Radio Demagogues and the Radical Roots of the “Paranoid Style”

During their extended war-time exile in the United States, several prominent German philosophers developed a powerful social-psychological theory of paranoia and conspiracy theories—a theory which reflected far more on their adopted American home than on their self-destructing fatherland. Known collectively as the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal and others sought to fuse Marxism with psychoanalysis so as to explain the psychological sources, cultural manifestations and social consequences of what they termed authoritarianism. Convinced that modern capitalism and the bureaucratic state bred a dehumanizing and manipulative “mass culture,” the Frankfurt School argued that Fascism was an extreme resurgence of irrational and barbaric impulses within the most technologically advanced capitalist societies. To advance this anti-Fascist critique, they undertook a series of projects including several studies of the speeches of American right-wing radio demagogues. Through these speeches, the Frankfurt philosophers closely analyzed the enormous psychological power that the agitator’s paranoia and conspiracy theories cast over their audience and mid-century America as a whole.