By SAMIR GANDESHA*
The frustrated masses and the “little-big man”
1.
There can be no doubt today that, after a long period of dormancy, authoritarian and sometimes downright fascist elements have returned to public life with a vengeance. They have returned not only across Europe, the UK and the US, but globally, most notably in Turkey, India and Brazil. The most visually shocking image of this return is the migrant detention centres that are dotting southern Europe. Most notorious are the “hostages” of neglected and terrorised Central American children, allegedly subjected to psychological and sexual abuse, in concentration camps on the southern US border with Mexico.
However, contemporary fascism largely does not take the form of a mass movement aimed at the violent overthrow of democracy and the installation of a one-party state that jails and liquidates its “enemies.” Instead, it produces a gradual but steady erosion of the institutions of the liberal-democratic order, which consist, among others, of the rule of law, the separation of powers, and in particular the independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press, and the right to dissent. Taken together, this erosion produces what has been called by advocates and critics alike “illiberal democracy.”
Against the backdrop of social and economic crises, this illiberal democracy has been formed by supposedly strong leaders. They claim to express the will of an ethno-nationalist “community” that is supposedly surrounded by both a “flood” of poor immigrants and a nefarious and abstract logic introduced by finance. Occasionally, when they point to figures like George Soros, these two forces seem to them to be combined; in this case, in a paranoid key, it seems to them that they act in secret complicity.
The current return of fascist elements to politics in the context of neoliberal capitalism, that is, in a social order in which the State has become totally commodified, in which the figure of the homo politicicus was eclipsed by the homo economicus, requires some explanation.
2.
As Michel Foucault showed in his lectures on biopolitics in the late 1970s, one of the dominant currents in economic thought in the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany was the doctrine of ordoliberalism. Supported by the Freiburg School, it argued that the most effective way to prevent the return of the authoritarian state was to strengthen the rationality inherent in the market; this would allow – in a kind of inverted Keynesianism – to limit and regulate the power of the state. So how was it possible that, instead of preventing authoritarianism, neoliberalism in fact created a favorable environment for it to take root and flourish in society?
One way to explain the relationship between authoritarianism and neoliberalism is found in the essay Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda, by Theodor W. Adorno. Although there is now a veritable “academic industry” of studies on Donald Trump and political authoritarianism, they largely fail, in my view, to address the larger problem of the “specifically damaged life” produced by neoliberal society. The reason for this is that they focus too much on Donald Trump himself – and figures like him – while ignoring the socioeconomic conditions that make such figures so attractive to a significant proportion of the electorate. This is precisely why Theodor Adorno’s synthesis of socioeconomic and sociopsychological perspectives is so appropriate and timely.
Na Freudian theory, Theodor Adorno deals mainly with two texts: the first is Prophets of Deception: A Study of the Techniques of American Agitators, published in 1949, by Löwenthal and Guterman; and the second is Crowd psychology and the analysis of the self, by Sigmund Freud, published a year before the “march on Rome” and the seizure of power in Italy by Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party in 1922.
The first represents a content analysis of the speeches of “agitators” or far-right demagogues, such as Father Coughlin and Gerald Smith. In this book, Löwenthal and Guterman understand that they respond in a specific way to real socioeconomic problems. The second seeks to show how the individual’s orientation towards the reality principle (Freud) can be short-circuited by the feeling of power and security provided by joining a mass movement.
How do “modern men [and women]” – Adorno glosses Freud here – fall into patterns of behavior that blatantly contradict their own rational interest as well as the current level of enlightenment of technological civilization”?
For such a reversal, or regression, to occur, an artificial social bond must be created based on the pleasure principle; that is, “real or vicarious gratifications must be obtained as soon as individuals surrender to the mass condition.” Here Freud helps to explain something that most schools of thought in social psychology only describe: the potential for “discharge” that exists in “violent emotions” and “violent actions.” The particular nature of the mass social bond, in Freud’s view, allows the individual to free himself from the “repression of his unconscious instincts.”
