"
In the end the usurper idea coincides with that of the conspirator who makes "secret deals" detrimental to his country.
In the end the usurper idea coincides with that of the conspirator who makes "secret deals" detrimental to his country.
Adorno-T-Authoritarian-Personality-Harper-Bros-1950
.
.
I did read George Bernard Shaw's (book on socialism).
"
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THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
One may differentiate between two kinds of pseudoconservatives: those ? who profess to believe in democracy and are actually antidemocratic, and those who call themselves conservative while surreptitiously indulging in sub- versive wishes. This differentiation, however, is somewhat rationalistic. It does not amount to much, either in terms of psychological motivations or of actual political decision. It seems to pertain merely to thin rationalizations: the core of the phenomenon is both times identical. The just-quoted 66zA belongs to the pseudoconservative group in the narrower sense and so does Mzo5, a prelaw student high on all scales, who stresses his conservative back- ground while admitting overt fascist leanings:
"Naturally, I get my Republican sentiments from my parents. But recently I have read more for myself, and I agree with them. . . . \V e are a conservative family. W e hate anything to do with socialism. My father regretted that he voted for F. D. R. in 1932? Father wrote to Senator Reynolds of South Carolina about the Nationalist Party. lt's not America First, it's not really isolationist, but we believe that our coun- try is being sold down the river. "
The overt link between father-fixation as discussed in the clinical chapters (Part II) and authoritarian persuasions in politics should be stressed. He uses a phrase familiar with fascists when they were faced with the defeat of Germany and the German system and yet somehow wished to cling to their
negative Utopia.
"America is fighting the war but we will lose the peace if we win the war. I can't see what I can possibly get out of it. "
Conversely, a striking example of pseudodemocratism in the narrower sense is offered at the beginning of the political section of the interview of the high-scoring man Mzo8, a strongly fascistic student of insect toxicol- ogy, discussed in the chapter on typology as representative of the extreme "manipulative" syndrome. He is against Roosevelt, against the New Deal, and against practically any social humanitarian idea. At the next moment, however, he says he did feel that he was "somewhat of a socialist. "
This is literally the pattern by which the German Nazis denounced the Weimar Republic in the name of authority unchecked by democratic con- trol, exalted the sacredness of private property, and simultaneously inserted the word socialist into the vernacular of their own party. It is obvious that this kind of "socialism," which actually amounts merely to the curtailment of individual liberties in the name of some ill-defined collectivity, blends very well with the desire for authoritarian control as expressed by those who style themselves as conservatives. Here the overt incompatibility between private interests (what he "gets out of it") and objective political logic (the cer- tainty of an Allied victory) is by hook and crook put into the service of profascist postwar defeatism. No matter how it goes, democracy must lose. Psychologically, the destructive "impending doom" pattern is involved.
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? POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MA TERIAL 68 I
This defeatism is characteristic of another trait of pseudoconservative po- litical philosophy: sympathy with the fascist enemy, Hitler's Germany. This is easily rationalized as humane magnanimity and even as the democratic wish to give everybody a fair deal. It is the fifth-column mentality on which Hit- lerian propaganda in democratic countries drew heavily before the war and which has by no means been uprooted.
M zo6, a college student high on all scales, fairly rational in many respects, seems at first sight to be critical of Germany. By tracing grandiloquently the sources of German fascism to supposedly profound historical roots, largely invented themselves by fascist propaganda, however, he slips into an apolo- getic attitude:
"German people have always been aggressive, have loved pa~ades, have always had a big army. They received an unfair peace after the last war. The treaty of Ver- sailles was obviously unfair to them, and because they were hard up, they were will- ing to listen to a young man like Hitler when he came along. If there had been a better peace, there'd be no trouble now. Hitler came along with promises, and people were willing to go for him. They had huge unemployment, inflation, and so on. "
The legend of the "unjust" treaty of Versailles must feed on tremendous psy- chological resources-unconscious guilt feelings against the established sym- bol of prowess-in non-German countries: otherwise it could not have survived the Hitlerian war. That this subject's explanations of Hitler really mean sympathy is evidenced by a subsequent statement on Hitler's policy of exterminating the Jews, already quoted in Chapter XVI:
"Well, Hitler, carried things just a little too far. There was some justification- some are bad, but not all. But Hitler went on the idea that a rotten apple in the barrel will spoil all the rest of them. "
Still, even this subject clings to the democratic cloak and refrains from overt fascism. Asked about the Jews in this country he answers:
"Same problem but it's handled much better, because we're a democratic coun- try. "
While pseudoconservatism is, of course, predominantly a trait of high scorers, it is by no means lacking among low scorers. This pertains particularly to the apologetic attitude toward the Nazis. Thus, F133, a woman low on
prejudice though high on F, a young student of mathematics, calls herself "rather conservative. " Her "official" ideology is set against bigotry. But re- ferring to her Irish descent, she resents the English and this leads her to pro-German statements which, in harmony with her F score, more than merely hint at underlying fascist leanings:
"I am prejudiced against England. England gave a dirty deal to the Irish people. England says the Nazis are black and Russia is white, but I think England is black. She goes around conquering people and is not just at all; and I am opposed to
? THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
Russia. It is true that they took up the cause of the people, but on the whole they are not right, and their type of government is inferior to ours. (\Vhat about the Nazis? ) The Germans lost everything; they just got hopeless. I don't believe in dividing Germany just in order to make Russia and England richer. It isn't true that Germany started the war-for war two people are necessary. It is not fair to put all the burden on one nation. The Germans will only feel more persecuted and fight more. One should leave the Germans to themselves. There is much too much em- phasis on how cruel the Nazis are. The Germans did not have a just peace. W e can't put our own Nazi regime in to run the Germans. The Russians will cause the next war. The devastation in Germany has been just too great. I am pessimistic because people believe that everybody is bad who is down, and those are good who are strong, and the strong ones cut in pieces the one who is down, and they are just practical and not just. "
The decisive shift occurs when the subject, after demanding "fairness" with regard to the problem of war guilt, protests against "too much emphasis" on Nazi atrocities.
ExcuRsus oN THE MEANING oF PsEUDOCONSERVATISM. The introduction of the term pseudoconservative which may often be replaced by pseudoliberal and even pseudoprogressive, necessitates a brief theoretical discussion of what is "pseudo" about the subjects in question and whether and to what extent the notion of genuine political ideologies can be upheld. All these terms have to be handled with the utmost caution and should never be hypostatized. The distinction between pseudo and genuine political ideologies has been in- troduced mainly in order to avoid the pitfall of oversimplification, of identi- fying the prejudiced person, and the prospective fascist in general, with "reactionism. " It has been established beyond any doubt that fascism in terms of efficient organization and technological achievement has many "pro- gressive" features. Moreover, it has been recognized long before our study that the general idea of "preserving the American way of living," as soon as it assumes the features of vigilantism, hides violently aggressive and destructive tendencies which pertain both to overt political manifestations and to charac- ter traits. However, it has to be emphasized that the idea of the genuine- ness of an attitude or of behavior set against its "overplaying," is some- how as problematic as that of, say, normality. Whether a person is a genuine or a pseudoconservative in overt political terms can be decided only in critical situations when he has to decide on his actions. As far as the distinction per- tains to psychological determinants, it has to be relativized. Since all our psychological urges are permeated by identifications of all levels and types, it is impossible ever completely to sever the "genuine" from what is "imita- tion. " It would be obviously nonsensical to call ungenuine those traits of a person which are based on the identification with his father. The idea of an
absolute individual per se, completely identical with itself and with nothing else, is an empty abstraction. There is no psychological borderline between the genuine and the "assumed. " Nor can the relation between the two ever
? POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MA TERIAL 683
be regarded as a static one. ? Today's pseudoconservative may become the genuine conservative of tomorrow.
In the light of these considerations, it will be of some methodological im- portance to formulate the distinction between "genuine" and "pseudo" with care. The simplest procedure, of course, would be to define both concepts operationally in terms of cluster relationships of the questionnaire and also of the interviews. One would have to call roughly pseudoconservative those who show blatant contradictions between their acceptance of all kinds of conventional and traditional values-by no means only in the political sphere -and their simultaneous acceptance of the more destructive clusters of the F scale, such as cynicism, punitiveness, and violent anti-Semitism. Yet, this procedure is somewhat arbitrary and mechanical. At its best, it would define the terms but never help to understand their implicit etiology. It would be more satisfactory to base the distinction on a psychological hypothesis that makes sense. An hypothesis that might serve is one that takes as its point of departure the differentiation between successful or unsuccessful identifica- tion. This would imply that the "genuine" conservative characters would be those who essentially or at least temporarily succeeded in their identification with authoritarian patterns without considerable carry-overs of their emo- tional conflicts-without strong ambivalence and destructive countertend- encies. Conversely, the "pseudo" traits are characteristic of those whose au- thoritarian identification succeeded only on a superficial level. They are forced to overdo it continuously in order to convince themselves and the others that they belong, to quote the revolution-hater of San Quentin, to the right strata of society. The stubborn energy which they employ in order to accept conformist values constantly threatens to shatter these values them- selves, to make them turn into their opposite, just as their "fanatical" eager- ness to defend God and Country makes them join lunatic fringe rackets and sympathize with the enemies of their country.
