring San Quentin inmate, {\em M622A},
who comes fairly close to the ``tough-guy" syndrome discussed in
Chapter XIX. When asked
``what is an ideal society like," he answers: ``Plenty of work for
everybody; have all the strikes stopped."

To the na\"ivet\'e of this man, who certainly belongs to the poorest
strata himself, the image of the present order has been petrified
to such an extent that he cannot even conceive of a social system
where, because of rational organization, each individual has {\em
less}
to work --- to him the ideal is that everybody {\em can} work, which does not
only include satisfaction of basic needs but also efforts which
might easily be dispensed with today. The idea that some
%% 698     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
strict order should prevail is so overpowering to him that utopia
becomes a society where no strikes are to be tolerated any more,
rather than a society where strikes would be unnecessary.

It should be mentioned that the general denial of utopianism is
sometimes reversed by the subjects whose statements we are scrutinizing
here, when they speak about the United States.

Thus, {\em M619}, a low scorer of the San Quentin group, led by the
prison situation to complete political resignation, still feels:

\begin{Quote}
``\ldots\ I think part of the reason America has become the greatest
country in the world is that because the dreams a man makes might
come true."
\end{Quote}

Of course, this is to be understood primarily as an expression of
the dream that can be measured by the dollars and cents an individual
can make, but it should not be forgotten that among the ideological
foundations of American liberalism there is also a utopian element
which, under certain conditions, may break through and overcome the
gospel of supposed realism.

Apparently, the anti-utopian somehow feels uneasy about his own
``realism," and seeks an outlet by attributing to the reality with
which he is most strongly identified, his own country, some of the
utopian qualities he otherwise disavows.

Only the low- to medium-scoring San Quentin murderer, {\em M628B},
a man who has nothing to lose in life, says bluntly:

\begin{Quote}
``This country educates people, but in the so-called American way.
\ldots\ I don't believe this is the best country. Maybe in a materialistic
way\ldots\ . I would not value my life by material things."
\end{Quote}

The undertone of this statement is, similar to {\em M619}, one of fatalistic
resignation. Even low scorers who are not anti-utopian cannot think
of utopia but in a quasi-fatalistic way: as if it were something
preconceived, fixed once
and for all; something which one has to ``look up" rather than think
and realize oneself. {\em M711}:

\begin{Quote}
(What is ideal society like?) ``That's an awfully difficult question.
Isn't it based on the four freedoms?"
\end{Quote}

\subsubsection*{9. No Pity For The Poor}

One should expect that a frame of mind which regards everything as
basically bad should at least favor, in the area of politics and
social measures, as much help for those who suffer as possible. But
the philosophy of the anti-utopian pessimists is not tinged by
Schopenhauerian\footnote{%
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788--1860). German philosopher.
He espoused a philosophical
pessimism that saw life as essentially evil, futile, and full of
suffering. However, in accordance with
Eastern thought (Hinduism and Buddhism) he saw
salvation, deliverance, or escape from suffering in aesthetic
contemplation, sympathy for others, and ascetic living.}
mercy. The general pattern we are investigating
here is characterized by an all-pervasive feature. These subjects
want no pity for the poor, neither here nor abroad. This trait seems
to be strictly confined to high scorers and to be one of the most
differentiating features in political philosophy. At this point,
the interrelatedness of some ideas measured by the PEC scale and
certain attitudes caught by the
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    699
F scale should be stressed. Abolition of the dole,\footnote{{\em The
``dole"}: welfare.} 
rejection of
state interference with the ``natural" play of supply and demand on
the labor market, the spirit of the adage ``who does not work, shall
not eat" belong to the traditional wisdom of economic rugged
individualism and are stressed by all those who regard the liberal
system as being endangered by socialism. At the same time, the ideas
involved have a tinge of punitiveness and authoritarian aggressiveness
which makes them ideal receptacles of some typical psychological
urges of the prejudiced character. Here goes, for example, the
conviction that people would not work unless subject to pressure --- a
way of reasoning closely related to vilification of human nature
and cynicism. The mechanism of projectivity is also involved: the
potentially fascist character blames the poor who need assistance
for the very same passivity and greediness which he has learnt not
to admit to his own consciousness.

Examples: The extremely high-scoring San Quentin inmate, {\em M664C},
whose F score is outstanding, shows clearly the psychological aspect
of this particular ideology. He regards as the ``major problem"
facing this country the fact that it might do something for the
starving people abroad. His statement shows also the intimate
interrelation between the ``no pity for the poor" and the fatalism
complexes.

\begin{Quote}
``Christ, we licked those other countries and now we're gonna feed
'em\ldots\ . I think we ought to let 'em starve, especially them
Japs\ldots\ . Lucky I don't have any relations killed in this war, I'd
go out and kill me some Japs\ldots\ . We're gonna have another depression
and gonna have another war too in a few years."
\end{Quote}

By contrast, {\em M658}, another high-scoring convict with certain
psychopathic traits, turn his affects against the unemployed rather
than against the Japanese:

\begin{Quote}
``I believe everybody should have an opportunity. Should not be any
unemployment. Only reason they are unemployed, they are lazy like
me."
\end{Quote}

This may be regarded as one of the most authentic examples of
sadomasochistic thinking in our interviews. He wants others to be
treated harshly because he despises himself: his punitiveness is
obviously a projection of his own guilt feelings.

Women are freer of the ``no pity for the poor" complex. They rather
over-compensate for it in terms of social welfare and charity which
is, as indicated previously, a ``high" value anyway. The following
statement may be regarded as characteristic of the woman who
humiliates him whom she pretends to help, and actually does not
help at all but just makes herself feel important.

{\em F359}, a high scorer who combines conventionality with somewhat
paranoid ideas about the Negroes:

\begin{Quote}
Subject thinks that the poorer people should be taken care of by
state or community projects. People in the community should get
together, like people, for instance, who are good at organizing
boys' clubs; or they might organize dances
%% 700     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
and hold them at one person's house one week, and at somebody else's
the next week. Everybody should contribute something; take up a
small collection. In the case of a poor section it might get the
funds from the city. One might also call on public funds for
buildings, if needed.
\end{Quote}

The attitude of indifference to the lot of the poor together with
admiration for rich and successful people sheds light on the potential
attitude of the high scorers toward the prospective victims of
fascism in a critical situation. Those who humiliate mentally those
who are downtrodden anyway, are more than likely to react the same
way when an outgroup is being ``liquidated." This attitude has, of
course, strong sociological determinants: upward social mobility,
identification with the higher class to whom they wish to belong
themselves, recognition of universal competition as a measuring rod
for what a person is worth, and the wish to keep down the potential
threat of the disinherited masses. These sociological motives,
however, are inseparably bound up with the psychological mechanisms
indicated above. The specific infantile implications may be indicated
as follows: identification with the poor is quite enticing for
children, since the world of the poor appears to them in many ways
less restricted than their own, whilst they somehow sense the
similarity between the social status of a child in an adult society
and the status of the poor in a rich man's world. This identification
is repressed at an early phase for the sake of ``upward mobility,"
and also --- even if the children are poor themselves --- for the sake of the
reality principle in general which tolerates compassion only as an
ideology or as ``charity" but not in its more spontaneous manifestations.
They project the ``punishment" they have received for their own
compassion upon the downtrodden by regarding poverty as something
the poor ``brought upon themselves." The same formula, incidentally,
plays a decisive role in anti-Semitism.

\subsubsection*{10. Education Instead Of Social Change}

The complement of the ``no pity for the poor" complex is the
overemphasis given to the education of people within the political
sections of our interviews. The frequent reference to this topic
is the more significant since it does not appear in the interview
schedule. Nobody will deny the desirability of political education.
It is hard to overlook, however, that the ideal of education often
serves as a rationalization for social privileges. People who do
not want to confess to anti-democratic leanings prefer to take the
stand that democracy would be all right if only people were educated
and more ``mature." This condition, naturally, would here and now
exclude from political activities those who, on account of their
economic situation, need most urgently a social change. This, of
course, is never stated in so many words. If, however, as once
happened, an overtly fascist man speaks in favor of the abolition
of the poll tax in the South, and wants to replace it by an
``intelligence test," there is little doubt about the ultimate
purpose. The adulation of ``education"
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    70I
occurs quite frequently among uneducated people --- perhaps because, for
some reason beyond the scope of the present study, education has
come to be a kind of a panacea in American ideology. None of our
subjects ever takes the trouble of defining to what the mysterious
``education" should refer: whether it pertains to the general
educational level or whether some special kind of political education
is envisaged and how it should be carried out.

The education complex is not confined to high or medium scorers but
seems to be more frequent with them than with low scorers. Some
examples are given.

{\em M1230A}, a high-scoring man of the Maritime School Group, states,

\begin{Quote}
(What is an ideal society like?) ``It would take generations of
breeding to bring everybody to the same educational standards \ldots\ 
though not to have such {\em great} classes \ldots\  although I think we
should always have class distinction \ldots\ some initiative to try
to improve yourself."
\end{Quote}

Here it is obvious that the education idea serves as a subtle device
by which the anti-utopian can act to prevent a change and yet appear
progressive. It is also characteristic that the stress put on a
long drawn-out educational
process is concomitant with the idea that there always {\em should} be
some class distinction.