Insofar as Freud points to the interpenetration of the archaic and the modern, of the mythical elements and the Enlightenment elements examined by social psychology, he anticipates the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Archaic myth and modern enlightenment converge on the idea of sacrifice. The main difference is that the process of enlightenment through disenchantment and rationalization involves an increasing “introjection” or internalization of sacrifice understood as “self-renunciation” or repression. This means that in order to survive, the individual must adjust to external imperatives and, as a result, must renounce the aspiration for happiness or sensual fulfillment.
3.
It is therefore the civilizing process, that is, the “second nature,” that produces the revolt of the “first nature.” In recent decades, as is well known, Freud’s supposedly “negative” account of repression has been challenged by figures such as Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.
Nowhere has this account been so strongly criticized as in the first, introductory volume of The history of sexuality. Here, Foucault criticizes Freud’s “repressive hypothesis” as if it were merely a purely negative account of power. This second author postulates that social and historical forces restrict the expression of “instincts” from a position that is external to them. He further concludes that an act of resistance requires “nothing less than a transgression of the laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reintegration of pleasure into reality and an entirely new economy in the mechanisms of power.”
Theodor Adorno, in contrast, shows the way in which Freud's own account of repression is much more subtle than this, for it involves the interpenetration and mutual conditioning of nature and history in the very operation of psychic agencies. As Adorno suggests in his gloss on Civilization and its discontents: “as a rebellion against civilization, fascism is not simply the recurrence of the archaic, but its reproduction in and by civilization itself.”
Returning to the question of the nature of the social relationship, it seems doubtful that a bond based on libido can provide a convincing explanation of Nazism, supporting the thesis that Hitler replaced the loving father with a threatening and punitive father. Although there may be a connection with Freud's conception of the primordial father in Totem and Taboo, it is necessary to explain the nature and content of fascist propaganda that deliberately aims to reactivate the individual's “archaic heritage.” This heritage is manufactured and constantly reinforced.
If under modern conditions in which the guiding principle of public life is individualism, how can individuals be induced to renounce their own individuality and thereby their rational interests, including, in extreme cases, even their interest in self-preservation? This is a question that becomes especially pertinent under the extremely individualistic conditions of the neoliberal order. The question is: how do people become a mass? The answer that Adorno provides, drawing on Freud, is that this happens through the mechanism of identification.
Building on the work of Erik H. Erikson, Theodor Adorno suggests that the agitator appears to be the “magnification” of the subject’s own personality. As is well known, the image of the father and his authority had already begun to fade significantly in the period between the two world wars. Therefore, contemporary fascist leaders are not simply manifestations of an ambivalent image of the father or the domineering leader of the “primitive horde.” They do not establish a monopoly over women through the threat of violence, but instead configure themselves, as Adorno pointed out, as “little-great men.”
The process of identification is inextricable from the process of idealization. In Prophets of deception, the authors emphasize the way in which the agitator exploits the negative affects of his followers. Löwenthal and Guterman argue that “unlike the usual advocate of social change, the agitator, in exploiting a state of discontent, does not attempt to define the nature of this discontent by means of rational concepts.
Instead, he increases the disorientation of his audience by destroying all rational frameworks and proposing that they adopt apparently spontaneous modes of behavior.” Adorno explains more specifically how these frustrations and anxieties arise and how fascist propaganda exploits them by promoting identification through a process of idealization.
In presenting the core of his argument, Theodor Adorno suggests that frustration arises from “the characteristic modern conflict between a highly developed rational and self-preserving ego agency and the continuing failure to satisfy the ego’s own demands.” In other words, the conflicts arise from the contradiction at the heart of bourgeois or liberal-democratic society between the political ideal of individual autonomy or self-determination through democratic institutions, on the one hand, and a purely negative conception of freedom that characterizes capitalist relations of production, on the other.