Even this distinction, however, can claim only limited validity and is sub- ject to psychological dynamics. W e know from Freud that the identification with the father is always of a precarious nature and even in the "genuine" cases, where it seems to be well established, it may break down under the impact of a situation which substitutes the paternal superego by collectivized authority of the fascist brand.
Yet, with all these qualifications, the distinction still can claim some justi- fication under present conditions. It may be permissible to contrast the pseudoconservatives so far discussed with a "genuine" conservative taken from the Los Angeles sample which, as pointed out in Chapter I, included- in contrast to the Berkeley sample-a number of actual or self-styled mem- bers of the upper class.
Fsoo8 is low onE, middle on F, and high on PEC. She is a woman of old American stock, a direct descendant of Jefferson. She is apparently free of
? THE AUTHORIT ARIAN PERSO~ALITY
any vindictive sense of her social status and lays no emphasis on her good family or on her being a real member of the "right strata of society. " She is definitely nonprejudiced. Her T. A. T. shows traits of a somewhat neurotic overoptimism which may or may not be a product of reaction-formation. One might venture that the "genuine" conservatives who still survive and whose number is probably shrinking, may develop an increasingly bad con- science because they become aware of the rapid development of important conservative layers of American society into the direction of labor baiting and race hatred. The more this tendency increases, the more the "genuine" conservative seems to feel compelled to profess democratic ideals, even if they are somewhat incompatible with his own upbringing and psychological patterns. If this observation could be generalized, it would imply that the
"genuine" conservatives are more and more driven into the liberal camp by today's social dynamics. This may help to explain why it is so hard to find any striking examples for genuine conservatism among high scorers.
If our assumption is correct, that pseudoconservatism is based-as far as its psychological aspect is concerned-on incomplete identification, it becomes understandable why it is linked to a trait which also plays a considerable role within the pattern of conventionality: identification with higher social groups. The identification that failed is probably in most cases that with the father. Those people in whom this failure does not result in any real antago- nism to authority, who accept the authoritarian pattern without, however, internalizing it, are likely to be those who identify themselves sociologically with higher social groups. This would be in harmony with the fact that the fascist movement in Germany drew heavily on frustrated middle-class peo- ple of all kinds: of those who had lost their economic basis without being ready to admit their being declasse; of those who did not see any chances for themselves but the shortcut of joining a powerful movement which promised them jobs and ultimately a successful war. This socioeconomic aspect of pseudoconservatism is often hard to distinguish from the psychological one. To the prospective fascist his social identification is as precarious as that with the father. At the social root of this phenomenon is probably the fact that to rise by the means of "normal" economic competition becomes increasingly difficult, so that people who want to "make it"-which leads back to the psychological situation-are forced to seek other ways in order to be admitted into the ruling group. They must look for a kind of "co-optation," some- what after the fashion of those who want to be admitted to a smart club. Snob- bery, so violently denounced by the fascist, probably for reasons of projec- tion, has been democratized and is part and parcel of their own mental make-up: who wants to make a "career" must really rely on "pull and climb- ing" rather than on individual merit in business or the professions. Identifica- tion with higher groups is the presupposition for climbing, or at least appears so to the outsider, whereas the "genuine" conservative group is utterly al-
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lergic to it. However, the man ? who often, in accordance with the old Horatio Alger ideology, maintains his own "upward social mobility" draws from it at least some narcissistic gratifications and felicitously anticipates internally a status which he ultimately hopes to attain in reality.
Here two examples of high scorers may be quoted, both again taken from the Los Angeles group.
soo6, an extreme high scorer on all scales, one of the few of our inter- viewees who actually admitted that they want to kill the Jews (see his in- terview in Chapter XVI, p. 636), is the grandson of a dentist, whereas his father failed to become one, and he hopes fervently to regain the grand- father's social status. As to the problem of failure in identification, it is sig- nificant in this case that the image of the father is replaced by that of the grandfather-just as the idea of "having seen better times," of a good family background clouded over by recent economic developments, played a? large role with the prefascist, postinflation generation in Germany.
501;, who is also extremely high on all scales, describes her father as a doctor, whereas he is actually a chiropractor-a habit which seems to be largely shared by the chiropractors themselves. If the German example teaches anything and if our concept of semierudition proves to be correct, one may expect that nonacademic "scientists" and "doctors" are strongly attracted by the fascist platform. 5
5. THE USURP A TION COMPLEX
The goal toward which the pseudoconservative mentality strives-diffusedly and semiconsciously-is to establish a dictatorship of the economically strong- est group. This is to be achieved by means of a mass movement, one which promises security and privileges to the so-called "little man" (that is to say, wor_ried members of the middle and lower middle class who still cling to their status and their supposed independence), if they join with the right people at the right time. This wish appears throughout pseudoconservative ideology in mirrored reflection. Government by representation is accused of perverting democracy. Roosevelt and the New Deal particularly are said to have usurped power and to have entrenched themselves dictatorially. Thus
5 The role played by shady pseudo-medicine in Nazi Germany is sociologically linked to the ascendance of declasse intellectuals under National Socialism, psychologically to the paranoid twist of Nazi ideology as well as of the personalities of many leaders. There is a direct interconnection between the doctrine of "purity of blood" and the glorification of sundry purifiers of the body. The first academic chair created by Hitler was one for "natural healing. '' His own physician was a quack, Rimmler's a chiropractor, and Rudolf Hess encouraged all kinds of superstitious approaches to medicine. It should be noted that analogous tendencies make themselves felt in the American "lunatic fringe. " One of our native crackpot agitators combines Jew-baiting with a "health food" campaign, directed against the delikatessen which are not only denounced as being Jewish but also as unwholesome. The imagery of Jewish food throughout the fascist ideology deserves careful examination.
? 686 THE AUTHORIT ARIAN PERSONALITY
pseudoconservatives accuse the progressives of the very thing which they would like to do, and they utilize their indictment as a pretext for "throw- ing the rascals out. " They call for a defense of democracy against its "abuses" and would, through attacking the "abuses," ultimately abolish democracy altogether. Pseudoconservative ideology harmonizes completely with psy- chological projectivity.
One may well ask why people so concerned with power, if they really see the Roosevelt policy as a strong-armed dictatorship, do not endorse it and feel happy about it. The reasons, it would seem, are several. First, the social types representative of pseudoconservatism are not or do not regard them- selves as beneficiaries of the New Deal. It appears to them as a government for the unemployed and for labor; and even if they themselves received some benefits from WPA or the closed shop, they are resentful about it because this demonstrates to them what they are least willing to admit: that their belonging to the middle classes has lost its economic foundation. Second, to them, the Roosevelt administration never was really strong enough. They sense very well the degree to which the New Deal was handicapped by the Supreme Court and by Congress; they know or have an inkling of the con- cessions Roosevelt had to make- he had to give conspicuous jobs to several men opposed to his political line, e. g. , Jesse Jones; they cry "dictator" because they realize that the New Deal was no dictatorship at all and that it did not fit within the authoritarian pattern of their over-all ideology. Thirdly, their idea of the strong man, no matter in what glowing personalized terms it may be expressed, is colored by an image of real strength: the back- ing of the most powerful industrial groups. To them, progressives in the government are real usurpers, not so much because they have acquired by shrewd and illegal manipulation rights incompatible with American democ- racy, but rather because they assume a power position which should be re- served for the "right people. " Pseudoconservatives have an underlying sense of "legitimacy": legitimate rulers are those who are actually in command of the machinery of production-not those who owe their ephemeral power to formal political processes. This last motif, which also plays a heavy role in the prehistory of German fascism, is to be taken the more seriously because it does not altogether contradict social reality. As long as democracy is really a formal system of political government which made, under Roosevelt, cer-
tain inroads into economic fields but never touched upon the economic fun- damentals, it is true that the life of the people depends on the economic organization of the country and, in the last analysis, on those who control American industry, more than on the chosen representatives of the people. Pseudoconservatives sense an element of untruth in the idea of "their" demo- cratic government, and realize that they do not really determine their fate as social beings by going to the polls. Resentment of this state of affairs, how- ever, is not directed against the dangerous contradiction between economic
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inequality and formal political equality but against the democratic form as such. Instead of trying to give to this form its adequate content, they want to do away with the form of democracy itself and to bring about the direct control of those whom they deem the most powerful anyway.
