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Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator
This book analyzes and defines media appeals specific to American pro-fascist and anti-Semite agitators of the 1940s, such as the application of psychosocial manipulation for political ends. The book details psychological deceits that idealogues or authoritarians commonly used. The techniques are grouped under the headings "Discontent", "The Opponent", "The Movement" and "The Leader". The authors demonstrate repetitive patterns commonly utilized, such as turning unfocused social discontent towards a targeted enemy. The agitator positions himself as a unifying he is the ideal, the only leader capable of freeing his audience from the perceived enemy. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, he is a shallow person who creates social or racial disharmony, thereby reinforcing that his leadership is needed. The authors believed fascist tendencies in America were at an early stage in the 1940s, but warned a time might come when Americans could and would be "susceptible to ... [the] psychological manipulation" of a rabble rouser.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1949
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About the author
Leo Löwenthal
31 books13 followersLeo Löwenthal (1900–1993) was a German sociologist associated with the Frankfurt School. He joined the newly founded Institute for Social Research in 1926 and quickly became its leading expert on the sociology of literature and mass culture as well as the managing editor of the journal it launched in 1932, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. When the Nazis came to power, he fled to the USA. After seven years as research director of the Voice of America, he joined the Berkeley Speech Department in 1956 and shortly thereafter the Department of Sociology.
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December 14, 2024
Re-upping this post-2024 election. Welcome to the Orange Reich.
Wherein it is revealed that Trump deploys early 20th century fascist thematics and topoi.
The 1948 preface tells us that grandmaster Horkheimer conceived “the idea of studying agitation as a surface manifestation of deeper social and psychological events” (vi), which resulted in a series, and this volume was delegated to fellow Frankfurt School member Lowenthal.
It provides great selections of right populist agitation current during the global crisis of the 30s and the second world war, such as the beliefs that “a comprehensive and carefully planned conspiracy, directed by a powerfully organized clique, and operating through official and semiofficial channels, has been in continuous existence since the days of Nimrod of Babylon” (1) and that “Hitler and Hitlerism are the creatures of Jewry” (1). If it sounds like David Icke minus the aliens, that’s because this is the same discourse. Within this paranoid and delusional set of discursive practices, we see all the normal rightwing villains: liberalism, socialism, internationalism, communism, foreign influence, cosmopolitanism, other religions, other ideologies, other practices, other languages.
Analysis of “the constants of agitation,” the “recurrent motifs,” the “underlying patterns” (5) reveals much of interest: “As differentiated from propagandistic slogans, agitational themes directly reflect the audience’s predispositions. The agitator does not confront his audience from the outside; he seems rather like someone arising from its midst to express its innermost thoughts” (5). Agitation is often unserious, ambiguous, difficult to pin down: “trying to leave himself a margin of uncertainty, a possibility of retreat in case any of his improvisations fall flat” (id.); he tries “to establish a tentative understanding which will lead to nothing less than seduction” (id.). This is manifestly the villain in Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here as well as the classic Harry Frankfurt bullshitter--but it is also most certainly Trump.
The explanation is fairly straightforward insofar as the agitator wants ‘social change’ of a
Unlike bona fide social reformers or revolutionaries, “the agitator, while exploiting a state of discontent, does not try to define the nature of that discontent by means of rational concepts” (id.), seeking instead to “increase his audience’s disorientation.” The agitator is vague about the social structure’s causing problems “but he does not hold it ultimately responsible for social ills, as does the revolutionary” (7). The agitator normally wants “the elimination of people rather than a change in political structure” and political changes are merely means to that end (id.). For example, the agitator does not care for the “economic causes of unemployment” but rather “lays responsibility on an unvarying set of enemies” (id.).
In figuring out right populist agitation, Lowenthal wants to “locate the cause of the movements in a specific condition of discontent” (11), rather than in a set of vulnerable villains; but the rightwing agitator by contrast has a habit of answering questions that have not been asked, such as if we ask ‘what’ we are answered with ‘who’—which sounds very familiar in any discussions of the Trump regime, whose supporters will irrelevantly scream Obama! or Hillary! regarding any policy question, which indicates that they have no policy preferences except obedience to the fuhrerprinzip. Lowenthal wants to examine therefore the ‘social malaise’ underlying this sort of political delusion, noting that the afflicted “ascribe social evil not to an unjust or obsolete form of society or to a poor organization of an adequate society, but rather to activities of individuals or groups motivated by innate impulses,” which impulses are “biological in nature,” e.g., “Jews, for instance, are evil” (16). The agitator on this basis claims to represent the general interest of “the nation and race” rather than a limited “materialistic attitude” (17); agitation claims to be “a romantic defender of ancient traditions today trampled down by modern industrialism” (id.).
Lowenthal traces this sort of malaise (which strikes the same chords as identified in Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism and Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism) to “growing doubt with relation to those universal beliefs that bound western society together”; “such a pragmatic maxim as ‘honesty is the best policy’ is itself striking evidence of the disintegration of moral axioms” (18).
Much specific analysis of early 20th century righting tactics and thematics—which have survived in unbroken chains to the present fucking moment. One tactic that we can watch in Trump’s practices: “on the one hand the agitator brands his followers as suckers, harping on the suffering they have endured in their unsuccessful lives and thereby satisfying their latent masochism. On the other, he transforms this very humiliation into something to be proud of, a mark of the new elite he will eventually elevate” (23). Every time Trump claims that the US has been duped by bad trade deals, this is what’s going on.
Conspiracy allegations is another: we will see how they “ascribe their misfortunes to secret enemy machinations” (24). ‘Deep State’ conspiracism, duh? And “there is no telling how far this conspiracy may extend. In fact, it has been going on since time immemorial” (26). Unsupported election fraud allegations? And then there’s always the practices described in Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, regarding how the rightwing controls all branches of government but only can ever lower taxes on the wealthy—ascribing their abject failure otherwise to a conspiracy of evil liberals. We see this with Trump, who controls all three branches of government, and can only pass a tax reduction statute, whereas his overtly fascistic items, doomed to failure and deliberately so, are generally caught up in the judiciary as provocations that he can then point to as a stab-in-the-back for future conspiracism—recall the frequent mendacity about the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal, the designation of some courts as “Obama judges,” the suggestion that a Latino judge ruled against one of his fascistic policies because of ethnicity.
Though an agitator may appear to be “advocating redistribution of social wealth,” “he manages to steer clear of such explosive implication” (27). Unlike the Marxist, who wants the fruits of capitalism to be enjoyed by all of its participants, for the rightwing populist “the very presence of material comfort is viewed with suspicion and implicitly condemned” (28). So, while the agitator appears to advocate for his audience, “he is actually suppressing their claims” (28), dissolving a legitimate claim for greater remuneration into vitriolic condemnation—seeking essentially to lower everyone to the least common standard of indecency. That’s how numbnuts can complain that prisoners have better health care than working citizens; even assuming arguendo that this idiocy were true (it is most certainly not), we see that the rightwing populist in 2018 prefers to take away the prisoner’s allegedly good health care and replace it with the nihilistic wasteland of the current health insurance regime under which most people in the US labor, rather than raising everyone to the same civilized standard. This sort of blinkered position “activates revolutionary sentiment, but directs it against a caricature [the agitator] has himself drawn of human aspirations for pleasure” (28).
The right populist “skillfully works on this disillusionment by simultaneously damning and praising the accepted ideologies” (29). So, when Trump complains about alleged fraud in his own election—he is working both ends of disillusionment; when he claims that he will ‘drain the swamp,’ he is performing this trick. Part of this technique is the blurring of distinctions between democratic and non-democratic systems; the right populist might declare that “he is no more a fascist than Abraham Lincoln” or suggest that his opponents are the true fascists, such as maligning “the New Deal as an effort to introduce totalitarianism” (30): “Roosevelt got his technique from Hitler and the Jews” (id.).
Part of this last technique is a fundamental “unseriousness,” such as the right populist refrain that “there are too many laws and regulations behind which are hidden the ‘gossamers of un-Americanism’”; “as against ‘inspired’ laws, he champions ‘individualism’”—and yet the right populist “simultaneously poses as a champion of legality, denouncing the ‘rulings’ of the New Deal as ‘illegal’” (31). This latter instance shows up in Ayn Rand and Hayek with regularity—and we see it routinely in the Trump regime.
The right populist “interpretation of democracy results in its negation”:
Along with this sort of rationale comes a casual apocalypticism, “visions of catastrophe” (33). The goal of this sort of rhetoric is that “the gospel of doom relieves the individual of responsibility for struggling with his problems” (37).
Ultimately, the right populist is about enemies, not policy: “in other movements, defeat of the enemy is a means to an end (a new society or a reformed society of one sort or another), in agitation it is an end in itself” (38). Plenty here about anti-semitism. But also, “his denunciations of communism are so virulent” because the right populist must show “that he hates the enemies of private property” (39); presentations of communism are “drawn from civil war situations” and are presented as always already imminent (id.). The true sleight of mind occurs in “that groups holding actual political or economic power are linked to communism” (40)—so, Trump beating up wealthy capitalist liberals (Soros, say) as ‘communist’ fits well enough. But also McCarthyism and teabagger claims that Obama is not only a communist but is an “atheist nazi moslem communist” in one formulation that I recall, indicating right populists dialed it up from batshit insane to crazier than a shithouse rat a long time ago.
Part of the insanity is in how right populism “denounces both the radicals and those who are denounced by the radicals” (41), insofar as ‘plutocrats’ are also enemies. But this is limited: “the attention of the audience is concentrated, not on capitalism, but on the bankers” (42), avoiding specific references, except to imply that the bankers are Jewish (43 et seq.). The fascistic mind tries to make “the identification of communism with capitalism” (44), tarring the former with the “plutocratic exploitation” of the latter. “It is perhaps this very incongruity, amounting almost to uncanniness, of the idea of the communist banker that attracts the audience as a simple explanation of bewildering real situations” (45).
What’s more, we see that the right populist limits his denunciations to the personnel of the government; he does not attack its basic structure” (44). Trump therefore has plenty to say about particular public servants, and even groups of them, but it is rare for him to say that the basic structure is bad. This is a sort of constitutional fundamentalism—which they will preserve in principle even while going after specific rules, such as jus soli citizenship. Similarly, the right populist “interprets the New Deal’s attempts to regulate big business as the first steps in the establishment of a dictatorship” (48).
