More Adorno; Trump's Paleocon Foreign Policy; Christopher Hitchens on Ross Perot
Reading Watching 01.26.25
Good morning! This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
I’m pleased to announce that When the Clock Broke is a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.
In case you missed it,
and I spoke to historian Quinn Slobodian about Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and what all those characters are really up to.
This past week, I read Theodor Adorno’s essay “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” a classic work of the Frankfurt School combination of psychoanalysis and social theory. Written in 1951 and building on the work of Lowenthal and Guterman, which I’ve discussed here previously, I think many of its observations hold up pretty well:
While appearing as a superman, the leader must at the same time work the miracle of appearing as an average person, just as Hitler posed as a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber…. Even the fascist leader's startling symptoms of inferiority, his resemblance to ham actors and asocial psychopaths, is thus antic ipated in Freud's theory. For the sake of those parts of the follower's narcissistic libido which have not been thrown into the leader image but remain attached to the follower's own ego, the superman must still resemble the follower and appear as his " enlargement ." Accordingly , one of the basic devices of personalized fascist propaganda is the concept of the " great little man," a person who suggests both omnipotence and the idea that he is just one of the folks, a plain, red blooded American, untainted by material or spiritual wealth. Psychological ambivalence helps to work a social miracle. The leader image gratifies the follower's twofold wish to submit to authority and to be the authority himself.
Or here:
…fascism does not altogether speak the untruth when it refers to its own irration al powers, however faked the mythology which ideologically rationalizes the irrational may be. Since it would be impossible for fascism to win the masses through rational arguments, its propaganda must necessarily be deflected from discursive thinking; it must be oriented psychologically, and has to mobilize irrational, unconscious, regressive processes. This task is facilitated by the frame of mind of all those strata of the population who suffer from senseless frustrations and therefore develop a stunted, irrational mentality. It may well be the secret of fascist propaganda that it simply takes men for what they are: the true children of today's standardized mass culture, largely robbed of autonomy and spontaneity, instead of setting goals the realization of which would transcend the psychological status quo no less than the social one. Fascist propaganda has only to reproduce the existent mentality for its own purposes;-it need not induce a change-and the compulsive repetition which is one of its foremost characteristics will be at one with the necessity for this continuous reproduction.