Vad betyder ordet populism?

In the post–World War II era The Authoritarian Personality became an ideological weapon against historical American populist movements, especially McCarthyism (Gottfried 1998; Lasch 1991, 455ff). “[T]he people as a whole had little understanding of liberal democracy and . . . important questions of public policy would be decided by educated elites, not submitted to popular vote” (Lasch 1991, 455).
These trends are exemplified in The Politics of Unreason, a volume in the Patterns of American Prejudice Series funded by the ADL and written by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab (1970). (Raab and Lipset also wrote Prejudice and Society, published by the ADL in 1959. Again, as in the Studies in Prejudice Series [funded by the AJCommittee] there is a link between academic research on ethnic relations and Jewish activist organizations. Raab’s career has combined academic scholarship with deep involvement as a Jewish ethnic activist; see Ch. 7, note 1.) As indicated by the title, The Politics of Unreason analyses political and ideological expressions of ethnocentrism by European-derived peoples as irrational and as being unrelated to legitimate ethnic interests in retaining political power. “Right-wing extremist” movements aim at retaining or restoring the power of the European-derived majority of the United States, but “Extremist politics is the politics of despair” (Lipset & Raab 1970, 3). For Lipset and Raab, tolerance of cultural and ethnic pluralism is a defining feature of democracy, so that groups that oppose cultural and ethnic pluralism are by definition extremist and anti-democratic. Indeed, citing Edward A. Shils (1956, 154), they conceptualize pluralism as implying multiple centers of power without domination by any one group—a view in which the self-interest of ethnic groups in retaining and expanding their power is conceptualized as fundamentally anti-democratic. Attempts by majorities to resist the increase in the power and influence of other groups are therefore contrary to “the fixed spiritual center of the democratic political process” (p. 5). “Extremism is anti-pluralism. . . . And the operational heart of extremism is the repression of difference and dissent” (p. 6; italics in text).
Right-wing extremism is condemned for its moralism—an ironic move given the centrality of a sense of moral superiority that pervades the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements reviewed here, not to mention Lipset and Raab’s own analysis in which right-wing extremism is labeled “an absolute political evil” (p. 4) because of its links with authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Right-wing extremism is also condemned for its tendency to advocate simple solutions to complex problems, which, as noted by Lasch (1991), is a plea that solutions to social problems should be formulated by an intellectual elite. And finally, right-wing extremism is condemned because of its tendency to distrust institutions that intervene between the people and their direct exercise of power, another plea for the power of elites: “Populism identifies the will of the people with justice and morality” (p. 13). The conclusion of this analysis is that democracy is identified not with the power of the people to pursue their perceived interests. Rather, democracy is conceptualized as guaranteeing that majorities will not resist the expansion of power of minorities even if that means a decline in their own power.
Viewed at its most abstract level, a fundamental agenda is thus to influence the European-derived peoples of the United States to view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology. Adorno’s concept of the “pseudo-conservative” was used by influential intellectuals such as Harvard historian Richard Hofstadter to condemn departures from liberal orthodoxy in terms of the psychopathology of “status anxiety.” Hofstadter developed the “consensus” approach to history, characterized by Nugent (1963, 22) as having “a querulous view of popular movements, which seem to threaten the leadership of an urbanized, often academic, intelligentsia or elite, and the use of concepts that originated in the behavioral sciences.” In terms derived entirely from the Authoritarian Personality studies, pseudo-conservatism is diagnosed as “among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission” (Hofstadter 1965, 58). As Nugent (1963, 26) points out, this perspective largely ignored the “concrete economic and political reality involved in populism and therefore left it to be viewed fundamentally in terms of the psychopathological and irrational.” This is precisely the method of The Authoritarian Personality: Real conflicts of interest between ethnic groups are conceptualized as nothing more than the irrational projections of the inadequate personalities of majority group members.

Another good example of this intellectual onslaught on the lower middle-class associated with the Frankfurt School is Erich Fromm’s (1941) Escape from Freedom, in which the lower middle-class is regarded as highly prone to developing “sado-masochistic” reaction formations (as indicated by participating in authoritarian groups!) as a response to their economic and social status frustrations. It is not surprising that the lower middle-class target of this intellectual onslaught—including, one might add, the mittlestand of Wilhelminian German politics—has historically been prone to anti-Semitism as an explanation of their downward social mobility and their frustrated attempts to achieve upward social mobility. This group has also been prone to joining cohesive authoritarian groups as a means of attaining their political goals. But within the context of The Authoritarian Personality, the desire for upward social mobility and the concern with downward social mobility characteristic The Frankfurt School and Pathologization of many supporters of populist movements are signs of a specific psychiatric disorder, pathetic results of inappropriate socialization that would disappear in the liberalized utopian society of the future.

The elitism in their [the New York Intellectuals’] outlook was not a socioeconomic sort dependent on upper-class privileges, of course, but rather an intellectual elitism—a Jeffersonian aristocracy of talent, ability, intelligence, and critical acuity. They were worried about maintaining the intellectual vocation and its values. Further, they were the elite in the sense of being elect or chosen. But all these types of elitism had some connection: they were ways of conserving power for one group, and they resulted in a patronizing condescension toward the lower orders of society. (Jumonville 1991, 169)

This condescension and failure to respect others’ ideas are particularly obvious in the New York Intellectuals’ attitudes toward traditional American culture, especially the culture of rural America. There is a large overlap between the New York Intellectuals and the anti-populist forces who, as discussed in Chapter 5, used The Authoritarian Personality to pathologize the behavior of gentile Americans and particularly the lower middle class. The New York Intellectuals were cultural elitists who abhorred cultural democracy and feared the masses while nevertheless remaining consistently left-of-center politically. The movement was “a leftist elitism—a leftist conservatism, we might say—that slowly evolved into . . . neoconservatism (Jumonville 1991, 185). The New York Intellectuals associated rural America with “nativism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and fascism as well as with anti-intellectualism and provincialism; the urban was associated antithetically with ethnic and cultural tolerance, with internationalism, and with advanced ideas. . . . The New York Intellectuals simply began with the assumption that the rural—with which they associated much of American tradition and most of the territory beyond New York—had little to contribute to a cosmopolitan culture. . . . By interpreting cultural and political issues through the urban-rural lens, writers could even mask assertions of superiority and expressions of anti-democratic sentiments as the judgments of an objective expertise” (Cooney 1986, 267–268; italics in text). In Chapter 7 the battle between this urbanized intellectual and political establishment and rural America is joined over the issue of immigration, in this case with the support of all of the mainstream Jewish political organizations.