Of course one ‘ruthless enemy” is immigrants, whom the right populist denounces in terms of NSDAP lebensraum rhetoric (49); this is the Trump regime’s main thesis. Lowenthal has much on this point (though of course the main locus of analysis is anti-semitism).
Other things: the enemy is sneaky but weak, requiring only the unmasking in right populist agitation to be defeated (52)—which proves that there is no enemy or threat. The enemy is furthermore responsible for “accidents and natural events” (53), all part of “diabolical plots”--such as California wildfires as caused by liberals or that Puerto Rico faked hurricane deaths in Trump's paranoia. The enemy’s crime “remains unpunished, even uninvestigated” ( 53)—Trump and his parrots continue to complain that Secretary Clinton has not been indicted.
Genocidal imperatives are developed through referring to enemy populations as vermin (56 et seq.)—such as in the Third Reich and Rwanda.
Right populism likes to amalgamate various groups in its denunciation: “these dictators, these czars, these fascists, these Nazis, theses communists, these gangs” (59)—a construction that suggests “that there is no need to be cautious in attacking any of them. In these enumerations the underlying motive becomes apparent when refugees are linked with crackpots, termites, and traitors” (id.). Trump on the ‘caravan,’ yes?
One topos is the denunciation of the “professional complainer” (69). Another is “collective responsibility” of a disfavored group for any action of one of its alleged members (id.). Another is to insist that the enemy “must be kept apart from the community” but then accuse the enemy of seclusiveness (76). Yet another is reversal of responsibility: “Jews had instigated a crusade against Hitler” (83): hence, Trump characterizes refugees as an “invasion,” and locks infants in cages.
When it comes to principles and standards and general criteria, the right populist opts out; “the will to survive becomes the agitator’s frame of reference” (92)—which indicates that this is Agamben’s ‘bare life,’ unconnected with the development of the polis—and what I would describe more simply as lumpenized antisocial nihilism, the ideology of the Anarchist’s Cookbook. We see a right populist shift of “emphasis of discussion from a defense of ethical values to biological self-defense”; Trump’s white nationalist voters oppose immigration as well as the right to terminate pregnancy of ‘white’ persons for precisely this reason. Much of this idiocy is contingent upon an “exogenic theory of disease” (95), but also on the fact that “except for purity, the agitator seems to have great difficulty in assigning any specific content to his nationalism” (96).
“The basic implication of the agitator’s ‘defense’ of American principles is that the human rights they proclaim should be transformed into a privilege. Even this doubtful privilege is nowhere clearly defined, except in contexts where its meaning comes down to the right to persecute minorities” (98). Rights of business and property to discriminate, say—or the right of Trump to grab genitals without repercussion.
Though the right populist proclaims peaceful intention, he reserves the right to use force and “fight you in Franco’s way” (100). This is Palin’s second amendment remedies and Trump’s gangs of supporters killing demonstrators. But the right populist does not “call upon the masses to take power into their own hands”; rather “their aroused fury is to be kept in a kind of indefinite suspension” (100).
The right populist “must make the reaction of refusing to hear the views of his competitors quasi-automatic. This automatism cannot be achieved merely by discrediting the competitor’s wares as fraudulent. It requires immediate negative emotional reaction, which is obtained by the warning that the enemy’s material should not be touched because it is filthy” (103-4). This is Ayn Rand, of course, in declining to read books that she thinks confront her puerile ideas—but also obviously Trump, who has inculcated immediate emotive reactions in his followers. How many of them can resist a shrill Pocahontas! whenever anyone mentions Senator Warren? How many can even hear what Secretary Clinton’s position might be on an issue, before their faces contort in an inarticulate snarl? If ‘Lying Ted’ or ‘Little Marco’ is talking, we can be sure that a Trump stormtrooper will not listen, instead hearing only the internal hypertensive drumbeat of an inchoate tachycardic event. No intellectual challenge is required or permitted; it is all emotive, rooted in the fuhrerprinzip.
Regarding the effect of this right populist agitation on its receptive audience:
Part of the ‘Simple American’ theme is that the followers “must be convinced that they belong to an elite even if the elite presumes to include the vast majority of the people." Hence, race doctrine: “the agitator tries to adapt the Nazi notion of a pure Nordic race. The results are pathetically poor: All he can produce is a vague biological intimation in ‘Americans of the original species’” (108); this elite is accordingly negative: depending “for definition on those in the out-group” (id.). Part of this process is anti-intellectualism, a standard “device which by its very nature often tends to transform democratic psychological patterns into totalitarian ones” (109)—I doubt that we have seen a more anti-intellectual regime that Trump's, as he has boasted of his poor academic performance, his inability to read, and his mockery of actual learned persons. The right populist will normally imply that “intellectual pursuits are inherently depraved” (id.). These techniques are intended to maintain a “perpetual state of mobilization” (112), even to the point of claiming “character assassination” (111) when one of their own is confronted reasonably.
What must be made clear is that the right populist is unable to promise “the good society” (114); all he can do is identify enemies that create a bad society. Trump thus claims to Make America Great Again by expelling certain foreign persons and firing public employees and cutting regulation and excluding imports and threatening war. This is not how one builds a utopia, NB. Rather, the right populist 'utopia' is mostly found in immediate explosions of rage—the right populist gives “his permission to indulge in violence” (117)—recall Trump’s behavior at campaign rallies, encouraging violence against hecklers, demonstrators, and journalists.
Pure Trump: “For all his insistence that he is one of the common folk, he does not hesitate to declare that he is an exceptionally gifted man” (124).
Pure Trump: “The agitator does not count on the support of people capable of self-criticism or self-reliance” (126).
Pure Trump: “somewhere in the interstices of this harmless braggadocio there lurk the glimmer notes of violence and destruction” (130-1).
Pure Trump: “he also has access to secret and highly important information, the source of which he is most careful not to reveal” (132).
Plenty more, including an excellent catalog of actual fascistic statements in the US during the pertinent times.
Recommended for anyone thinking of traveling back in time to the 2016 election, as apparently we have in 2024.
Wherein it is revealed that Trump deploys early 20th century fascist thematics and topoi.
The 1948 preface tells us that grandmaster Horkheimer conceived “the idea of studying agitation as a surface manifestation of deeper social and psychological events” (vi), which resulted in a series, and this volume was delegated to fellow Frankfurt School member Lowenthal.
It provides great selections of right populist agitation current during the global crisis of the 30s and the second world war, such as the beliefs that “a comprehensive and carefully planned conspiracy, directed by a powerfully organized clique, and operating through official and semiofficial channels, has been in continuous existence since the days of Nimrod of Babylon” (1) and that “Hitler and Hitlerism are the creatures of Jewry” (1). If it sounds like David Icke minus the aliens, that’s because this is the same discourse. Within this paranoid and delusional set of discursive practices, we see all the normal rightwing villains: liberalism, socialism, internationalism, communism, foreign influence, cosmopolitanism, other religions, other ideologies, other practices, other languages.
Analysis of “the constants of agitation,” the “recurrent motifs,” the “underlying patterns” (5) reveals much of interest: “As differentiated from propagandistic slogans, agitational themes directly reflect the audience’s predispositions. The agitator does not confront his audience from the outside; he seems rather like someone arising from its midst to express its innermost thoughts” (5). Agitation is often unserious, ambiguous, difficult to pin down: “trying to leave himself a margin of uncertainty, a possibility of retreat in case any of his improvisations fall flat” (id.); he tries “to establish a tentative understanding which will lead to nothing less than seduction” (id.). This is manifestly the villain in Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here as well as the classic Harry Frankfurt bullshitter--but it is also most certainly Trump.
The explanation is fairly straightforward insofar as the agitator wants ‘social change’ of a
condition that a section of the population feels to be iniquitous or frustrating. This discontent he articulates by pointing out its presumed causes. He proposes to defeat the social groups held responsible for perpetuating the social condition that gives rise to the discontent. (6)
Unlike bona fide social reformers or revolutionaries, “the agitator, while exploiting a state of discontent, does not try to define the nature of that discontent by means of rational concepts” (id.), seeking instead to “increase his audience’s disorientation.” The agitator is vague about the social structure’s causing problems “but he does not hold it ultimately responsible for social ills, as does the revolutionary” (7). The agitator normally wants “the elimination of people rather than a change in political structure” and political changes are merely means to that end (id.). For example, the agitator does not care for the “economic causes of unemployment” but rather “lays responsibility on an unvarying set of enemies” (id.).
In figuring out right populist agitation, Lowenthal wants to “locate the cause of the movements in a specific condition of discontent” (11), rather than in a set of vulnerable villains; but the rightwing agitator by contrast has a habit of answering questions that have not been asked, such as if we ask ‘what’ we are answered with ‘who’—which sounds very familiar in any discussions of the Trump regime, whose supporters will irrelevantly scream Obama! or Hillary! regarding any policy question, which indicates that they have no policy preferences except obedience to the fuhrerprinzip. Lowenthal wants to examine therefore the ‘social malaise’ underlying this sort of political delusion, noting that the afflicted “ascribe social evil not to an unjust or obsolete form of society or to a poor organization of an adequate society, but rather to activities of individuals or groups motivated by innate impulses,” which impulses are “biological in nature,” e.g., “Jews, for instance, are evil” (16). The agitator on this basis claims to represent the general interest of “the nation and race” rather than a limited “materialistic attitude” (17); agitation claims to be “a romantic defender of ancient traditions today trampled down by modern industrialism” (id.).
Lowenthal traces this sort of malaise (which strikes the same chords as identified in Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism and Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism) to “growing doubt with relation to those universal beliefs that bound western society together”; “such a pragmatic maxim as ‘honesty is the best policy’ is itself striking evidence of the disintegration of moral axioms” (18).
Much specific analysis of early 20th century righting tactics and thematics—which have survived in unbroken chains to the present fucking moment. One tactic that we can watch in Trump’s practices: “on the one hand the agitator brands his followers as suckers, harping on the suffering they have endured in their unsuccessful lives and thereby satisfying their latent masochism. On the other, he transforms this very humiliation into something to be proud of, a mark of the new elite he will eventually elevate” (23). Every time Trump claims that the US has been duped by bad trade deals, this is what’s going on.