This background of the dictatorship idea, that democracy is no reality under prevailing conditions, may be evidenced by two quotations from me- dium-scoring men. M1223h follows up his statement that the Democrats are going communistic and that the unions should be curbed, by the statement, "The people aren't running the country. "
M1225a speaks cautiously about democracy: "It's supposed to be a govern- ment of the people by representation. "
Asked whether we had it in this country he answers bluntly: No, but qualifies this immediately with the statement-a pretty standardized one- "We have as close to it as there is. "
Similarly, M1223h qualifies his critique by the contention that "America is still fairly democratic but going away from democracy too fast. "
The contradictory utterances of these two men, apart from wishful think- ing, indicate that they are perturbed by the antagonism between formal political democracy and actual social control. They just reach the point where they see this antagonism. They did not dare, however, to explain it but rather retract their own opinions in order not to become "unrealistic. " Conformism works as a brake on their political thinking.
A few examples of the usurpation fantasy proper follow.
M2o8, who obtained a middle score on E and F and a high score on PEC, insists, according to his interviewer,
that,President Roosevelt lost the popular vote by several thousand votes, accord- ing to counts he and his father made following the news reports over the radio, implying that the official count had been incorrect.
While this man is for "initiative and competition, against government bungling and inefficiencies," he has boundless confidence in social control exercised by the proper organization:
"The best organizations for a citizen to belong to in order to influence the condi- tions in his community are local Chambers of Commerce. By improving your city, you make it attractive and create wealth. " He said the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce was something he belonged to and his organization would send out postcards very soon to every single individual in the city in a huge membership drive.
M656, a high-scoring prison inmate (grand theft and forgery), was inter- viewed shortly after President Roosevelt's death and when asked what he regarded as the greatest danger facing this country, said
"the government we just had, the one that brought on the war, the Nazi-dictator- ship. "
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The high-scoring man Mzo8, the aforementioned insect toxicologist, is convinced that Roosevelt only carried out Hoover's ideas, a statement not infrequent among prejudiced subjects who regard the New Deal as usurpa- tion in so far as it has "stolen" its ideas from its opponents. Asked further about Roosevelt, he goes on:
"he usurped power that was necessary to do something-he took a lot more power than a lot. . . . He has been in too long, and there were deals on the fire that we
don't know about with Churchill or Stalin.
"
In the end the usurper idea coincides with that of the conspirator who makes "secret deals" detrimental to his country.
The frequency and intensity of the usurper idea, together with the fan- tastic nature of many of the pertinent assertions in our material justifies our calling it a "complex," that is to say, looking for a widespread and stable psychological configuration on which this idea feeds. As far as we know, no attention has been given to this complex in psychological literature, though the frequency of usurpation conflicts throughout occidental drama warrants the assumption that there must be some deep-rooted basis in instinctual dy- namics for it. Suffice it to recollect that Shakespeare's most famous tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Richard III deal in one way or the other with usurpation, and that the usurper theme runs as a red thread through the whole dramatic work of Schiller, from Franz Moor in the "Robbers" to Demetrius. On a sociopsychological level, that is to say com- paratively abstractly and superficially, an explanation is easy at hand. The existence of power and privilege, demanding sacrifices of all those who do not share in its advantages, provokes resentment and hurts deeply the longing for equality and justice evolved throughout the history of our culture. In the
depth of his heart, everyone regards any privilege as illegitimate. Yet one is forced continuously, in order to get along in the world as it is, to adjust him- self to the system of power relationships that actually defines this world. This process has been going on over the ages, and its results have become part and parcel of today's personalities. This means that people have learned to repress their resentment of privilege and to accept as legitimate just that which is suspected of being illegitimate. But since human sufferings from the survival of privilege have never ceased, adjustment to it has never become complete. Hence the prevailing attitude towards privileges is essentially am- bivalent. While it is being accepted consciously, the underlying resentment is displaced unconsciously. This is done in such a way that a kind of emo- tional compromise between our forced acceptance of the existence of power, and resistance against it, is reached. Resentment is shifted from the "legiti- , mate" representatives of power to those who want to take it away from them, who identify themselves, in their aims, with power but violate, at the same time, the code of existent power relations. The ideal object of this
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shift is the political usurper'in whom one can denounce "greed for power" while at the same time taking a positive stand with regard to established power. Still, sympathy with the usurper survives at the bottom. It is the conflict between this sympathy and our displaced aggressiveness which quali- fies him for dramatic conflict. ?
There is reason to believe, however, that this line of thought does not fully explain the usurper complex. Much more deep-lying, archaic mech- anisms seem to be involved. . As a rule, the usurper complex is linked with the problem of the family. The usurper is he who claims to be the member of a family to which he does not belong, or at least to pretend to rights due to another. family. It may be noted that even in the Oedipus legend, the usurper complex is involved in so far as Oedipus believes himself to be the real child of his foster-parents, and this error accounts for his tragic en- tanglement. We venture, with all due reservation, the hypothesis that this has something to do with an observation that can be made not infrequently: that people are afraid of not really being the children of their parents. This fear may be based on the dim awareness that the order of the family, which stands for civilization in the form in which we know it, is not identical with "nature" -that our biological origin does not coincide with the institutional framework of marriage and monogamy, that "the stork brings us from the pond. " We sense that the shelter of civilization is not safe, that the house of the family is built on shaky ground. We project our uneasiness upon the us? urper, the image of him who is not his parents' child, who becomes psychologically a kind of ritualized, institutional "victim" whose annihilation is unconsciously supposed to bring us rest and security. It may very well be that our tend- ency to "look for the usurper" has its origin in psychological resources as deep as those here suggested.
6. F. D. R.
The usurpation complex is focused on Roosevelt, whose name evokes the sharpest differences between high and low scorers that are to be found in the interview material on politico-economic topics.
It hardly needs to be said that all the statements touching upon the late president are personalized. The political issues involved appear mainly as qualities of the man himself. He is criticized and praised because he is this or that, not because he stands for this or that. The most drastic ? accusation is that of war-monger. This accusation often assumes the form of those con- spiracy fantasies which are so highly characteristic of the usurper complex.
The high-scoring man M664c, serving a San Quentin term of one year for forgery and check writing, professes to have been originally pro-Roose- velt.
"Hell, at that (election) I was strong for Roosevelt, we had an awful depression, one thing he'd done for that state he put that dam there. . . . We didn't need the war
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though. (Why did we get into it? ) Started sending that iron over to Japan and then helping England. . . . "
The idea of the "red Roosevelt" belongs to the same class of objections and paranoid exaggerations of political antipathies. Though much more common among subjects who score high on E and PEC, it can sometimes be found in the statements of low scorers. Note the remarks of Fz4o, a young nursery school helper, rated according to her questionnaire score as low on E but high on A-S and PEC. She first refers to her father.
(Is your father anti-Roosevelt? ) "Oh, sure he is. He just don't have any use for Roosevelt. It's all communism that is what he says. (And what do you think about it? ) Oh, I don't know. I guess he's right. He ought to know. That's all he thinks about-politics-politics. "
Sometimes the suspicion that Roosevelt was a Russophile war-monger is cloaked by legalistic argumentations, such as the statement that he left the country illegally during the war.
F zoz, a woman who stands high on all scales,' a somewhat frustrated young college student, relates that her father is "extremely anti-Roosevelt," and, when asked why, answers:
"No president is supposed to leave the country without the consent of Congress, and he goes whenever he feels like it. He is being a little too dictatorial. "
With regard to domestic politics, F359, the accountant in a government department who was quoted before (Chapter XVI, p. 616), states quite clearly and in fairly objective terms the contradiction which seems at the hub of anti-Roosevelt sentiment:
Subject did not like Roosevelt because of WPA. It creates a class of lazy people who would rather get $20 a week than work. She feels that Roosevelt did not ac- complish what he set out to do-raise the stand? ard of the poorer classes.
The conceptions of communist, internationalist, and war-monger are close to another one previously mentioned-that of the snob. Just as the fascist agitator persistently mixes up radicals and bankers, claiming that the latter financed the revolution and that the former seek financial gains, the contradictory ideas of an ultraleftist and an exclusive person alienated from the people are brought together by anti-Roosevelt sentiment. One may ven- ture the hypothesis that the ultimate content of both objections is the same: the resentment of the frustrated middle-class person against those who rep- resent the idea of happiness, be it by wanting other people-even the "lazy ones"-to be happy, be it that they are enjoying life themselves. This irra- tionality can be grasped better on the level of personality than on that of ideology.
Mz223h, of the Maritime School, with medium scores onE and PEC, but high on F, does not like Roosevelt-"a socialite; got too much power. " Simi-
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lady, the high-scoring married woman F117, 37 years old, employed m a Public Health Department,
feels that Roosevelt does not know how to handle money; he was born with a great deal. Now he throws it around-"millions here and millions there. "
This is the exact opposite of the praise of Dewey, whose more humble origin is supposed to guarantee thriftiness. The "democratic cloak" of the pseudoconservative consists, in cases like these, in the assertion that measures taken for the benefit of the people cannot be approved because the one who carried them out is not one of the people and therefore, in a way, has no right to act in their behalf-he is a usurper. Really folksy men, one might suppose, would rather let them starve.
