Gin’s Reviews > Lectures 1949-1968, Volume 2: Social Theory and Politics > Status Update

“…propaganda here is primarily a technique of mass psychology. It is based on the model of the authority-bound personality… The unity lies in this appeal to the authority-bound personality. One hears time and again that these movements all promise something and that is true as a characteristic of the lack of theory.” Again, MAGA and Trump come to mind, and the most recent example of what Adorno talks about.

Third paragraph describes Trump’s US to a T.

Psychoanalytically speaking here - “Someone who is unable to see anything ahead of them and does not want the social foundation to change really has no alternative other than…’The end.’ This person, from the perspective of their own social situation, longs for demise… the demise of all.”

“Fascists movements as the wounds, the scars of a democracy that, to this day, has not yet lived up to its own concept.” - what Zizek mentioning someone saying the same thing - the rise of fascism is an outcome of a failed revolution.

“… even the people who stand within the production process already feel potentially superfluous… they totally feel potential unemployed.” Adorno refers to the production line workers but almost 60 years later in 2026, this can also apply to service/intellectual labour with the advent of AI. The form may change but the underlying substance does not.

The last paragraph of this page refers to the Nazis, but can easily describe today’s situation in many countries. Most aptly, the MAGA movement, and how Trunp is seen by them.

Personalisation of politics through idealism akin to Harvey’s notion of aesthetics as opposed to material basis of political power ( parallel the ethics domain of Harvey)?

The concept of “socialised semi-culture” which I think is key to also understanding the readiness to turn to some form of “ersatz rationality”, such as superstition or other brief structures like fascism or dialectical-materialism (diamat). In today’s context and within American society, the MAGA movement is a contemporary example.

Adorno’s concern with superstition is in how as a mechanism of contemporary mass culture, it leads and influences people in a certain way that keeps them dependent through “exploiting certain factors in the masses themselves.” For Adorno, the mass culture is the ideology of those wishing to exploit those masses. What allows this to happen is what

Second-hand superstition - ideas that are “cranked up and boosted by material interests, essentially by the interests of journals, magazines and newspapers I. Order to increase their sales and spread their influence.”