Conspiracy allegations is another: we will see how they “ascribe their misfortunes to secret enemy machinations” (24). ‘Deep State’ conspiracism, duh? And “there is no telling how far this conspiracy may extend. In fact, it has been going on since time immemorial” (26). Unsupported election fraud allegations? And then there’s always the practices described in Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, regarding how the rightwing controls all branches of government but only can ever lower taxes on the wealthy—ascribing their abject failure otherwise to a conspiracy of evil liberals. We see this with Trump, who controls all three branches of government, and can only pass a tax reduction statute, whereas his overtly fascistic items, doomed to failure and deliberately so, are generally caught up in the judiciary as provocations that he can then point to as a stab-in-the-back for future conspiracism—recall the frequent mendacity about the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal, the designation of some courts as “Obama judges,” the suggestion that a Latino judge ruled against one of his fascistic policies because of ethnicity.
Though an agitator may appear to be “advocating redistribution of social wealth,” “he manages to steer clear of such explosive implication” (27). Unlike the Marxist, who wants the fruits of capitalism to be enjoyed by all of its participants, for the rightwing populist “the very presence of material comfort is viewed with suspicion and implicitly condemned” (28). So, while the agitator appears to advocate for his audience, “he is actually suppressing their claims” (28), dissolving a legitimate claim for greater remuneration into vitriolic condemnation—seeking essentially to lower everyone to the least common standard of indecency. That’s how numbnuts can complain that prisoners have better health care than working citizens; even assuming arguendo that this idiocy were true (it is most certainly not), we see that the rightwing populist in 2018 prefers to take away the prisoner’s allegedly good health care and replace it with the nihilistic wasteland of the current health insurance regime under which most people in the US labor, rather than raising everyone to the same civilized standard. This sort of blinkered position “activates revolutionary sentiment, but directs it against a caricature [the agitator] has himself drawn of human aspirations for pleasure” (28).
The right populist “skillfully works on this disillusionment by simultaneously damning and praising the accepted ideologies” (29). So, when Trump complains about alleged fraud in his own election—he is working both ends of disillusionment; when he claims that he will ‘drain the swamp,’ he is performing this trick. Part of this technique is the blurring of distinctions between democratic and non-democratic systems; the right populist might declare that “he is no more a fascist than Abraham Lincoln” or suggest that his opponents are the true fascists, such as maligning “the New Deal as an effort to introduce totalitarianism” (30): “Roosevelt got his technique from Hitler and the Jews” (id.).
Part of this last technique is a fundamental “unseriousness,” such as the right populist refrain that “there are too many laws and regulations behind which are hidden the ‘gossamers of un-Americanism’”; “as against ‘inspired’ laws, he champions ‘individualism’”—and yet the right populist “simultaneously poses as a champion of legality, denouncing the ‘rulings’ of the New Deal as ‘illegal’” (31). This latter instance shows up in Ayn Rand and Hayek with regularity—and we see it routinely in the Trump regime.
The right populist “interpretation of democracy results in its negation”:
The agitator transforms democracy from a system that guarantees minority rights into one that merely affirms the privileged status of the majority. Persecution of minorities is thus within the rights of the majority and any attempt to limit the exercise of this ‘right’ is interpreted as persecution of the majority by the minority. (32)
Along with this sort of rationale comes a casual apocalypticism, “visions of catastrophe” (33). The goal of this sort of rhetoric is that “the gospel of doom relieves the individual of responsibility for struggling with his problems” (37).
Ultimately, the right populist is about enemies, not policy: “in other movements, defeat of the enemy is a means to an end (a new society or a reformed society of one sort or another), in agitation it is an end in itself” (38). Plenty here about anti-semitism. But also, “his denunciations of communism are so virulent” because the right populist must show “that he hates the enemies of private property” (39); presentations of communism are “drawn from civil war situations” and are presented as always already imminent (id.). The true sleight of mind occurs in “that groups holding actual political or economic power are linked to communism” (40)—so, Trump beating up wealthy capitalist liberals (Soros, say) as ‘communist’ fits well enough. But also McCarthyism and teabagger claims that Obama is not only a communist but is an “atheist nazi moslem communist” in one formulation that I recall, indicating right populists dialed it up from batshit insane to crazier than a shithouse rat a long time ago.
Part of the insanity is in how right populism “denounces both the radicals and those who are denounced by the radicals” (41), insofar as ‘plutocrats’ are also enemies. But this is limited: “the attention of the audience is concentrated, not on capitalism, but on the bankers” (42), avoiding specific references, except to imply that the bankers are Jewish (43 et seq.). The fascistic mind tries to make “the identification of communism with capitalism” (44), tarring the former with the “plutocratic exploitation” of the latter. “It is perhaps this very incongruity, amounting almost to uncanniness, of the idea of the communist banker that attracts the audience as a simple explanation of bewildering real situations” (45).
What’s more, we see that the right populist limits his denunciations to the personnel of the government; he does not attack its basic structure” (44). Trump therefore has plenty to say about particular public servants, and even groups of them, but it is rare for him to say that the basic structure is bad. This is a sort of constitutional fundamentalism—which they will preserve in principle even while going after specific rules, such as jus soli citizenship. Similarly, the right populist “interprets the New Deal’s attempts to regulate big business as the first steps in the establishment of a dictatorship” (48).
Of course one ‘ruthless enemy” is immigrants, whom the right populist denounces in terms of NSDAP lebensraum rhetoric (49); this is the Trump regime’s main thesis. Lowenthal has much on this point (though of course the main locus of analysis is anti-semitism).
Other things: the enemy is sneaky but weak, requiring only the unmasking in right populist agitation to be defeated (52)—which proves that there is no enemy or threat. The enemy is furthermore responsible for “accidents and natural events” (53), all part of “diabolical plots”--such as California wildfires as caused by liberals or that Puerto Rico faked hurricane deaths in Trump's paranoia. The enemy’s crime “remains unpunished, even uninvestigated” ( 53)—Trump and his parrots continue to complain that Secretary Clinton has not been indicted.
Genocidal imperatives are developed through referring to enemy populations as vermin (56 et seq.)—such as in the Third Reich and Rwanda.
Right populism likes to amalgamate various groups in its denunciation: “these dictators, these czars, these fascists, these Nazis, theses communists, these gangs” (59)—a construction that suggests “that there is no need to be cautious in attacking any of them. In these enumerations the underlying motive becomes apparent when refugees are linked with crackpots, termites, and traitors” (id.). Trump on the ‘caravan,’ yes?
One topos is the denunciation of the “professional complainer” (69). Another is “collective responsibility” of a disfavored group for any action of one of its alleged members (id.). Another is to insist that the enemy “must be kept apart from the community” but then accuse the enemy of seclusiveness (76). Yet another is reversal of responsibility: “Jews had instigated a crusade against Hitler” (83): hence, Trump characterizes refugees as an “invasion,” and locks infants in cages.
When it comes to principles and standards and general criteria, the right populist opts out; “the will to survive becomes the agitator’s frame of reference” (92)—which indicates that this is Agamben’s ‘bare life,’ unconnected with the development of the polis—and what I would describe more simply as lumpenized antisocial nihilism, the ideology of the Anarchist’s Cookbook. We see a right populist shift of “emphasis of discussion from a defense of ethical values to biological self-defense”; Trump’s white nationalist voters oppose immigration as well as the right to terminate pregnancy of ‘white’ persons for precisely this reason. Much of this idiocy is contingent upon an “exogenic theory of disease” (95), but also on the fact that “except for purity, the agitator seems to have great difficulty in assigning any specific content to his nationalism” (96).
“The basic implication of the agitator’s ‘defense’ of American principles is that the human rights they proclaim should be transformed into a privilege. Even this doubtful privilege is nowhere clearly defined, except in contexts where its meaning comes down to the right to persecute minorities” (98). Rights of business and property to discriminate, say—or the right of Trump to grab genitals without repercussion.
Though the right populist proclaims peaceful intention, he reserves the right to use force and “fight you in Franco’s way” (100). This is Palin’s second amendment remedies and Trump’s gangs of supporters killing demonstrators. But the right populist does not “call upon the masses to take power into their own hands”; rather “their aroused fury is to be kept in a kind of indefinite suspension” (100).
The right populist “must make the reaction of refusing to hear the views of his competitors quasi-automatic. This automatism cannot be achieved merely by discrediting the competitor’s wares as fraudulent. It requires immediate negative emotional reaction, which is obtained by the warning that the enemy’s material should not be touched because it is filthy” (103-4). This is Ayn Rand, of course, in declining to read books that she thinks confront her puerile ideas—but also obviously Trump, who has inculcated immediate emotive reactions in his followers. How many of them can resist a shrill Pocahontas! whenever anyone mentions Senator Warren? How many can even hear what Secretary Clinton’s position might be on an issue, before their faces contort in an inarticulate snarl? If ‘Lying Ted’ or ‘Little Marco’ is talking, we can be sure that a Trump stormtrooper will not listen, instead hearing only the internal hypertensive drumbeat of an inchoate tachycardic event. No intellectual challenge is required or permitted; it is all emotive, rooted in the fuhrerprinzip.
Regarding the effect of this right populist agitation on its receptive audience:
The invention of the Aryan race and the agitator’s glorification of the Simple American are symptomatic of similar efforts to strengthen social coercion. Both the Volksgemeinschaft of the Nazis and the community of pure Americans proposed by the agitator are actually pseudo-Gemeinschaften, or pseudo-communities. Such notions are deceptive solutions of the problem created by the disintegration of individualism. (106)
Part of the ‘Simple American’ theme is that the followers “must be convinced that they belong to an elite even if the elite presumes to include the vast majority of the people." Hence, race doctrine: “the agitator tries to adapt the Nazi notion of a pure Nordic race. The results are pathetically poor: All he can produce is a vague biological intimation in ‘Americans of the original species’” (108); this elite is accordingly negative: depending “for definition on those in the out-group” (id.). Part of this process is anti-intellectualism, a standard “device which by its very nature often tends to transform democratic psychological patterns into totalitarian ones” (109)—I doubt that we have seen a more anti-intellectual regime that Trump's, as he has boasted of his poor academic performance, his inability to read, and his mockery of actual learned persons. The right populist will normally imply that “intellectual pursuits are inherently depraved” (id.). These techniques are intended to maintain a “perpetual state of mobilization” (112), even to the point of claiming “character assassination” (111) when one of their own is confronted reasonably.
What must be made clear is that the right populist is unable to promise “the good society” (114); all he can do is identify enemies that create a bad society. Trump thus claims to Make America Great Again by expelling certain foreign persons and firing public employees and cutting regulation and excluding imports and threatening war. This is not how one builds a utopia, NB. Rather, the right populist 'utopia' is mostly found in immediate explosions of rage—the right populist gives “his permission to indulge in violence” (117)—recall Trump’s behavior at campaign rallies, encouraging violence against hecklers, demonstrators, and journalists.
