Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940). Colorization by Shakibul Aram Risvy.
“Mass culture is psychoanalysis in reverse.”—Leo Lowenthal
This post is the fourth and final installment of ‘The Open Society and Its Frenemies,’ a project I began in order to explore what it means to try to defend the ideal of the Open Society today, given that the value of openness is being seriously challenged in this country since the election of Donald Trump. In the first post in this series, I explained that defending the open society today is initially somewhat complicated because the conditions under which we seek to do so now are so different than when Karl Popper first popularized the term after WWII.
Karl Popper was all about defending the open society (Western democracies) by zeroing in on the kinds of appeals to legitimacy that were being made in support of illiberal regimes like Nazism and Stalinism. He felt that while the threat of these rivals on the world stage had obviously been well-recognized, the insidious appeal of certain claims that they relied upon had not been. This meant two things: first, that he would be focused on the Enemies of the Open Society; and second, because he considered the threat to be external, Popper’s defense ends up being rather long on ‘Enemies’ and rather short on ‘Open Society.’
I concluded the first post by recalling the scene of George Soros’s attempt to get the ideal of the open society to take root in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his stated realization, in the late 1990s, that while Popper was reacting to the power of the state, under both fascism and communism, “…an open society may also be threatened from the opposite direction, from excessive individualism.” Soros concluded that the main enemy of the open society had actually become what he called “robber capitalism,” or “the gangster state.” This led to my suggestion that defending the open society today (something I consider to be urgently needed) means first recognizing that the threat now comes from within rather than from without, from dynamics internal to liberal democratic societies. With friends like these, I said, we don’t need enemies.
In the second post, Karl Popper’s Critical Rationalism, I thought it made sense to pause for a moment and try to extract some key points from Popper’s theory of knowledge and to explain why it led to a robust defense of liberal democratic politics. For Popper, there is a fundamental mutuality between the theory of knowledge underlying the logic of scientific discovery and the practice of liberal democracy.
In the third post, Karl Popper’s Historical Sociology, I completed this detour, by stepping through Popper’s account of the golden age of Pericles and the Peloponnesian War as a way to understand the perennial struggle between the forces of the open society and the closed society, and to show that this portrait of a democratic society under conditions of strain is actually a mirror in which we can still see the struggle for openness in contemporary societies.
In this final installment, I return to the main theme of the Open Society and Its Frenemies. Who are the enemies of the Open Society today? What does it mean to try to defend the ideals of the open society, knowing that its enemies come from within our own polity, when the enemy is in fact ourselves?
What if Some People Have a Predisposition to Intolerance?
I can’t forget those terrible first days after the 2016 election, when I stood aghast, literally stunned by the fact that Americans across the country had voted in large numbers for a deranged ethno-nationalist billionaire con-artist. That there was certainly a ‘basket of deplorables’ who would vote for a proto-fascist, no one could be in doubt; but how could so many people have heeded this primitive emotional appeal, apparently contrary to their own rational self-interest? In the ensuing months, this question has continued to simmer for many in the commentariat. Why did they do it? How could they do it? By way of explanation, some have pointed to worsening material and social conditions for working class whites over a long period of time, and the sense that neither party establishment was listening to them or addressing their most pressing concerns. It has been suggested that it wasn’t so much that Trump’s (barely) coded messages resonated, as it was the fact that in the end he was the only populist running in the general election, and working-class whites wanted to send a message, in order to shake up the establishment.
Democratic voters, their eyes glued to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight for every permutation in the polling, saw with satisfaction that it was headed toward a blowout. The Democrats had policy papers; the Democrats had arguments and reasons; and this time, the Democrats had positioned themselves at the convention as the party of values. With neither ideas nor values, surely then, Trumpism would be soundly repudiated. What most people didn’t count on, was that populistic appeals are appeals to emotion, and not to either ideas or values.
Agonizing over the so-called problem of ideology, of why various segments of society respond more strongly to certain markers of group identification rather than adopting a revolutionary consciousness, certainly has a rather long philosophical and political pedigree. But sitting around dejected while awaiting the inauguration, the following unsettling thoughts occurred: What if there was a percentage of people who were just wired this way, with a predisposition to intolerance, and as such, were largely unreachable by any sort of rational appeal, made from either ideas or from values? Seriously, what if right-wing authoritarians and the rest of us just have fundamentally different brains?