The idea that the late President was too old and too ill, and that the New Deal was decrepit plays a particular role among anti-Roosevelt arguments. The dark forebodings about Roosevelt's death have come true. Yet, one may suspect here a psychological element: the fear of his death often rationalizes the wish for it. Moreover, the idea of his supposed old age pertains to the il- legitimacy complex: he should give way to others, to the "young generation," to fresh blood. This is in keeping with the fact that Gennan Nazism often denounced the over-age of the representatives of the Weimar Republic, and that Italian fascism heavily emphasized the idea of youth per se. Ultimately, some light is shed on the whole complex of the President's age and illness by our clinical findings, pertaining to the tendency of our high scorers to praise physical health and vigor as the outstanding quality of their parents, particu:. . lady of the mother (pp. 340 if. ). This is due to the general "extemalization" of values, the anti-intraceptiveness of the prejudiced personalities who seem to be continuously afraid of illnesses. If there is an interconnection between at least some syndromes of high scorers and psychotic dispositions, one may also think of the disproportionate role played by the concern with one's own body in many schizophrenics-a phenomenon linked to the mechanisms of "depersonalization"6 which represents the extreme of the "ego-alienness" of the id characteristic of the high scoring subject. It should be remembered once again how large a role was played by ideas such as physical health, purity of the blood, and syphilophobia throughout fascist ideology.
M104, a high scoring young man of the Public Speaking Class, who changed from studying engineering to law is an example:
Subject would have voted for Dewey. The whole New Deal has become very stagnant, old, and decrepit. He feels Roosevelt has done some fine things, some of his experiments were about as good a cure as you could get for the depression, but it is now time for a change in party, a new President, younger blood.
As in most cases, the argument has, of course, a "rational" aspect too- the Roosevelt government held office for a longer period than any other
6 Cf. Otto Fenichel (27).
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one in American history. However, the complaints about "too long" are ut- tered only in the name of "changing the guard," not in the name of concrete progressive ideas which could be brought about by younger people.
Resentment against old people has a psychological aspect by which it seems to be linked to anti-Semitism. There is reason to believe that some subjects displace their hostility against the father upon aged persons and the notion of old age as such. Old people are, as it were, earmarked for death. In accordance with this pattern, the image of the Jew often bears features of the old man, thus allowing for the discharge of repressed hostility against the father. Judaism is regarded, not incidentally, as the religion of the father and Christianity that of the son. The most emphatic stereotype of the Jew, that of the inhabitant of the Eastern ghetto, bears attributes of the old, such as the beard or worn and obsolete clothes.
Hostility for the aged has, to be sure, a sociological as well as a psycho- logical aspect: old people who cannot work any more are regarded as useless and are, therefore, rejected. But this idea, like those just discussed, has little immediate bearing upon the person of Roosevelt; rather, they are transferred to him after aggr. ession has turned against him. The universally ambivalent role of the President as a father figure thus makes itself felt.
As to those who are in favor of Roosevelt, there are two clear-cut main motifs which are almost the reverse of those found in the Roosevelt haters. The man "who thinks too much of himself and assumes dictatorial powers" is now praised as a great personality; the leftist and initiator of the New Deal is loved as a friend of the underdog.
The "great personality" motif appears in the statement of the low-scoring man, M711, an interviewer in government employment, with many of the typical "low" characteristics of mildness, gentleness, and indecision.
(Roosevelt) "seemed to be the only man the country had produced that se'emed to have the qualifications for the assignment (of war). . . . I'd say his ability to get along with other people . . . had been pretty responsible in the unification of our country. "
The young woman, F126, scores low on A-S and E, middle on F, and high on PEC. She is studying journalism but actually is interested in "creative writing. " She states
that her brother-in-law can find so many things to criticize and, of course, there are plenty. "But I think the President is for the underdog, and I've always been for the underdog. "
The high-scoring man, Mzo2, a student of seismology who went to college because he did not want to be "lined up as just an electrician," praises Roose- velt's "talent":
"Well, if another candidate had approached Roosevelt, I'd have voted for him. But, no other candidate approached his talent. "
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POLITICS AND ECON9MICS IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL 693
M zo6, another hjgh-scoring man, again characterized by upward social mobility, is pro-Roosevelt for reasons that are just the opposite of those given by one group of his critics for disliking him, although he too suffers from the "old age" complex.
"Roosevelt has done a wonderful job but we should have a young man. Roosevelt stabilized the nation's currency, helped on unemployment, has handled foreign rela- tions marvelously. He is a common man, goes fishing, takes time for relaxation- that's what I like. Mrs. Roosevelt has been active in political and social affairs. "
The explanation of the deviation of this highly prejudiced man, who is beset by power ideas and objects to the Jews because they supposedly strive for power, is that he himself
"had infantile paralysis, and you appreciate what Roosevelt has done. "
The inference may be allowed that if the same man is praised by some people as a "common man" and by others blamed as a "socialite," these judg- ments express subjective value scales rather than objective facts.
The established status of a President of the United States, the irrefutable success of Roosevelt, and, one may add, his tremendous impact as a symbolic father figure on the unconscious, seem in more cases than this particular one to check the usurper complex of the pse~doconservative and allow only for vague attacks about which there is something half~hearted, as if they were being made with a bad conscience.
7. BUREAUCRA TS AND POLITICIANS
There is no mercy, however, for those to whom Roosevelt is supposed to have delegated power. They are usurpers, parasites, know nothing about the people, and should, one may well assume, be replaced by the "right men. " The wealth of statements against bureaucrats and politicians in our interview material is tremendous. Although it comes mostly from high scorers, it is by no means confined to them, and may again be regarded as one of those patterns of political ideology which spread over the well-defined border lines of right vs. left.
It is beyond the scope of the present study to analyze the amount of truth inherent in American distrust of professional politics. Nor should it be denied that a tremendously swollen bureaucratic apparatus, such as that which was necessitated by war conditions and which was, to a certain extent, safe from public criticism, develops unpleasant features, and that the machinery has an inbound tendency to entrench itself and to perpetuate itself for its own sake. However, as one analyzes carefully the standard criticism of the bureaucrats and politicians, he finds very little evidence of such observations, very few specific indictments of bureaucratic institutions which prove them to be incompetent. It is impossible to escape the impression that "the bureau- crat," with the help of some sections of the press, and some radio commenta-
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tors, has become a magic word, that he functions as a scapegoat to be blamed indiscriminately for all kinds of unsatisfactory conditions, somewhat remi- niscent of the anti-Semitic imagery of the Jew with which that of the bureau- crat is often enough merged. At any rate, the frequency and intensity of antibureaucratic and antipolitician invectives is quite out of proportion with any possible experience. Resentment about the "alienation" of the political sphere as a whole, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, is turned against those who represent the political sphere. The bureaucrat is the per- sonalization of ununderstandable politics, of a depersonalized world.
Striking examples of this general attitude of high scorers are provided by the above-quoted political statements of Mack (p. 34) and of the markedly anti-Semitic manager of a leather factory, M359 (p. 666 of this chapter).
Sometimes the invectives against politics terminate in tautologies: politics is blamed for being too political.
M123oa is a young welder who wanted to study engineering. He scores high onE but low on F and PEC.
(What thinking of political trends today? ) "Well, they're very disrupted. We discussed them a lot, and a lot of things we don't like. The admin~tration seems to be so tied up in politics. . . . Statesmanship is gone completely. . . ? :Can't believe any-
r thing you read in the newspapers. We read the newspapers mainly to laugh. . . . "
The last passage is characteristic of the alienation from politics which expresses itself in a complete, and by no means altogether unjustified,distrust of the reliability of any news which has gone through the filter of a system of communications controlled by vested interests. This distrust, however, is shifted to the scapegoat, the bureaucrat and the politician, usually attacked by the same press which is this subject's laughing stock.
Fz20, a high-scoring woman, differentiates between Roosevelt and the bureaucracy. 7
(Roosevelt and the New Deal? ) "I admired him, in fact I voted for him, althol! lgh I did not approve of a lot of things about the New Deal. All the bureaus. I would not have minded the spending if it had gone to help people. But I resented all the wasted motion-professional people digging ditches-and especially the expensive agencies stuffed with do-nothings, bureaucrats. "
Mz2z4b, a medium scorer of the Maritime School, is antipolitical in a tra- ditionalistic way, the ultimate direction of which is still undetermined.
