The Authoritarian Personality and GOP voters: conservatism's true face is fascism.

(This is an updated and revised version of an essay originally published online Dec. 1, 2016.)

When I first wrote about the GOP as a fascist organization, and its rank and file voters as the true threat to our democracy- not the fascist figureheads— since the rank and file compose the fascist crowd, I received a fair amount of disdain (and vitriolic opprobrium, to be honest) for my broad-brush, hyperbolic labeling.

My impression of that reaction, from self-described progressives mind you, was that I provoked it because I was asking these same self-described progressives to look at family members, neighbors and coworkers in an uncomfortable way— as adults choosing to be complicit in atrocities, and facilitating the dismantling of our democracy, and generally, these rank and file fascists are in fact enthusiastic about it. As I’ve said many times in the past seven plus years about the rank and file fascists- none were duped.

Welp, after another election in 2020, in which more Americans pulled the lever for the fascist figurehead than the first time, and oh yeah, an armed insurrection and various ongoing efforts from within the institutions of government to dismantle our democracy, and commit atrocities, and numerous precursors to the justification of outright genocide, my take on American fascists, the rank and file fascist crowd of GOP voters, has become slightly less outside the popular wisdom:

It’s Time to Use the F-word: An Anti-fascist Approach to Trump and Franco

Jonah S. Rubin / Society for Cultural Anthropology

April 15, 2021

The debate over whether Donald Trump qualifies as a fascist has simmered since he emerged on the national political scene. But the insurrection at the Capitol seems to have broken the taboo against using the f-word. In the four weeks following January 6, 2021, the words “Trump” and “fascism” or “fascist” appeared together in 3,167 news items published in the United States, according to a NexisUni search. By contrast, only 970 such pieces appeared after the Commander in Chief directed militarized forces to clear Black Lives Matter protesters from Lafayette Square, many only to note the presence of anti-fascists.

Mainstream media’s vernacular shift rekindled long-simmering debates over defining fascism. With a few notable exceptions, historians of twentieth-century European fascism continue to reject the label. Roger Griffin and Stanley Payne, for example, separately declared Trump too “incoherent” to meet their criteria (see Matthews 2021). Similarly, Thomas Weber (2021) contrasts Trump’s “ruthless pursuit of individual self-interest” with the collectivism that characterized Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Each of these scholars remain critical of Trump. Yet they admonish those who would carelessly throw around the f-word, accusing them of transforming a rigorous analytic category into a generic insult…

For Robert O. Paxton (2021), the images of Trump supporters, many of them armed, interrupting the peaceful transfer of power was the final straw. Though he previously rejected the designation, Trump, he declared, has now crossed a “red line” into fascism. What, though, had been revealed by the insurrection that was not already apparent when Trump described Mexicans as rapists, directed violence against protesters, passed the Muslim ban, praised the “very fine people” at white supremacist rallies, incarcerated migrant children in concentration camps, and repeatedly flouted laws restricting executive power?

For American anti-fascists, attempts at drawing bright lines between fascism and nonfascism are not only misguided, but dangerous. Rather than wait politely for fascism to cross some metaphorical line, anti-fascist work to dismantle the fascist tendencies that are already affecting people’s lives, albeit below the threshold of visibility for most commentators. (emphasis added)

This was precisely my point in a comment I made just a few weeks ago in reply to an essay by Prof. Jules Evans that appeared in aeon, which asked whether an obscure English academic, Colin Wilson, was ‘a fascist, or fascist adjacent?’:

Whenever I come across the term ‘fascist-adjacent’, I’m left wondering why the writer feels the need to qualify and hedge in this way.

Fascism is an ideology, and one does not become fascist by running for office. A person displays their fascist affinities in their attitudes towards other people, and towards civil society more generally- their worldview is predicated on contempt for others.

Wilson did not question his inherent superiority to others, and indulged in fantasies of violence. Apparently he also fancied himself akin to omniscient, omnipotent deities to boot (a self-assessment shared not only by the manifestly insane Nietzsche, but also trust-fund bloviator William F. Buckley, Jr, who once compared himself to a giant standing ‘athwart history, saying stop!’).

Wilson was, fundamentally, a fascist.

The rank and file of the fascist crowd is composed largely of insecure males who feel slighted because academia (and the great mass of society) somehow fails to recognize their inherent superiority. And these insecure males never tire of having their tender egos stroked by the likes of Nietzsche, or Ayn Rand (or more recently, Jordan Peterson).

It is imperative that we not mince words with regard to anyone who would see the last vestige of pluralistic democracy reduced, literally, to ashes. There is no shortage of recruits for the fascist crowd, and they are in the midst of an overt effort to dismantle the constitutional democracy of the US (the 1.6.01 insurrection was not only the manifest demonstration of the intent of the fascist crowd, it has become their rallying point).

If we fail to name fascists what they are, in every instance, and so fail to oppose them, they become more emboldened. We have seen where that leads, and we ignore it to our peril.

The pedantic quibbles of Prof. Paxton, echoed by Prof. Evans, about when some arbitrary threshold is crossed and the person, in some ambiguous Poof! of manifest fascist-ness because a ‘for real, no kidding this time, real fascist’, is as inane as it is disconnected from human experience. And when it comes to confronting the threat posed by the fascist crowd, inane pedantic blathering about who gets to divine and proclaim the markings of the true fascist gets people killed, and will cost us our democracy. Not good.

Contrary to all this inane pedantic blathering, I submit that we are better served paying attention to some very smart people who happened to live through the horrors of fascism as it unfolded in its full murderous form in Europe- Theodor Adorno and Umberto Eco.

