From Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)

As a long time activist, I am understandably alarmed to see low income Americans flock to the Tea Party and Patriot movement and the ultra conservative candidates they support. Especially after similar trends in 1980, 1994 and 2000 installed conservative Republican governments that enacted legislation that significantly worsened the economic standing of the political base that put them into office. It raises a question I have struggled with for three decades now – why the New Right is so successful in engaging the working poor. Surely this is a group that should be supporting progressive candidates and policies that offer genuine solutions to their economic difficulties.

As Reich’s 1933 Mass Psychology of Fascism lays out, the allure of fascism and reactionary politics for the working poor is actually a very old problem. Reich, a Marxist psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, relates it to an innate fear of freedom and social responsibility that stems from authoritarian child rearing styles that characterize western industrialized society.

Indoctrinating the Poor Doesn’t Work

Reich lays out some interesting alternatives for effective outreach to minimum wage workers (who constitute the majority of US society). He asserts, I believe rightly, that progressives are wasting their time trying to educate the masses about political and economic injustice without first addressing the innate fear of freedom and social responsibility that makes the far right so attractive. He makes a very strong case for this fear and lack of self-confidence being learned, as a result of early childhood experience. (Fascists and ultra-conservatives would attribute it to human nature – arguing that poor and non-white people are born innately inferior.) Reich argues strenuously that it can be overcome – that shifts can and do occur in the way large populations view themselves and the society around them.

What Reich advocates is that instead of educating them about economic and political injustice, progressives ought to directly address the emotional baggage the working poor carry from authoritarian family and school experiences. He proposes that the best way to do this is to engage in self-aware social reform activities, primarily directed towards youth – to facilitate their capacity to become resilient adults unhampered by their parents’ insecurities – and towards women.

The Need to Focus On Teenagers – and Women

During his lifetime, Reich was an outspoken champion of women’s rights – arguing that freeing women from authoritarian family structures was the best way to free their children from them. He campaigned tirelessly for women’s ability to access (free) birth control and abortion – recognizing that many women are forced to raise their children in a paternalistic, authoritarian families for economic reasons – as well as for laws and programs promoting women’s economic independence. He also advocated that progressives involve themselves in parent and teacher education (to specifically address authoritarian child rearing and teaching styles) and sex education (as anxiety about sexual functioning seems to be nearly universal in western society).

Avoiding Common Pitfalls

In prescribing exactly how progressives should take on this “social reform” work, Reich recommends that we merely do what we are good at – as teachers, health care workers, scientists, writers, artists, counselors – but in a self-aware way. We all, based on our own upbringing, carry the capacity to be taken in my reactionary thinking. He lays out two specific pitfalls we need to be wary of. Specifically

1. A tendency towards moralizing and punitive attitudes towards the people we are trying to recruit. According to Reich, the non-voting majority can only become more politically aware and active by becoming more confident of their ability to function without the rigid control of an external authority. We have no hope of accomplishing this by trying to substitute our own values and rules for those of the reactionary right.

2. Getting caught up in the “anti” position (e.g. wanting to punish smoking, unhealthy lifestyles, using the wrong kind of lightbulbs and dare I say, the desire to own a gun). Reich stresses, repeatedly, that this is a trap politicians draw us into seeking to distract us from what we are really about. True freedom fighters must be about the positive actualization of our acquired knowledge and skills in a more democratic future.

To be continued, with examples of activities that Reich lays out

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