Similarly, the Canadian {\em M934}, a medium scorer, endorses the education
idea as a ``brake," this time on the labor movement. He believes:

\begin{Quote}
``The important thing in the labor movement today is education of
the rank and file. I just don't think labor is ready to take more
influence today."
\end{Quote}

It may be noted at random that the more production processes are
standardized, the less special training is required, the more
technological progress leads toward a certain enlightenment of the
masses, the emptier the postulate of education becomes. Our subjects
stick to it in a rather fetishistic way.

For the very high-scoring woman, {\em F104}, majoring in Spanish and
interested in business, the political demarcation line between her
ingroup, the Republicans, and the Democrats coincides with that of
education.

\begin{Quote}
``The type of people I have known who are Democrats are usually
uneducated people who really don't know what is happening. The
present administration has made a mess of things."
\end{Quote}

Thus the education ideology interprets the fact that the Democratic
Party is more of a lower-class party than the Republicans.

Among low scorers the education idea is somewhat mixed up with the
traditional socialist wish for enlightenment. Frequently, there
occurs a complaint about the lethargy and the lack of political
interest of the masses --- from which, regularly, the subjects
exempt themselves. In this context we may mention again the
phraseological statement of our sailor, {\em M117}:

\begin{Quote}
``We have a good basis for our political system. The majority of
people are not
%% 702     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
interested or equipped enough to understand politics, so that the
big proportion of U.S.\ politics is governed by the capitalistic
system."
\end{Quote}

The education complex leads us back to where our analysis started,
to the ignorance and confusion which clouds the political thinking
of most of our sample. It is possible that the education complex
somehow expresses the awareness that one really does not know what
one talks about when one discusses politics --- often enough the praise
of education follows, with low scorers, self-accusations on account
of their lack of knowledge. However, the vague idea of education
takes care of the experience of ignorance rather summarily by a
slogan and reliance on an isolated factor of cultural life, thus
dispensing with the effort of political thinking. Moreover, it
serves in most cases the purpose of projecting one's own ignorance
onto others so that one may appear informed oneself.

One last observation may prove to be significant. Whereas the praise
of education is heavily accentuated by high scorers, it is at the
same time one of the most frequently heard anti-Semitic statements
that ``the Jews are all out for education" --- generally associated with
the assertion that they dodge hard manual labor. We may suspect
that there is, at the hub of the education complex, the vague
realization that this culture excludes the bulk of those whom it
embraces from real participation in its more subtle gratifications.
While the awkward talk about education expresses longing for a state
of affairs where one is no longer stunted by the requirements of
``being practical," fury about one's own educational frustration is
projected upon the chosen foe who is supposed to possess what one
has to deny to oneself.

\subsection*{C. Some Political And Economic Topics}

Our previous discussion was, in accordance with the general approach
of our study, formulated in subjective, rather than objective terms.
That is to say, we have focused our interest on the patterns of
political thinking of our interviewees, rather than on the stand
they take with regard to objective political issues. As a matter
of course our approach led also to a discussion of numerous political
topics such as, for example, the evaluation of Roosevelt, the problem
of government ``bureaucracy," attitudes taken toward ``ideal society,"
etc. No strict dichotomy between the subjective and objective
political issues could be made. What remains now to be discussed
are the attitudes of our subjects toward those political topics of
the interview schedule so far not covered, though some of them,
particularly with regard to the bureaucrat complex and the problem
of government control of business, have been touched upon.

\subsubsection*{1. Unions}

The problem of unionism was heavily emphasized in our interview
schedule because it is a very timely politico-economic topic, and
because
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    703
we expected it to be highly discriminatory. The questionnaire item,
``Labor Unions should become stronger and have more influence
generally," did indeed prove to be discriminating in the statistical
sense (D.P., 3.16 for men and 3.49 for women on Forms 40--45), but
the interview protocols offer ample warning against any such primitive
formula as low-score = pro-union, high-score = anti-union. A certain
amount of criticism of unions is universal and there is no lack of
otherwise outspoken low scorers who deviate with regard to the union
question. Unambiguously pro-union are only a small number of
politically conscious and highly articulate left-wingers. Otherwise,
there are strong reservations with respect to unions throughout our
sample. High and low scorers differ more in the way these reservations
are made than in the simple pro- vs.\ anti- dimension. A critical
attitude is taken by people who do not belong to unions, as well
as by those who are members.

Some differences between questionnaire and interview might be
expected on the basis that the questionnaire calls for more or less
forthright statements, whereas the interview allows the subjects
to elaborate their ideas in all their complexity. Here, it would
seem, the interview comes closer to the subjects' real opinion than
does the questionnaire. Since the organization of labor and the
issue of the closed shop affects the lives of most people in some
immediate way, the factor of ``alienation" and the accompanying
ignorance and confusion plays a lesser part than it does, say,
when people discuss ``all those bureaus" far away in Washington.

Thus, the critical sentiment expressed with regard to the unions
has to be taken very seriously. This criticism must not be identified
automatically with reactionism. Here more than anywhere else, there
is some basis in reality, and the complaints are, generally, much
more reasonable, show much more common sense than when it comes to
issues such as the politicians or the Jews. Labor organizations
have more or less to adapt themselves to the prevailing conditions
of an economic life ruled by huge combines, and thus they tend to
become ``monopolies." This means discomfort for innumerable persons
who in their business are faced with a power which interferes with
what they still feel to be their individual right as free competitors.
They have to yield an extra part of their profit to what labor
demands from them, over and above the price for the commodity which
they buy, the laborer's working power. This appears to them as a
mere tribute to the power of the organization. It is significant,
however, that at least the high scorers resent labor monopolies but
not their model, industrial monopolization as such. This is not
surprising. The population has much more direct contact with the
labor organizations than with the organizations of industry. People
have to negotiate with their local unions about extra pay, overtime,
wage increases, and working conditions, while Detroit, where their
car is being made and priced, is far away. Of course, deeper-lying
motives of social identification are also involved.

%% 704     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

The monopolization of labor affects also the workers themselves who
feel bossed by the huge organization upon which they exercise very
little influence as individuals and who, if they are not admitted,
feel hopelessly ``out-grouped." This nucleus of experience in the
critique of organized labor has to be recognized lest one rush to
conclusions.

The element of partial truth in the critique of labor is among the
most dangerous fascist potentials in this country. While there are
quite a few points in the critique of labor which cannot be refuted,
they are easily chosen as points of departure, in order to do away
with unions altogether, replacing them by government-controlled
corporations --- one of the main economic objectives of fascists
everywhere.  No analysis of the fascist potential is valid which
does not give account of the agglomerate of rational critique and
irrational hatred in the people's attitude toward labor. Some
characteristic reactions of our interviewees may, at least, illustrate
the problem.

We begin with examples of an attitude toward labor which is very
widespread among low scorers: the acceptance of unions with more
or less incisive qualifications. Obviously, anti-labor attitudes
among otherwise ``progressive" people are particularly important for
broader issues of prognosis.

{\em M310}, a thoroughly liberal and progressive member of the
University Extension Testing Class, speaks about the ``so-called
free enterprise system which really is monopoly." To the question
about the 30 per cent wage increase demanded by labor, he answers:

\begin{Quote}
``Well, don't like to see anybody set an arbitrary figure for any
demand. At the same time very sympathetic to wage demands. E.g.\ the
auto workers right now. On the other hand, the bakery workers in
San Francisco are striking merely for a base rate, although all of
them are making above that now: they are just thinking of the future.
\ldots\ I am for unions, but I think we should recognize that sometimes
they become selfish-interest groups\ldots\ . Disappointed in the labor
movement as a reform vehicle, their only interest is in higher wages
for their own small group, especially A.F.\ of L.\ craft unions or
monopolies."
\end{Quote}

Behind this statement looms the dim consciousness that today's labor
movement, instead of aiming at a better society, is satisfied with
securing certain advantages and privileges within the present setup.
This is just the opposite of the typical high scorer's complaint
that unions have become too political, a matter to be discussed
later.

{\em M112}, a low-scoring college sophomore, senses the danger that
cumbersome, mammoth unions might become undemocratic. He is
anti-monopoly in
the sense that he hopes to stop social trends by breaking down
highly centralized units into smaller ones.

\begin{Quote}
``I don't like large organizations. There should be local unions,
local companies, never very large. There is Kaiser, but he's not
so bad. Standard Oil is not good or I.G.\ Farben of Germany."
\end{Quote}

{\em M620}, a low-scoring convict, is typical of those who resent
the interference
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL  705
of organized labor with the functioning of the machinery of production
as a whole:

\begin{Quote}
(What do you think of political trends today?) ``Well, I believe
seriously that labor is going to have to acquire a sense of
responsibility\ldots\ . Well, to me a contract is more or less
sacred." Subject objects to strikes in general, especially to
jurisdictional strikes. (What about 30\% increase in wage demands?)
``I believe if the unions are willing to work they should have it.
But if they give no returns, completely unjustified. (What about
G.M.\ strike?) Should be settled as quickly as possible, one way
or the other\ldots\ .  I believe both labor and business sort of
ignore the little fellow.  \ldots\  I am sort of bitter about this
strike business\ldots\ . I feel labor should have more responsibility."
\end{Quote}