"No respect for politicians: bunch of windbags. They try to sound people out and follow along. " (This is just the opposite of the usual argument according to which
7 This observation is in accordance with experience in Nazi Germany where all kinds of criticism and jokes about the party hierarchy were whispered everywhere, whilst Hitler seems to have been largely exempted from this kind of criticism. One heard frequently the remark: "The Fiihrer does not know about these things"-even when concentration camps were concerned.
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One may differentiate between two kinds of pseudoconservatives: those ? who profess to believe in democracy and are actually antidemocratic, and those who call themselves conservative while surreptitiously indulging in sub- versive wishes. This differentiation, however, is somewhat rationalistic. It does not amount to much, either in terms of psychological motivations or of actual political decision. It seems to pertain merely to thin rationalizations: the core of the phenomenon is both times identical. The just-quoted 66zA belongs to the pseudoconservative group in the narrower sense and so does Mzo5, a prelaw student high on all scales, who stresses his conservative back- ground while admitting overt fascist leanings:
"Naturally, I get my Republican sentiments from my parents. But recently I have read more for myself, and I agree with them. . . . \V e are a conservative family. W e hate anything to do with socialism. My father regretted that he voted for F. D. R. in 1932? Father wrote to Senator Reynolds of South Carolina about the Nationalist Party. lt's not America First, it's not really isolationist, but we believe that our coun- try is being sold down the river. "
The overt link between father-fixation as discussed in the clinical chapters (Part II) and authoritarian persuasions in politics should be stressed. He uses a phrase familiar with fascists when they were faced with the defeat of Germany and the German system and yet somehow wished to cling to their
negative Utopia.
"America is fighting the war but we will lose the peace if we win the war. I can't see what I can possibly get out of it. "
Conversely, a striking example of pseudodemocratism in the narrower sense is offered at the beginning of the political section of the interview of the high-scoring man Mzo8, a strongly fascistic student of insect toxicol- ogy, discussed in the chapter on typology as representative of the extreme "manipulative" syndrome. He is against Roosevelt, against the New Deal, and against practically any social humanitarian idea. At the next moment, however, he says he did feel that he was "somewhat of a socialist. "
This is literally the pattern by which the German Nazis denounced the Weimar Republic in the name of authority unchecked by democratic con- trol, exalted the sacredness of private property, and simultaneously inserted the word socialist into the vernacular of their own party. It is obvious that this kind of "socialism," which actually amounts merely to the curtailment of individual liberties in the name of some ill-defined collectivity, blends very well with the desire for authoritarian control as expressed by those who style themselves as conservatives. Here the overt incompatibility between private interests (what he "gets out of it") and objective political logic (the cer- tainty of an Allied victory) is by hook and crook put into the service of profascist postwar defeatism. No matter how it goes, democracy must lose. Psychologically, the destructive "impending doom" pattern is involved.
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? POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN INTERVIEW MA TERIAL 68 I
This defeatism is characteristic of another trait of pseudoconservative po- litical philosophy: sympathy with the fascist enemy, Hitler's Germany. This is easily rationalized as humane magnanimity and even as the democratic wish to give everybody a fair deal. It is the fifth-column mentality on which Hit- lerian propaganda in democratic countries drew heavily before the war and which has by no means been uprooted.
M zo6, a college student high on all scales, fairly rational in many respects, seems at first sight to be critical of Germany. By tracing grandiloquently the sources of German fascism to supposedly profound historical roots, largely invented themselves by fascist propaganda, however, he slips into an apolo- getic attitude:
"German people have always been aggressive, have loved pa~ades, have always had a big army. They received an unfair peace after the last war. The treaty of Ver- sailles was obviously unfair to them, and because they were hard up, they were will- ing to listen to a young man like Hitler when he came along. If there had been a better peace, there'd be no trouble now. Hitler came along with promises, and people were willing to go for him. They had huge unemployment, inflation, and so on. "
The legend of the "unjust" treaty of Versailles must feed on tremendous psy- chological resources-unconscious guilt feelings against the established sym- bol of prowess-in non-German countries: otherwise it could not have survived the Hitlerian war. That this subject's explanations of Hitler really mean sympathy is evidenced by a subsequent statement on Hitler's policy of exterminating the Jews, already quoted in Chapter XVI:
"Well, Hitler, carried things just a little too far. There was some justification- some are bad, but not all. But Hitler went on the idea that a rotten apple in the barrel will spoil all the rest of them. "
Still, even this subject clings to the democratic cloak and refrains from overt fascism. Asked about the Jews in this country he answers:
"Same problem but it's handled much better, because we're a democratic coun- try. "
While pseudoconservatism is, of course, predominantly a trait of high scorers, it is by no means lacking among low scorers. This pertains particularly to the apologetic attitude toward the Nazis. Thus, F133, a woman low on
prejudice though high on F, a young student of mathematics, calls herself "rather conservative. " Her "official" ideology is set against bigotry. But re- ferring to her Irish descent, she resents the English and this leads her to pro-German statements which, in harmony with her F score, more than merely hint at underlying fascist leanings:
"I am prejudiced against England. England gave a dirty deal to the Irish people. England says the Nazis are black and Russia is white, but I think England is black. She goes around conquering people and is not just at all; and I am opposed to
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Russia. It is true that they took up the cause of the people, but on the whole they are not right, and their type of government is inferior to ours. (\Vhat about the Nazis? ) The Germans lost everything; they just got hopeless. I don't believe in dividing Germany just in order to make Russia and England richer. It isn't true that Germany started the war-for war two people are necessary. It is not fair to put all the burden on one nation. The Germans will only feel more persecuted and fight more. One should leave the Germans to themselves. There is much too much em- phasis on how cruel the Nazis are. The Germans did not have a just peace. W e can't put our own Nazi regime in to run the Germans. The Russians will cause the next war. The devastation in Germany has been just too great. I am pessimistic because people believe that everybody is bad who is down, and those are good who are strong, and the strong ones cut in pieces the one who is down, and they are just practical and not just. "
The decisive shift occurs when the subject, after demanding "fairness" with regard to the problem of war guilt, protests against "too much emphasis" on Nazi atrocities.
ExcuRsus oN THE MEANING oF PsEUDOCONSERVATISM. The introduction of the term pseudoconservative which may often be replaced by pseudoliberal and even pseudoprogressive, necessitates a brief theoretical discussion of what is "pseudo" about the subjects in question and whether and to what extent the notion of genuine political ideologies can be upheld. All these terms have to be handled with the utmost caution and should never be hypostatized. The distinction between pseudo and genuine political ideologies has been in- troduced mainly in order to avoid the pitfall of oversimplification, of identi- fying the prejudiced person, and the prospective fascist in general, with "reactionism. " It has been established beyond any doubt that fascism in terms of efficient organization and technological achievement has many "pro- gressive" features. Moreover, it has been recognized long before our study that the general idea of "preserving the American way of living," as soon as it assumes the features of vigilantism, hides violently aggressive and destructive tendencies which pertain both to overt political manifestations and to charac- ter traits. However, it has to be emphasized that the idea of the genuine- ness of an attitude or of behavior set against its "overplaying," is some- how as problematic as that of, say, normality. Whether a person is a genuine or a pseudoconservative in overt political terms can be decided only in critical situations when he has to decide on his actions. As far as the distinction per- tains to psychological determinants, it has to be relativized. Since all our psychological urges are permeated by identifications of all levels and types, it is impossible ever completely to sever the "genuine" from what is "imita- tion. " It would be obviously nonsensical to call ungenuine those traits of a person which are based on the identification with his father. The idea of an
absolute individual per se, completely identical with itself and with nothing else, is an empty abstraction. There is no psychological borderline between the genuine and the "assumed. " Nor can the relation between the two ever
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be regarded as a static one. ? Today's pseudoconservative may become the genuine conservative of tomorrow.
In the light of these considerations, it will be of some methodological im- portance to formulate the distinction between "genuine" and "pseudo" with care. The simplest procedure, of course, would be to define both concepts operationally in terms of cluster relationships of the questionnaire and also of the interviews. One would have to call roughly pseudoconservative those who show blatant contradictions between their acceptance of all kinds of conventional and traditional values-by no means only in the political sphere -and their simultaneous acceptance of the more destructive clusters of the F scale, such as cynicism, punitiveness, and violent anti-Semitism. Yet, this procedure is somewhat arbitrary and mechanical. At its best, it would define the terms but never help to understand their implicit etiology. It would be more satisfactory to base the distinction on a psychological hypothesis that makes sense. An hypothesis that might serve is one that takes as its point of departure the differentiation between successful or unsuccessful identifica- tion. This would imply that the "genuine" conservative characters would be those who essentially or at least temporarily succeeded in their identification with authoritarian patterns without considerable carry-overs of their emo- tional conflicts-without strong ambivalence and destructive countertend- encies. Conversely, the "pseudo" traits are characteristic of those whose au- thoritarian identification succeeded only on a superficial level. They are forced to overdo it continuously in order to convince themselves and the others that they belong, to quote the revolution-hater of San Quentin, to the right strata of society. The stubborn energy which they employ in order to accept conformist values constantly threatens to shatter these values them- selves, to make them turn into their opposite, just as their "fanatical" eager- ness to defend God and Country makes them join lunatic fringe rackets and sympathize with the enemies of their country.