The Authoritarian Personality, Redux
In the wake of WWII, Marxist émigrés in America such as Theodor Adorno were apparently asking themselves something quite similar. Already in the 1930s, even before publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and friends of the Frankfurt School had diverged from classical Marxism with its utopia of the classless society, and sought instead to try to understand, through studies of modern society and culture, why it was that socialist revolution had failed in Europe, as well as the rise of both Nazism and Stalinism. But later, in Los Angeles in the late 40s, Adorno found himself after the war very worried about America–so he was also asking, along with his American empirical psychologist colleagues, why it was that so many people respond to emotional appeals based on various kinds of group affiliation rather than voting their economic or class interests.
The main point, however, is that while personality is not an ultimate determinant, once developed, it is a structure–as such, while modifiable, it is frequently very resistant to fundamental change.
In the introduction to The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno and his co-authors, laying out the motivations for the study, wrote, “The major concern was with the potentially fascistic individual, one whose structure is such as to render him particularly susceptible to anti-democratic propaganda…it seems necessary to study ideology at this readiness level in order to gauge the potential for fascism in this country.”
The starting point, however understated, is once again the vexing problem of class consciousness. It is a fact that people of the same socio-economic status frequently have different ideologies, while people of different status often have very similar ideologies. Adorno et al. recognize that recourse to something other than purely economic needs is required in order to explain things. Although we look at the anti-democratic individual as a totality, he writes, nonetheless “…two essential conceptions may be distinguished: the conception of ideology, and the conception of the underlying needs of the person.” It is necessary to study them separately, he writes, because the same ideological trends may have different sources in different individuals, while similar needs may express themselves in rather different ideological trends.
One of the many complexities arising out of all of this is the obvious strangeness of what is being sought after–namely a pre-disposition toward a kind of rigidity—what are the factors influencing the formation of a kind of person who, in some very important respects, seemingly cannot be influenced? What is needed, the researchers decide, is an investigation based on an understanding of personality. As a persisting configuration of forces within the individual, personality helps to determine our responses in that it is provides a ‘readiness for response’ in various situations. Since personality, therefore, is an organization of needs that lies behind specific behavior, it may also be regarded as a determinant of ideological preferences.
In identifying the need for a theory of the total personality, understood as a variable structure of needs (drives, wishes, emotional impulses), Adorno and friends nonetheless insist that personality so understood is still both a cause AND an effect—personality certainly develops and evolves in relation to the social environment, and what happens in child raising is profoundly influenced by economic and social factors among others. The main point, however, is that while personality is not an ultimate determinant, once developed, it is a structure–as such, while modifiable, it is frequently very resistant to fundamental change. The present study, the authors write, “focuses on personality because fascism, as a mass movement, can only be successful if it secures both submission and cooperation…since it cannot show that it serves the majority of people on a rational basis, it must do so by making an appeal to emotional needs…to do this, it speaks to the structure of personality.”
To measure the predisposition to intolerance, Adorno and his American psychologist colleagues developed a study that ultimately included about two thousand subjects on the west coast, from Oregon to Los Angeles, and also some additional subjects on the east coast. The research design involved batteries of indirect questions intended to measure responses on several different scales, including what they called the A-S Scale (anti-Semitism), the E-Scale (ethnocentrism), and the PEC-Scale (politico-economic-conservatism). After much work to confirm the usefulness of these tools, the researchers then decided to take what they had learned and develop the F-Scale (potential for fascism).
Most recently, there have been those like Karen Stenner who have sought to describe authoritarianism not as a static property of the individual psyche, but as a social phenomenon that is actually a dynamic of the political process.
It is not necessary to go into the details of the study and its results here (although I know you real scientists out there are groaning). The basic point is that Adorno and his fellow researchers believed that they had created a set of tools such that when the results were scored, it was possible to correlate the responses of subjects who scored high on one of the scales (as opposed to low) with certain patterns of thinking or personality trends. Adorno et al. further asserted that these trends revolved around groups of variables that, when taken together, formed a sort of syndrome, reflecting a predisposition of receptivity to anti-democratic propaganda. Elements or traits of the syndrome, explored in detail in The Authoritarian Personality: Conventionalism, Authoritarian Submission, Authoritarian Aggression, Anti-Intraception (opposition to the subjective, imaginative, the tender-minded), Superstition and Stereotypy, Power and Toughness, Destructiveness and Cynicism, Projectivity, and Sex (as in obsessive concern with the goings on).
