Ebenstein/Fogelman. Kohn. Lasch.

In the United States, anxiety over preserving one’s threatened status has been one of the main psychological forces exploited by the radical right and by fascists groups. This status anxiety has been centered, above all, on the rising power of organised labour, which is perceived as a threat to the existing status quo. In addition, American fascists and semifascist propaganda has focused on white fears of the rising status of [B]lacks.

The Marxist interpretation of fascism in terms of class (identifying fascism with capitalism in decay) is not borne out by the facts. Fascism cuts across all social groups; wealthy industrialists and landowners support it for one reason, the lower middle classes for another, and some blue-collar workers for still another. Finally, there are the many nationalists and chauvinists in every country who prove themselves vulnerable to promises of conquest and empire. William Ebenstein/Edwin Fogelman, Today’s ISMS. 1954-1980.

Integral nationalism stressed the authority and absolute precedence of the national community over the individual and the need of determined action by a closely-knit, disciplined and well-armed vanguard, an elite which would seize power at the decisive moment.

Whereas Communism, the first and most extreme totalitarian movement, was in its original ideology not connected with nationalism, Fascism, the other great authoritarian mass movement in opposition to modern middle-class civilisation, was from the beginning an inflammation of nationalism. It dedicated itself to preparation for the “inevitable” struggle that forms the life of nations. Fascism absolutised nationalism. The nation became the supreme arbiter, its service the one supreme duty. Only actions, thoughts, and sentiments which help to increase the power of the nation are regarded as good by Fascism. The absolute devotion to the nation becomes the guiding principle of all Fascist education. Hans Kohn, NATIONALISM: Its Meaning and History. 1955.

Every society reproduces its culture – its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organising experience – in the individual, in the form of personality; Personality is the individual socialised. The process of socialisation, carried out by the family and secondarily by the school and other agencies of character formation, modifies human nature to conform to the prevailing social norms. Each society tries to solve the universal crises of childhood – the trauma of seperation from the mother, the fear of abandonment, the pain of competing with others for the mother’s love – in its own way, and in the manner in which it deals with these psychic events produces a characteristic form of personality, a characteristic form of psychological deformation, by means of which the individual reconciles himself to instinctual deprivation and submits to the requirements of social existence.

Insistence on the continuity between psychic health and psychic sickness makes it possible to see neuroses and psychoses as in some sense the characteristic expression of a given culture. Christopher Lasch, THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations. 1979.