Even this distinction, however, can claim only limited validity and is sub- ject to psychological dynamics. W e know from Freud that the identification with the father is always of a precarious nature and even in the "genuine" cases, where it seems to be well established, it may break down under the impact of a situation which substitutes the paternal superego by collectivized authority of the fascist brand.
Yet, with all these qualifications, the distinction still can claim some justi- fication under present conditions. It may be permissible to contrast the pseudoconservatives so far discussed with a "genuine" conservative taken from the Los Angeles sample which, as pointed out in Chapter I, included- in contrast to the Berkeley sample-a number of actual or self-styled mem- bers of the upper class.
Fsoo8 is low onE, middle on F, and high on PEC. She is a woman of old American stock, a direct descendant of Jefferson. She is apparently free of
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any vindictive sense of her social status and lays no emphasis on her good family or on her being a real member of the "right strata of society. " She is definitely nonprejudiced. Her T. A. T. shows traits of a somewhat neurotic overoptimism which may or may not be a product of reaction-formation. One might venture that the "genuine" conservatives who still survive and whose number is probably shrinking, may develop an increasingly bad con- science because they become aware of the rapid development of important conservative layers of American society into the direction of labor baiting and race hatred. The more this tendency increases, the more the "genuine" conservative seems to feel compelled to profess democratic ideals, even if they are somewhat incompatible with his own upbringing and psychological patterns. If this observation could be generalized, it would imply that the
"genuine" conservatives are more and more driven into the liberal camp by today's social dynamics. This may help to explain why it is so hard to find any striking examples for genuine conservatism among high scorers.
If our assumption is correct, that pseudoconservatism is based-as far as its psychological aspect is concerned-on incomplete identification, it becomes understandable why it is linked to a trait which also plays a considerable role within the pattern of conventionality: identification with higher social groups. The identification that failed is probably in most cases that with the father. Those people in whom this failure does not result in any real antago- nism to authority, who accept the authoritarian pattern without, however, internalizing it, are likely to be those who identify themselves sociologically with higher social groups. This would be in harmony with the fact that the fascist movement in Germany drew heavily on frustrated middle-class peo- ple of all kinds: of those who had lost their economic basis without being ready to admit their being declasse; of those who did not see any chances for themselves but the shortcut of joining a powerful movement which promised them jobs and ultimately a successful war. This socioeconomic aspect of pseudoconservatism is often hard to distinguish from the psychological one. To the prospective fascist his social identification is as precarious as that with the father. At the social root of this phenomenon is probably the fact that to rise by the means of "normal" economic competition becomes increasingly difficult, so that people who want to "make it"-which leads back to the psychological situation-are forced to seek other ways in order to be admitted into the ruling group. They must look for a kind of "co-optation," some- what after the fashion of those who want to be admitted to a smart club. Snob- bery, so violently denounced by the fascist, probably for reasons of projec- tion, has been democratized and is part and parcel of their own mental make-up: who wants to make a "career" must really rely on "pull and climb- ing" rather than on individual merit in business or the professions. Identifica- tion with higher groups is the presupposition for climbing, or at least appears so to the outsider, whereas the "genuine" conservative group is utterly al-
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lergic to it. However, the man ? who often, in accordance with the old Horatio Alger ideology, maintains his own "upward social mobility" draws from it at least some narcissistic gratifications and felicitously anticipates internally a status which he ultimately hopes to attain in reality.
Here two examples of high scorers may be quoted, both again taken from the Los Angeles group.
soo6, an extreme high scorer on all scales, one of the few of our inter- viewees who actually admitted that they want to kill the Jews (see his in- terview in Chapter XVI, p. 636), is the grandson of a dentist, whereas his father failed to become one, and he hopes fervently to regain the grand- father's social status. As to the problem of failure in identification, it is sig- nificant in this case that the image of the father is replaced by that of the grandfather-just as the idea of "having seen better times," of a good family background clouded over by recent economic developments, played a? large role with the prefascist, postinflation generation in Germany.
501;, who is also extremely high on all scales, describes her father as a doctor, whereas he is actually a chiropractor-a habit which seems to be largely shared by the chiropractors themselves. If the German example teaches anything and if our concept of semierudition proves to be correct, one may expect that nonacademic "scientists" and "doctors" are strongly attracted by the fascist platform. 5
5. THE USURP A TION COMPLEX
The goal toward which the pseudoconservative mentality strives-diffusedly and semiconsciously-is to establish a dictatorship of the economically strong- est group. This is to be achieved by means of a mass movement, one which promises security and privileges to the so-called "little man" (that is to say, wor_ried members of the middle and lower middle class who still cling to their status and their supposed independence), if they join with the right people at the right time. This wish appears throughout pseudoconservative ideology in mirrored reflection. Government by representation is accused of perverting democracy. Roosevelt and the New Deal particularly are said to have usurped power and to have entrenched themselves dictatorially. Thus
5 The role played by shady pseudo-medicine in Nazi Germany is sociologically linked to the ascendance of declasse intellectuals under National Socialism, psychologically to the paranoid twist of Nazi ideology as well as of the personalities of many leaders. There is a direct interconnection between the doctrine of "purity of blood" and the glorification of sundry purifiers of the body. The first academic chair created by Hitler was one for "natural healing. '' His own physician was a quack, Rimmler's a chiropractor, and Rudolf Hess encouraged all kinds of superstitious approaches to medicine. It should be noted that analogous tendencies make themselves felt in the American "lunatic fringe. " One of our native crackpot agitators combines Jew-baiting with a "health food" campaign, directed against the delikatessen which are not only denounced as being Jewish but also as unwholesome. The imagery of Jewish food throughout the fascist ideology deserves careful examination.
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pseudoconservatives accuse the progressives of the very thing which they would like to do, and they utilize their indictment as a pretext for "throw- ing the rascals out. " They call for a defense of democracy against its "abuses" and would, through attacking the "abuses," ultimately abolish democracy altogether. Pseudoconservative ideology harmonizes completely with psy- chological projectivity.
One may well ask why people so concerned with power, if they really see the Roosevelt policy as a strong-armed dictatorship, do not endorse it and feel happy about it. The reasons, it would seem, are several. First, the social types representative of pseudoconservatism are not or do not regard them- selves as beneficiaries of the New Deal. It appears to them as a government for the unemployed and for labor; and even if they themselves received some benefits from WPA or the closed shop, they are resentful about it because this demonstrates to them what they are least willing to admit: that their belonging to the middle classes has lost its economic foundation. Second, to them, the Roosevelt administration never was really strong enough. They sense very well the degree to which the New Deal was handicapped by the Supreme Court and by Congress; they know or have an inkling of the con- cessions Roosevelt had to make- he had to give conspicuous jobs to several men opposed to his political line, e. g. , Jesse Jones; they cry "dictator" because they realize that the New Deal was no dictatorship at all and that it did not fit within the authoritarian pattern of their over-all ideology. Thirdly, their idea of the strong man, no matter in what glowing personalized terms it may be expressed, is colored by an image of real strength: the back- ing of the most powerful industrial groups. To them, progressives in the government are real usurpers, not so much because they have acquired by shrewd and illegal manipulation rights incompatible with American democ- racy, but rather because they assume a power position which should be re- served for the "right people. " Pseudoconservatives have an underlying sense of "legitimacy": legitimate rulers are those who are actually in command of the machinery of production-not those who owe their ephemeral power to formal political processes. This last motif, which also plays a heavy role in the prehistory of German fascism, is to be taken the more seriously because it does not altogether contradict social reality. As long as democracy is really a formal system of political government which made, under Roosevelt, cer-
tain inroads into economic fields but never touched upon the economic fun- damentals, it is true that the life of the people depends on the economic organization of the country and, in the last analysis, on those who control American industry, more than on the chosen representatives of the people. Pseudoconservatives sense an element of untruth in the idea of "their" demo- cratic government, and realize that they do not really determine their fate as social beings by going to the polls. Resentment of this state of affairs, how- ever, is not directed against the dangerous contradiction between economic
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inequality and formal political equality but against the democratic form as such. Instead of trying to give to this form its adequate content, they want to do away with the form of democracy itself and to bring about the direct control of those whom they deem the most powerful anyway.