Beyond the F-Scale
Early in the section of the work dealing with the construction of the F-Scale, the authors remark, “If the reader considers that most of what has gone before in this volume was either known or thought about before construction of the F-Scale began, it will be apparent that in devising the scale we did not proceed in a strictly empirical fashion.” Rather than starting randomly, to see what could be correlated with the findings of A-S and E, it was easy to intuit, starting from this data and its results, various hypotheses, especially given that they also relied on the findings of prior studies of personality conducted at Berkeley and at the Institute for Social Research. This being said, the authors simply acknowledge the obvious: “It will have been recognized that the interpretation of the material of the present study was guided by a theoretical orientation that was present at the start.”
It is a hallmark of the uneasy alliance between Adorno and his American empirical psychology colleagues that The Authoritarian Personality left itself so wide open to charges of ‘confirmation bias.’ For Adorno, the empirical research was an important and even necessary supplement to his philosophical and cultural studies. While it is clear that he took a keen interest in the research methodology, he was never invested in the notion that empirical rigor was the only path to results and conclusions. He remained a historically-oriented dialectical thinker, so it’s not surprising that he might not have met (or been concerned to meet) the standards of 1950s empirical social science orthodoxy, much less the standards of this community in the ensuring decades.
It is easy to see from the discussion just completed why The Authoritarian Personality has been both largely dismissed and yet also highly influential.
But confirmation bias is not the only significant criticism to be leveled against The Authoritarian Personality. For example, Adorno’s reliance on Freud in describing a theory of personality (to locate the syndrome in psychodynamic conflicts arising in childhood) has been updated by the Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer in favor of a social learning theory. He employs it to describe the basis for a more narrowly construed (three major traits instead of nine) and more rigorously correlated, version that more thoroughly eliminates acquiescence bias (by providing a balance of pro and anti-authoritarian statements in the questionnaire).
Most recently, over the last ten years, there have been those like Karen Stenner who have sought to describe authoritarianism not as a static property of the individual psyche, but as a social phenomenon that is actually a dynamic of the political process (hence her title, The Authoritarian Dynamic). For Stenner and her followers, authoritarianism is still a kind of pre-disposition, but one that surges and declines with changing levels of perceived societal threat. In Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler modify Stenner so that it’s not so much that some people shift toward authoritarianism in relation to threat level, but rather that under conditions of extreme political polarization, people are mostly pre-sorted–by media manipulation, negative campaigning, and gerrymandering, and the like, so that the key factor in understanding authoritarian pre-disposition in American politics is the dynamics affecting the political choices of the people in the middle (neither high nor low on the F-scale, so to speak).
Last but not least, there are what I like to call the authoritarian critics (the empire strikes back). Going back to the 1980s, there were critics who pointed out that the study neglected left-wing authoritarianism (more confirmation bias), and critics on the right certainly ran with that. Reacting to the use of a theory of personality, such that authoritarianism comes to be understood as a psychopathology, Christopher Lasch remarked that The Authoritarian Personality leads to the conclusion that prejudice can be eliminated only by subjecting the populace to collective psychotherapy, as if they were inmates of an insane asylum. The most troubling of these critics, Kevin McDonald, has been called out by Slavoj Zizek for basically suggesting that the work of the Frankfurt School, and The Authoritarian Personality in particular, was nothing more than a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the core values of the Christian West after they failed to bring about a socialist revolution.
It is easy to see from the discussion just completed why The Authoritarian Personality has been both largely dismissed and yet also highly influential. It was born of an uneasy collaboration between American empirical psychologists who were concerned with research methods, and who were content to view the individual as more of a cause than an effect, and European Marxist emigres who agreed that structures of personality were persistent after childhood, but who were also committed to see human beings as historically determined, by way of economic and cultural factors, and generally tended to eschew psychologism. Basically, from the start, there was something for everyone not to like, and these divides deepened in the ensuing decades and the urgency of the questioning (men in dark times) receded and political liberalism began to seem like it was going to become ubiquitous.