Pure Trump: “For all his insistence that he is one of the common folk, he does not hesitate to declare that he is an exceptionally gifted man” (124).
Pure Trump: “The agitator does not count on the support of people capable of self-criticism or self-reliance” (126).
Pure Trump: “somewhere in the interstices of this harmless braggadocio there lurk the glimmer notes of violence and destruction” (130-1).
Pure Trump: “he also has access to secret and highly important information, the source of which he is most careful not to reveal” (132).
Plenty more, including an excellent catalog of actual fascistic statements in the US during the pertinent times.
Recommended for anyone thinking of traveling back in time to the 2016 election, as apparently we have in 2024.
August 3, 2022
Read about half of this book for class awhile back but figured I should write something to get this out of my head. It's a long study of the form and content of WWII-era Amerikan fascist agitation, with a decent dab of Löwenthal's psychoanalysis which seems reasonable. Of course, the interesting thing about Amerika is that the Euro-Hitlerite variety of fascism didn't pick up a notable amount of followers over here back in its heyday—rather, white settler-colonialism filled the same "ecological niche" as fascism did in Europe. But now that imperialism seems to be turning its back on settler-colonialism ("Imperialism doesn’t care if you are a bigot. Or if you make decisions on that basis just as the big guys do. Only you are expected to not be crudely upfront about it and cause them problems. Be a team player, as they always say."), white settler men are finding themselves in crisis, and fascism is just as enticing as settler-colonialism (it should be said that, at the same time, Amerikan liberal superstars have leashed, fed, and clothed overseas fascists with much vigor).
And so I think it's arguable that the use of the mechanisms and techniques Löwenthal and Guterman identify here (the exploitation of the social malaise, the ruthless and helpless enemy, the symbolic function of "the jew" in conspiracy) is growing only greater today in regards to how Amerikan ideological state apparatuses represent our modern-day "axis of evil" (you-know-who). Iyko Day's useful formulation of "romantic anti-capitalism" would be a good supplement. Anyways what I read of this was very readable, I appreciate that thumbs up
And so I think it's arguable that the use of the mechanisms and techniques Löwenthal and Guterman identify here (the exploitation of the social malaise, the ruthless and helpless enemy, the symbolic function of "the jew" in conspiracy) is growing only greater today in regards to how Amerikan ideological state apparatuses represent our modern-day "axis of evil" (you-know-who). Iyko Day's useful formulation of "romantic anti-capitalism" would be a good supplement. Anyways what I read of this was very readable, I appreciate that thumbs up
April 12, 2019
The book is extremely well-written, clear, and gives an excellent explanation of the techniques used by agitators/demagogues to sway an audience and convert them to blind followers, as well as explaining what makes a population susceptible to their hateful message. I recommend it to anyone interested in finding out more about the psychological manipulation employed by agitators. The book ends on a powerful note - a "translation" into plain English of the agitator's twisted "coded" double-talk message of hate.
Here are some quotes:
From the Forward to the Second Edition by Herbert Marcuse:
"...if the "prophet of deceit" is an "advocate of social change" which really is no change because he suggests "the elimination of people rather than a change in political structure," so are the leaders of the established political parties on the campaign path: everything will be all right as soon as the old leaders go out and the new ones come in." "...the legitimate politician does not "humiliate" his adherents, he does not impress on them their inferiority and his own superiority." "The enemy, indispensable factor of national unity and social cohesion, threatens at home." "The follower has all but completely surrendered to the leader who promises an end to his frustration, while the voter still retains a demonstrable test of deliberation of decision."
From the Introduction by Max Horkheimer:
"[The study] ... seeks to cast light on the inner, and often unconscious, mechanisms at which agitation is directed." "Demagogy makes it appearance whenever a democratic society is threatened with internal destruction. In a general sense, its function has always been the same, to lead the masses toward goals that run counter to their basic interests. And this function accounts for the irrationality of demagogy; the psychological techniques it employs have a definite social basis." "...the contemporary agitator, the expert propagandist who has assumed the role of leader, dwells incessantly on his own person. He portrays himself as both leader and common man. By suggesting that he too is a victim of sinister social forces, by displaying his own weakness as it were, he helps conceal from his followers the very possibility of independent thinking and autonomous decision." "...the emphasis of the book is on the meaning of the phenomena under analysis..."
From the Preface by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman:
"[The American agitator] ... is usually thought of as a crackpot whose appeals and goals derive neither from domestic conditions nor from native attitudes. Seen thus as a kind of foreign agent, the agitator has usually been fought by the method of exposure." "...since...we believe that the agitator often relies upon unconscious mechanisms to build instruments for manipulating his audience, we have tried to probe beneath the manifest content of his speeches and writings to disinter their latent content."
From Chapter 1 - The Themes of Agitation
"The Agitator Speaks"
"[Agitator:] A comprehensive and carefully planned conspiracy, directed by a powerfully organized clique, and operating through official and semiofficial channels, has been in continuous existence since the days of Nimrod of Babylon, and is the ever lurking enemy of the people's liberty." "We are going to take this government out of the hands of these city-slickers and give it back to the people that still believe that 2 and 2 is 4, that God is in his heaven and the Bible is the Word." "That's what they do not want me to say. That's why I am such a bad man. Because I say what you all want to say and haven't got the guts to say."
"Background for Seduction"
"...speeches and articles that voice essentially the same ideas and are couched in similar language do attract steady audiences in this country, if, for the time being, only small ones. What are the social and psychological implications of such materials?" "Their activity has many characteristics of a psychological racket: they play on vague fears or expectations of a radical change. Some of these agitators hardly seem to take their own ideas seriously, and it is likely that their aim is merely to make a living by publishing a paper or holding meetings." "This then is the basic task of the present study: to discover the social and psychological strains of agitation by means of isolating and describing its fundamental themes." "The agitator's statements are often ambiguous and unserious. It is difficult to pin him down to anything and he given the impression that he is deliberately playacting. He seems to be trying to leave himself a margin of uncertainty..." "Moving in a twilight zone between the respectable and the forbidden, he is ready to use any device, from jokes to double-talk to wild extravagances. This apparent unseriousness is, however, concerned with very serious matters. In his relationship to the audience the agitator tries to establish a tentative understanding which will lead to nothing less than seduction."
"Working on the Audience"
"He proposes to defeat the social groups held responsible for perpetuating the social condition that gives rise to discontent. ...he promotes a movement capable of achieving this objective, and he proposes himself as its leader." "...the agitator...does not try to define the nature of that discontent by means of rational concepts. Rather does he increase his audience's disorientation by destroying all rational guideposts and by proposing that they instead adopt seemingly spontaneous modes of behavior." "He always suggests that what is necessary is the elimination of people rather than a change in political structure. Whatever political changes may be involved in the process of getting rid of the enemy he sees as a means rather than an end." "The energy spent by the reformer and revolutionary to lift the audience's ideas and emotions to a higher plane of awareness is used by the agitator to exaggerate and intensify the irrational elements in the original complaint." "In contradistinction to all other programs of social change, the explicit content of agitational material is in the last analysis incidental -- it is like the manifest content of dreams. The primary function of the agitator's words is to release reactions of gratification or frustration whose total effect is to make the audience subservient to his personal leadership." "What he generalizes is not an intellectual perception; what he produces is not he intellectual awareness of the predicament, but an aggravation of the emotion itself." "...the agitator appeals primarily to irrational or subconscious elements at the expense of the rational and analytical."
From Chapter 2 - Social Malaise
"The difficulty is not that agitation fails to provide him with answers, but rather that it answers a question he did not ask: whenever he asks what he is answered as if he had asked who. He finds numerous vituperative and indignant references to enemies, but nowhere can he find a clearly defined objective condition from which the agitator's audience presumably suffers."
"A Catalog of Grievances"
"Economic Grievances"
"The agitator roams freely over every area of economic life. He may begin anywhere at all. Too much help is being extended to foreign nations." "Not only are foreigners taking our money, they also threaten our jobs."
"Political Grievances"
"International commitments by the United States government jeopardize political liberties." "Of course it is only reasonable that "treaties and agreements ... shall be reached with other nations, but ... we want no world court and no world congress made up of a few Orientals and a few Russians a few Europeans and a few British...to make laws for us to obey...""
"Cultural Grievances"
"The agitator is greatly disturbed because the media of public information are in the hands of enemies of the nation."
"Moral Grievances"
"...what is most galling of all is that "we gentiles are suckers." For "while we were praying they had their hands in our pockets.""
"Emotional Substratum"
"Distrust:"
"The agitator plays on his audience's suspicions all social phenomena impinging on its life in ways it does not understand. Foreign refugees cash in on the "gullibility" of Americans, whom he warns not to be "duped" by internationalists. Strewn through the output of the agitator are such words as hoax, corrupt, insincere, duped, manipulate."
"Dependence:"
"The agitator seems to assume that he is addressing people who suffer from a sense of helplessness and passivity. He plays on the ambivalent nature of this complex which on the one hand reflects a protest against manipulation and on the other hand a wish to be protected, to belong to a strong organization or be led by a strong leader."
"Exclusion:"
"The American taxpayer's money is use to help everyone but himself -- "we feed foreigners," the agitator complains, while we neglect our own millions of unemployed."
"Anxiety:"
"...the middle-class...suspicion that the moral mainstays of social life are being undermined. The agitator speaks of the "darkest hour in American history" and graphically describes a pervasive sense of fear and insecurity..."
"Disillusionment:"
"This complex is seen in such remarks as the agitator's characterization of politics as "make-believe, pretense, pretext, sham, fraud, deception, dishonesty, falsehood, hypocrisy..."