These two brilliant scholars and writers lay bare the features that make a fascist a fascist, before they sign on to storm a capitol and engage in mass violence against disfavored groups.

Theodore Adorno’s research on Authoritarian Personality seems remarkably dead on today, as precise, accurate and relevant a personality profile as when it first appeared over six decades ago. See if this sounds like any conservative politician or voter you’ve know your whole life:

a. Conventionalism. Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.

b. Authoritarian submission. Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the ingroup.

c. Authoritarian aggression. Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.

d. Anti-intraception. Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender- minded.

e. Superstition and stereotypy. The belief in mystical determinants of the individual's fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.

f. Power and "toughness." Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.

g. Destructiveness and cynicism. Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.

h. Projectivity. The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.

i.  Sex. Exaggerated concern with sexual "goings-on."

These variables were thought of as going together to form a single syndrome, a more or less enduring structure in the person that renders him receptive to antidemocratic propaganda.

These are not psychological features that are amenable to patient listening and reasoned discourse— in fact, patient listening and reasoned discourse are precisely the sort of displays that a conservative proto-fascist will respond to with disgust and hostility— (see items d., f. and g., above). 

Try to understand them, reason with them, and you will be met with either dismissive contempt, or violent hate. 

These are over seventy million of your fellow citizens, and they don’t think any of us, not one person who calls themselves a progressive-- especially those who are not white heterosexual Christian males --deserve any place in society, are entitled to political representation, or equal protection of the law.

Believing otherwise, no matter how much you may want to, will get a lot of us imprisoned and killed. Because that was already happening before Trump’s election:

… regardless of whites’ “sincere fictions,”5  racial considerations shade almost everything in America. Blacks and dark-skinned racial minorities lag well behind whites in virtually every area of social life; they are about three times more likely to be poor than whites, earn about 40 percent less than whites, and have about an eighth of the net worth that whites have.6 They also receive an inferior education compared to whites, even when they attend integrated institutions.7 In terms of housing, black-owned units comparable to white-owned ones are valued at 35 percent less.8 Blacks and Latinos also have less access to the entire housing market because whites, through a variety of exclusionary practices by white realtors and homeowners, have been successful in effectively limiting their entrance into many neighborhoods.9 Blacks receive impolite treatment in stores, in restaurants, and in a host of other commercial transactions.10 Researchers have also documented that blacks pay more for goods such as cars and houses than do whites.11 Finally, blacks and dark-skinned Latinos are the targets of racial profiling by the police, which, combined with the highly racialized criminal court system, guarantees their overrepresentation among those arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, and if charged for a capital crime, executed.12 Racial profiling on the highways has become such a prevalent phenomenon that a term has emerged to describe it: driving while black.13 In short, blacks and most minorities are “at the bottom of the well.”14 How is it possible to have this tremendous degree of racial inequality in a country where most whites claim that race is no longer relevant? (pp. 1-3, emphasis added)

Umberto Eco, who lived through the ascendance of Mussolini, and the rise of fascism throughout Europe, gave us the clearest description of what fascism is, and the social psychology of why it appeals to those drawn to it, in his 1995 essay Ur-Fascism:

Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values…

Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one.

What part of the above description does not fit the worldview of conservatives, and what we’re being told is the reason masses of working class white people in Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio voted for Trump? How about the appeal to the ‘frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation ’? Aren’t these the people we’re now told we need to understand? The ones who ‘Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.’  Trump’s political career was founded on the premise that President Obama’s Kenyan heritage made him ‘not American’, and his most consistent rhetoric was in the form of attacks on immigrants. 

Trump is nakedly racist, and has avowed Nazi’s among his inner circle. Eco identifies this clearly, as well:

Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

Make no mistake— when a person speaks of ‘traditional values’, as so often we hear from conservatives, what they are really communicating is a fundamental rejection of change and pluralism. This is the very core of conservatism, and it is aligned with authoritarianism:

We broadly follow these newer approaches by suggesting that this core idea (i.e., support for the subordination of the individual to collective authority) represents a social attitudinal expression of the broad motivational goal or value of collective security, which arises from social threat and insecurity in general…

Thus, the “authoritarian submission” dimension can be defined as expressing attitudes favouring uncritical, respectful, obedient, submissive support for existing societal or group authorities and institutions (protrait) versus critical, questioning, rebellious, oppositional attitudes to them (contrait). This dimension expresses the value or motivational goal of maintaining social order, harmony, cohesion, and consensus in society or the collective. Since these values and attitudes effectively involve defending and maintaining the existing social status quo, whatever it is, they seem best described by the concept of Conservatism as a social or ideological value, and as a social attitudinal dimension...

The “authoritarian aggression” dimension can be defined as expressing attitudinal beliefs favouring the use of strict, tough, harsh, punitive, coercive social control (protrait) versus leniency, indulgence, permissiveness, softness, to violation of social rules and laws (contrait). The value or motivational goal of maintaining coercive social control seems well expressed by the concept of Authoritarianism…

The “conventionalism” dimension can be defined as expressing attitudes favouring traditional, old fashioned social norms, values, and morality (protrait) versus modern, liberal, secular, bohemian, “alternative” values, norms, and morality...

Trump voters voted for him for the simple reason that they agreed with his basic premise: the country, and the sole authority to rule over it, belongs to them, and it’s being stolen from them by the ‘basket of liberal special interests’, with the assistance of ‘powerful international elites’ . No need to read between the lines, Steve Bannon and Anne Coulter will tell you— and have said explicitly, repeatedly- the powerful international elites are the Jews.

We need to see them for who they are, GOP voters, and name them, if we are to oppose them- they are America’s fascist crowd.