Here’s a good explanation from a 1998 book on Jewish fears relating to the Donald Trump phenomenon. He’s the first populist and nationalist in more than a century with a good chance of becoming president of the United States.
Kevin MacDonald writes in his book The Culture of Critique:
Although it is difficult to assess the effect of works like The Authoritarian Personality on gentile culture, there can be little question that the thrust of the radical critique of gentile culture in this work, as well as other works inspired by psychoanalysis and its derivatives, was to pathologize high-investment parenting
and upward social mobility, as well as pride in family, religion, and country, among gentiles. Certainly many of the central attitudes of the largely successful 1960s countercultural revolution find expression in The Authoritarian Personality, including idealizing rebellion against parents, low-investment sexual relationships, and scorn for upward social mobility, social status, family pride,
the Christian religion, and patriotism.
We have seen that despite this antagonistic perspective on gentile culture, Jewish 1960s radicals continued to identify with their parents and with Judaism. The countercultural revolution was in a very deep sense a mission to the gentiles in which adaptive behavior and group-identifications of gentiles were pathologized while Jewish group identification, ingroup pride, family pride, upward social mobility, and group continuity retained their psychological
importance and positive moral evaluation. In this regard, the behavior of these radicals was exactly analogous to that of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality and Jewish involvement in psychoanalysis and radical politics generally: Gentile culture and gentile group strategies are fundamentally pathological and are to be anathemized in the interests of making the world safe for Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.
As with political radicalism, only a rarified cultural elite could attain the extremely high level of mental health epitomized by the true liberal: The replacement of moral and political argument by reckless psychologizing not only enabled Adorno and his collaborators to dismiss unacceptable political opinions on medical grounds; it led them to set up an impossible standard of political health—one that only members of a self-constituted cultural vanguard
could consistently meet. In order to establish their emotional
“autonomy,” the subjects of their research had to hold the right
opinions and also to hold them deeply and spontaneously. (Lasch
1991, 453-455)
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 antidemocratic.
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).
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, rightwing 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.
Lasch also focuses on the work of Leslie Friedman, Daniel Bell, and
Seymour Martin Lipset as representing similar tendencies. (In a collection of essays edited by Daniel Bell [1955] entitled The New American Right, both Hofstadter and Lipset refer approvingly to The Authoritarian Personality as a way of understanding right-wing political attitudes and behavior.) Nugent (1963, 7ff) mentions an overlapping set of individuals who were not historians and
whose views were based mostly on impressions without any attempt at detailed study, including Victor Ferkiss, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Lipset, Edward A. Shils, and Peter Viereck. However, this group also included historians who “were among the luminaries of the historical profession” (Nugent 1963, 13), including Hofstadter, Oscar Handlin, and Max Lerner—all of whom were involved in intellectual activity in opposition to restrictionist immigration
policies (see Ch. 7). A common theme was what Nugent (1963, 15) terms “undue stress” on the image of the populist as an anti-Semite—an image that exaggerated and oversimplified the Populist movement but was sufficient to render the movement as morally repugnant. Novick (1988, 341) is more explicit in finding that Jewish identification was an important ingredient in this analysis, attributing the negative view of American populism held by some American Jewish historians (Hofstadter, Bell, and Lipset) to the fact that “they were one generation removed from the Eastern European shtetl [small Jewish town], where insurgent gentile peasants meant pogrom.”
There may be some truth in the latter comment, but I rather doubt that the interpretations of these Jewish historians were simply an irrational legacy left over from European anti-Semitism. There were also real conflicts of interest involved. On one side were Jewish intellectuals advancing their interests as an urbanized intellectual elite bent on ending Protestant, Anglo-Saxon demographic and cultural predominance. On the other side were what Higham (1984, 49)
terms “the common people of the South and West” who were battling to maintain their own cultural and demographic dominance. (The struggle between these groups is the theme of the discussion of Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy in Ch. 7 as well as the discussion of the New York Intellectuals in Ch. 6. Several of the intellectuals mentioned here are regarded as members of the New York Intellectuals [Bell, Glazer, Lipset, Riesman, and Shils], while others [Hofstadter and Handlin] may be regarded as peripheral
members; see Ch. 7, note 26.)