{\em M711}, an extreme low scorer of the Employment Service Veterans
group, mixes up the collectivistic power of unions with the threat
of fascism and makes, by projection, Hitler a pro-union man:

\begin{Quote}
(How do you feel about labor unions?) I don't know frankly on that.
In theory I'm very much in favor of labor unions. (How do you feel
about 30\% wage increase demand?) Well, I do not approve \ldots\ because
I think any wage increase demand should be made in relation to
living costs. (How do you mean that?) As a matter of fact, I just
don't think about it \ldots\ 30\% wage increase won't mean a damn thing
if living costs go up too. (What about G.M.'s labor union demand
for increased wages, with no increase in prices?) ``Yes \ldots\ but I
think wages and prices have to hit a stabilization\ldots\ ." (Interviewer
reads question \#4, stating that labor unions should become stronger,
and refers to subject's disagreeing a little with this item and
asks for elaboration.) ``Well, my disagreement on that --- I'm perhaps
thinking that labor unions becoming stronger would lead to a state
of fascism\ldots\ . After all, didn't Hider use the labor unions in his
early days, increasing labor unions and making them stronger\ldots\ . I
know we have labor unions in San Francisco which are simply little
empires. On the other hand, we have others that are working for the
general good. \ldots\  I certainly don't think they should be controlled
as some of our senators seem to want them."
\end{Quote}

{\em F340B} has been mentioned before. She is of the University
Extension Testing Class and scores middle on E, low on F, and high
on PEC. She differentiates between the positive function of unions
and their inherent evils which she describes in personalistic terms
as ``capitalistic" themselves.

\begin{Quote}
(What do you think of labor unions in general?) ``I think they are
necessary --- as an idea they are fine, but in practice --- I have had the
misfortune to meet some of the labor leaders in this area, and it
was very disillusioning to me. (In what way? ) Well, if there ever
were `capitalists,' they were every bit of it, running their
organization just like running a business --- to squeeze everything out
of it. (What do you think should be done about that?) Well, they
should not object to having their financial statements audited --- should
be more open about it. (Do you think standards should be set up
then, by the government perhaps?) Yes, I think I would rather see
a strong public opinion do it --- makes them realize they should be more
fair-minded and open."
\end{Quote}

Although no scoring has been done, the impression created by careful
%% 706     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
perusal of the whole interview material is that the attitude which
accepts unions as a necessary evil is the average one, at least
among those who are not articulately reactionary.

There is an exceedingly small number of unqualified pro-labor
statements. The two examples to follow stem from San Quentin, both,
of course, from low scorers.

{\em M628B}, a murderer:

\begin{Quote}
(What do you think of labor unions?) ``Definitely in favor of the
closed shop. I don't believe in private enterprise as in this
country. If it was what they say it is, I would be in favor of it.
\ldots\ I don't suppose the Constitution, but \ldots\ we don't live by
it\ldots\ . This story of work hard, my boy, and you'll be great one
day is fine \ldots\ but when you won't clothe and house, etc. the
masses, I'll say that's an outrage\ldots\ ."
\end{Quote}

{\em M619}, a sex criminal characterized by the psychiatrist as ``simple
schizophrenic," is not altogether uncritical of labor but believes
that the weaknesses of the unions are gradually disappearing: his
unqualified acceptance is based on a somewhat empty general idea
of progress.

\begin{Quote}
(How do you feel about labor leaders today?) ``The A.F.\ of L., I am
in favor of it very much. The C.I.O., formerly I was not in favor
of it, but as time moves on, the people seem to accept it more and
more. I'm inclined to feel the faults of its inception have been
ironed out \ldots\ of course, the unions in the beginning used pretty
high-handed methods, but perhaps the end will justify the means
they took."
\end{Quote}

One particular aspect of critical feelings toward labor should be
stressed. It is the idea that unions should not engage in politics.
Since this has nothing to do with those economic experiences with
labor at which the complaints of many people aim, it is a matter
of plain ideology, derived very probably from some belief that
according to American tradition unions offer a means of ``bargaining,"
of obtaining higher shares, and should not meddle in other issues.
The anger about wage disputes and strikes is displaced and becomes
rationalized by hasty identification of organized labor and communism.
Since unions in this country are incomparably less political and
class-conscious than anywhere else, this objection is of an entirely
different order from those previously discussed: it is truly an
expression of reactionism. However, in this area the reactionary
ideology is so strongly backed by preconceived notions that it
infiltrates easily into the opinion of people of whom it could
hardly be expected.

{\em M621A} is serving a term in San Quentin for theft. He scores
low on E and F but high on PEC.

\begin{Quote}
``I admire unions, but they shouldn't agitate. (Evidently referring
to any political activities.) They shouldn't try to get more money,
but should help people more. They should want to keep prices down
like anyone else \ldots\ unions have no business in politics."
\end{Quote}

{\em M627}, another San Quentin man, scores low on E and PEC but high on F.
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL       707
He is a psychopathic alcoholic convicted for what seems to be a
minor sex offense.

\begin{Quote}
(What about the P.A.C.\ of the C.I.O.?) ``No, politics should be let
alone. Keep politics out of any organization. I just feel that labor
and politics won't mix. (Do you think it ought to be prohibited?)
Yessir."
\end{Quote}

Finally just one example from a San Quentin high scorer, {\em M656A}, who
is by no means extreme:

\begin{Quote}
(P.A.C.?) ``Well, I don't say they should go into politics, they
should work through their representatives \ldots\ as a whole they
shouldn't enter into politics. (Why not?) If they go into politics,
they're demanding a lot on the side, where rightfully they should
take it to the lawful legislative body\ldots\ . As far as I am
concerned, politics shouldn't enter into business, and these unions
are a business."
\end{Quote}

That many statements of forthright hostility to labor can be found
in our material is not astonishing. The striking fact, however, is
that such statements occur not only among high scorers but again
also among medium and low scorers.

We again limit ourselves to a few examples which will give an idea
of the structure of unqualified anti-unionism.

{\em M202}, a construction engineer, scoring generally very low,
is nevertheless strongly identified with the entrepreneurs. His
interviewer, as was mentioned above (p.\ 649), called him ``a person
who is conservative but not fascist." His invectives against labor,
however, make this evaluation appear to be a little too optimistic.
As an interesting deviation, a full account of his anti-labor stand
should be given.

\begin{Quote}
In connection with the discussion of his work subject was asked
about his attitude toward labor unions. His response was, ``I am
hipped about unions; there you have a hole in me!" He joined a
company as a strike-breaker in 1935. He took on a job as a chemist.
At that time he was just out of California and there was a depression
on. He had no strong feeling about unions then, but just wanted a
job. However, he did feel that a man had a right to work if he
wanted to, and he had no compunction about taking another man's
job. He continued with the company after the strike was over. He
described himself as a ``company man," and, consequently, as having
the company point of view. When he works for a company he is one
hundred per cent for that company's interests, otherwise he would
not stay with them. He has two objections to unions: (1) their
policy of assuming that older men are better than younger men and
giving the better jobs to them rather than to newcomers; (2) the
closed shop. He thinks men should be allowed to ``enjoy their work."
If men know that they are going to be kept on a job even if they
don't work hard, it does not encourage them to do their best. For
example, he hired two shop stewards whom he found were no good, so
he fired them; but the union demanded that he take them back, which
he had to do, as otherwise he would have had no one to work for
him. If a man sees that the fellow next to him goes slow on the job
and yet makes the same wages, he will have no incentive to work
hard and pretty soon he, too, will slow down. The unions should not
prevent a man from working who
%% 7o8     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
does not want to join a union. The interviewer suggested that the
main purpose of the closed shop was to bargain for rates of pay.
Subject replied that if a group of men would band together to rate
themselves and ask for more pay for the skilled workers, or to work
out better means of production, that would be all right. If a company
is not willing to pay for skilled work, they don't need to work
there. By way of a summary, it may be pointed out that the subject's
objections to unions boil down to a feeling that unions not only
do not foster hard work, but even discourage it.
\end{Quote}

This case seems to be that of a man who, although politically
unbiased, became highly antagonistic to labor through concrete
experience. It should be emphasized that, in spite of his own
description of himself as a ``company man," he by no means admires
businessmen, thinks that poverty could be done away with by changes
in our social system, and favors government control in many respects.
His views may be summarized as being torn by a conflict between
very progressive general ideology and violent reactionary impulses
within the sphere of his own immediate interests --- a configuration
that may be indicative of a dangerous pattern of potentialities in
many ``liberals." It seems, however, that the inconsistency of this
subject is not so much due to psychological factors as to his
professional position. His reactionary traits are derived from his
function as a member of the technological hierarchy who has to look
out for ``efficiency" and finds that union interference tends to
lower this efficiency rather than to enhance it. Thus his attitude
is not really so inconsistent as it appears on the surface: one
might rather say that his over-all progressiveness clashes with his
technological progressiveness because the two kinds of progress
by no means harmonize objectively under the present conditions of
production.