As Adorno presciently suggests in negative dialectic: “The more freedom the subject – and the community of subjects – thinks he has, the greater his responsibility becomes; but, faced with this burden, he will fail in his daily bourgeois life, because, in practice, it never gave him that full autonomy that it seems to have granted him in theory. It is because of this that this subject will assume the blame for his failures.”
As a result of this contradiction between the ideality and reality of freedom, the promise and failure to realize a life of self-determination, the individual experiences frustration and discontent. And they result from his own ego ideal or idealized sense of self, often derived from the imago of a parent. Such conflict constitutes a fundamental aspect of the “damaged life” of late capitalist societies, the anatomy of which Theodor Adorno expounds in Minimum Moralia.
“This conflict,” argues Theodor Adorno, “results in strong narcissistic impulses that can be absorbed and satisfied only through idealization as the partial transfer of the narcissistic libido onto the object.” The collective adulation and love of the leader is the way in which frustrated modern subjects overcome their negative self-images resulting from their failure to approximate their ego ideal—the gap between the ego and the ego ideal becomes, in other words, unbearable.
The leader's seductive aura of omnipotence, therefore, owes less to the “archaic inheritance” of the primordial father and more to the individual's narcissistic investment in the homogeneous collectivity as a result of this failure.
For such collective identification through idealization to be successful, the leader must be “absolutely narcissistic,” that is, someone who is loved but who does not love in return. This is what explains the disinterest of the agitator—in contrast to the revolutionary and the reformer—in presenting a positive political program outlining concrete policy proposals, as Löwenthal and Guterman point out. In place of the latter, which would suggest some minimal concern for the needs of the followers, there is only the “paradoxical program of threat and denial.”
At the same time, the leader embodies a contradiction, since he appears to be, on the one hand, a superhuman figure and, on the other, an ordinary person. And this is what Adorno memorably presents when referring to Adolf Hitler: he is nothing more than “a cross between King Kong and a suburban barber.” This is essential to understanding the seductive psychological structure of fascism: for these two dimensions, retained by them, reflect a division that exists in the followers’ own narcissistic egos – one side is attached to “King Kong” and the other to the “suburban barber.”
This is how the leader represents the followers in an enlarged form. Fascist propaganda is built around the basic concept of the “‘little-big man,’ a person who suggests both omnipotence and the idea that he is just another of the people, a simple, red-blooded, immaculate guy.”
This is how Theodor Adorno presents the guiding concept of the “authoritarian personality”: that type of personality characterized both by subordination to the “strong” (suburban barber) and by domination over the “weak” (King Kong). In this, the structure of the social character reproduces the contradiction that lies at the heart of bourgeois society between the thesis of autonomy or freedom and the practice of heteronomy or lack of freedom.
According to Adorno, the image of the “little-great man” responds “to the follower’s dual desire to submit to authority and to be authority himself. This happens in a world in which irrational control is exercised, even if there has already been a loss of inner conviction, through universal enlightenment. People who obey dictators feel, moreover, that the latter are superfluous. They reconcile this contradiction by assuming that they themselves are ruthless oppressors.”
This is perfectly expressed in Hitler's motto “Verantwortung nach oben, Autorität nach unten”, that is, “responsibility to those above, authority to those below”. This motto, you see, exposes the essence of the ambivalence inherent in the typical authoritarian personality, that is, it constitutes itself as a sadomasochist. In the book the authoritative personality, Adorno asserts that “the identification of the 'authoritarian' character with force is concomitant with the rejection of everything that is 'below'.”
*Samir Gandesha is a professor at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.
Excerpts from the article “A composite of King Kong and a suburban barber – Adorno's Freudian theory and pattern of fascist propagandaa. In: Specters of Fascism: Historical, Theoretical and International Perspectives. London: Pluto Press, 2020.
Translation: Eleutério FS Prado.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE