Fascism: The Quiz

PETER ONUF: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN BALOGH: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today, we’re taking on the history of mental illness in America.

PETER ONUF: In 1950, four researchers at the University of California Berkeley published a 999 page study that would dramatically shape psychology for the next couple of decades. It was called the “Authoritarian Personality,” and it attempted to figure out why some people embraced authoritarianism while others didn’t.

BRIAN BALOGH: This research had begun in the midst of World War II. And two of the researchers, Theodor Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswick had, themselves, fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. So they had a very personal interest in this study. The big question was, might Americans ever embrace fascism on a large scale? Could anybody embrace authoritarian beliefs?

PETER ONUF: The answer they arrived at was essentially this, what made some likely to embrace authoritarian politics was a specific type of disordered personality, close-minded conformists deferential to power. People with this so-called authoritarian personality, the researchers thought, posed a threat to America’s democratic society.

And so they put together a bunch of tests that could help identify these dangerous authoritarian types. There was the AS-scale, which tested for antisemitism, There was E-scale for ethnocentrism. And then there was the F-scale.

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: For fascists, yeah.

BRIAN BALOGH: This is Jamie Cohen-Cole, an Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University.

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: So if you agree strongly, this is an indication that you are fascist. OK. So this is item number 31. Nowadays, more and more people are prying into matters that should remain personal and private.

BRIAN BALOGH: I’m ambivalent on that.

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: You’re ambivalent on that. OK. So you don’t point in either direction on that one, then.

BRIAN BALOGH: No. Hit me with another one.

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: People can be divided into two distinct classes, the weak and the strong.

BRIAN BALOGH: So everything is very clear cut, if you’re going to score high on this personality.

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: Yes. Item number 41, the businessman and the manufacturer are more important to society than the artist and the professor.

BRIAN BALOGH: This has to do with psychology, not politics?

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: OK. So the argument is, is that people who score high on this test, that is, who agree a lot with these terms, that they would score high on all of these things. So they’re conventional. They have tendencies toward authoritarian submission. They have authoritarian aggression. They have anti-interception.

BRIAN BALOGH: I’m sorry. Anti-interception?

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: So they are opposed to the subjective, the imaginative, or the tender-minded.

BRIAN BALOGH: So by covering these different realms, they really get at the essence of the individual, not just political views? Or so they would argue.

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: Right. The larger conclusion was to argue that there was such a thing as an authoritarian personality. That authoritarianism was composed of these different subcategories that belong together. That fascistic kinds of thinking explain not only racism, but also antisemitism. And also explains certain beliefs about child rearing, certain beliefs about religion, certain beliefs about conformist behavior.

BRIAN BALOGH: How was this received? Did this make a big splash? Did this make much of an impact in America in the early 1950s?

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: So, yes, it had an enormous impact. The member’s of the group they wrote this book were mostly left leaning. They were generally opposed to McCarthyism and actually wanted to describe right-wing politics as being best explained by the categories of the authoritarian personality.

And then what happened is, that because it was picked up by so many social psychologists, but also by widely read sociologists and historians– so here, it would be worth noting the work of Daniel Bell and his collaborators in a book known as The Radical Right. Collaborators included historian Richard Hofstadter.

For these social thinkers who were trying to explain, how do we understand the way which segments American society supported clearly anti-American positions, anti-democratic positions that Joe McCarthy was taking, the abridgment of the Constitution, and the Rights to Freedom Association? And the way to make sense of this was to understand those members of the American population who had subscribed to McCarthyism.

To understand them as having a certain form of mental illness, in which they would be attached to a strong leader. In which they would assign all of the problems that they saw in national life and in culture to an out group, that is, people not like them. So to communists, to minority groups. And that would then be the explanation of that particular problem.

BRIAN BALOGH: Well, if I were researcher, where would I look across the spectrum of American society to find these authoritarian McCarthyite types?

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: For the psychologist reading this book, and the sociologists, the most obvious example of these people would be small shopkeepers, housewives, the kind of lower middle class. They’re basically thinking about the prototype example of people who were the first joiners of the Nazi party.

BRIAN BALOGH: Yet, the authoritarian personality, if I’m not mistaken, ends up getting applied to people on the left eventually. How does that happen?

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: So because this book was so important in the field of social psychology and sociology, it received a lot of attention for its methodological claims and the way that is understood individuals. And two modes of criticism made what you talked about happen, that is, is the application of [INAUDIBLE] personality people on the left.

On the one hand, Edward Shils, who was a right-leaning sociologist, argued that all of the problems with the authoritarian personality, which if you read the book seems to be mostly people on the right, could best be applied, perhaps, to Marxists, and to Communists.

And so he wrote a lengthy critique of the “Authoritarian Personality” making sure that we would think about how Marxists had all of the conformist irrationality that had been assigned to McCarthyites and to fascists. So that’s part one.

The other part is, that social psychology has been struggling since its birth to claim that it is a hard science, that it is as good a science and as rigorous a science as the natural sciences. And one way to do that is to make sure that there’s no politics involved.

And so a psychologist by the name and Milton Rokeach adopted a new term, closed-minded, rather than authoritarian as a way of talking about people whose political views were outside of the most common centrist views. And its with that invention that the field above political psychology could claim that it wasn’t only looking at people at the right, but simply looking at people who had unconventional political views.

BRIAN BALOGH: So if the central concern of the authors of the “Authoritarian Personality” was avoiding conformity, avoiding rigid thinking, didn’t they contribute to creating that kind of society by marginalizing so many different perspectives?

JAMIE COHEN-COLE: Right. Indeed so. And that’s one of the ironies of this work. And, I mean, an even, maybe, deeper irony is that one of the ways that they said you can recognize an authoritarian personality is that they applied a categorical way, a bipolar way of understanding the world. That is, there’s the inside group and the outside group. There’s Aryans and non-Aryans, for instance. And then they then proceeded to apply a bipolar way of thinking about American society.

We have the authoritarian and democratic minded. And it took really until the mid ’60s when, mostly people on the left started to criticize the framing of the authoritarian personality and closed-mindedness as producing conformity in and of itself.

BRIAN BALOGH: That was Jamie Cohen-Cole, an Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. His forthcoming book is, The Open Mind; Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature.

PETER ONUF: If you’d like to rank your own level of fascistic thinking, you can take a version of the F-scale on our website, backstoryradio.org.