The 22-year-old woman, {\em F316A}, is structurally similar. She
is a low scorer who turns violently anti-labor on account of some
grudges she has developed in her work as a junior chemist in an oil
development company.

\begin{Quote}
Subject feels that the present labor situation is very bad because
of all the strikes and that industry is really hamstrung. The big
unions are asking too much. (What about the union at S.?) The 
S.\ union (C.I.O.) is undemocratic because the department heads and the
junior chemists make all the decisions, then tell the members about
it at meetings, and they are not even members of the union. (You
also have a company union at S., don't you?) ``You mean the Association
of Industrial Scientists? It is not a company union (rather angrily).
That was a dirty trick of the C.I.O. --- or rather not a dirty trick but
a ruse --- to accuse it of being a company union, because then it could
not be registered with the W.P.B.\ and so could not become a bargaining
agent for the employees. They thought if they could prevent it from
being registered for one or two years that it would die. Because
it is not the bargaining agent it cannot make a contract for the
workers, it can only hint to the company what it would like. Although
the A.I.S.\ only has a chapter at S., I don't think it is company
dominated, although I have no proof. (Don't the laboratory assistants
get paid almost as much as the junior chemists?) Yes, when the
junior chemists were getting \$170 a month 
and the C.I.O.\ secured a
raise to \$180 
for the laboratory assistants, the company had to
raise the junior chemists to \$200 a
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    709
month.\footnote{\$170 = \$1,400; \$200 = \$1,600 in 2005.} 
The C.I.O.\ complains that they do all the work and yet the
junior chemists won't join. (Was not the raise a good thing?) Yes,
but I still would like to see what the A.I.S.\ could do if it were
registered: maybe it wouldn't do anything."
\end{Quote}

As to the high scorers, the key theme of their anti-labor ideology
is that of the {\em racket}. They regard the pressure exercised by organized
labor as illegitimate in a way comparable to organized crime and
conspiracy --- the latter being one of the high scorers' favorite topics
anyway. To them, whose moralism has been emphasized from time to
time in this book, the concept of the free market coincides with
the moral law, and any factors which introduce, as it were, an
extra-economic element into the business sphere are regarded by
them as irregular. Incidentally, this suspicion does not pertain
to industrial monopolies and their pricing agreements but merely
to the supposedly monopolistic structure of unions. Here again the
idea of ``legitimacy" --- of identification with the strong --- comes into
play. Industrial combines seem, according to this kind of thinking,
to be the outgrowth of a ``natural" tendency, labor organizations a
banding together of people who want to get more than their due
share.

Viewed from a purely psychological angle the idea of ``labor
racketeering" seems to be of a nature similar to the stereotype of
Jewish clannishness. It dates back to the lack of an adequately
internalized identification with paternal authority during the
Oedipus situation. It is our general assumption that the typical
high scorers, above all, fear the father and try to side with him
in order to participate in his power. The ``racketeers" are those
who by demanding too much (though the subject wants as much himself)
run the risk of arousing the father's anger --- and hence the subject's
castration anxiety. This anxiety, reflecting the subject's own guilt
feelings, is relieved by projection. Thinking in terms of in- and
outgroup, the high scorer who wants to ``outgroup" the others is
continuously prone to call them the ingroup. The more he tends
himself, on account of his pretense to ``status," to circumvent the
``normal" channels of free competition, the more he is likely to
blame those he deems weak for the very same thing. Workers become
``racketeers," criminals to him as soon as they organize. They appear
as the guilty ones after the pattern of ``peddler bites dog." Such
psychological tendencies are, of course, magnetically attracted by
any elements of reality which fit into the projective pattern. Here,
labor organizations afford a rare opportunity.

{\em M352}, a shift foreman who calls himself a ``head operator," scores
high on all scales.

\begin{Quote}
``Well, at Standard Oil, no unions recognized. I've never been a
union man. Through union there is strength, if it's run okay, but
a lot of unions of today have developed into a racket, and a source
of political influence. The C.I.O.\ Political Action Committee
particularly \ldots\ politics and unionism shouldn't become too
involved. The unions shouldn't become a political organization; and
the A.F.L.\ has
%% 710     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
developed into a racket for making money. The officers keep themselves
in positions practically until they die, with no strings on how
they use the money, and that should be controlled \ldots\ but if the
local organization can run itself in an orderly fashion, okay, if
the officers are conservative, but the minute they get too liberal,
use a strike as a first weapon instead of as a last resort\ldots\  
etc."
\end{Quote}
\noindent
Here, as in many instances, critique is directed against the largeness
of unions {\em  per se}; with the romantic idea that purely local organization,
being less institutionalized, would be better automatically.

{\em M658}, the San Quentin man quoted above, goes so far as plainly to
advocate the abolition of unions:

\begin{Quote}
(Political trends today?) ``Oh, I think we are going to be ruled by
a lot of clowns, by a lot of labor unions\ldots\ . Look at all these
working stiffs \ldots\  that don't know anything else, but how to drive
a nail \ldots\  they try to run things, because a few hundred thousands
of them get together. (What ought to be done?) Straighten them out,
show them where they belong\ldots\ . Take away their charters.
(Meaning?) Well, every union has to have a charter. Abolish them.
If necessary, abolish their meetings. (What about strikes?) That's
what I'm thinking of \ldots\ they're a detriment to the country. (How
should strikes be handled?) Refuse to re-employ them, or fine them,
I don't believe in sweat shops either, but this quittin' when you're
making \$150 
a week\footnote{About \$1,200 in 2005.} 
anyway --- kind of silly. Create inflation." (Subject
had earlier made a remark in discussing vocation and income --- which
interviewer neglected to record --- to the effect that he himself thinks
in terms of saving perhaps \$500 
or so,\footnote{About \$4,000 in  2005.}
e.g., by theatre work, and
then quitting for awhile. Note subject's highly exaggerated fantasies
of wartime wages.)
\end{Quote}

A few statements of extreme anti-unionism can be found among the
Los Angeles sample. Perhaps the 20-year-old boy, {\em 5014}, high on E
and PEC and middle on F, represents a certain kind of war veterans'
anti-unionism:

\begin{Quote}
When asked about organized labor he says: ``I am against it." He
doesn't know the difference between the A.F.L.\ and the C.I.O.\ but
he feels ``like many of the veterans, we worked for nothing while
the workers at home were on strike and making good money."
\end{Quote}

The contrast between this subject's hostility and his complete lack
of information is striking.

{\em 5031--5032} are a husband and wife in a very high income group. Both
are high on PEC, low on F, and low-middle on E. For them violent
anti-unionism is concomitant again with contempt for human nature:
they regard unionism simply as a device of the lazy ones to dodge
labor.

\begin{Quote}
Both of them are anti-labor. The husband is quite vehement about
this. Although he expects prosperity to continue he feels it will
be at the cost of a continual fight against labor's demands. He
feels that labor's demands are unreasonable and that with labor's
recent victories that ``even if one met labor's demands one certainly
does not get a day's work out of carpenters, plumbers, etc." Both
of them claim to be without prejudice with regard to various
minorities. It is interesting, however, that they did raise the
issue of the acceptance of Jewish children in the school where their
son went.
\end{Quote}

%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    71 I


{\em F5043}, an extremely high-scoring middle-aged housewife, belongs
to that school of potential fascists who find that ``everything is
a mess." She first
creates in true ``we-the-mothers" style the imagery of a desperate
crisis and then puts the blame on the labor situation.

\begin{Quote}
``I have never seen anything like this," she lamented when asked
about the labor situation. ``What have our boys been fighting for?
Why, they come back to find that they have to go without a lot of
things \ldots\ not even a place to live \ldots\ all because of the
strikes." Thus she blames labor for the present crises and resents
the growth and strength of labor unions. She also feels that there
is an irreconcilable breach between veterans and the workers and
fears internal strife. She also blames the strikers for the growing
trend of unemployment and is very pessimistic about the possibility
of full employment. However, she does not feel that there is too
much government interference and is rather vague about the role of
big business and free enterprise. In fact, she seems to harbor only
very strong anti-labor and anti-strike feelings, without any strong
convictions on other issues. ``It's just a terrible mess," she
repeated, and she does not think the layman should get his hands
dirty by ``messing with politics."
\end{Quote}

Whereas the low scorers who generally take a ``pro, but" attitude
toward unions insist on the soundness of the principle but object
that unions are ``going too far," getting more, as it were, than
their share, the typical high scorers blame them indiscriminately
for the supposedly critical social situation, for the standardization
of life ({\em 5001} and {\em 5003}), and for forthright dictatorial aims. To
the high scorers anti-unionism is no longer an expression of
dissatisfaction with concrete conditions from which they might have
suffered, but a plank in the platform of reactionism which also
automatically includes anti-Semitism, hostility toward foreign
countries, hatred of the New Deal, and all those hostile attitudes
which are integrated in the negative imagery of American society
underlying fascist and semi-fascist propaganda.

\subsubsection*{2. Business And Government}

As was to be expected, the general ideological pattern pertaining
to government interference in business is highly consistent with
that which pertains to labor. The average opinion --- if such a term,
without proper quantification, is allowed --- seems to be that a certain
degree of government control is indispensable, particularly in
wartime, but that it contradicts basically the principle of economic
liberalism. State interference still falls within the category of
the necessary evil. To the high scorers in particular the government
interference in business is just another aspect of the usurpation
complex, a matter of dictatorial arbitrariness jeopardizing the
rights of the hard-working money earners. But it should be noted
again that there is no sharp line between high and low scorers with
regard to government interference, whilst the {\em how}, the way in which
both groups express their critical attitude, differentiates.

The following examples of a partly positive attitude toward government
interference are chosen from medium and high scorers.

