Politics and Economics in the Interview Material

The questionnaire findings on political and economic ideology have been analyzed in Chapter V. 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 molding 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 anti-democratic 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 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