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A surprise bestseller in Germany
Old recordings of lectures given by long-dead philosophers that someone finally transcribes and publishes rarely make it to the bestseller list, but that is exactly what happened in Germany this summer with the publication of a lecture Theodor Adorno gave to a group of students in Vienna in 1967.
Entitled Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus, or Aspects of the New Right-Radicalism, Adorno’s lecture became a surprise bestseller in Germany, in a summer that also saw the country’s first assassination of a politician by the far right since 1945 and two important state elections where the far right made major electoral gains.
Since the lecture hasn’t been published in English yet, I’ll give you a brief summary. I think you’ll see why so many readers think the lecture is relevant right now.
Where does radical-right politics come from?
Adorno saw fascism as a symptom of the contradictions inherent in modern capitalist democracies. But fascism was never a “spontaneous mass movement.” Instead, it would sprout up when “the potential that exists in the objective conditions is taken up [by radical right movements] and steered into acute situations.”
What are these “objective conditions?”
One is the structure of capitalism itself, which involves a “tendency toward the concentration of capital.” This tendency, and the fact that it can never really be done away with, means the potential for loss of status, unemployment, even impoverishment is always present, and this potential is felt particularly strongly by groups that like to see themselves as middle class.
Another such condition is the fact that “democracy has nowhere been fully realized” but “remains formal.” This leaves plenty of room for the radical right to blame problems on the perfidy of the democratic elites.
Socialism tries to offer a solution, but the groups that perceive (correctly) that their status is threatened by the concentration of capital instead blame socialism for proposing to change the system “in which they once possessed status.”
These factors produce what Adorno calls a “feeling of social catastrophe” that seems always latent in capitalist democracies. People living in these regimes don’t feel that there will be anywhere to turn once the catastrophe happens.
This is not about the ups and downs of the market, or what the rates of unemployment or economic growth happen to be at a given moment.
Rather, these factors represent fault lines that are always present in a modern capitalist democracy, and fascism festers in these fault lines, ready to be used by a skilled practitioner of the fascist technique.
What are the techniques of the radical right?
Adorno emphasizes that the radical right is all about the technique, and not about ideology. The radical right engages in “praxis without a concept” (“begriffslose Praxis”).
The technique is fundamentally about propaganda. “Propaganda makes up the substance of the politics,” Adorno says. And the point of the propaganda is not to spread ideology — because there really isn’t one — but “to yoke together the masses.”
The goals of the movement are not defined, or they frequently change. If you’re looking for consistency, you won’t find any.
Here, too, Adorno finds that the radical right feeds off a contradiction inherent in modern society. The fascist combination of “rational means” and “irrational ends” fits the “overall tendency” (“Gesamttendenz”) of our civilization, which, he points out, is based on endless technical refinement and improvement without any goal or purpose in mind.
Adorno identifies a number of what he calls “tricks” that characterize radical right propaganda. Among these is what he calls “pseudoscientific pedantry,” of a kind that will immediately be familiar to anyone who follows debates in western countries on immigration. Here, he says, the fascist constructs elaborate arguments around statistics that are easy to lie about, hard to check, and that appear authoritative (and scary).
Another “trick” is the deployment of legalism or “formalism” always divorced from any meaningful context. The example Adorno gives is the argument made by the far right in postwar Germany that Britain and France had agreed at Munich to Germany’s takeover of the Sudetenland and that the agreement had never been repudiated. So why is it fair that Germany doesn’t have the Sudetenland now?
How should we respond to the radical right?
Adorno doesn’t say it quite this way, but these arguments in bad faith are never designed to address real problems, but only to discredit democrats, and stoke fear, hostility, and paranoia in the “masses” that have been “yoked together” behind the fascist leader.
So what should we do?
First, Adorno has a lot to say about what not to do.
Because the people to whom the fascist technique most appeals are characterized by the “authoritarian personality” Adorno famously described elsewhere, they can’t really be addressed directly or convinced to accept the real reasons that they are following the fascist movement. There is a psychological root to the problem, according to Adorno, but no one wants to admit that they have the “authoritarian personality,” and you can’t carry out the kind of psychoanalysis on these people that would be required to make them admit it and possibly change it.
So, essentially, don’t attack individual voters or think that personal dialogue is going to make any kind of difference.
Another thing not to do, according to Adorno, is to try to address the supposed “concerns” raised by the fascist movement. Don’t turn politics into a discussion about the groups the right wing hates. This only gives credibility to the dishonest, bad-faith arguments the fascists are making in their propaganda.
It also won’t work to be silent, in the hopes the fascist movement will go away.
And you also can’t make appeals to abstract ethical principles, like “humanism,” as Adorno puts it, or, I suppose, to the idea of “human rights” today. The fascists don’t care about those principles, and even see them as an excuse for betrayal of the nation and its interests.
Adorno argues that there are responses to fascism that can work. One is to warn supporters of the negative consequences to them of following the fascist movement. This appeal to very simple, concrete interests can be effective, Adorno thinks, based on his research in the United States during the war (this was his work on the “authoritarian personality”), where he says that he could convince “enemies of Roosevelt” to support specific policies that helped them, like rent control or cheaper prescriptions.
Ultimately, Adorno thinks, the democrat has to be as good as the fascist in the use of propaganda, but not to “put lie against lie.” Instead, the democrat has to work against fascist propaganda with the “power of reason, with the actually un-ideological truth.”
Is it already too late?
That seems like a tall order, and maybe even feels irrelevant now, given the fact that politicians who have employed the techniques Adorno describes are already in power in what used to be reliably democratic countries, such as Britain and the United States.
The context of Adorno’s lecture was the appearance, in 1964, of the extremist NPD party in West Germany. Adorno’s proposed responses make sense in that context, and the NPD (which is still in business, by the way) never did become a major party.
There is a remark Adorno makes in this lecture, almost offhand it seems, about the importance of the international context. He points out that one factor that should limit the NPD’s potential is that its extreme nationalism runs counter to the overall global trend and thus threatens to “completely provincialize” West Germany.
“This places…narrow limits” on the far-right political project, “unless,” he says, “in other and much more powerful countries the radical right also succeeds.”
That’s a chilling remark, when you consider the situation in countries like Russia and the United States today.
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