%% 712     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

{\em F340A}, of the Extension Testing Class, a young clerk, is
middle on E but high on F and PEC. She is interesting because of a
certain attitude of intellectual fairness expressing itself in
attempts to see also the other side of the picture: an ``anti-paranoid"
trait of the American frame of mind which, incidentally, is among
the strongest bulwarks against fascism as far as subjective factors
are concerned.

\begin{Quote}
She doesn't believe in government control of industry. Maybe it
would be all right for the government to take over transportation,
gas, electricity, and water. (Why?) Maybe they could do it cheaper;
she is not sure about that. Anyway, if there was a strike, like on
the Key System they would be holding up everything and the government
could make them go back to work. ``When the government tells you to
do something, you do it."
\end{Quote}

The quotation shows an ambiguous element in the affirmation of
government interference: whereas the latter is resented as a violation
of liberalism, it is, simultaneously, appreciated as a potential
means to keep organized labor at bay. It should be remembered that
the National Socialists always complained about the ``Welfare State"
of Weimar but later on surpassed by far any state interference ever
attempted by German socialist governments.

The high-scoring parole officer, {\em M109}, is reminiscent of {\em
F340A} in so far as his support for some kind of government
interference is authoritarian rather than favorable to any restrictions
on the anarchy of free enterprise or to rational planning for the
sake of all. (Cf.\ quotations on pp.\ 676, 679.)

Those who are outspokenly set against government controls again
comprise both low and high scorers. Here, of course, the low scorers
are particularly interesting.

The already quoted {\em M711}, an ``easy going" low scorer, is opposed to
state interference simply because he feels a fascist potential in
it, apparently unaware of the progressive function this interference
had under Roosevelt:

\begin{Quote}
(Government control?) ``I don't. There, again, that could be a road
to a fascist state eventually. Certain controls would have to be
exercised."
\end{Quote}

In spite of his leftist ideology this man shows symptoms of a
confusion which may make him the prey of pseudo-progressive slogans
of fascist propaganda: it is the same man who justifies his anti-union
attitude with the spurious assertion that Hitler was in favor of
unions.

{\em M204}, another low scorer, a young man of the Psychiatric
Clinic group, suffering from anxiety neurosis, calls himself a
socialist and feels that the New Deal was too conservative, but
states, nevertheless:

\begin{Quote}
The government should not be completely in control of everything.
Favors something like the Scandinavian system: CCF, full employment,
labor government, favors cooperatives. ``I think it will come that
way in this country. Government control can be run wrong. Instead
we should preserve individual freedom and work through education."
\end{Quote}

%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    713

To sum up: the low scorers' criticism of government interference
is based on the traditional idea of freedom, the fear of an
authoritarian abolition of democratic institutions and an individualistic
way of living. This makes for a potential resistance against any
attempts at a planned economy. There is a possibility that a good
many traditional values of American democratism and liberalism, if
na\"ively maintained within the setup of today's society, may radically
change their objective functions without the subjects even being
aware of it. In an era in which ``rugged individualism" actually has
resulted in far-reaching social control, all the ideals concomitant
with an uncritical individualistic concept of liberty may simply
serve to play into the hands of the most powerful groups.

The statements against government control of our high scorers are
of a completely different kind. To them, unionism, New Dealism,
government control are all the same, the rule of those who should
not rule. Here resentment of government interference is fused with
the ``no pity for the poor" complex.

The San Quentin ``tough guy," {\em M664b}:

\begin{Quote}
(Political trends today?) ``Well, the way it's agoing now, I think
it's a detriment to our country. (How do you mean that?) I think a
person should earn a living instead of expecting the government to
give it to him. I don't believe in this New Deal and I don't believe
in labor running the country\ldots\ . If a man can't make a profit
in his business, he'll close it down\ldots\ ."
\end{Quote}

The San Quentin murderer, {\em M651a}, who is serving a life sentence,
is set against government interference, his point of view being
that of the businessman who talks ``common sense."

\begin{Quote}
(What about government controls over business?) ``No, I believe in
free enterprise. I believe that business should be able to conduct
their own business, except during the war we had to have ceiling
prices\ldots\ . But competitive business makes low prices\ldots\ ."
\end{Quote}

It may be noted that the feeling, even of the high scorers, with
regard to government control as such, though it represents to them
the hated New Deal, does not seem to be as ``violent" as their
anti-unionism. This may be partly due to the authoritarian undercurrent
which, somehow, makes them respect, to a certain extent, any strong
government, even if it is built on lines different from their own,
partly from the rational insight into the necessity of some government
interference. Many of our interviews were conducted during or shortly
after the war, at a time when it was obvious that nothing could be
achieved without government control, and it is this fact to which
reference is frequently made, mostly as a qualification of the
rejection of government control. This, however, certainly depends
largely on the situation, and if interviews should be conducted
today, the picture would very probably be different.

%% 7 14    THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

There is one particular issue which deserves some attention in this
connection, the attitude of our subjects toward monopolism. On the
one hand, monopolies are the outgrowth of free enterprise, the
consummation of rugged individualism; on the other hand, they tend
to assume that kind of noncompetitive control which is rejected
when exercised by the government. Probably no ``public opinion"
concerning monopoly has crystallized so far, mainly because much
fewer people are aware of the anonymous and objective power of big
combines than are aware of official legal measures of the state.
However, a few examples may illustrate how the problem of
institutionalized super-business is reflected in the minds of some
of our subjects.

{\em M115}, a conventional but non-fascistic fraternity man, who
scores low on E and F but high on PEC, is set against ``this Mandan
stuff," but nevertheless, feels:

\begin{Quote}
``Big business should be controlled when it gets too large. In some
fields, like transportation, power, etc., large-scale organization
is necessary. The main thing there is to prevent monopoly, and to
have limitations on profits."
\end{Quote}

The unresolved contradiction between this man's strongly anti-socialist
and equally outspoken anti-monopoly attitudes, is in all probability
characteristic of a very large section of the population. In practice,
it amounts to an artificial ``holding up" of economic developmental
tendencies, rather than to a clear-cut economic concept. Those
layers of the European middle class which were finally enlisted by
fascism were also not infrequently set, in ideology, against the
big combines.

{\em M118}, a low-scoring man of the University Extension Testing
Class, sees the problem but is still so deeply imbued with traditional
economic concepts that he is prevented from following his logic to
its conclusions.

\begin{Quote}
``The emphasis now is on `free enterprise,' but that often results
in monopoly, the big concerns squeezing the little guys to death.
There is too much of a gap between the rich and the poor. People
climb up by pushing others down, with no regulation. For this reason,
government should have more influence economically, whether or not
it goes as far as socialism."
\end{Quote}

The same man criticizes Wallace for being ``too impractical." One
cannot escape the impression that monopolism is used as a vague
negative formula but that very few subjects are actually aware of
the impact of monopolization on their lives. The union issue, in
particular, plays a much bigger role in over-all ideology.

\subsubsection*{3. Political Issues Close To The Subjects}

It has been pointed out in the early part of this chapter that
political confusion and ignorance, and the gap between surface
ideology and concrete reactions, are partly due to the fact that
the political sphere, even today, seems to most Americans too far
away from their own experiences and their
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    715
own pressing interests. Here we go briefly into a discussion of
some political and economic topics of the interview schedule which,
for imaginary or actual reasons, are {\em closer} to the hearts of our
subjects, in order to form at least an impression on how they behave
with regard to these matters, and whether their behavior differs
markedly from that in the field of ``high politics."

First, an illustration of what may be called ``imaginary closeness."
Our interview schedule contained at least one question which was,
in the middle of its realistic surroundings, of a ``projective"
nature. It was concerned with the \$25,000 income
limit.\footnote{About \$200,000 in 2005.} 
Neither is
this question a pressing political issue nor could many of our
interviewees be expected to have any immediate personal interest
in limitations of income on such a high level. The answers to this
question, which would deserve a thorough going analysis of its own,
are indicative of an element of the American dream much more than
of political attitudes. There were exceedingly few among our subjects
who wanted to accept such an income limitation. The utmost concession
they made was the acknowledgment that one can live on this amount.
The prevailing view, however, was that, in a free country, every
person should be allowed to earn as much as he can, notwithstanding
the fact that the chance to make as much today has become largely
illusory. It is as if the American kind of utopia was still much
more that of the shoeshine boy who becomes a railroad king, than
that of a world without poverty. The dream of unrestricted happiness
has found its refuge, one might almost say its sole refuge, in the
somewhat infantile fantasy of infinite wealth to be gathered by the
individual. It goes without saying that this dream works in favor
of the {\em status quo}; that the identification of the individual with
the tycoon, in terms of the chance to become one himself, helps to
perpetuate big business control.

Among those subjects who are outspokenly in favor of the income
limit is the San Quentin check-writer, {\em M664C}, a high-scoring
man, so full of fury and envy against everything that he does not
even like the wealthy.

\begin{Quote}
(What about \$25,000 limit on salaries?) ``What the hell is that for?
That's no more than fair; hell, that's too much money anyway."
\end{Quote}

The apparent radicalism of this man can be appreciated only if one
recollects that it is he who is outraged by the idea of feeding
starving countries.

