The Wounds of Democracy: Fascist Politics

Why do so many voters in political democracies support antidemocratic fascism? My recent posts have touched on this in an American context. With Kristin Kobes Du Mez and David Gushee, I’ve asked why two thirds of white evangelical voters currently support the authoritarian reactionary politics of Donald Trump. With Jim Wallis, I’ve also called attention to the white Christian racism that drives their support.

Photo by Jongsun Lee on Unsplash

White American evangelicals face what Billy Graham once called the Hour of Decision. They need to turn away from an authoritarian politics of hate, resentment, and fear and toward a generous politics of solidarity, justice, and hope.

My opening question goes beyond white evangelicalism in the United States, however. Many other cultural strands enter American Trumpism, and authoritarian reactionaries are gaining strength in political democracies around the world—most notably in Europe, where millions lost their lives and loved ones to the forces of fascism. Less than eighty years after World War Two ended, right-wing extremism is on the rise. Why? What’s the attraction? And how can democratic citizens and organizations resist it?

Right-Wing Extremism

Mural of Theodor Adorno by Justus Becker and Oğuz Şen, on the Senckenberganlage, Frankfurt am Main.  Photo by Vysotsky (Wikimedia), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Theodor Adorno addressed such questions nearly 60 years ago, in a lecture titled Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (Polity Press, 2020). Speaking at the University of Vienna in April 1967, Adorno analyzed why the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands or NDP) had so much electoral success in 1966, just two years after the party was formed and two decades after World War Two ended.

[The NDP has never gained representation in the German Parliament (Bundestag). It came surprisingly close in 1969, however, the year Adorno died. Recently its position has weakened as other far-right political parties have gained support, most notably the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland or AfD). Last year the NDP renamed itself The Homeland (Die Heimat).]

Adorno says the postwar collapse of fascism does not mean the social conditions for fascism have disappeared. No, they’re still present. Specifically, an ongoing concentration of wealth among the rich and powerful occurs at the expense of social strata that rapid technological changes leave behind. Because of this combined “tendency towards concentration and immiseration,” the political promise of democracy—the promise of freedom and equality—has not been economically fulfilled. Antidemocratic political parties offer extreme responses to this broken promise. Indeed, fascist movements are “the wounds … of a democracy that has not lived up to its own to concept” (p. 9).

The Authoritarian Personality

One might expect this sort of analysis from a social philosopher whose critique of capitalism stems from Karl Marx. But Adorno does not rest at this level of political-economic generality. Instead, he delves into the cultural and psychological factors that motivate right-wing extremism, drawing on extensive research into antisemitism at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) during the previous three decades.

Much of Adorno’s research occurred in the United States, where he and his German Jewish ISR colleagues lived during the Nazi era. The most notable product was a massive study in social psychology titled The Authoritarian Personality (Harper, 1950; reissued by Verso in 2019). Using both quantitative general surveys and qualitative in-depth interviews, Adorno and his American co-authors asked whether certain character traits make people more prone to support fascism. To focus their inquiry, they devised a detailed questionnaire. How people responded to specific questions would indicate whether their psychology inclined them toward fascist politics, as measured on what was called the F scale (“F” for fascist).

Many of the character traits thought to incline people toward fascism map onto what Kristin Kobes Du Mez calls militant masculinity (“an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power,” Jesus and John Wayne, p. 3): conventionalism; authoritarian submission and aggression; preoccupation with power and “toughness”; and obsessions about sexual “immorality.” Other traits align with the fear and resentment that, according to David Gushee, motivate authoritarian reactionary politics: anti-intraception (i.e., opposition to what’s “tender-minded”); stereotypical perception; destructiveness and cynicism; and false projection.

Adorno explains these traits in Freudian terms. They are the characteristics of a weak ego, he says—weak toward either unsatisfied impulses or unchallenged authority figures or both. Such an ego tends to be narcissistic, just like the authoritarian political figures whose lives and regimes are what I have called a waking nightmare.

Two Challenges

Obviously, some challenges confront attempts like this to correlate social psychology with actual politics. One is a problematic tendency to treat our political opponents as so psychologically damaged that we neither take their grievances seriously nor try to persuade them to change their views. As Martin Jay shows in a chapter about The Authoritarian Personality in his recent book Immanent Critiques (Verso, 2023, pp. 89-114), such pathologizing of politics undermines the practices of democratic deliberation. It also tends to let fascists off the hook: If they’re so psychologically damaged, how can we expect them to follow the norms of democratic politics?

Photo by Delano Ramdas on Unsplash

A second challenge is to establish exactly what sort of connection lies between a specific social-psychological syndrome (e.g., the authoritarian personality) and larger societal tendencies (e.g., the growing electoral success of reactionary authoritarians). To put it crassly, do voters support Trump because of their authoritarian character traits? Or do authoritarian politicians like Trump succeed because they know how to stoke and manipulate such voters? Moreover, as Peter Gordon asks in his contribution to the book Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2018), might not both the authoritarian personality and authoritarian politics be products of the sort of society all of us inhabit? Perhaps Trumpism is simply “another instance of the general pathology that is American political culture” (p. 68).

Democratic Culture

While acknowledging these challenges, I do think Adorno and his colleagues have put their fingers on a politically relevant psychological wound, one that continues to fester many decades later. Mixed together, the traits of conventionalism, authoritarian submission, and the like are a dangerous brew; they easily erupt into fanatical support for authoritarian political “leaders.” We can acknowledge this without either pathologizing Trump supporters or reducing politics to a psychological struggle.

Cover image: Haiku (2006) by Joyce Recker. Photograph by Patty Watteyne.

To the extent that such social psychological traits help explain reactionary political attitudes and conduct, democratic resistance to fascism and authoritarianism must be more than political. It’s not enough to defeat Trumpism at the ballot box and resist it in our courts of law. Families and friendships, schools and religious communities, social media and the arts need to be in the mix. For that’s where character traits take shape and where people can become genuinely democratic citizens. As I put it in Art in Public (Cambridge University Press, 2011), that’s where we need to foster and maintain a democratic culture. Without this, the wounds of democracy will not heal.

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