As the vanguard of an urbanized Jewish intellectual elite, this group of intellectuals was also contemptuous of the lower middle class generally. From the perspective of these intellectuals, this class clung to outworn folkways—conventional religiosity, hearth
and home, the sentimental cult of motherhood—and obsolete modes of production. It looked back to a mythical golden age in the past. It resented social classes more highly placed but internalized their standards, lording it over the poor instead of joining them in a common struggle against oppression. It was haunted by the fear of slipping farther down the social scale and clutched the shreds of respectability that distinguished it from the class of manual workers. Fiercely committed to a work ethic, it believed that anyone who wanted a job could find one and that those who refused to work should starve. Lacking liberal culture, it fell easy prey to all sorts of nostrums and political fads. (Lasch 1991, 458)
Recall also Nicholas von Hoffman’s (1996) comment on the attitude of
cultural superiority to the lower middle class held by the liberal defenders of communism during this period, such as Hofstadter and the editors of The New Republic. “In the ongoing kulturkampf dividing the society, the elites of Hollywood, Cambridge and liberal thank-tankery had little sympathy for bowlegged men with their American Legion caps and their fat wives, their yapping about Yalta and the Katyn Forest. Catholic and kitsch, looking out of their
picture windows at their flock of pink plastic flamingos, the lower middles and their foreign policy anguish were too infra dig to be taken seriously” (von Hoffman 1996, C2).
Another good example of this intellectual onslaught on the lower middleclass 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 of many supporters of populist movements is a sign of a specific psychiatric disorder, a pathetic result of inappropriate socialization that would disappear in the liberalized utopian society of the future.
Although Critical Theory ceased to be a guide for protest movements by the early 1970s (Wiggershaus 1994, 656), it has retained a very large influence in the intellectual world generally. In the 1970s, the Frankfurt School intellectuals continued to draw the fire of German conservatives who characterized them as the “intellectual foster-parents of terrorists” and as fomenters of “cultural
revolution to destroy the Christian West” (Wiggershaus 1994, 657). “The inseparability of concepts such as Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and neo-Marxism indicates that, from the 1930’s onwards, theoretically productive leftwing ideas in German-speaking countries had focused on Horkheimer, Adorno and the Institute of Social Research” (Wiggershaus 1994, 658).
However, the influence of the Frankfurt School has gone well beyond the German-speaking world, and not only with The Authoritarian Personality studies, the writings of Erich Fromm, and the enormously influential work of Herbert Marcuse as a countercultural guru to the New Left. In the contemporary intellectual world, there are several journals devoted to this legacy, including New German Critique, Cultural Critique, and Theory, Culture, and Society: Explorations in Critical Social Science. The influence of the Frankfurt School
increased greatly following the success of the New Left countercultural movement of the 1960s (Piccone 1993, xii). Reflecting its current influence in the humanities, the Frankfurt School retains pride of place as a major inspiration at the meetings of the notoriously postmodern Modern Language Association held
in December 1994. Kramer and Kimball (1995) describe the large number of laudatory references to Adorno, Horkheimer, and especially Walter Benjamin, who had the honor of being the most-referred-to scholar at the convention.144 Marxism and psychoanalysis were also major influences at the conference. One bright spot occurred when the radical Marxist Richard Ohmann acknowledged that the humanities had been revolutionized by the “critical legacy of the Sixties”
(p. 12)—a point of view, Kramer and Kimball note, often denied by the academic left but commonplace in conservative publications like The New Criterion and central to the perspective developed here.
Reflecting the congruence between the Frankfurt School and contemporary postmodernism, the enormously influential postmodernist Michel Foucault stated, “If I had known about the Frankfurt School in time, I would have been saved a great deal of work. I would not have said a certain amount of nonsense and would not have taken so many false trails trying not to get lost, when the Frankfurt School had already cleared the way” (in Wiggershaus 1994, 4).
