Gordon, Peter E. “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump”

In this article, Peter E. Gordon explores Theodor Adorno’s study of the authoritarian personality and its significance in understanding the resurgence of authoritarianism and Trumpism in America. Gordon starts with briefly introducing Matthew MacWilliams’s report on Trump’s supporters, which suggests that they are “Americans with authoritarian inclinations” (31). This report resonates with the authoritarian personality study (hereafter the AP study) conducted by Theodor Adorno and his American colleagues from the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The results of the AP study were published as The Authoritarian Personality (1950), in which the authoritarian personality was identified as a “new anthropological type” (36).
Gordon focuses on Adorno’s 1948 essay “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality”, in which he distanced himself from the AP study and criticized its individualistic and aggregative research method. In line with the Frankfurt school approach, Adorno argues that authoritarianism represents “the total structure of our society” (43). The subjects with so-called authoritarian personality are not exceptional, but are “paradigmatic or intensified instances of trends that were increasingly visible across the whole of modern society” (45).
Compared to the notion of the authoritarian personality, Adorno’s own theory better explains Trumpism in America. While Trumpism does present features of the authoritarian personality, it is not “an instance of a personality or a psychology”. Rather, “it is a thoughtlessness and a penchant for standardization that today marks not just Trump and his followers but nearly all forms of culture” (50). The Frankfurt School’s analysis of the culture industry also illuminates Trumpism, which, according to Gordon, “is just another name for the culture industry” (52). Trump’s performance of authenticity and undoing repression exemplifies “[t]he evacuation of content from politics and the emergence of a desubstantialized and mediatized performance of political forms” (ibid.). “It is the political consequence of a mediatized public sphere in which politics in the substantive sense is giving way to the commodification of politics, and politicians themselves are scrutinized less for their policies than for their so-called brands” (53).
This article contributes to Perpetrator Studies by demonstrating how Adorno’s approach to The Authoritarian Personality can provide valuable insights not only into authoritarianism in the 1950s but also and especially in the current era.

Further Reading: Peter E. Gordon. “Introduction” in Adorno, et al, The Authoritarian Personality (Verso Press, 2019).

Author of this entry: Runcong Liu.

Gordon, Peter E. “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump.” Boundary 2 44, no. 2 (June 2017): 31–56.