"The Individual in Crisis"
"Distrust, dependence, exclusion, anxiety, and disillusionment blend together to form a fundamental condition of modern life: malaise." "...certain recurrent characteristics of agitation: its diffuseness, its pseudo-spontaneity, its flexibility in utilizing a variety of grievances, and its substation of a personal enemy for an objective condition." "This malaise reflects the stresses imposed on the individual by the profound transformations taking place in our economic and social structure--the replacement of the class of small independent producers by gigantic industrial bureaucracies, the decay of the patriarchal family, the breakdown of primary personal ties between individuals in an increasingly mechanized world, the compartmentalization and atomization of group life, and the substitution of mass culture for traditional patterns." "Malaise is neither an illusion of the audience nor a mere imposition by the agitator; it is a psychological symptom of an oppressive situation." "...he tricks his audience into accepting the very situation that produced its malaise. Under the guise of a protest against the oppressive situation, the agitator binds his audience to it. Since this pseudo-protest never produces a genuine solution, it merely leads the audience to seek permanent relief from a permanent predicament by means of irrational outbursts. The agitator does not create the malaise, but he aggravated and fixates it because he bars the path to overcoming it. Those afflicted by the malaise ascribe social evil not to an unjust or obsolete form of society or to a poor organization of an adequate society, but rather to activities of individuals or groups motivated by innate impulses. For the agitator these impulses are biological in nature, they function beyond and above history..." "The agitator exploits not primarily the feelings generated by specific hardships or frustrations, but more fundamentally those diffuse feelings of malaise which pervade all modern life." "Because malaise originates in the deepest layers of the individual psyche, it can appear to be an expression of frustrated spontaneity and essential spiritual needs." "Malaise is a consequence of the depersonalization and permanent insecurity of modern life." "Vaguely sensing that something has gone astray in modern life but also strongly convinced that he lacks the power to right whatever is wrong (even if it were possible to discover what is wrong), the individual lives in a sort of eternal adolescent uneasiness." "...once the agitator's audience has been driven to this paranoiac point, it is ripe for his ministrations." "When, for whatever reasons, direct expression of feelings is inhibited, they are projected through some apparently unrelated materials." "So the agitator sanctions immediate resentments and seemingly paves the way for the relief of the malaise through discharge of the audience's aggressive impulses; but simultaneously he perpetuates the malaise by blocking the way toward real understanding of its cause."
From Chapter 3 - A Hostile World
"He crystallizes and hardens these feelings [that reflect the malaise] and distorts the objective situation." "... its disillusionment is transformed into the complete renunciation of values and ideals; and its anxiety is both repressed and magnified into the perpetual expectation of apocalyptic doom."
"Theme 1 - The Eternal Dupes"
"He cannot win adherents without in a sense humiliating them, that is, suggesting that they are inferior in knowledge, strength, or courage and that they need him more than he needs them." "In agitation, this humiliation is permanent. In establishing the inferiority of his prospective followers, the agitator claims superior knowledge, which, he implies, he has obtained by virtue of his special position and abilities. The audience is inferior not because it is temporarily "unenlightened" but because it is composed of "dupes"and "suckers." Throughout his utterances there can be found many unflattering references to potential followers." "He warns his audience that it needs his guidance in the bewildering situation in which it finds itself; but he offers it no way to escape its bewilderment by its own intellectual efforts." "They are cheated all along the line, in rationing, in war, through the press and the movies." "It must not be forgotten that the agitator banks on an audience composed of "dupes"--people who bear the world a grudge because they feel it has cheated them, and who are therefore insecure, dependent, and bewildered." "By calling his followers suckers and telling them they must follow him if they are no longer to be cheated, the agitator promises that he will take care of them and "think" for them. Those who chafe under an authority they distrust and whose motives they cannot understand, are now to be subjected to the promptings of an agitator who will sanction their spontaneous resentments and seem to gratify their deepest wishes." "...the agitator breaks down these folkways; he seems to say, "let us be honest, let us admit we are disillusioned, ignorant and cheated." Such an invitation can only be welcomed by people who feel that hey have always been "misunderstood." Hence, by reversing the optimistic stereotypes of liberal society the agitator makes the feeling of acknowledged failure seem respectable." "His bad manners become a guaranty of his sincerity. They can trust him, for he does not flatter them, and since they are unable by themselves to "pierce the sham of propaganda" their only possible course of action is to join his movement." "On the one hand the agitator brands his followers as suckers, harping on the suffering they have endured in their unsuccessful lives an thereby satisfying their latent masochism. On the other hand, he transforms this very humiliation into something to be proud of, a mark of the new elite he will eventually elevate." "...the agitator seems to be especially interested in the little man who has not made the grade." "...he does make it possible for them to feel at ease in their common inferiority."
"Theme 2 - Conspiracy"
"Nor is his inability to overcome his bewilderment and helplessness surprising, for he is the victim of a "comprehensive and carefully-planned political conspiracy."" "[The agitator]... refers to popular stereotypes only to encourage the vague resentments they reflect." "On a social scale he stirs his audience to reactions similar to those of paranoia on an individual scale, and his primary means of doing this is by indefinitely extending the concept of conspiracy." "Phrases like the "Hidden Hand" or "International Invisible Government" appear in his writings and speeches again and again." "The very stereotypes that once referred more or less definitely to social oligarchies, now refer to gigantic but undefined secret international plots." "In this transformation of a circumscribed group of magnates into mysterious invisible rulers, the process of blurring reality by encouraging paranoiac tendencies, is clearly evident." "...by exaggerating to the point of the fantastic its suspicions that it is the toy of anonymous forces, and by pointing to mysterious individuals rather than analyzing social forces, the agitator in effect cheats his audience of its curiosity." "...the paranoiac brooding and the projection of conspiracies end with suggestions for acts of violence." "This implies that existing laws and institutions cannot cope with [the conspirators] ... and that extraordinary measures are needed."
"Theme 3 - Forbidden Fruit"
""The sweet and simple things of life" are "discarded, absent, forgotten.""Enjoyment of wealth means debauch and vice --hence wealth is a forbidden fruit." "Rather than offering suggestions for a greater utilization of productive facilities or a more just distribution of the social product, the agitator encourages resentment against the excesses of luxury. Appealing to puritanical attitudes the agitator condemns indulgence not in order to propose the elimination of poverty, but rather to exasperate his followers' feelings of envy while simultaneous arousing their sense of guilt at being envious." "Even when the agitator denounces the "society world of snobbery and fraud" and shouts "Down must come those who live in luxury!" he is not proposing to the audience a way for it to increase its share of wealth and pleasure." "If the agitator cannot promise his adherents a greater share of the good things of life, he can suggest that the good life consists in something else: the gratification of repressed impulses; and that if they are obedient to him they will be offered the luxurious sinners as sacrificial prey."
"Theme 4 - Disaffection"
"...when confronted with his audience's moral confusion, he implies that he shares neither the conservative's total acceptance of existing values and institutions, nor the "naive idealism of the liberals." He knows that the "two-party system is a sham" and "democracy" a "trick word."" "...he declare, he is ...called [a fascist] ... merely because he is one of the individualists who still believe in Constitutional government..."" "He therefore seems bent not on concealing but on flaunting his cynicism, the effect of which is to sanction and fixate his audience's disillusionment." "In the way he points to the traditional as the great ideal, the agitator discourages a serious critique of existing values; in the way he debunks existing values, he makes impossible any sincere attempt to realize them more effectively in practice." "...his general desecration of the idea of truth as such." "The distinction between truth and lies is accordingly inconsequential; bot are neutral means to be used according to their helpfulness to his cause." "His doctrine thus consists in drawing the ultimate consequences of a totally amoral opportunism."
"Transformation of Meaning"
"The agitator transforms democracy from a system that guarantees minority rights into one that merely affirms the privileged status of the majority."
"Anti-Universality
"The agitator explicitly rejects the ideal of universality. This rejection is evidenced, for instance, in his attitude toward tolerance, which he brand[s] as "silly sentimentality" and "non-Christian," as contrary to self-interest and a weakness that must eradicated for the sake of survival."
Here are some quotes:
From the Forward to the Second Edition by Herbert Marcuse:
"...if the "prophet of deceit" is an "advocate of social change" which really is no change because he suggests "the elimination of people rather than a change in political structure," so are the leaders of the established political parties on the campaign path: everything will be all right as soon as the old leaders go out and the new ones come in." "...the legitimate politician does not "humiliate" his adherents, he does not impress on them their inferiority and his own superiority." "The enemy, indispensable factor of national unity and social cohesion, threatens at home." "The follower has all but completely surrendered to the leader who promises an end to his frustration, while the voter still retains a demonstrable test of deliberation of decision."
From the Introduction by Max Horkheimer:
"[The study] ... seeks to cast light on the inner, and often unconscious, mechanisms at which agitation is directed." "Demagogy makes it appearance whenever a democratic society is threatened with internal destruction. In a general sense, its function has always been the same, to lead the masses toward goals that run counter to their basic interests. And this function accounts for the irrationality of demagogy; the psychological techniques it employs have a definite social basis." "...the contemporary agitator, the expert propagandist who has assumed the role of leader, dwells incessantly on his own person. He portrays himself as both leader and common man. By suggesting that he too is a victim of sinister social forces, by displaying his own weakness as it were, he helps conceal from his followers the very possibility of independent thinking and autonomous decision." "...the emphasis of the book is on the meaning of the phenomena under analysis..."
From the Preface by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman:
"[The American agitator] ... is usually thought of as a crackpot whose appeals and goals derive neither from domestic conditions nor from native attitudes. Seen thus as a kind of foreign agent, the agitator has usually been fought by the method of exposure." "...since...we believe that the agitator often relies upon unconscious mechanisms to build instruments for manipulating his audience, we have tried to probe beneath the manifest content of his speeches and writings to disinter their latent content."
From Chapter 1 - The Themes of Agitation
"The Agitator Speaks"
"[Agitator:] A comprehensive and carefully planned conspiracy, directed by a powerfully organized clique, and operating through official and semiofficial channels, has been in continuous existence since the days of Nimrod of Babylon, and is the ever lurking enemy of the people's liberty." "We are going to take this government out of the hands of these city-slickers and give it back to the people that still believe that 2 and 2 is 4, that God is in his heaven and the Bible is the Word." "That's what they do not want me to say. That's why I am such a bad man. Because I say what you all want to say and haven't got the guts to say."
"Background for Seduction"
"...speeches and articles that voice essentially the same ideas and are couched in similar language do attract steady audiences in this country, if, for the time being, only small ones. What are the social and psychological implications of such materials?" "Their activity has many characteristics of a psychological racket: they play on vague fears or expectations of a radical change. Some of these agitators hardly seem to take their own ideas seriously, and it is likely that their aim is merely to make a living by publishing a paper or holding meetings." "This then is the basic task of the present study: to discover the social and psychological strains of agitation by means of isolating and describing its fundamental themes." "The agitator's statements are often ambiguous and unserious. It is difficult to pin him down to anything and he given the impression that he is deliberately playacting. He seems to be trying to leave himself a margin of uncertainty..." "Moving in a twilight zone between the respectable and the forbidden, he is ready to use any device, from jokes to double-talk to wild extravagances. This apparent unseriousness is, however, concerned with very serious matters. In his relationship to the audience the agitator tries to establish a tentative understanding which will lead to nothing less than seduction."