And yet, The Authoritarian Personality has hung around, largely because study after study has confirmed the balance of its findings, despite minor quibbles. It appears to be the case that a certain set of attitudes point to a group of underlying traits that are also predictive of a certain set of strongly held political beliefs.
Spare the Rod and Spoil the Ethno-Nationalist
The strong thread of connection linking Adorno and friends account of the psychodynamic conflicts emerging out of child rearing, and the social learning approach of Altemeyer’s revision is the common terra firma of corporal punishment. This was true in the original studies, and continues to be so. In the first chapter of their book, called “Spanking or Time Out: A Clash of Worldviews?” Hetherington and Weiler start by referring to a 2004 national survey on corporal punishment where favorability toward corporal punishment is remarkably well-correlated with national voting trends in favor of George W. Bush. Whatever one thinks of why this is the case or what it all means, it is clear that there is something to all of this.
As Hetherington and Weiler write, “Those who score high in authoritarianism tend to have a different cognitive style than those who score low.” They view the world in more concrete, black and white terms, with a greater than average need for order. They make stronger than average distinctions between in groups with whom they identify, and out groups that they perceive challenge them. They are protective of existing social norms; they have negative feelings toward minority groups, and they are hawkish on foreign policy.
Karen Stenner puts it this way: “Some people will never live comfortably in a modern liberal democracy.” She describes the type of person as someone “who cannot treat with natural ease or generosity those who are not his own kindred or kind, who is inclined to believe that only right-thinking people should be free to air their opinions, and who tend to see other’s moral choices as everybody’s business—indeed, the business of the state.” She concludes this rumination by saying that they “…will always be imperfect democratic citizens and only discouraged from infringing others’ rights and liberties by responsible leadership, the force of law, fortuitous social conditions, and near constant reassurance.”
Authoritarian Predisposition as the Apotheosis of the Individual
In June of 2016, Harvard philosophy professor Peter E. Gordon published a piece in Boundary 2 called “The Authoritarian Personality, Revisited.” Gordon begins the piece by noticing an article in Politico from January 2016 by Matthew MacWilliams, in which the author points out that people are barking up the wrong tree when suggesting that the biggest predictor of whether someone is a Trump supporter was race, or income, or education or anything like that. MacWilliams, both a communications professional and a Ph.D. student at UMass Amherst, had actually conducted his own national study—along with the usual questions about demographics, the horse race, policy positions, etc., MacWilliams had included questions about child rearing—once again, the “authoritarian” answers to these questions turned out to be the most predictive of Trump support of any variable in the study.
Gordon uses this identification as an occasion for his revisiting of Adorno and The Authoritarian Personality; but his concern is ultimately to draw out yet another ambivalence, other than the one mentioned previously (about whether the subject, as seen in empirical psychology, is best understood as a cause or an effect). Reviewing remarks Adorno wrote for the study that did not make it into the final version, Gordon draws out the extent to which Adorno came to view high scoring individuals less as a case of social pathology than as an emergent social norm.
The enemies of the open society are our best frenemies, because they are actually ourselves, finding common cause with the authoritarians among us, succumbing to the aesthetic pleasure of shaking things up and embracing the political sublime.
It wasn’t so much that Adorno repudiated the overall compromise that came to be published as The Authoritarian Personality as it was that, along with the published remarks, he also held a set of esoteric convictions that he kept to himself, or perhaps to just himself and his circle of émigré friends. As Gordon explains, the high scoring subjects could no longer be dismissed as exceptional. Rather, they became paradigmatic, or intensified instances of trends that were visible across the whole of modern society. The implication of this, therefore, was that the high scoring individuals conform more thoroughly to the present historical situation, and at least superficially, are thus better adjusted than the low scorers.
It was not so much that the authoritarian personality represented the rise of a new human type, as it was that under conditions of modern patterns of economic exchange and commoditized cultural experience that the individual psyche was becoming generally weakened, increasingly reducing everybody to “types” as something less than true individuals, which were now actually becoming an endangered species. As Adorno wrote in his unpublished remarks, “Our high scoring subjects do not seem to behave as autonomous units whose decisions are important for their own fate as well as society, but rather as submissive centers of reactions, looking for the conventional thing to do, and riding what they consider to be the wave of the future.”