The very widespread feeling of our subjects on the \$25,000 income
limit can be summed up in the eager plea of {\em M621A}, of the San
Quentin Group, a low scorer on E and F but a high scorer on PEC.

\begin{Quote}
``They shouldn't do that. If a man has the ability, more power to
him."
\end{Quote}

The next few topics are characteristic of the aforementioned tendency
of our subjects to become more rational and ``progressive" as soon
as institutions or measures of a supposedly ``socialistic" nature,
from which the individual feels he can draw immediate benefits,
are, brought into the discussion. OPA\footnote{{\em OPA}:  Office of
Price Administration.  Set up in 1941.}
and health insurance are examples.

%% 716     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

Our interviews seem to show that OPA, also a ``bureaucratic" agency
of government interference, is very generally accepted. Here are a
few examples, picked at random:

Again {\em M621A}:

\begin{Quote}
(OPA?) ``I think it's done a very wonderful thing in this country.
May have gone too far, e.g., in the housing situation in San Diego."
(Subject thinks the OPA should have solved the housing situation.)
\end{Quote}

One of the few exceptions is the wealthy Los Angeles couple, {\em
5031} and {\em 5032}, who are ``disgusted and fed up with the New
Deal, priorities, and all this damn red tape created by OPA."

Most others are in favor of OPA, sometimes, however, with a certain
strain of punitiveness, such as the San Quentin low scorer, {\em M627}, 
already quoted:

\begin{Quote}
``Well, the OPA is doing a good job if they control this black
market."
\end{Quote}

This comes out most strongly in the interview of the San Quentin
high scorer {\em M658}, the man who wants to abolish labor unions.

\begin{Quote}
``If (the OPA) had an iron glove underneath their kid gloves, be all
right. They fine a guy \$100 --- for making \$100,000."\footnote{\$100
= \$800; \$100,000 = \$800,000 in 2005.}
\end{Quote}

The general appreciation of OPA is the more interesting since this
institution has been under constant newspaper attacks for many
years. But here the advantages, particularly with regard to the
housing situation, are so obvious that ideological invectives
apparently lose some of their impact on the population. To demand
the abolition of OPA because of the ``damn red tape" in Washington
may mean that one has no roof over one's head.

Something similar holds true of health insurance. High and low
scorers, with very few exceptions, concur in its appreciation. {\em
M656A}, a high scorer of the San Quentin Group, serving a term for
second-degree murder, after having stated that a person can live
on \$25,000 a year\footnote{About \$200,000 in 2005.} 
but should be allowed to make what he is capable
of making, and who certainly cannot be called a socialist, answers
to the question about public health insurance, ``I'm for it."

The above quoted easy-going, low-scoring man, {\em M711}, is
enthusiastic:

\begin{Quote}
``Public health insurance? Unqualifiedly yes \ldots\ important as
almost any measure of ideal society."
\end{Quote}

Finally, our attention should be directed toward an economic area
which is of the utmost importance for the formative processes of
fascism. This is taxes. It is perhaps the point at which pent-up
social fury is most freely given vent. With the high scorers, this
fury is never directed overtly against basic conditions but has
nevertheless the undertone of desired violent action. The man who
bangs his fist on the table and complains about heavy taxation is
a ``natural candidate" for totalitarian movements. Not only are taxes
associated with a supposedly spendthrift democratic government
giving away millions to idlers and bureaucrats, but it is the very
point where people feel, to put it
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    717
in the words of one of our subjects, that this world does not really
belong to the people. Here they feel immediately that they are
required to make sacrifices for which they do not get any visible
returns, just as one of our subjects complains that he cannot see
what he can get out of the war. The indirect advantages each
individual may draw from taxes paid are obscure to him. He can only
see that he has to give something without getting anything back,
and this, in itself, seems to contradict the concept of exchange
upon which the free market idea of liberalism is built. However,
the extraordinary amount of libido attached to the complex of taxes,
even in a boom period, such as the years when our subjects were
interviewed, seems to confirm the hypothesis that it draws on deeper
sources of the personality as much as on the surface resentment of
being deprived of a considerable part of one's income without visible
advantages to the individual. The rage against the rational tax
system is an explosion of the irrational hatred against the irrational
taxation of the individual by society. The Nazis knew very well how
to exploit the complex of the ``taxpayer's money." They went so far
as to grant, during the first years of their rule, a kind of tax
amnesty, publicized by Goering. When they had to resort to heavier
taxation than ever before they camouflaged it most skilfully as
charity, voluntary donations, and so forth, and collected large
amounts of money by illegal threats, rather than by official tax
legislation.

Here are a few examples of the anti-taxation complex:

The high-scoring man, {\em M105}, who is violently anti-Semitic and
associated with the ``lunatic fringe," says:

\begin{Quote}
``It is the taxpayer's money that has been put into South America;
other countries will think we are fools."
\end{Quote}

{\em M345}, a radar engineer of the Extension Testing Class, who scores
middle on E, low on F, but high on PEC, believes:

\begin{Quote}
(What about government control of business?) ``It has gotten to the
point where it is requiring too much of the citizens' tax money and
time."
\end{Quote}

Again, the taxpayer's complex is not limited to high scorers. The
low-scoring man, {\em M116}, the deviate case of a conformist, conventional
conservative definitely opposed to prejudice, strongly identified
with his father, accepts his Republican views:

\begin{Quote}
``\ldots\  also because businessmen generally don't like the taxes."
\end{Quote}

In case of a new economic crisis, where unemployment would necessitate
high taxation of people whose incomes have shrunk, this complex
would undoubtedly play an exceptionally dangerous role. The threat
is the more serious since, in such a situation, a government which
would not impose taxes would fail, while one which would take steps
in this direction would invariably
%% 718     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
antagonize the very same group from which totalitarian movements
most likely draw their support.

\subsubsection*{4. Foreign Policy And Russia}

Lack of information on the part of our subjects prevails, even more
than anywhere else, in the area of foreign politics. There are
usually rather vague and misty ideas about international conflicts,
interspersed with morsels of information on some individual topics
with which the subjects either happen to be familiar or to which
they have taken a fancy. The general mood is one of disappointment,
anxiety, and vague discontent, as symbolically epitomized by the
medium-scoring woman, {\em F340B}: ``Seems we haven't got any foreign
policy."

This may easily be a mere echo of newspaper statements frequently
made at the time of the study by columnists such as Walter Lippman
and Dorothy Thompson. Repeating them transforms the feeling of
insecurity and disorientation of many of our subjects into the
semblance of critical superiority. More than in any other political
sphere, our subjects live ``from hand to mouth" in the area of
international affairs.

There is a striking lack of a sense of proportion, of balanced
judgment, considering the importance or unimportance of topics of
foreign politics. One illustration, stemming from the ``easy going"
low scorer {\em M711}:

\begin{Quote}
(Major problems facing country?) ``Hard question to answer\ldots\  
Perhaps the main one is how we're going to fit in with the rest of
the world\ldots\ . I'm a little concerned about what we seem to be
doing in China\ldots\ . If we are a carrier of the torch of the Four
Freedoms, I think we are a little inconsistent in our maneuverings
in China and Indonesia."
\end{Quote}

This statement seems to be a ``day residue" of continuous newspaper
reading rather than the expression of autonomous thinking. Yet it
should be noted that it remains within the anti-imperialist frame
of reference of the low scorer.

The symbol of political uneasiness is the atom bomb which is dreaded
everywhere. The stand taken toward the atom bomb seems to differentiate
the high from the low scorers. As is to be expected, also for
psychological reasons, the high scorers are all out for secrecy.
Here, as elsewhere, ``they want to keep what we have."

{\em M662A}, the San Quentin ``tough guy," high on all scales:

\begin{Quote}
(Threats to present form of government?) ``Atom bomb. If these other
countries get it, they're going to use it on us and we're going to
have to look out for Russia. \ldots\ 
I'm for Russia, but \ldots\ I think sooner 
or later we're going to go to war with them."
\end{Quote}

As to the prospect of a devastating war, this man seems to take a
fatalistic view as if it were a natural catastrophe rather than
something dependent on
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    719
humans. This is in keeping with our clinical knowledge of the male
high scorers' psychological passivity (cf.\ p.\ 575).

The low scorers either want to outlaw the atom bomb or to make the
secret public:

{\em M627}, the alcoholic sex-offender, low on E and PEC but high on F:

\begin{Quote}
(Major problems facing this country?) ``Well, I think this atom bomb.
(Solution?) \ldots\ Well, it ought to be outlawed and money appropriated
to see if we can't use that power for good."
\end{Quote}

{\em F515}, the ``genuine liberal" who is to be discussed in detail in
Chapter XIX (p.\ 782), pleads for international atomic control:

\begin{Quote}
``Truman doesn't want to give away the secret of the atom bomb --- I think
he should. It's already out anyway."
\end{Quote}

Although the over-all ideology is fear of war, the high scorer's
attitude indicates that, while deeming war inevitable, they have
some underlying sympathy for war-making, such as that found in the
Los Angeles high-scoring radio writer {\em 5003} characterized as highly
neurotic:

\begin{Quote}
As for the world state, he expects anything at the present time.
``Why shouldn't we have further wars? We are animals and have animal
instincts and Darwin showed us it is the survival of the fittest.
I'd like to believe in the spiritual brotherhood of men, but it's
the strong man who wins."
\end{Quote}

This kind of phrasing, ``why shouldn't we have further wars," is
indicative of his agreement with the idea, in spite of his talk of
spiritual brotherhood. The use that is often made of the Darwinian
slogan of the survival of the fittest in order to rationalize crude
aggressiveness, may be significant of the fascist potential within
American ``naturalism," although it is supposedly linked to progressive
ideals and enlightenment.