"Working on the Audience"
"He proposes to defeat the social groups held responsible for perpetuating the social condition that gives rise to discontent. ...he promotes a movement capable of achieving this objective, and he proposes himself as its leader." "...the agitator...does not try to define the nature of that discontent by means of rational concepts. Rather does he increase his audience's disorientation by destroying all rational guideposts and by proposing that they instead adopt seemingly spontaneous modes of behavior." "He always suggests that what is necessary is the elimination of people rather than a change in political structure. Whatever political changes may be involved in the process of getting rid of the enemy he sees as a means rather than an end." "The energy spent by the reformer and revolutionary to lift the audience's ideas and emotions to a higher plane of awareness is used by the agitator to exaggerate and intensify the irrational elements in the original complaint." "In contradistinction to all other programs of social change, the explicit content of agitational material is in the last analysis incidental -- it is like the manifest content of dreams. The primary function of the agitator's words is to release reactions of gratification or frustration whose total effect is to make the audience subservient to his personal leadership." "What he generalizes is not an intellectual perception; what he produces is not he intellectual awareness of the predicament, but an aggravation of the emotion itself." "...the agitator appeals primarily to irrational or subconscious elements at the expense of the rational and analytical."
From Chapter 2 - Social Malaise
"The difficulty is not that agitation fails to provide him with answers, but rather that it answers a question he did not ask: whenever he asks what he is answered as if he had asked who. He finds numerous vituperative and indignant references to enemies, but nowhere can he find a clearly defined objective condition from which the agitator's audience presumably suffers."
"A Catalog of Grievances"
"Economic Grievances"
"The agitator roams freely over every area of economic life. He may begin anywhere at all. Too much help is being extended to foreign nations." "Not only are foreigners taking our money, they also threaten our jobs."
"Political Grievances"
"International commitments by the United States government jeopardize political liberties." "Of course it is only reasonable that "treaties and agreements ... shall be reached with other nations, but ... we want no world court and no world congress made up of a few Orientals and a few Russians a few Europeans and a few British...to make laws for us to obey...""
"Cultural Grievances"
"The agitator is greatly disturbed because the media of public information are in the hands of enemies of the nation."
"Moral Grievances"
"...what is most galling of all is that "we gentiles are suckers." For "while we were praying they had their hands in our pockets.""
"Emotional Substratum"
"Distrust:"
"The agitator plays on his audience's suspicions all social phenomena impinging on its life in ways it does not understand. Foreign refugees cash in on the "gullibility" of Americans, whom he warns not to be "duped" by internationalists. Strewn through the output of the agitator are such words as hoax, corrupt, insincere, duped, manipulate."
"Dependence:"
"The agitator seems to assume that he is addressing people who suffer from a sense of helplessness and passivity. He plays on the ambivalent nature of this complex which on the one hand reflects a protest against manipulation and on the other hand a wish to be protected, to belong to a strong organization or be led by a strong leader."
"Exclusion:"
"The American taxpayer's money is use to help everyone but himself -- "we feed foreigners," the agitator complains, while we neglect our own millions of unemployed."
"Anxiety:"
"...the middle-class...suspicion that the moral mainstays of social life are being undermined. The agitator speaks of the "darkest hour in American history" and graphically describes a pervasive sense of fear and insecurity..."
"Disillusionment:"
"This complex is seen in such remarks as the agitator's characterization of politics as "make-believe, pretense, pretext, sham, fraud, deception, dishonesty, falsehood, hypocrisy..."
"The Individual in Crisis"
"Distrust, dependence, exclusion, anxiety, and disillusionment blend together to form a fundamental condition of modern life: malaise." "...certain recurrent characteristics of agitation: its diffuseness, its pseudo-spontaneity, its flexibility in utilizing a variety of grievances, and its substation of a personal enemy for an objective condition." "This malaise reflects the stresses imposed on the individual by the profound transformations taking place in our economic and social structure--the replacement of the class of small independent producers by gigantic industrial bureaucracies, the decay of the patriarchal family, the breakdown of primary personal ties between individuals in an increasingly mechanized world, the compartmentalization and atomization of group life, and the substitution of mass culture for traditional patterns." "Malaise is neither an illusion of the audience nor a mere imposition by the agitator; it is a psychological symptom of an oppressive situation." "...he tricks his audience into accepting the very situation that produced its malaise. Under the guise of a protest against the oppressive situation, the agitator binds his audience to it. Since this pseudo-protest never produces a genuine solution, it merely leads the audience to seek permanent relief from a permanent predicament by means of irrational outbursts. The agitator does not create the malaise, but he aggravated and fixates it because he bars the path to overcoming it. Those afflicted by the malaise ascribe social evil not to an unjust or obsolete form of society or to a poor organization of an adequate society, but rather to activities of individuals or groups motivated by innate impulses. For the agitator these impulses are biological in nature, they function beyond and above history..." "The agitator exploits not primarily the feelings generated by specific hardships or frustrations, but more fundamentally those diffuse feelings of malaise which pervade all modern life." "Because malaise originates in the deepest layers of the individual psyche, it can appear to be an expression of frustrated spontaneity and essential spiritual needs." "Malaise is a consequence of the depersonalization and permanent insecurity of modern life." "Vaguely sensing that something has gone astray in modern life but also strongly convinced that he lacks the power to right whatever is wrong (even if it were possible to discover what is wrong), the individual lives in a sort of eternal adolescent uneasiness." "...once the agitator's audience has been driven to this paranoiac point, it is ripe for his ministrations." "When, for whatever reasons, direct expression of feelings is inhibited, they are projected through some apparently unrelated materials." "So the agitator sanctions immediate resentments and seemingly paves the way for the relief of the malaise through discharge of the audience's aggressive impulses; but simultaneously he perpetuates the malaise by blocking the way toward real understanding of its cause."
From Chapter 3 - A Hostile World
"He crystallizes and hardens these feelings [that reflect the malaise] and distorts the objective situation." "... its disillusionment is transformed into the complete renunciation of values and ideals; and its anxiety is both repressed and magnified into the perpetual expectation of apocalyptic doom."
"Theme 1 - The Eternal Dupes"
"He cannot win adherents without in a sense humiliating them, that is, suggesting that they are inferior in knowledge, strength, or courage and that they need him more than he needs them." "In agitation, this humiliation is permanent. In establishing the inferiority of his prospective followers, the agitator claims superior knowledge, which, he implies, he has obtained by virtue of his special position and abilities. The audience is inferior not because it is temporarily "unenlightened" but because it is composed of "dupes"and "suckers." Throughout his utterances there can be found many unflattering references to potential followers." "He warns his audience that it needs his guidance in the bewildering situation in which it finds itself; but he offers it no way to escape its bewilderment by its own intellectual efforts." "They are cheated all along the line, in rationing, in war, through the press and the movies." "It must not be forgotten that the agitator banks on an audience composed of "dupes"--people who bear the world a grudge because they feel it has cheated them, and who are therefore insecure, dependent, and bewildered." "By calling his followers suckers and telling them they must follow him if they are no longer to be cheated, the agitator promises that he will take care of them and "think" for them. Those who chafe under an authority they distrust and whose motives they cannot understand, are now to be subjected to the promptings of an agitator who will sanction their spontaneous resentments and seem to gratify their deepest wishes." "...the agitator breaks down these folkways; he seems to say, "let us be honest, let us admit we are disillusioned, ignorant and cheated." Such an invitation can only be welcomed by people who feel that hey have always been "misunderstood." Hence, by reversing the optimistic stereotypes of liberal society the agitator makes the feeling of acknowledged failure seem respectable." "His bad manners become a guaranty of his sincerity. They can trust him, for he does not flatter them, and since they are unable by themselves to "pierce the sham of propaganda" their only possible course of action is to join his movement." "On the one hand the agitator brands his followers as suckers, harping on the suffering they have endured in their unsuccessful lives an thereby satisfying their latent masochism. On the other hand, he transforms this very humiliation into something to be proud of, a mark of the new elite he will eventually elevate." "...the agitator seems to be especially interested in the little man who has not made the grade." "...he does make it possible for them to feel at ease in their common inferiority."
"Theme 2 - Conspiracy"
"Nor is his inability to overcome his bewilderment and helplessness surprising, for he is the victim of a "comprehensive and carefully-planned political conspiracy."" "[The agitator]... refers to popular stereotypes only to encourage the vague resentments they reflect." "On a social scale he stirs his audience to reactions similar to those of paranoia on an individual scale, and his primary means of doing this is by indefinitely extending the concept of conspiracy." "Phrases like the "Hidden Hand" or "International Invisible Government" appear in his writings and speeches again and again." "The very stereotypes that once referred more or less definitely to social oligarchies, now refer to gigantic but undefined secret international plots." "In this transformation of a circumscribed group of magnates into mysterious invisible rulers, the process of blurring reality by encouraging paranoiac tendencies, is clearly evident." "...by exaggerating to the point of the fantastic its suspicions that it is the toy of anonymous forces, and by pointing to mysterious individuals rather than analyzing social forces, the agitator in effect cheats his audience of its curiosity." "...the paranoiac brooding and the projection of conspiracies end with suggestions for acts of violence." "This implies that existing laws and institutions cannot cope with [the conspirators] ... and that extraordinary measures are needed."
"Theme 3 - Forbidden Fruit"
""The sweet and simple things of life" are "discarded, absent, forgotten.""Enjoyment of wealth means debauch and vice --hence wealth is a forbidden fruit." "Rather than offering suggestions for a greater utilization of productive facilities or a more just distribution of the social product, the agitator encourages resentment against the excesses of luxury. Appealing to puritanical attitudes the agitator condemns indulgence not in order to propose the elimination of poverty, but rather to exasperate his followers' feelings of envy while simultaneous arousing their sense of guilt at being envious." "Even when the agitator denounces the "society world of snobbery and fraud" and shouts "Down must come those who live in luxury!" he is not proposing to the audience a way for it to increase its share of wealth and pleasure." "If the agitator cannot promise his adherents a greater share of the good things of life, he can suggest that the good life consists in something else: the gratification of repressed impulses; and that if they are obedient to him they will be offered the luxurious sinners as sacrificial prey."