Whereas the strategy of the Frankfurt School was to deconstruct universalist, scientific thinking by the use of “critical reason,” postmodernism has opted for complete relativism and the lack of objective standards of any kind in the interests of preventing any general theories of society or universally valid philosophical or moral systems (Norris 1993, 287ff).145
Contemporary postmodernism and multiculturalist ideology (see, e.g., Gless & Herrnstein Smith 1992) have adopted several central pillars of the Frankfurt School: the fundamental priority of ethics and values in approaching education and the social sciences; empirical science as oppressive and an aspect of social domination; a rejection of the possibility of shared values or any sense of
universalism or national culture (see also Jacoby’s [1995, 35] discussion of “post-colonial theory”—another intellectual descendant of the Frankfurt School); a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in which any attempt to construct such universals or a national culture is energetically resisted and “deconstructed”—essentially the same activity termed by Adorno “negative dialectics.” There is an implicit acceptance of a Balkanized model of society in which certain groups and their interests have a priori moral value and there is no possibility of developing a scientific, rational theory of any particular group, much less a theory of panhuman universals. Both the Frankfurt School and postmodernism implicitly accept a model in which there is competition among antagonistic groups and no
rational way of reaching consensus, although there is also an implicit double standard in which cohesive groups formed by majorities are viewed as pathological and subject to radical criticism.
It is immensely ironic that this onslaught against Western universalism effectively rationalizes minority group ethnocentrism while undercutting the intellectual basis of ethnocentrism. Intellectually one wonders how one could be a postmodernist and a committed Jew at the same time. Intellectual consistency would seem to require that all personal identifications be subjected to the same deconstructing logic, unless, of course, personal identity itself involves deep ambiguities, deception, and self-deception. This in fact appears to be the case for Jacques Derrida, the premier philosopher of deconstruction, whose philosophy shows the deep connections between the intellectual agendas of postmodernism
and the Frankfurt School.146 Derrida has a complex and ambiguous Jewish identity despite being “a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist” (Caputo 1997, xxiii). Derrida was born into a Sephardic Jewish family that immigrated to Algeria from Spain in the nineteenth century. His family were thus crypto-Jews who retained their religious-ethnic identity for 400 years in Spain
during the period of the Inquisition.
Derrida identifies himself as a crypto-Jew—”Marranos that we are, Marranos in any case whether we want to be or not, whether we know it or not” (Derrida 1993a, 81)—a confession perhaps of the complexity, ambivalence, and selfdeception often involved in post-Enlightenment forms of Jewish identity. In his notebooks, Derrida (1993b, 70) writes of the centrality that Jewish issues have
held in his writing: “Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.” In the same passage he writes that he has always taken “the most careful account, in anamnesis, of the fact that in my family and among the Algerian Jews, one scarcely ever said ‘circumcision’ but ‘baptism,’ not Bar Mitzvah but ‘communion,’ with the consequences of softening, dulling, through fearful acculturation, that I’ve always suffered from more or less consciously” (1993b,
72-73)—an allusion to the continuation of crypto-Jewish practices among the Algerian Jews and a clear indication that Jewish identification and the need to hide it have remained psychologically salient to Derrida. Significantly, he identifies his mother as Esther (1993b, 73), the biblical heroine who “had not made known her people nor her kindred” (Est. 2:10) and who was an inspiration
to generations of crypto-Jews. Derrida was deeply attached to his mother and states as she nears death, “I can be sure that you will not understand much of what you will nonetheless have dictated to me, inspired me with, asked of me, ordered from me.” Like his mother (who spoke of baptism and communion rather than circumcision and Bar Mitzvah), Derrida thus has an inward Jewish identity while outwardly assimilating to the French Catholic culture of Algeria. For
Derrida, however, there are indications of ambivalence for both identities (Caputo 1997, 304): “I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts” (Derrida 1993b, 170).
Derrida’s experience with anti-Semitism during World War II in Algeria was traumatic and inevitably resulted in a deep consciousness of his own Jewishness. Derrida was expelled from school at age 13 under the Vichy government because of the numerus clausus, a self-described “little black and very Arab Jew who
understood nothing about it, to whom no one ever gave the slightest reason, neither his parents nor his friends” (Derrida 1993b, 58).