{\em 5009}, a 32-year-old teaching principal in a small California town,
who scores high on all scales, rationalizes his belief in a forthcoming
war differently:

\begin{Quote}
He expects no warless world and thinks that the next war will be
with Russia. ``The United States has always ranged itself against
dictatorship."
\end{Quote}

While he shows the typical high scorers' attitude --- psychologically
linked to cynicism and contempt for man --- of regarding war as unavoidable,
he justifies a policy which actually may lead to war with a democratic
ideal: the stand to be taken against dictatorships.

A third aspect of subscribing to the war idea comes up in the
interview of the aforementioned {\em 5031}, a wealthy building contractor.
He feels that perhaps we had better go to war with Russia now and get
it over with.

Here the high scorer's typical cynicism, a fusion of contempt for
man, exaggerated down-to-earthness, and underlying destructiveness,
is allowed
%% 720     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
uncensored expression. Whereas in the sphere of private morale such
psychological urges are held at bay by the acceptance of more or
less conventionalized humane standards, they are let loose in the
sphere of international politics where there seems to be as little
of a collective superego as there is of a truly powerful supranational
control agency.

The all-too-ready assumption that war cannot be abolished --- which,
according to this man, could be hoped for only if military men ran
the UNO\footnote{{\em UNO}: United Nations Organization.}  --- 
is fused with the administrative, quasi-technical, idea that
one ``should get it over with" as soon as possible, that Russia
should be taken care of. War and peace become matters of technological
expediency. The political consequence of this way of thinking is
self-explanatory.

As with many other political topics, attitude toward Russia, whether
for or against, does not by itself differentiate with any sharpness
between high and low scorers. There is, first, a kind of ``pseudo-low"
attitude toward Russia. It falls in line with the general admiration
of power in high scorers and is positive only as far as Russian
military successes are concerned. It turns into hostility where
Russian strength is presented as potentially dangerous. This happens
with the San Quentin inmate {\em M621A}, who scores low on E and F
but high on PEC. He expresses his true anti-Russian feelings by
means of personalization:

\begin{Quote}
(Major problems facing country today?) ``I think Russia\ldots\ .
(Subject fears a war with Russia sooner or later over the atom
bomb.) Russia wants control of territory in China, so do the United
States and England. (What do you dislike most about Russia?) Well,
a little bit too aggressive. Of course, they've done some wonderful
things. Five year plan, educated themselves. (What good things about
Russia?) Lots of stamina to stand up under hardship. (Objections?)
I met quite a few Russians. Don't like them, because they seem to
be overbearing. (How do you mean?) They like to have their own way.
\ldots\ (Subject met the Russians he has been exposed to in Shanghai,
chiefly Russian merchants.) They really believe in `taking' you.
They are not very clean \ldots\ I didn't have any very definite ideas
before."
\end{Quote}

It may be noted how close this man's attitude toward the Russians
comes to certain anti-Semitic stereotypes. However, he has nothing
against the Jews; as a matter of fact his wife is Jewish. In this case
anti-Russianism may be a phenomenon of displacement.

However, there is also a ``genuine" low scorer's negative attitude
against Russia, based on aversion to totalitarianism. Here, the
Psychiatric Clinic 
patient {\em M204}, suffering from anxiety neurosis, a moderate
socialist and militant pacifist, with low scores on all scales,
fits in:

\begin{Quote}
He is a little skeptical about the Soviet Union, disapproving of
their totalitarian methods, but being interested in ``their interesting
experiment."
\end{Quote}

Another example is {\em M310}, a liberal of the Extension Testing
Class with an unusually low score, assistant manager for an advertising
agency, whose
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    72I
criticism touches upon formal democratism while at the same time
he is repelled by the oligarchic aspects of Russian government:

\begin{Quote}
(Your understanding of democracy?) ``Government of, for, and by the
people. Government by majority, directed to its achieving good
results for the people. May be a difference between Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia, in that sense, may be democracy in Russia. I
don't think it necessarily takes our voting system, although I like
(democratic voting)\ldots\ . (You are critical of Soviet Russia?) I
don't like the concentration of political power in so few hands."
\end{Quote}

Sometimes this kind of critique assumes, with low scorers, the
aspect of disagreement with American communists because of their
wholesale endorsement of Russian politics.

{\em M203}, a teacher, ``liberal but not radical," with low scores
on all scales:

\begin{Quote}
``It is good to have intelligent, liberal leadership, rather than
radical leadership, which would be bad. (Example?) Well, like the
communists in this country: they are not intelligent, they are too
radical, and there is too much line which is determined by Russia.
For instance, Roosevelt was less rigid and learned more by his
mistakes."
\end{Quote}

It should be noted that this man is an outspoken anti-fascist who
finds it ``disgraceful that Bilbo\footnote{Theodore Bilbo
(1877--1947), US Senator from Mississippi 1935--47. 
Defender of segregation.} should be in Congress."

As to the pro-Russian attitude found among low scorers, it cannot
be overlooked that it has sometimes a somewhat mechanical outlook.
Here the element of stereotypy comes clearly to the fore in low
scorers. As an example {\em M713A} may serve. He is a young veteran,
studying landscape architecture, whose scores are all low.

\begin{Quote}
(How do you feel about Soviet Russia?) ``A very wonderful 
experiment\ldots\ . 
I believe that if left alone will be the greatest power in a few
years. (Disagreement with the communists' line?) Just in the matter
of approach. Their approach is a little too violent, though I can
see the reason for that\ldots\ . I think we ought to approach it a
little more gradually\ldots\ . If went into communism would just be
like the army\ldots\ . Maybe take a hundred years --- we are working
gradually toward it."
\end{Quote}

It is a question whether the idea of a gradual development is
compatible with the theory of dialectical materialism officially
accepted in Russia, or whether it is indicative of a dubious element
in the subject's appreciation of the ``wonderful experiment." It
should be noted that the idea of socialism as an ``experiment" stems
from the vernacular of middle-class ``common sense" and it tends to
replace the traditional socialist concept of class struggle with
the image of a kind of joint, unanimous venture --- as if society as a
whole, as it is today, were ready to try socialism regardless of
the influence of existing property relations. This pattern of
thinking is at least inconsistent with the very same social theory
to which our subject seems to subscribe. Anyway, he, like any of
our other subjects, goes little into matters of
%% 722     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
Marxian doctrine or of specific Russian issues, but contents himself
with rather a summary positive stand.

And then there is the idea of the ``greatest power." That this idea
is not exceptional among low scorers, in other words, that a positive
stand toward Russia may have something to do with the Russian
successes on the battle-fields and in international competition,
rather than with the system, is corroborated by the San Quentin
inmate {\em M619}, who scores low on E and F but high on PEC, the
man who does not believe in any real utopia:

\begin{Quote}
``Well, Russia is undoubtedly one of the most powerful nations in
the world today. They've risen to power in the last few years and
made more progress than any other country."
\end{Quote}

Our general impression concerning our subjects' attitude towards
Russia may be summed up as follows. To the vast majority of Americans,
the very existence of the Soviet Union constitutes a source of
continuous uneasiness. The emergence and survival of a system that
has done away with free enterprise seems to them a threat to the
basic tenets of the culture of this country, to the ``American way,"
by the mere fact that it has shattered the belief in liberal economy
and liberal political organization as a ``natural" eternal phenomenon
which excludes any other rational form of society. On the other
hand, the success of Russia, particularly her performance during
the war, appeals strongly to the American belief that values can
be tested by the outcome, by whether they ``work" --- which is a profoundly
liberalistic idea by itself. The way our subjects cope with this
inconsistency of evaluation differentiates between high and low
scorers. To the former, the Soviet Union, incompatible with their
frame of reference, should be done away with as the extreme expression
of the ``foreign," of what is also in a psychological sense ``strange,"
more than anything else. Even the fact that Russia has proved
successful in some respects is put into the service of this fantasy:
frequently, Russian power is exaggerated, with a highly ambivalent
undertone comparable to the stereotypes about ``Jewish world power."
To the low scorers Russia is rarely less ``strange" --- an attitude which
has doubtless some basis in reality. But they try to master this
sense of strangeness in a different way, by taking an objective
attitude of ``appreciation," combining understanding with detachment
and a dash of superiority. When they express more out-spoken
sympathies for the Soviet Union, they do so by implicitly translating
Russian phenomena into ideas more familiar to Americans, often by
presenting the Russian system as something more harmless and
``democratic" than it is, as a kind of pioneering venture somehow
reminiscent of our own tradition. Yet indices of a certain inner
aloofness are rarely missing. The low scorers' pro-Russian sympathies
seem to be of a somewhat indirect nature, either by rigid acceptance
of an extraneous ``ticket" or by identification based on theoretical
thinking and moral reflections rather than on an immediate
%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    723
feeling that this is ``my" cause. Their appraisal of Russia frequently
assumes an air of hesitant, benevolent expectancy --- let us see how
they will manage. This contains both an element of authentic
rationality and the potential of their swinging against Russia under
the cover of handy rationalizations if pressure of public opinion
should urge such a change.