"Theme 4 - Disaffection"
"...when confronted with his audience's moral confusion, he implies that he shares neither the conservative's total acceptance of existing values and institutions, nor the "naive idealism of the liberals." He knows that the "two-party system is a sham" and "democracy" a "trick word."" "...he declare, he is ...called [a fascist] ... merely because he is one of the individualists who still believe in Constitutional government..."" "He therefore seems bent not on concealing but on flaunting his cynicism, the effect of which is to sanction and fixate his audience's disillusionment." "In the way he points to the traditional as the great ideal, the agitator discourages a serious critique of existing values; in the way he debunks existing values, he makes impossible any sincere attempt to realize them more effectively in practice." "...his general desecration of the idea of truth as such." "The distinction between truth and lies is accordingly inconsequential; bot are neutral means to be used according to their helpfulness to his cause." "His doctrine thus consists in drawing the ultimate consequences of a totally amoral opportunism."
"Transformation of Meaning"
"The agitator transforms democracy from a system that guarantees minority rights into one that merely affirms the privileged status of the majority."
"Anti-Universality
"The agitator explicitly rejects the ideal of universality. This rejection is evidenced, for instance, in his attitude toward tolerance, which he brand[s] as "silly sentimentality" and "non-Christian," as contrary to self-interest and a weakness that must eradicated for the sake of survival."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 15, 2022
ห้ากลวิธีที่นักปลุกระดมใช้เพื่อเปลี่ยนพลเมืองในระบอบประชาธิปไตยให้กลายเป็นหุ่นเชิดของเผด็จการฟาสซิสต์
1. ตอกย้ำตลอดเวลาว่าพลเมืองทุกคนต่างก็ไร้เดียงสา ถูกหลอกลวง ไม่รู้ความจริง และมีแต่พวกตนเอง(หรือนักการเมืองฝ่ายตน) ที่รู้ว่าอะไรคือความจริง และเป็นผู้ตีแผ่ความจริงต่างๆด้วยการค้นคว้าข้อมูลเชิงลึกและการวิเคราะห์อันยอดเยี่ยมเท่านั้น ที่จะช่วยพลเมืองและอนาคตของสังคมการเมืองได้ วาทศิลป์ของนักปลุกระดมจึงเป็นวาทศิลป์ที่ตอกย้ำให้สาวกตระหนักรู้ถึงความเขลาเบาปัญญาจนต้องยอมเชื่อฟังนักปลุกระดม ในฐานะเข็มทิศนำทางให้กับการตัดสินใจต่างๆในทางการเมืองของตน
2.เน้นย้ำอยู่เสมอว่าสภาพสังคมอันเลวร้ายและวิกฤติทั้งหมดทั้งปวงที่พลเมืองเผชิญอยู่นั้น เป็นผลจากการชักใยเบื้องหลังของกลุ่ม/องค์กร/บุคคลผู้ไม่หวังดีทั้งหลาย นักปลุกระดมจึงต้องเป็นนักทฤษฎีสมคบคิดที่คอยสร้างเรื่องราวมาหลอกหลอนสาวกของตน ด้วยการชี้ให้เห็นถึงการดำรงอยู่ของ "มื่อที่มองไม่เห็น" อันจะย้อนกลับมาตอกย้ำถึงความสำคัญของนักปลุกระดมเองในฐานะผู้รู้ความจริง ผู้ปลดปล่อยพลเมืองทั้งหลายจากการครอบงำของมื่อที่มองไม่เห็นเหล่านั้น
3. ฉายภาพความชั่วร้ายของตัวการผู้อยู่เบื้องหลังวิกฤติทางสังคมและชีวิตอันบัดซบของพลเมือง โดยเฉพาะการตอกย้ำถึงความเป็นอยู่ที่ดีเลิศ สุขสบายของตัวการเหล่านั้น เพื่อกระตุ้นให้เกิดความเกลียดชังอันจะทำให้พลเมืองเลือกละทิ้งเหตุผลและใช้อารมณ์ความรู้สึกเป็นหลักสำหรับการตัดสินใจทางการเมืองได้อย่างง่ายดาย
4.บิดเบือนและทำลายหลักการภายในคุณค่าต่างๆของสังคมทั้งหมด ด้วยการใช้วาทศิลป์ยกย่องตนเองว่าคือผู้ปกป้องคุณค่าเหล่านั้น ทั้งๆที่การกระทำทั้งหมดนั้นขัดกับคุณค่าดังกล่าวอย่างชัดเจน เพื่อเป็นการตอกย้ำถึงความจำเป็นของชัยชนะทางการเมืองเหนืออีกฝ่า่ย นักปลุกระดมจึงต้องเป็นนักโวหารที่สามารถสร้างข้อยกเว้นต่างๆให้กับคุณค่าของตนเองเพื่อทำให้คุณค่าเหล่านั้นกลายเป็นสัญญะกลวงเปล่าที่ตนสามารถฉวยใช้เพื่อสร้างความชอบธรรมทางการเมืองของตนได้
5.ฉายภาพให้เห็นถึงหายนะในอนาคตที่จะเกิดขึ้นกับสังคมหากพลเมืองนิ่งเฉยไม่ยอมปฏิบัติตามแนวทางที่ตนกำหนด นักปลุกระดมจึงต้องเชี่ยวชาญการปลุกเร้าความหวาดกลัวทางสังคมในหมู่สาวก เพื่อให้เหล่าสาวกกระตือรือล้นลุกขึ้นมาประกอบกิจกรรมทางการเมืองตามที่นักปลุกระดมวางแผนเอาไว้ ในฐานะของการเคลื่อนไหวเพื่อปกป้องสังคมการเมืองที่ตนเติบโตและใช้ชีวิต (แม้ในความเป็นจริงแล้วการเคลื่อนไหวดังกล่าวอาจส่งผลในทางตรงกันข้ามก็ตาม)
1. ตอกย้ำตลอดเวลาว่าพลเมืองทุกคนต่างก็ไร้เดียงสา ถูกหลอกลวง ไม่รู้ความจริง และมีแต่พวกตนเอง(หรือนักการเมืองฝ่ายตน) ที่รู้ว่าอะไรคือความจริง และเป็นผู้ตีแผ่ความจริงต่างๆด้วยการค้นคว้าข้อมูลเชิงลึกและการวิเคราะห์อันยอดเยี่ยมเท่านั้น ที่จะช่วยพลเมืองและอนาคตของสังคมการเมืองได้ วาทศิลป์ของนักปลุกระดมจึงเป็นวาทศิลป์ที่ตอกย้ำให้สาวกตระหนักรู้ถึงความเขลาเบาปัญญาจนต้องยอมเชื่อฟังนักปลุกระดม ในฐานะเข็มทิศนำทางให้กับการตัดสินใจต่างๆในทางการเมืองของตน
2.เน้นย้ำอยู่เสมอว่าสภาพสังคมอันเลวร้ายและวิกฤติทั้งหมดทั้งปวงที่พลเมืองเผชิญอยู่นั้น เป็นผลจากการชักใยเบื้องหลังของกลุ่ม/องค์กร/บุคคลผู้ไม่หวังดีทั้งหลาย นักปลุกระดมจึงต้องเป็นนักทฤษฎีสมคบคิดที่คอยสร้างเรื่องราวมาหลอกหลอนสาวกของตน ด้วยการชี้ให้เห็นถึงการดำรงอยู่ของ "มื่อที่มองไม่เห็น" อันจะย้อนกลับมาตอกย้ำถึงความสำคัญของนักปลุกระดมเองในฐานะผู้รู้ความจริง ผู้ปลดปล่อยพลเมืองทั้งหลายจากการครอบงำของมื่อที่มองไม่เห็นเหล่านั้น
3. ฉายภาพความชั่วร้ายของตัวการผู้อยู่เบื้องหลังวิกฤติทางสังคมและชีวิตอันบัดซบของพลเมือง โดยเฉพาะการตอกย้ำถึงความเป็นอยู่ที่ดีเลิศ สุขสบายของตัวการเหล่านั้น เพื่อกระตุ้นให้เกิดความเกลียดชังอันจะทำให้พลเมืองเลือกละทิ้งเหตุผลและใช้อารมณ์ความรู้สึกเป็นหลักสำหรับการตัดสินใจทางการเมืองได้อย่างง่ายดาย
4.บิดเบือนและทำลายหลักการภายในคุณค่าต่างๆของสังคมทั้งหมด ด้วยการใช้วาทศิลป์ยกย่องตนเองว่าคือผู้ปกป้องคุณค่าเหล่านั้น ทั้งๆที่การกระทำทั้งหมดนั้นขัดกับคุณค่าดังกล่าวอย่างชัดเจน เพื่อเป็นการตอกย้ำถึงความจำเป็นของชัยชนะทางการเมืองเหนืออีกฝ่า่ย นักปลุกระดมจึงต้องเป็นนักโวหารที่สามารถสร้างข้อยกเว้นต่างๆให้กับคุณค่าของตนเองเพื่อทำให้คุณค่าเหล่านั้นกลายเป็นสัญญะกลวงเปล่าที่ตนสามารถฉวยใช้เพื่อสร้างความชอบธรรมทางการเมืองของตนได้
5.ฉายภาพให้เห็นถึงหายนะในอนาคตที่จะเกิดขึ้นกับสังคมหากพลเมืองนิ่งเฉยไม่ยอมปฏิบัติตามแนวทางที่ตนกำหนด นักปลุกระดมจึงต้องเชี่ยวชาญการปลุกเร้าความหวาดกลัวทางสังคมในหมู่สาวก เพื่อให้เหล่าสาวกกระตือรือล้นลุกขึ้นมาประกอบกิจกรรมทางการเมืองตามที่นักปลุกระดมวางแผนเอาไว้ ในฐานะของการเคลื่อนไหวเพื่อปกป้องสังคมการเมืองที่ตนเติบโตและใช้ชีวิต (แม้ในความเป็นจริงแล้วการเคลื่อนไหวดังกล่าวอาจส่งผลในทางตรงกันข้ามก็ตาม)
January 3, 2025
herregud den er fra 1949 om fascisme under ww2 og er så relevant og skummel at jeg gråter helt ekte tårer. sånn annet enn kontekst og fokus (antisemittisme mer enn rasisme feks) kunne den vært skrevet i går. logger den før jeg er ferdig fordi jeg er desp etter at andre skal lese den så vi kan snakke (please!!!)
