Fascism: Why Not Here?

7 Authoritarianism

153 AUTHORITARIANISM ——7—— IN 1961 A YALE PSYCHOLOGIST NAMED Stanley Milgram set out to see whether a German penchant for obedience could explain the rise of the National Socialists and the ensuing fall into totalitarianism, war, genocide, and ruin. His intent was to compare Germans with people of other cultures in terms of their willingness to follow orders, even when those orders were morally odious. He established a baseline using American subjects. He contrived an experiment by which subjects would be cast in the role of “teachers” who monitored “learners” as they tried to memorize pairs of words. Each time a learner failed to remember a word pair, the teacher was required to administer an electric shock as a negative reinforcement. The shock was to be increased with each error and could go up to what seemed to be a lethal level. The teachers were unaware that the learner was always the researcher’s confederate, a professional actor making errors according to plan, and that no actual shocks were delivered. Expecting that most teachers would refuse to administer the punishment as soon as it became apparent that the learner was suffering, Milgram was stunned to find that fully half the subjects continued to administer shocks all the way up the scale to the maximum voltage. The confederate learner by that time had screamed, begged to be released, and finally ceased responding altogether. It appeared that for many teachers, simply nothing could prick their consciences enough to stop tormenting their fellow humans. Milgram never got around to studying the Germans. He had already learned that many people, Americans included, had the capacity for following the dictates of a morally questionable authority. 154 ❙ FASCISM: WHY NOT HERE? Milgram was just one of many scholars who reacted to the Third Reich with research seeking to explain how and why people could be made to support such a criminal regime and to participate in its crimes themselves. Even before World War II ended, scholars had taken up the question of how National Socialism and other forms of totalitarianism could have taken root in the technologically and socially advanced twentieth century. Erich Fromm had raised the question in 1941, observing that the modern age and its freedoms had removed many of the comforting constraints of the past; instead, in times of crisis and uncertainty, people sought an “escape from freedom” in authoritarian political regimes.1 In 1950 Theodor Adorno and his colleagues had explored with several associates the possibility that there might be an authoritarian personality type that could account for the rise of fascism in Germany. Using psychometric techniques that were advanced for the time, they found that certain kinds of beliefs and values seemed to occur together in individuals, creating a syndrome of personality traits. This authoritarian type tended to show overly rigid respect for convention and authority, of course, but at the same time exhibited a tendency to believe in mysterious forces or secret conspiracies that control things. They admired toughness and rigidity and detested tenderness or imaginative thinking. They tended also to have an exaggerated concern with controlling sexuality and other pleasures.2 Such a personality type’s predominance in a society would seem to go a long way toward explaining why Germans might respond to crisis by seeking an authoritarian leader or accepting an authoritarian regime. It’s not hard to see that this personality type would be more accepting of the National Socialist view of the world and that the founding members of the party itself would be disproportionately composed of such types. After all, the Nazis promised strict enforcement of convention and harsh punishment for violators. They also promoted aggression in the pursuit of German ideals and inculcated militaristic toughness in German youth through the schools and youth associations, especially the Hitler Youth. And of course, the shadowy international Jewish conspiracy was their bread and butter. But there were two problems with this psychological approach to understanding the rise of authoritarian regimes. The first was that if differences were found between Germans and other peoples, this discovery would only raise a further question: how had these differences been created? Why might Germans be more psychologically predisposed to obedience than, say, Americans? In fact, many researchers looked for answers to this AUTHORITARIANISM ❙ 155 question, hypothesizing that rigid gender roles, patriarchal family structure , strict discipline of children, or some other characteristic of German life might account for such...