\subsubsection*{5. Communism}

The complex, Russia, is closely associated with the complex of
communism in the minds of our subjects. This is all the more the
case since communism has ceased to be in the public mind an entirely
new form of society, based on a complete break in the economic
setup, and has become bluntly identified with the Russian government
and Russian influence on international politics. Hardly any reference
to the basic issue of nationalization of the means of production
as a part of the communist program has been found in our sample --- a
negative result which is significant enough with regard to the
historical dynamics to which the concept of communism has been
subjected during the last two decades.

Among the high scorers the only feature of the old idea that seems
to have survived is the ``bogy" of communism. The more the latter
concept is emptied of any specific content, the more it is being
transformed into a receptacle for all kinds of hostile projections,
many of them on an infantile level somehow reminiscent of the
presentation of evil forces in comic strips. Practically all features
of ``high" thinking are absorbed by this imagery. The vagueness of
the notion of communism, which makes it an unknown and inscrutable
quantity, may even contribute to the negative affects attached to
it.

Among the crudest expressions of these feelings is that of our
insect toxicologist {\em M108}, by whom the problem of communism
is stated in terms of plain ethnocentrism:

\begin{Quote}
(Why is he against communism?) ``Well, it is foreign. Socialism,
o.k.\ --- you respect a man who is a socialist but a communist comes from
a foreign country and he has no business here."
\end{Quote}

{\em F111}, who scores high on E, middle on F, and low on PEC, is
a young girl who wants to become a diplomat because she is ``mad at
England and Russia." Her idea of communism has an involuntarily
parodistic ring:

\begin{Quote}
(Political outgroups?) ``Fascists and communists. I don't like the
totalitarian ideas of the fascists, the centralization of the
communists. In Russia nothing is private, everything goes to one
man. They have violent ways of doing things."
\end{Quote}

To the mind of this woman, the idea of political dictatorship has
turned into the bogy of a kind of economic supra-individualism,
just as if Stalin claimed ownership of her typewriter.

By a similarly irrational twist another high scorer, {\em M664B},
an uneducated
%% 724     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
and unintelligent sex offender of the San Quentin group, with high
scores on all scales, simply associates communism with the danger
of war:

\begin{Quote}
``If labor keeps getting more power, we'll be like Russia. That's
what causes wars."
\end{Quote}

The complete irrationality, not to say idiocy, of the last three
examples shows what vast psychological resources fascist propaganda
can rely on when denouncing a more or less imaginary communism
without taking the trouble to discuss any real political or economic
issues.

If representatives of this attitude enter upon any argumentation
at all, it is, the last examples indicate, centered in the facile,
though not completely
spurious identification of communism and fascism which displaces
hostility against the defeated enemy upon the foe to be.

Low scorers are not immune in this respect. Thus the low-scoring
student-minister {\em M910} is of the following opinion:

\begin{Quote}
(How do you feel about Russia's government?) ``I think there is very
little difference between fascism and communism as it's {\em
practiced}
in Russia. The 1936 Constitution is a marvelous {\em document}. I think
it's five hundred years ahead of our Constitution because it
guarantees {\em social} rights instead of individual rights but when man
hasn't any rights except as a member of the Communist Party\ldots\ .
I think it's capitalistic\ldots\ . (What is the nature of your
objections to Russia?) Well, first of all, I think it was Russia
that carried the ball in entering this veto power into the UNO which
I think will be the death of the thing right now\ldots\  . Russia has
got the things right where she wants them. We think we're the leaders
but we fool ourselves\ldots\ ." (Subject objects strongly to deceitful
diplomacy.)
\end{Quote}

High scorers who make less intellectual effort simply find communism
not individualistic enough. The standard phraseology they employ
contrasts nicely with the belief in spiritual independence which
they profess. We
quote as an example {\em F106}, a high scorer of the Public Speaking
Class group, a young teacher:

\begin{Quote}
(Political outgroups?) ``Communists have some good ideas but I don't
think too much of them. They don't give the individuals enough mind
of their own."
\end{Quote}

Sometimes the identification of communism and fascism is accompanied
by paranoid twists in the Elders of Zion\footnote{{\em The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion}: A antisemetic literary forgery that purports
to describe a Jewish plot to achieve world domination.} 
style. {\em M345}, our radar
field engineer:

\begin{Quote}
(What do you think of the P.A.C.?) ``Never found any definite
information on the C.I.O.\ldots\ but \ldots\ C.I.O.\ seems the agency to
turn international, certainly has got all the earmarks, not because
of being labor union, but just because of the way they compare."
(Subject compares communism to Hitler in {\em Mein Kampf}, telling
exactly what planned to do and how, and then doing it.) ``C.I.O.\ has
followed the lines of action very similar to pronounced policies
of Comintern --- even their name, Congress for Industrial Workers; not
much faith in the communists succeeding. Their aim is tight little
control of their own group."
\end{Quote}

The mix-up of Comintern, CIO, and {\em Mein Kampf} is the appropriate
climate for panic, and subsequent violent action.

%% POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL    7 2 5

But this climate by no means prevails. There is one quite frequently
noted way of dealing with the problem of communism which safeguards
the aspects of detached objectivity while allowing for good-natured
rejection. It reminds one of the story of the boy who, when offered
some very sour dish and asked whether he liked it answered:
``Excellent --- when I'll be grown up." Communism is a good thing {\em for the
others}, particularly for ``those foreigners," from whom it has been
imported anyway. This technique is employed by both high and low
scorers. {\em 5008}, the liberal-minded Jefferson descendant:

\begin{Quote}
``The communists may be able to do something in the Soviet Union,
but they would utterly fail here."
\end{Quote}

In {\em M115}, the low-scoring fraternity man, the argument has a
noticeable taint of contempt for the have-nots. This is the man who
wants ``none of this Marxian stuff."

\begin{Quote}
``\ldots\ but in poorer countries, like in Russia, Germany, etc., it's
necessary in some modified form; but not in America. We have too
much here already, that is we are too developed already."
\end{Quote}

The subject is not struck by the idea that a collectivistic economy
might be easier in an industrially highly advanced, mature country,
rather than more difficult. To him, communism is simply identified
with enhancement of material productive powers through more efficient
organization. He seems to be afraid of overproduction as if this
concept would still make sense in an economy no longer dependent
upon the contingencies of the market.

Even the extreme low scorer {\em M1206a}, of the Maritime School
group, who believes that America will eventually become a socialistic
country,

\begin{Quote}
thinks that Russia has a wonderful system of government --- for Russia``though
I don't think we could transplant its system to this country\ldots\  
though we should watch her and get ideas to build our own country
better."
\end{Quote}

In this case the argument is mitigated by an element of thoughtfulness
which is in accordance with the stand taken by this subject with
regard to the Communist Party in this country:

\begin{Quote}
``Well, I don't know a great deal about it. I believe that if a man
wants to be a communist, that's not only his privilege, but his
duty \ldots\ to try and convince as many people as he can\ldots\ ."
Subject objects vigorously to red-baiting tactics\ldots\  . ``I think
that Russia will be the most democratic country in the world in
time\ldots\  . Joe has been a little ruthless at times, but\ldots\ ."
\end{Quote}

Sometimes the argument is fused with the idea that socialism would
not be ``practical," for purely economic reasons which are mostly
taken from the very sphere of a profit system which is supposed to
be replaced under socialism by an economic organization molded
after the needs of the population. {\em F359}, the previously (pp.\ 616,
690) quoted high-scoring accountant in a government department:

%% 726     THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

\begin{Quote}
Subject thinks that communism is all right for Russia, but not for
this country, although the trend seems to be more and more that
way. She believes in private ownership of property and the private
enterprise system. She considers it more efficient. She is not so
sure about government ownership of public utilities such as water,
etc. She thinks that they probably operate better under private
ownership, that the costs are lower.
\end{Quote}

The interviews of other subjects show an unmistakably condescending
overtone of this same argument, such as {\em M107}, a medical student
who scores high on E but middle on F and PEC:

\begin{Quote}
``We can cooperate with Russia; if they want communism they have to
have it."
\end{Quote}

This type of liberal approach, of which, incidentally, the Hitler
regime profited during the whole Chamberlain era of noninterference,
is not as broad-minded as it may appear. It often hides the conviction
that there is no objective truth in politics, that every country,
as every individual, may behave as it likes and that the only thing
that counts is success. It is precisely this pragmatization of
politics which ultimately defines fascist philosophy.

Obviously, the relationship between anti-communism and fascist
potential as measured by our scales should not be oversimplified.
In some of our earlier studies the correlation between anti-Semitism
and anti-communism was very high,\footnote{Cf.\ Levinson and Sanford (71).}
but there is reason
to believe that it would not be so high today, not, at least, at
the surface level. During the last several years all the propaganda
machinery of the country has been devoted to promoting anti-communist
feeling in the sense of an irrational ``scare" and there are probably
not many people, except followers of the ``party line," who have
been able to resist the incessant ideological pressure. At the same
time, during the past two or three years it may have become more
``conventional" to be overtly opposed to anti-Semitism, if the large
number of magazine articles, books, and films with wide circulation
can be regarded as symptomatic of a trend. The underlying character
structure has little bearing on such fluctuations. If they could
be ascertained, they would demonstrate the extreme importance of
propaganda in political matters. Propaganda, when directed to the
anti-democratic potential in the people, determines to a large extent
the choice of the social objects of psychological aggressiveness.

\end{multicols}

\end{document}