Since the Second World War, the left has done its very best to pathologize being right-wing: not just explicit identification with parties of the right, but also the basic attitudes, beliefs, and stances associated with being of a conservative temperament. The goal of that endeavor is to discourage and even punish right-wing affiliation, to the social and electoral benefit of the left.
Theodor Adorno, of the Frankfurt School, landed some heavy early blows with his 1950 book, The Authoritarian Personality. Rooted in Freudian ideas of repression and the Oedipus complex, the book argued for the existence of a specific personality structure that predisposes people to undemocratic and fascist beliefs. The book produced a special tool called the F-Scale—literally, the “Fascism Scale”—that measured nine key components of the authoritarian personality. These included “conventionalism” (rigid adherence to middle-class values), “anti-intraception” (opposition to the subjective, imaginative, and sentimental), and “authoritarian submission” (uncritical acceptance of authority figures within the in-group).
Critics pointed out that The Authoritarian Personality had nothing to say about the traits shared by, say, Stalinists. Didn’t they also worship power, persecute dissent, believe hysterical conspiracies about their enemies, and lapse into terrifying pogroms and bouts of mass murder? The historian Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism and The Revolt of the Elites, said the book effectively made leftism the sole bastion of true mental health and risked defining large swathes of American society as a kind of open-air “insane asylum.”
But these criticisms are moot, really: Adorno wanted to obfuscate leftist terror, and he hated the average American and his entire way of life.
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