This background of the dictatorship idea, that democracy is no reality under prevailing conditions, may be evidenced by two quotations from me- dium-scoring men. M1223h follows up his statement that the Democrats are going communistic and that the unions should be curbed, by the statement, "The people aren't running the country. "
M1225a speaks cautiously about democracy: "It's supposed to be a govern- ment of the people by representation. "
Asked whether we had it in this country he answers bluntly: No, but qualifies this immediately with the statement-a pretty standardized one- "We have as close to it as there is. "
Similarly, M1223h qualifies his critique by the contention that "America is still fairly democratic but going away from democracy too fast. "
The contradictory utterances of these two men, apart from wishful think- ing, indicate that they are perturbed by the antagonism between formal political democracy and actual social control. They just reach the point where they see this antagonism. They did not dare, however, to explain it but rather retract their own opinions in order not to become "unrealistic. " Conformism works as a brake on their political thinking.
A few examples of the usurpation fantasy proper follow.
M2o8, who obtained a middle score on E and F and a high score on PEC, insists, according to his interviewer,
that,President Roosevelt lost the popular vote by several thousand votes, accord- ing to counts he and his father made following the news reports over the radio, implying that the official count had been incorrect.
While this man is for "initiative and competition, against government bungling and inefficiencies," he has boundless confidence in social control exercised by the proper organization:
"The best organizations for a citizen to belong to in order to influence the condi- tions in his community are local Chambers of Commerce. By improving your city, you make it attractive and create wealth. " He said the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce was something he belonged to and his organization would send out postcards very soon to every single individual in the city in a huge membership drive.
M656, a high-scoring prison inmate (grand theft and forgery), was inter- viewed shortly after President Roosevelt's death and when asked what he regarded as the greatest danger facing this country, said
"the government we just had, the one that brought on the war, the Nazi-dictator- ship. "
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The high-scoring man Mzo8, the aforementioned insect toxicologist, is convinced that Roosevelt only carried out Hoover's ideas, a statement not infrequent among prejudiced subjects who regard the New Deal as usurpa- tion in so far as it has "stolen" its ideas from its opponents. Asked further about Roosevelt, he goes on:
"he usurped power that was necessary to do something-he took a lot more power than a lot. . . . He has been in too long, and there were deals on the fire that we
don't know about with Churchill or Stalin.
"
In the end the usurper idea coincides with that of the conspirator who makes "secret deals" detrimental to his country.
The frequency and intensity of the usurper idea, together with the fan- tastic nature of many of the pertinent assertions in our material justifies our calling it a "complex," that is to say, looking for a widespread and stable psychological configuration on which this idea feeds. As far as we know, no attention has been given to this complex in psychological literature, though the frequency of usurpation conflicts throughout occidental drama warrants the assumption that there must be some deep-rooted basis in instinctual dy- namics for it. Suffice it to recollect that Shakespeare's most famous tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Richard III deal in one way or the other with usurpation, and that the usurper theme runs as a red thread through the whole dramatic work of Schiller, from Franz Moor in the "Robbers" to Demetrius. On a sociopsychological level, that is to say com- paratively abstractly and superficially, an explanation is easy at hand. The existence of power and privilege, demanding sacrifices of all those who do not share in its advantages, provokes resentment and hurts deeply the longing for equality and justice evolved throughout the history of our culture. In the
depth of his heart, everyone regards any privilege as illegitimate. Yet one is forced continuously, in order to get along in the world as it is, to adjust him- self to the system of power relationships that actually defines this world. This process has been going on over the ages, and its results have become part and parcel of today's personalities. This means that people have learned to repress their resentment of privilege and to accept as legitimate just that which is suspected of being illegitimate. But since human sufferings from the survival of privilege have never ceased, adjustment to it has never become complete. Hence the prevailing attitude towards privileges is essentially am- bivalent. While it is being accepted consciously, the underlying resentment is displaced unconsciously. This is done in such a way that a kind of emo- tional compromise between our forced acceptance of the existence of power, and resistance against it, is reached. Resentment is shifted from the "legiti- , mate" representatives of power to those who want to take it away from them, who identify themselves, in their aims, with power but violate, at the same time, the code of existent power relations. The ideal object of this
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shift is the political usurper'in whom one can denounce "greed for power" while at the same time taking a positive stand with regard to established power. Still, sympathy with the usurper survives at the bottom. It is the conflict between this sympathy and our displaced aggressiveness which quali- fies him for dramatic conflict. ?
There is reason to believe, however, that this line of thought does not fully explain the usurper complex. Much more deep-lying, archaic mech- anisms seem to be involved. . As a rule, the usurper complex is linked with the problem of the family. The usurper is he who claims to be the member of a family to which he does not belong, or at least to pretend to rights due to another. family. It may be noted that even in the Oedipus legend, the usurper complex is involved in so far as Oedipus believes himself to be the real child of his foster-parents, and this error accounts for his tragic en- tanglement. We venture, with all due reservation, the hypothesis that this has something to do with an observation that can be made not infrequently: that people are afraid of not really being the children of their parents. This fear may be based on the dim awareness that the order of the family, which stands for civilization in the form in which we know it, is not identical with "nature" -that our biological origin does not coincide with the institutional framework of marriage and monogamy, that "the stork brings us from the pond. " We sense that the shelter of civilization is not safe, that the house of the family is built on shaky ground. We project our uneasiness upon the us? urper, the image of him who is not his parents' child, who becomes psychologically a kind of ritualized, institutional "victim" whose annihilation is unconsciously supposed to bring us rest and security. It may very well be that our tend- ency to "look for the usurper" has its origin in psychological resources as deep as those here suggested.
6. F. D. R.
The usurpation complex is focused on Roosevelt, whose name evokes the sharpest differences between high and low scorers that are to be found in the interview material on politico-economic topics.
It hardly needs to be said that all the statements touching upon the late president are personalized. The political issues involved appear mainly as qualities of the man himself. He is criticized and praised because he is this or that, not because he stands for this or that. The most drastic ? accusation is that of war-monger. This accusation often assumes the form of those con- spiracy fantasies which are so highly characteristic of the usurper complex.
The high-scoring man M664c, serving a San Quentin term of one year for forgery and check writing, professes to have been originally pro-Roose- velt.
"Hell, at that (election) I was strong for Roosevelt, we had an awful depression, one thing he'd done for that state he put that dam there. . . . We didn't need the war
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though. (Why did we get into it? ) Started sending that iron over to Japan and then helping England. . . . "
The idea of the "red Roosevelt" belongs to the same class of objections and paranoid exaggerations of political antipathies. Though much more common among subjects who score high on E and PEC, it can sometimes be found in the statements of low scorers. Note the remarks of Fz4o, a young nursery school helper, rated according to her questionnaire score as low on E but high on A-S and PEC. She first refers to her father.
(Is your father anti-Roosevelt? ) "Oh, sure he is. He just don't have any use for Roosevelt. It's all communism that is what he says. (And what do you think about it? ) Oh, I don't know. I guess he's right. He ought to know. That's all he thinks about-politics-politics. "
Sometimes the suspicion that Roosevelt was a Russophile war-monger is cloaked by legalistic argumentations, such as the statement that he left the country illegally during the war.
F zoz, a woman who stands high on all scales,' a somewhat frustrated young college student, relates that her father is "extremely anti-Roosevelt," and, when asked why, answers:
"No president is supposed to leave the country without the consent of Congress, and he goes whenever he feels like it. He is being a little too dictatorial. "
With regard to domestic politics, F359, the accountant in a government department who was quoted before (Chapter XVI, p. 616), states quite clearly and in fairly objective terms the contradiction which seems at the hub of anti-Roosevelt sentiment:
Subject did not like Roosevelt because of WPA. It creates a class of lazy people who would rather get $20 a week than work. She feels that Roosevelt did not ac- complish what he set out to do-raise the stand? ard of the poorer classes.
The conceptions of communist, internationalist, and war-monger are close to another one previously mentioned-that of the snob. Just as the fascist agitator persistently mixes up radicals and bankers, claiming that the latter financed the revolution and that the former seek financial gains, the contradictory ideas of an ultraleftist and an exclusive person alienated from the people are brought together by anti-Roosevelt sentiment. One may ven- ture the hypothesis that the ultimate content of both objections is the same: the resentment of the frustrated middle-class person against those who rep- resent the idea of happiness, be it by wanting other people-even the "lazy ones"-to be happy, be it that they are enjoying life themselves. This irra- tionality can be grasped better on the level of personality than on that of ideology.
Mz223h, of the Maritime School, with medium scores onE and PEC, but high on F, does not like Roosevelt-"a socialite; got too much power. " Simi-
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lady, the high-scoring married woman F117, 37 years old, employed m a Public Health Department,
feels that Roosevelt does not know how to handle money; he was born with a great deal. Now he throws it around-"millions here and millions there. "
This is the exact opposite of the praise of Dewey, whose more humble origin is supposed to guarantee thriftiness. The "democratic cloak" of the pseudoconservative consists, in cases like these, in the assertion that measures taken for the benefit of the people cannot be approved because the one who carried them out is not one of the people and therefore, in a way, has no right to act in their behalf-he is a usurper. Really folksy men, one might suppose, would rather let them starve.