December 20, 2025
If this was for Michelin stars, I’d have to give it five because dear lord did this book cook beyond all possibility
Want to read
August 21, 2009Off this article: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/m...
"In analyzing speeches and writings by the Depression agitators, Lowenthal showed a particular interest in how they operated as rhetoric – how the imagery, figures of speech, and recurrent themes worked together, appealing to the half-articulated desires and frustrations of the demagogue’s followers.
...
The insights and blindspots of this large-scale effort to analyze “the authoritarian personality” generated controversy that continues all these decades later. But I wasn’t thinking of any of that when Prophets of Deceit came back to mind not long ago.
The catalyst, rather, was my first exposure to the cable talk-show host Glenn Beck. His program, on the de facto Republican party network Fox, has been a locus for much of the pseudopopulist craziness about how the Presidency has been taken over by a totalitarian illegal alien. You will find most of the themes of this form of political thinking cataloged by Lowenthal and associates. (Sixty years ago, the ranting tended very quickly to become anti-Semitic, while now it seems the conspiracy is run by the Kenyans. This change deserves closer study.)
But the striking thing about Beck’s program was not its ideological message but something else: its mode of performance, which was so close to that described in Prophets of Deceit that I had to track down a copy to make sure my memory was not playing tricks. The book was reissued a few years ago in an edition of Lowenthal’s collected writings published by Transaction.
In case you have not seen him in action, Beck “weeps for his country.” Quite literally so: the display of waterworks is the most readily parodied aspect of his performance. He confesses to being terrified for the future, and quakes accordingly. He acts out aggressive scenarios, such as one in which he pretended to be Obama throwing gasoline on an Average American and threatening to set him on fire."
"In analyzing speeches and writings by the Depression agitators, Lowenthal showed a particular interest in how they operated as rhetoric – how the imagery, figures of speech, and recurrent themes worked together, appealing to the half-articulated desires and frustrations of the demagogue’s followers.
...
The insights and blindspots of this large-scale effort to analyze “the authoritarian personality” generated controversy that continues all these decades later. But I wasn’t thinking of any of that when Prophets of Deceit came back to mind not long ago.
The catalyst, rather, was my first exposure to the cable talk-show host Glenn Beck. His program, on the de facto Republican party network Fox, has been a locus for much of the pseudopopulist craziness about how the Presidency has been taken over by a totalitarian illegal alien. You will find most of the themes of this form of political thinking cataloged by Lowenthal and associates. (Sixty years ago, the ranting tended very quickly to become anti-Semitic, while now it seems the conspiracy is run by the Kenyans. This change deserves closer study.)
But the striking thing about Beck’s program was not its ideological message but something else: its mode of performance, which was so close to that described in Prophets of Deceit that I had to track down a copy to make sure my memory was not playing tricks. The book was reissued a few years ago in an edition of Lowenthal’s collected writings published by Transaction.
In case you have not seen him in action, Beck “weeps for his country.” Quite literally so: the display of waterworks is the most readily parodied aspect of his performance. He confesses to being terrified for the future, and quakes accordingly. He acts out aggressive scenarios, such as one in which he pretended to be Obama throwing gasoline on an Average American and threatening to set him on fire."
March 31, 2022
Studie zum Verhältnis von faschistischem Redner und seinem Publikum, die auf Grundlage us-amerikischer Beispiele geschrieben wurde. Fesselnd, wie wenig sich die damaligen Demagogen von den heutigen unterscheiden.
Gut lesbar, mit nachvollziehbarer Struktur.
Mit gewissen Längen was die Beispiele betrifft.
Gut lesbar, mit nachvollziehbarer Struktur.
Mit gewissen Längen was die Beispiele betrifft.
April 5, 2010
This book is sadly pertinent to current political discourse. It outlines the rhetoric of political agitators that outline scapegoats rather than solutions, rehearse violence against those that stand against them, while clinging to vague ideas of "true" American values.
August 22, 2009
excellent analysis of rightwing demagogues...it is about the
1930s but very appropriate for our time...
1930s but very appropriate for our time...
January 19, 2022
I only finished the first third of this or so. It's not bad, I just feel like I got the gist of it in the first 50 pages.
This book is a study of the 1930s-1940s "American agitator." It explains how the agitators attract an audience. The big question with a book like this is: how well does it hold up? Is Trump just like the people profiled in this book?
There are plenty of similarities. Trump's use of grievances and resentment resembles what you see here. Other techniques are here too. On page 30, one of the agitator's techniques is described as: "he does not intend to be taken literally." A famous Atlantic article stated that we should take Trump "seriously, not literally."
Some of the book seems like a product of its time. For example, I think it's a stretch to say that anti-Semitism is a core part of Trumpism. The book also uses early 20th century psychoanalysis in a way that hasn't aged well: there is a lot of Freudian talk about sadism, repressed sexual desires, etc. I find that stuff less convincing.
I paged through the index before I put the book down and was amused to see a figure from my alma mater. In The University of Chicago: A History , there is a good story about the agitator Elizabeth Dilling. In this book, she is included as an example of the author’s thesis.
This would have been a good book to read in 2016, not in 2022. Hopefully we are past all of this.
This book is a study of the 1930s-1940s "American agitator." It explains how the agitators attract an audience. The big question with a book like this is: how well does it hold up? Is Trump just like the people profiled in this book?
There are plenty of similarities. Trump's use of grievances and resentment resembles what you see here. Other techniques are here too. On page 30, one of the agitator's techniques is described as: "he does not intend to be taken literally." A famous Atlantic article stated that we should take Trump "seriously, not literally."
Some of the book seems like a product of its time. For example, I think it's a stretch to say that anti-Semitism is a core part of Trumpism. The book also uses early 20th century psychoanalysis in a way that hasn't aged well: there is a lot of Freudian talk about sadism, repressed sexual desires, etc. I find that stuff less convincing.
I paged through the index before I put the book down and was amused to see a figure from my alma mater. In The University of Chicago: A History , there is a good story about the agitator Elizabeth Dilling. In this book, she is included as an example of the author’s thesis.
This would have been a good book to read in 2016, not in 2022. Hopefully we are past all of this.
November 24, 2024
First off, I only give this a 4 star review because it’s a small book and I personally would’ve enjoyed a more thorough and in depth treatment, thought I think the authors aim was to make it approachable by the mass public to inform them. The idea now that the average American would choose to read a 160 page booklet to educate themselves on the techniques of political agitators seems so far off from reality, in my opinion. But if people chose to do so, I think this book can at least offer an objective look at the political landscape in America today, even if it was written in the 40s. I enjoyed it very much.
September 17, 2025
A great read about the nature of agitation that provides insights about the modern day as much as it does the agitators of Lowenthal's time. It is for a generalist audience but parts of it can come off as a little dull to read at times. Still, it serves as an informative read to understand the nature of politics in many a modern country. I greatly appreciated the knowledge I gained from it, even if I don't necessarily want to revisit it, hence the 3 star rating.
January 29, 2020
Through a detailed analysis of "political agitators" characterized by totalitarian, adversarial, and anti-Semitic discourse, Lowenthal and Guterman prophetically describe useful agitator identification/diagnostic criteria. Extremely relevant to today's populism and demagoguery, and all the more pertinent in an age of digitally-mediated communication.
March 23, 2023
A fairly stunning documentation of the persistence of neo or proto-fascist rhetorical tropes in the U.S. If you want to see how people complained about cancel culture in the 40's and claimed to simply be exercising their right to ask critical questions about the Jews concocting such awful stories about Hitler to weasel their way into the U.S., this is the book for you.
February 3, 2024
A prescient book about where the far right playbook comes from. The tactics are very much similar. The book’s sole focus on anti-Semitism, though good, particularly in the ways reactionaries employ anti-Semitic tropes without saying “Jew”, needs broadening about settler-colonialism, gender, and racism. But still, an incredibly insightful book for those studying reactionaries of the present.
August 12, 2022
If you are interested on the tactics the right wing populism has used to deceive the masses, then this book is for you.
Anti-intellectual movements are essentially right wing tactics to mantain the proletariat ignorant.
Anti-intellectual movements are essentially right wing tactics to mantain the proletariat ignorant.
January 6, 2021
An analysis of the psychology of the Anti- Semitism of the opposition to FDR. Not much has changed regarding a certain type of Republican, unfortunately.
November 5, 2021
The butler did it.
August 30, 2023
Written in 1949, but still frighteningly relevant. A clear-eyed and readable analysis.
May 4, 2022
While written in the 1940s regarding proto-fascist agitators of the era by School of Frankfurt cultural theorists/philosophers, it is still very much consumable and prevalent.
The analysis is as heterogeneous, with extensive quoting of the screeds of the time (it is common to read a footnote as "heard by Racist Magee, June 1940 on a street corner) no cultural analysis is truely scientific, but the author's go to great pains in their analysis to build theories that directly relate to their observations in almost every theory they posit.
It is also important to note that the work definitely applies to the rise of the far right that has insomuch gained authority in America since Barack Obama took office (Tea Partiers, Trump faithfull, Qanon etc.). Depictions of agitators often remind me of the tactics used by the assortment of Fox News assholes that come and go over the years, the worst of Right Wing Watch, and even some Republican politicians.
This book will assist you in understanding how the commentators and agitators for far right ideas have previously and currently been successful.
The analysis is as heterogeneous, with extensive quoting of the screeds of the time (it is common to read a footnote as "heard by Racist Magee, June 1940 on a street corner) no cultural analysis is truely scientific, but the author's go to great pains in their analysis to build theories that directly relate to their observations in almost every theory they posit.
It is also important to note that the work definitely applies to the rise of the far right that has insomuch gained authority in America since Barack Obama took office (Tea Partiers, Trump faithfull, Qanon etc.). Depictions of agitators often remind me of the tactics used by the assortment of Fox News assholes that come and go over the years, the worst of Right Wing Watch, and even some Republican politicians.
This book will assist you in understanding how the commentators and agitators for far right ideas have previously and currently been successful.
January 3, 2024
This felt like trying to reach the word count in an essay when you've already said all that needed to be said. That's just how it felt to me reading it. Other than that it was insightful particularly into the historical context (1930s and 1940s), American Fascism and its links to antisemitism, etc. It relies a lot on Freudian psychoanalysis which is kinda ehhhhh.
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February 18, 2023Favorite quote: “The agitator’s solutions may seem incongruous and morally shocking, but they are always facile, simple, and final, like day-dreams.”
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