The Authoritarian Horizon: Critical Theory and the Scars of Democracy

• In Event: Adorno, Benjamin, and Querying the Unreason in Contemporary Politics

Abstract

With the election of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States, democracy appears to have triumphed in the face of its potential ruin. Yet, as we see with Trump’s unending attempts to overturn the election, and the legion of supporters rallying to support him, the impending threat of authoritarian rule seems to rise on the political horizon. Whether or not Trump succeeds, Trumpism—with or without Trump—will undoubtedly continue to erode the foundation of American democracy. How can we understand the rise of Trumpism, the persistence of the alt-right, and the seeming allure of at the very least illiberal democratic politics, or, at worst, insipient authoritarianism today? In a recently translated and published lecture from 1967, Theodor Adorno directly deals with the rise of “new right-wing extremism” that began coursing through the body politic of Western Germany in the post-war period. While the Nazi menace seemed vanquished as a mass movement and killing machine, populist forms of right-wing extremism began to destabilize and terrorize the calm lifeworld of growing affluence of Western Europe. Noting that the reason for this was the continuing structural issues of the concentration of capital and economic displacement (particularly, the petit-bourgeoisie), Adorno also located its persistence in the continued gap between the ideal and reality of democracy itself—what he called the “scars” of democracy. If anything, both Adorno and other associates of the first-generation of the Frankfurt School were finely tuned to the specters and hauntings of fascism in the seemingly “post-fascist” world of capitalist democracies. We propose to draw upon the work of Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and others, to critically engage the always already potential for fascism—what we call “the authoritarian horizon”—that defines, undergirds, and ultimately limits the possibilities of democratic life and society under advanced capitalism. More specifically, we will flesh out the authoritarian horizon via a close reading of Adorno’s conception of the authoritarian personality and his attempts to show its social conditions, and ultimately, draw out the implications of this for contemporary American political life.

Authors

• Bradley J. Macdonald, Colorado State University

• Katherine Young, University of Hawaii at Hilo