How to Tell a Totalitarian

May 8, 1949

The danger of authoritarianism in this country is increased by the persistent failure of our self-styled liberals to recognize its real source. The leading article in The New York Times Magazine of April 23—“Portrait of the Authoritarian Man,” by Samuel H. Flowerman—typifies this state of affairs.

Flowerman tells us that “social scientists, interviewed and tested more than 2,000 persons” and found a “ready-made ‘authoritarian personality’.” Did they? Pseudo-science notwithstanding, there is no such thing as a typical “authoritarian man” but only an authoritarian ideology. It is the difference in ideology, and not in persons, that basically explains the contrast in political climate between 1950 and, say, 1910.

Flowerman implies that the totalitarian ideology is dominantly conservative. Error. It is dominantly radical. Soviet Russia—the greatest totalitarian power today—ought to be sufficient illustration. True, the Communists once explained Nazism as the last desperate stand of “capitalist conservatism.” But it is impossible to swallow this explanation of a movement that proudly called itself National Socialism and was vehemently anti-banker, anti-gold, anti-creditor, anti-“plutocrat,” and anti-capitalistic in its tirades and decrees.

Flowerman declares that the “opposite” of the “authoritarian personality” is the “extremely democratic personality.” Confusion. The true opposite of the authoritarian is the libertarian. A self-styled “democracy,” or “people’s government,” like Soviet Russia, that repudiates the principles of liberty is a phony democracy.

Flowerman implies that racial bigotry is an invariable and central characteristic of the authoritarian mind. Again Soviet Russia shows that this is not necessarily so. Totalitarianism, it is true, always needs scapegoats—but not necessarily racial scapegoats. They may be “Jews,” kulaks, “wreckers,” “American spies,” “profiteers,” speculators, employers.

Flowerman thinks it an “offset” to authoritarianism that “Americans traditionally scoff at authority.” Does he mean that we should admire the people who pass red lights, spit in the subway, and rob their neighbors? Those who fail to respect law within its proper bounds do not insure real liberty but imperil it.

“Certainly research findings indicate,” writes Flowerman, “that so far the key to the difference between the authoritarian and democratic personalities lies in the relationship between parents and children. Learning to disagree with one’s parents may be the capstone of a democratic personality.” Some of us had previously supposed that one should learn to seek and believe the truth, even if one’s parents also believed it. The real difference between the authoritarian and his opposite, the traditional liberal or libertarian, is this. The authoritarian has no faith in the people, and unlimited faith in the bureaucrats. The libertarian distrusts excessive power in the bureaucrats, because he has a real faith in the people. That is why he believes that the fundamental liberal institution is the free market. The free market means free voluntary relations between buyer and seller, worker and employer. It means free prices, free wages, free production, free trade. To the authoritarian such freedom means chaos. He distrusts any economic arrangement that is not planned from the center and from the top. He must fix prices, wages, profits, rents, allocate raw materials and labor. He cannot believe that international trade will balance unless he intervenes to balance it. He must control foreign exchanges, restrict travel, license or prohibit imports.

Once embarked upon this “social engineering,” he must keep widening the circle of his prohibitions and coercions until he has wiped out all economic liberty and all other liberty with it. His intolerance of liberty must grow because any liberty whatever will imperil his plan.

It is in this ideology—statist, collectivist, socialist—that the real menace of totalitarianism lies, rather than in children who agree with their parents.