Chapter XVII
Politics and Economics in the Interview Material
A. Introduction
The questionnaire findings on political and economic ideology have been analyzed in Chapter V.[1] It is now our task to study the interview material referring to the same topics. The purpose is, first of all, to concretize our insight into these ideologies. If we investigated, in Chapter V, into the responses of our subjects to a number of set, standardized political and economic ideas and slogans with which they are daily confronted, we shall now try to form a picture of »what they really think« – with the qualification that we shall also have to find out whether we are entitled to expect autonomous and spontaneous opinions from the majority of them. It is obvious that the answer to such problems, unless they should be made the very center of research, can be given only in a less rigorous way than was the case with the quantitative analysis of questionnaire responses, and that the results are of a more tentative nature. Their convincing power lies more in the consistency of specific interpretations with facts previously established than in any indisputable »proof« that one or the other of the ideological mechanisms under review prevail within a majority of subjects or within certain groups.
Again, our interpretations of ideology will go below the realm of surface opinion, and will be related to the psychological results of our study. It is not our aim merely to add some padding to our figures. As stated in the Introductory Remarks to this part, we would rather gain insight into the links between ideological opinions and psychological determinants. We do not pretend that psychology is the cause and ideology the effect. But we try to interrelate both as intimately as possible, guided by the assumption that ideological irrationalities just as other irrationalities of overt human behavior are concomitant with unconscious psychological conflicts. We combed through the interview material with particular attention to such irrationalities and to statements revealing something about the dynamics of personality. The establishment of plausible configurations involving both dynamic motivation and ideological rationalization seems to us the foremost means of achieving that consistency on which the evidence of the discussions to follow largely depends. The data discussed so far permit at least the assumption that personality could be regarded as one determinant of ideology.
Yet it is just the area with which we are now concerned that most strongly forbids any simple reduction to terms of personality. Our construct of the »potentially fascist character« was largely based on the division between high and low scorers. Whereas this division retains its value for numerous topics of political and economic ideology and can be substantiated, on a deeper level, probably for all ideological issues, there appears to be at work another determinant which, in numerous issues, blurs the distinction between high and low scorers and refuses to be stated unequivocally in terms of personality. This determinant may be called our general cultural climate, and particularly the ideological influence upon the people of most media for moulding public opinion. If our cultural climate has been standardized under the impact of social control and technological concentration to an extent never known before, we may expect that the thinking habits of individuals reflect this standardization as well as the dynamics of their own personalities. These personalities may, indeed, be the product of this very same standardization to a much higher degree than a naive observer is led to believe. In other words, we have to expect a kind of ideological »over-all pattern« in our interviewees which, though by no means indifferent to the dichotomy of high and low scorers, transcends its boundaries. Our data afford ample evidence that such an ideological over-all pattern exists in fact.
It is a major question for this chapter whether this over-all ideological pattern, perhaps even more than the specific susceptibility of our high scorers to fascist propaganda, does not entail the danger of a large-scale following of antidemocratic movements if they should get under way with powerful support.
The importance of this diagnosis, if it should be corroborated sufficiently by our data, is self-evident, its most immediate implication being that the fight against such a general potential cannot be carried through only educationally on a purely psychological level, but that it requires at the same time decisive changes of that cultural climate which makes for the over-all pattern. Methodologically, the importance of this aspect of our study lies in the fact that it relativizes, somewhat, the distinction between high vs. low scorers; this distinction, if taken as absolute, may easily lead to a »psychologizing« bias that would neglect the objective, supra-individual social forces operating in our society.
