Adorno’s Years in California 293of power. He related this psychological mechanism to the widespread
phenomenon of declaring the existing state of society to be the best
of all possible worlds and hence to identify with the world as it is. The
purpose of a limited number of repetitive rhetorical devices is to win
over individual sympathizers as a band of followers bound together
libidinally. These followers are to be recruited in the name of the leader
for purposes that are incompatible with the rational interests of the
individuals who make up the group. Because they sacrifice their con-
scious ability to judge reality, destructive instincts are released. ‘As a
rebellion against civilization, fascism is not simply the recurrence of the
archaic but its re-creation in and by civilization itself.’^95 Speaking in
very general terms, Adorno here argues very much along the lines of
Dialectic of Enlightenment to the effect that the constraints associated
with civilization provoke internal and external reactions. He claims that
the destructiveness of fascist mass movements has as its obverse the
masochistic readiness to submit blindly to leader figures. Such figures
are conceived by the individual within the mass as all-powerful, menacing,
‘primal fathers’. The mechanism of narcissistic identification functions
as long as the leader is both superman and average man: in accordance
with the stereotype of the ‘great, little man’. ‘The agitators disavow any
pretence to superiority, implying that the... leader is one who is as weak
as his brethren, but who is brave enough to confess his weakness without
inhibition and is consequently going to be transformed into a strong
man.’^96 As a further stereotype, Adorno pointed to the rigid opposition
of in-group and out-group which leads to the total identification with one’s
own group and to enmity towards all deviations from it. A constantly
recurring propaganda trick, finally, is the claim that we are all in the
same boat. ‘A repressive egalitarianism... is an essential component of
a fascist way of thinking and is expressed in the “if you only knew.. .”
technique used by agitators and consists in the promise to reveal as an
act of vengeance all the forbidden pleasures that others can afford.’^97
At the end of his analysis of propaganda, Adorno raised the question
of how the agitator manages to enter into the mind of his followers.
One reason, he thought, lay in the fundamental similarity between leader
and led. So the secret of fascist propaganda was that ‘it simply takes
people for what they are: genuine children of today’s standardized mass
culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and
spontaneity.’^98
Even though Adorno made use of Freudian theory here, in one
of the notebooks that would turn out later on to be a source book of
Minima Moralia, he nevertheless noted: ‘Horror is beyond the reach of
psychology.’^99 As a counterpoint to this statement, there is the further
assertion on the same page that fascism is ‘a dictatorship by persecution-
maniacs’ that ‘realizes all the persecution-fears of its victims’.^100
Thus Adorno had developed theories with which to explain people’s
susceptibility to fascism and anti-Semitic prejudice. Now that he had