This 1949 Examination of Fascist Rhetoric Shows Us How We Got Here
More on the connection between transphobia and antisemitism
Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator is a 1949 book by Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman. It’s reprinted by Verso.
It gives a 1940s U.S. perspective on anti-Jewish rhetoric. Max Horkheimer, Director of the Institute of Social Research, had decided to examine the social and psychological reasons why people become fascist agitators. The institute began these investigations in 1940, and Löwenthal and Guterman’s work is based on that. Horkheimer wrote a foreword to their book.
Fascists Draw on Fears of Vast Conspiracies
Like everyone else, the fascist agitator is impacted by
“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.”
Fascist political exhortations draw on motifs of “the modern individual’s sense of isolation, his so-called spiritual homelessness…