The introduction of the concept of an over-all pattern just in this ideological area may appear paradoxical at first glance. Since most political and economic issues are overt and relatively simple with reference to the blunt division between progressivism and reactionism, one should expect the difference to be particularly marked here. This, however, is not borne out by the facts. It is hard to escape the impression that there is much more actual similarity between high and low scorers in the political and economic section of the interviews than in more remote and complicated regions. To be sure, there are some topics which are as clearly discriminatory as some of the more extreme anti-Semitic ideas discussed in the preceding chapter. One hardly needs any research in order to establish that high scorers tend to be anti- and low scorers pro-Roosevelt, that high scorers more often want a »strong« foreign policy and low scorers favor reconciliation, that high scorers indignantly reject communism and low scorers tend to discuss it on a more discursive plane. However, there is a large number of what might be called more formal constituents of political ideology which seem to permeate the whole pattern while, by their own momentum, making for reactionary and potentially fascist persuasions. Here belong, as will be discussed in detail, general ignorance and confusion in political matters, the habits of »ticket thinking« and »personalization,« resentment of unions, of government interference in business, of income limitations, and a number of other trends.
The existence of such an over-all pattern in politics need not be surprising, when the whole context of our study is considered. As a matter of fact, the problem itself is derived from our quantitative findings. After we once administered the PEC scale, no close relation between politics and anti-Semitism could be expected. Chapter V2 offered the evidence that the correlation of PEC with either anti-Semitism or ethnocentrism was never very high. There were some subjects high on PEC but low on E, others high on E but middle or low on PEC. This means that in this area particularly we cannot speak in categorical terms of high vs. low scorers. We shall see if this is borne out by a consideration of the interviews: both what the weakening of our basic distinction means qualitatively and whether and how we still can differentiate successfully in this area.
If a trend that differentiates statistically between high and low scorers on E – the »highs« being higher on it – appears very commonly in the interviews of all subjects, then we must conclude that it is a trend in culture itself. In this chapter we shall be particularly concerned with these outstanding features. The evidence that they are potentially fascistic is the fact that they »go« statistically, psychologically, and in every other respect with high scale scores; if they also occur with considerable frequency in interviews of low scorers it must be because we are living in potentially fascist times.
If a subject is low on all scales, but still shows trends which look potentially fascist, then one might say that the scales and other techniques do not cover everything, that the potential fascism of the trend is hypothetical as far as the statistical evidence goes, and that one might perform an empirical study to see if it really does go with what we know of the subject. We expect our discussion at least to shed some light on this methodological problem.
As far as the differentiation between high and low scorers goes, it is obvious that an over-all pattern would necessitate more differentiated characterizations than those previously employed. This can be hinted at only occasionally throughout this chapter. Sometimes high and low scorers are similar in what they say in politico-economic terms, but different in some more subtle way; just as sometimes they are superficially different but similar with respect to underlying trends.
Political and economic facts are subject to rapid change. This holds particularly true for the last few years. When our material was gathered, mainly throughout 1945, Russia was an ally; today, the tension between this country and the Soviet Union overshadows all other issues. Such changes make a valid interpretation of political ideology difficult and precarious. Thus, it might well be that anti-Russian sentiments, which were in 1945 part and parcel of a general pattern of reactionism, largely conditioned subjectively, would be of a much more »realistic« nature today, or at least they would fall to a greater extent within the »over-all pattern,« being less differentiating per se between high and low scorers. Moreover, in all probability the typical high scorer has become even more articulate with regard to Russia. It is hard to imagine that Mack would still stick to his statement that »Joe« Stalin was all right. Our interpretation, of course, had to stick to the situation of 1945 in order to give an adequate picture of the relationship between ideology and personality factors. However, it should be emphasized that the PEC scale as well as its follow-up in the interviews depends to a much higher degree on external events than do the other scales. This is why we never expected that the correlations of PEC with E and F would be very high, and it is quite possible that under the new political circumstances the direction of some of the more superficial relationships might have changed. Ideology is so sensitive to political dynamics that even some interpretations formulated comparatively lately, when the bulk of the chapter had been written, should be qualified at publication time. Yet we may claim that the general trend of events has been entirely in accord with the general formulations reached in the discussion to follow.
With regard to the organization of the chapter we shall deal first with the more formal constituents of political and economic ideology and later with a number of specific political issues. The problem of cultural over-all pattern vs. psychological differentiation occurs in both sections, though the presuppositions of the over-all pattern belong mainly to the first one.