Bravery Understood as a Citizen’s Virtue
This series of posts on the Open Society and Its Frenemies began with the suggestion, made by George Soros, that the open society may be threatened from within, “…from excessive individualism…the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open democratic society.” This exploration of The Authoritarian Personality was meant to be responsive to this, to try to understand why a large number of citizens of the most advanced democratic republic on earth could somehow, en masse, walk away from liberal political institutions and values enshrined in our founding documents. The provisional conclusion I have reached through these various reflections is that there are economic, cultural, and technological forces at work in our society that are proving corrosive to the bourgeois individual that has always been the necessary precondition for our democratic processes, in terms of both functioning and reproduction and/or maintenance. The enemies of the open society are our best frenemies, because they are actually ourselves, finding common cause with the authoritarians among us, succumbing to the aesthetic pleasure of shaking things up and embracing the political sublime, even if it means letting the genie out of the bottle with little or no understanding of the consequences.
I would like to close this series of posts with one last set of reflection on something that emerged while reading the work of contemporary authoritarianism researchers. In Karen Stenner’s work, The Authoritarian Dynamic, and also in Hetherington and Weiler’s Authoritarianism and Polarization, the primary focus is on understanding the political dynamics that make authoritarian personality, or the pre-disposition to intolerance, a potentially serious threat to liberal democracy. Both of them, despite their differences, warn about the conditions (heightened perceived threat level, increased polarization) that activate or trigger the predisposition to intolerance, making it a more substantial political force to be reckoned with in democratic processes.
I would like to conclude by once again invoking Karl Popper’s paean to bravery, the defense of the open society under conditions of great societal strain.
Stenner writes, “living in a liberal democracy vastly increases the likelihood that authoritarian predispositions will be expressed…authoritarians are never more intolerant than when forced to endure a vibrant democracy.” She also says that she thinks that status quo conservatives could be liberal democracy’s strongest bulwark against the dangers posed by intolerant social movements.
For their part, Hetherington and Weiler write that, “…with rising levels of normative threat, characters with vastly different latent predispositions, whose positions on tolerance might have been virtually indistinguishable in a climate of relative equanimity, will suddenly sharply diverge in the stances they adopt toward any issue touching upon diversity, dissent, and deviance.”
It would appear that if the concern is really about the people of the middle, the ones who can be induced to join the high scoring authoritarians, then the most effective approach for protecting democratic institutions from assault from within under conditions of extreme polarization would be some form of political quietism, in order to get the middle scorers to consistently vote with the lows rather than the highs. Of course, the jury is simply still out on whether a manifest absence of bravery in the face of attacks on our institutions from our own best frenemies is a wise course of action, under the assumption that the norms and conditions of electoral politics will continue to obtain and the pendulum will swing, or whether it is sheer folly, because what we are witnessing is a slow-motion coup d’état. I would like to conclude by once again invoking Karl Popper’s paean to bravery, the defense of the open society under conditions of great societal strain.
In her book Beyond Justice, the philosopher Agnes Heller has a section where she talks about justice specifically as a moral virtue. In this short section of a very long and complex book, Heller reflects on the difference between socio-political justice and morality and their interplay. In the course of doing this, she does a rather striking thing. Where norms of justice are seen to obtain, the virtue of justice is simply the commitment to the rule of law and procedural justice. However, where these conditions cannot be assumed, she says there are other, supplemental virtues that, along with the commitment to just procedure, she calls citizen’s virtues.
I can’t think of another philosopher who draws up a table of modern virtues specifically for citizens of a democratic republic. I go to the trouble of mentioning this, here at the end, because these virtues she lists are surprisingly warm to be so closely associated with the cold virtue of justice. The first one is something expected. It is good moral judgment to be used in the application of justice. The others are surprising. There is solidarity with others. There is what she calls radical tolerance; and there is the willingness to be a dissenter, because dissent is necessary if we are going to seriously strive for something approaching a true consensus or at least consent, in our decision-making. Finally, associated with dissent, there are two more. There is the practice of self-knowledge, and finally, there is civic courage.
This description of Heller’s table of modern citizen’s virtues is unfortunately highly abstract. But there is a purpose to this brief mention. If it is true that there is a uniquely modern form of the virtue of courage, then I would like to add something to its description. I would like to add that the commitment to the ideal of the open society under conditions of great societal strain must be a feature of this account of courage as a distinctly modern virtue.
