Alex Ross - The Frankfurt School knew Trump was coming // President-elect of the USA insults trade-union leader on Twitter
Shortly after the
Presidential election, a small piece of good news came over the wire: the Thomas
Mann villa in Los Angeles has been saved. The house, which was built
to Mann’s specifications, in the nineteen-forties, went on the market earlier
this year, and it seemed likely to be demolished, because the structure was
deemed less valuable than the land beneath it. After prolonged negotiations,
the German government bought the property, with the idea of establishing it as a
cultural center.
President-elect of the USA insults trade-union leader on Twitter - intimidation follows
Half an hour after Trump tweeted about Jones on Wednesday, the union leader's phone began to ring and kept ringing, he said. One voice asked: What kind of car do you drive? Another said: We’re coming for you. He wasn’t sure how these people found his number. "Nothing that says they’re gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids,” Jones said later on MSNBC. “We know what car you drive. Things along those lines.”..
Support for Union leader grows after threats
The Art of the Autocrat, by Robert Reich
The house deserves to
stand not only because a great writer lived there but because it brings to mind
a tragic moment in American cultural history. The author of “Death in Venice”
and “The Magic Mountain” settled in this country in 1938, a grateful refugee
from Nazism. He became a citizen and extolled American ideals. By 1952, though,
he had become convinced that McCarthyism was a prelude to fascism, and felt
compelled to emigrate again. At the time of the House Un-American Activities
Committee’s hearings on Communism in Hollywood, Mann said, “Spiritual
intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this
in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency.’ . . . That is how it started in
Germany.” The tearing down of Mann’s “magic villa” would have been a cold
epilogue to a melancholy tale.
Mann was hardly the
only Central European émigré who experienced uneasy feelings of déjà vu in the
fearful years after the end of the Second World War. Members of the
intellectual enclave known as the Frankfurt School—originally based at the
Institute for Social Research, in Frankfurt—felt a similar alarm. In 1950, Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno helped to assemble a volume titled “The
Authoritarian Personality,” which constructed a psychological and
sociological profile of the “potentially fascistic individual.” The
work was based on interviews with American subjects, and the steady
accumulation of racist, antidemocratic, paranoid, and irrational sentiments in
the case studies gave the German-speakers pause. Likewise, Leo Lowenthal and
Norbert Guterman’s 1949 book, “Prophets
of Deceit,” studied the Father Coughlin type of rabble-rouser,
contemplating the “possibility that a situation will arise in which large numbers
of people would be susceptible to his psychological manipulation.”
Adorno believed that
the greatest danger to American democracy lay in the mass-culture apparatus of
film, radio, and television. Indeed, in his view, this apparatus operates in
dictatorial fashion even when no dictatorship is in place: it enforces
conformity, quiets dissent, mutes thought. Nazi Germany was merely the most
extreme case of a late-capitalist condition in which people surrender real
intellectual freedom in favor of a sham paradise of personal liberation and
comfort. Watching wartime newsreels, Adorno concluded that the “culture
industry,” as he and Horkheimer called it, was replicating fascist methods of
mass hypnosis. Above all, he saw a blurring of the line between reality and
fiction. In his 1951 book, “Minima Moralia,” he wrote:
Lies have long legs:
they are ahead of their time. The conversion of all questions of truth into
questions of power, a process that truth itself cannot escape if it is not to
be annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier despotic
orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and
false, which the hirelings of logic were in any case diligently working to
abolish. So Hitler, of whom no one can say whether he died or escaped,
survives.
Mann, who had
consulted Adorno while writing his musical novel “Doctor Faustus,” was reading
“Minima Moralia” as he contemplated his departure from America. He compared the
book’s aphoristic style to the “enormously strong gravitational force-field” of
a super-compact celestial body. Possibly, it exerted a pull on his decision to
go into exile again. A few months later, on the eve of leaving, Mann wrote to
Adorno, “The way things are developing is already clear. And we have rather
gone beyond Brüning.” Heinrich Brüning was the Chancellor of Germany from 1930
to 1932.
The fears of Mann,
Adorno, and other émigrés came to naught—or so it seemed. The McCarthyite
danger passed; civil rights advanced; free speech triumphed; liberal democracy
spread around the world. By the end of the century, the Frankfurt School was
seen in many quarters as an artifact of intellectual kitsch. In recent years,
though, its stock has risen once again... read more:
see also
Sigmund Freud is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal to flatter humankind
Adam Zagajewski: A defence of ardour
Adam Zagajewski: A defence of ardour
Ignorance is Strength-Freedom is Slavery-War is Peace (George Orwell, 1984)