The idea that the late President was too old and too ill, and that the New Deal was decrepit plays a particular role among anti-Roosevelt arguments. The dark forebodings about Roosevelt's death have come true. Yet, one may suspect here a psychological element: the fear of his death often rationalizes the wish for it. Moreover, the idea of his supposed old age pertains to the il- legitimacy complex: he should give way to others, to the "young generation," to fresh blood. This is in keeping with the fact that Gennan Nazism often denounced the over-age of the representatives of the Weimar Republic, and that Italian fascism heavily emphasized the idea of youth per se. Ultimately, some light is shed on the whole complex of the President's age and illness by our clinical findings, pertaining to the tendency of our high scorers to praise physical health and vigor as the outstanding quality of their parents, particu:. . lady of the mother (pp. 340 if. ). This is due to the general "extemalization" of values, the anti-intraceptiveness of the prejudiced personalities who seem to be continuously afraid of illnesses. If there is an interconnection between at least some syndromes of high scorers and psychotic dispositions, one may also think of the disproportionate role played by the concern with one's own body in many schizophrenics-a phenomenon linked to the mechanisms of "depersonalization"6 which represents the extreme of the "ego-alienness" of the id characteristic of the high scoring subject. It should be remembered once again how large a role was played by ideas such as physical health, purity of the blood, and syphilophobia throughout fascist ideology.
M104, a high scoring young man of the Public Speaking Class, who changed from studying engineering to law is an example:
Subject would have voted for Dewey. The whole New Deal has become very stagnant, old, and decrepit. He feels Roosevelt has done some fine things, some of his experiments were about as good a cure as you could get for the depression, but it is now time for a change in party, a new President, younger blood.
As in most cases, the argument has, of course, a "rational" aspect too- the Roosevelt government held office for a longer period than any other
6 Cf. Otto Fenichel (27).
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one in American history. However, the complaints about "too long" are ut- tered only in the name of "changing the guard," not in the name of concrete progressive ideas which could be brought about by younger people.
Resentment against old people has a psychological aspect by which it seems to be linked to anti-Semitism. There is reason to believe that some subjects displace their hostility against the father upon aged persons and the notion of old age as such. Old people are, as it were, earmarked for death. In accordance with this pattern, the image of the Jew often bears features of the old man, thus allowing for the discharge of repressed hostility against the father. Judaism is regarded, not incidentally, as the religion of the father and Christianity that of the son. The most emphatic stereotype of the Jew, that of the inhabitant of the Eastern ghetto, bears attributes of the old, such as the beard or worn and obsolete clothes.
Hostility for the aged has, to be sure, a sociological as well as a psycho- logical aspect: old people who cannot work any more are regarded as useless and are, therefore, rejected. But this idea, like those just discussed, has little immediate bearing upon the person of Roosevelt; rather, they are transferred to him after aggr. ession has turned against him. The universally ambivalent role of the President as a father figure thus makes itself felt.
As to those who are in favor of Roosevelt, there are two clear-cut main motifs which are almost the reverse of those found in the Roosevelt haters. The man "who thinks too much of himself and assumes dictatorial powers" is now praised as a great personality; the leftist and initiator of the New Deal is loved as a friend of the underdog.
The "great personality" motif appears in the statement of the low-scoring man, M711, an interviewer in government employment, with many of the typical "low" characteristics of mildness, gentleness, and indecision.
(Roosevelt) "seemed to be the only man the country had produced that se'emed to have the qualifications for the assignment (of war). . . . I'd say his ability to get along with other people . . . had been pretty responsible in the unification of our country. "
The young woman, F126, scores low on A-S and E, middle on F, and high on PEC. She is studying journalism but actually is interested in "creative writing. " She states
that her brother-in-law can find so many things to criticize and, of course, there are plenty. "But I think the President is for the underdog, and I've always been for the underdog. "
The high-scoring man, Mzo2, a student of seismology who went to college because he did not want to be "lined up as just an electrician," praises Roose- velt's "talent":
"Well, if another candidate had approached Roosevelt, I'd have voted for him. But, no other candidate approached his talent. "
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M zo6, another hjgh-scoring man, again characterized by upward social mobility, is pro-Roosevelt for reasons that are just the opposite of those given by one group of his critics for disliking him, although he too suffers from the "old age" complex.
"Roosevelt has done a wonderful job but we should have a young man. Roosevelt stabilized the nation's currency, helped on unemployment, has handled foreign rela- tions marvelously. He is a common man, goes fishing, takes time for relaxation- that's what I like. Mrs. Roosevelt has been active in political and social affairs. "
The explanation of the deviation of this highly prejudiced man, who is beset by power ideas and objects to the Jews because they supposedly strive for power, is that he himself
"had infantile paralysis, and you appreciate what Roosevelt has done. "
The inference may be allowed that if the same man is praised by some people as a "common man" and by others blamed as a "socialite," these judg- ments express subjective value scales rather than objective facts.
The established status of a President of the United States, the irrefutable success of Roosevelt, and, one may add, his tremendous impact as a symbolic father figure on the unconscious, seem in more cases than this particular one to check the usurper complex of the pse~doconservative and allow only for vague attacks about which there is something half~hearted, as if they were being made with a bad conscience.
7. BUREAUCRA TS AND POLITICIANS
There is no mercy, however, for those to whom Roosevelt is supposed to have delegated power. They are usurpers, parasites, know nothing about the people, and should, one may well assume, be replaced by the "right men. " The wealth of statements against bureaucrats and politicians in our interview material is tremendous. Although it comes mostly from high scorers, it is by no means confined to them, and may again be regarded as one of those patterns of political ideology which spread over the well-defined border lines of right vs. left.
It is beyond the scope of the present study to analyze the amount of truth inherent in American distrust of professional politics. Nor should it be denied that a tremendously swollen bureaucratic apparatus, such as that which was necessitated by war conditions and which was, to a certain extent, safe from public criticism, develops unpleasant features, and that the machinery has an inbound tendency to entrench itself and to perpetuate itself for its own sake. However, as one analyzes carefully the standard criticism of the bureaucrats and politicians, he finds very little evidence of such observations, very few specific indictments of bureaucratic institutions which prove them to be incompetent. It is impossible to escape the impression that "the bureau- crat," with the help of some sections of the press, and some radio commenta-
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tors, has become a magic word, that he functions as a scapegoat to be blamed indiscriminately for all kinds of unsatisfactory conditions, somewhat remi- niscent of the anti-Semitic imagery of the Jew with which that of the bureau- crat is often enough merged. At any rate, the frequency and intensity of antibureaucratic and antipolitician invectives is quite out of proportion with any possible experience. Resentment about the "alienation" of the political sphere as a whole, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, is turned against those who represent the political sphere. The bureaucrat is the per- sonalization of ununderstandable politics, of a depersonalized world.
Striking examples of this general attitude of high scorers are provided by the above-quoted political statements of Mack (p. 34) and of the markedly anti-Semitic manager of a leather factory, M359 (p. 666 of this chapter).
Sometimes the invectives against politics terminate in tautologies: politics is blamed for being too political.
M123oa is a young welder who wanted to study engineering. He scores high onE but low on F and PEC.
(What thinking of political trends today? ) "Well, they're very disrupted. We discussed them a lot, and a lot of things we don't like. The admin~tration seems to be so tied up in politics. . . . Statesmanship is gone completely. . . ? :Can't believe any-
r thing you read in the newspapers. We read the newspapers mainly to laugh. . . . "
The last passage is characteristic of the alienation from politics which expresses itself in a complete, and by no means altogether unjustified,distrust of the reliability of any news which has gone through the filter of a system of communications controlled by vested interests. This distrust, however, is shifted to the scapegoat, the bureaucrat and the politician, usually attacked by the same press which is this subject's laughing stock.
Fz20, a high-scoring woman, differentiates between Roosevelt and the bureaucracy. 7
(Roosevelt and the New Deal? ) "I admired him, in fact I voted for him, althol! lgh I did not approve of a lot of things about the New Deal. All the bureaus. I would not have minded the spending if it had gone to help people. But I resented all the wasted motion-professional people digging ditches-and especially the expensive agencies stuffed with do-nothings, bureaucrats. "
Mz2z4b, a medium scorer of the Maritime School, is antipolitical in a tra- ditionalistic way, the ultimate direction of which is still undetermined.
"No respect for politicians: bunch of windbags. They try to sound people out and follow along. " (This is just the opposite of the usual argument according to which
7 This observation is in accordance with experience in Nazi Germany where all kinds of criticism and jokes about the party hierarchy were whispered everywhere, whilst Hitler seems to have been largely exempted from this kind of criticism. One heard frequently the remark: "The Fiihrer does not know about these things"-even when concentration camps were concerned.
