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In her famous essay “Who Goes Nazi?”, Dorothy Thompson invited 15 (fictional) guests to a dinner party and tried to guess whom among them would “go Nazi.” Of the party, just under half would refuse the Wehrmacht: the blue-blooded and mild-mannered Mr. A; the popular ex-movie actress Mrs F; the courteous and genteel butler James; the straight-talking and patriotic student engineer Bill; the unconventional historian who works a farm and loves women, “H”; the Young German who believes in the ideals of America; and Mr. K, a Southern Jew who travels America collecting its stories.
Thompson produced a neat formula to predict the future fascist: “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi.” In contrast, “the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labour tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success – they would all go Nazi in a crisis.” What differentiates the Nazi from the Non-Nazi is confidence: something tells them “what they like and what they don’t – whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code.”
These criteria are obviously baloney. Adjectives like “Kind, Good, Wise, Gentlemanly, well-bred, and code-following” are vaporous, for whether one is any of these things depends upon personal definitions. Releasing a murderer because you feel sorry for him is neither kind nor wise; to the Nazi, every Jew is a future murderer. The SS recruited many well-bred aristocrats, just as they recruited many ‘principled’ code-followers.
Behind these terms are two hidden criteria. The first is a set of substantive, mostly Capraesque, moral preferences. No amount of ‘niceness’ will protect you from Thompson if you believe in big government telling the little guy what to do, or reject freedom of speech, or tarnish the founding myths of America. In short, Happiness and Niceness are defined partially by adherence to these principles. On some level, there is no ‘nice’ communist for Dorothy Thompson.
The second is a preference for 'character.' Character means a certain stability of preference; a certain deference to higher ideals and firmer ground; a commitment to a way of life and a willingness to make difficult sacrifices when necessary. Strictly speaking ‘character’ is compatible with Nazidom. I think Thompson accepts this when she describes the “Saturnian man” who is a ‘True Nazi.” The Saturnian man knows what he likes and what he doesn’t very well indeed. That is precisely the problem.
Nonetheless, character as Thompson sketches is undoubtedly incompatible with the modern mass movement. It is, in fact, incompatible with most forms of rapid modern change. It is an inherently conservative, slow-moving, inflexible thing. Thompson is not alone in her preference for rooted character. Similar allies can be found in J.R.R Tolkien, Frank Capra, Akira Kurosawa, and Joan Didion. Those who talk of Character are not straightforwardly conservative, especially not those who believe in American character. They have two straightforward beliefs:
The primitive conservative denies (2) and seeks to turn back the clock. The Amish man, for example, undoubtedly believe in character, he just thinks it will be destroyed by pitchforks and radiators. The progressive is sceptical of (1)., for reasons which I will describe shortly, and believe, in any case – and perhaps conveniently – that (2) is false.
Thompsonian character sounds quite good in one’s head. What could be better than a solid personality with clear likes, dislikes, and principles; confident in the value of one’s life and the importance of adhering to what is good and true? The problem is that character requires unchosen influences on your personality. You must be more than an effervescent ‘mindset’, possessions, prestige, and career. Some people are born with strong character – their lodestar is their heart – but others, most perhaps, must acquire it through:
And above all, you must allow these forces to permanently change you. This will require a lot of bullet-biting. We cannot have local government if no-one commits to living in one place a long time; community requires high degrees of social cohesion, which in turn require expectations and shame for non-participation; aesthetic unity, alongside unity of habits, customs, and manners, require both extensive enculturation, and social enforcement; ensuring elites work for the people is probably only possible when those elites have local pride, which is incompatible with a hatred of America.
The insanely optimistic, thoroughly Capraesque view is that most of the above is naturally acceptable to most people, both because totally awkward customers are rare, and because the American Way is eminently reasonable, natural, and good, even if its history is endlessly sordid. Thus, Dorothy Thompson’s description of the Young German’s faith in America:
He comes from an old East Prussian family; he was a member of the post-war Youth Movement and afterward of the Republican “Reichsbanner.” All his German friends went Nazi—without exception. He hiked to Switzerland penniless, there pursued his studies in New Testament Greek, sat under the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, came to America through the assistance of an American friend whom he had met in a university, got a job teaching the classics in a fashionable private school; quit, and is working now in an airplane factory—working on the night shift to make planes to send to Britain to defeat Germany. He has devoured volumes of American history, knows Whitman by heart, wonders why so few Americans have ever really read the Federalist papers, believes in the United States of Europe, the Union of the English-speaking world, and the coming democratic revolution all over the earth. He believes that America is the country of Creative Evolution once it shakes off its middle-class complacency, its bureaucratized industry, its tentacle-like and spreading government, and sets itself innerly free.
The people in the room think he is not an American, but he is more American than almost any of them. He has discovered America and his spirit is the spirit of the pioneers. He is furious with America because it does not realize its strength and beauty and power. He talks about the workmen in the factory where he is employed. . . He took the job “in order to understand the real America.” He thinks the men are wonderful. “Why don’t you American intellectuals ever get to them; talk to them?”
Democracy works because people from the bottom to the top of the heap love democracy; capitalism works because the rich men work for the poor men, and those who don’t are stopped by the good men; the government is small because those who would seek to expand it are checked by the reasonableness of everyday people. It is an idealistic view which combines individual freedom, an expectation of cultural alignment, and modern technological progress.
You find this belief in character all over the place, championed mostly by progressives from the 1920s to the 1950s, and then conservatives from the 1960s to the present. An interstitial character in this regard is Joan Didion, who longed for a world where doing the right thing was natural and we didn’t need to make hundreds of decisions without guidance or support. Here is her idealised vision of ‘character’:
In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. (Didion, “On Self Respect”, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem)
Didion seems to have looked for this in an idealised John Wayne, but these ideals were made real in a man: Coke Stevenson. Stevenson fought a Senate election against LBJ in 1948 but was beaten by the latter’s use of money, radio, ballot-stuffing, slander, and lawfare. Nonetheless, Stevenson refused, at all points, to play dirty. This is merely to say that Character is an ideal that is sometimes made real.
For all its power, believing in ‘character’ is a vulnerable ideal. There are two ways to reject this model of human virtue:
We have mostly decided to go for (2), although often with a sort of tacit commitment in (1). Different views are possible here. One is the Rousseauean premise that everyone is good deep down – a form of (1) – and that all the character forming forces above are, in fact, character destroying. Another is the Shakespearean view, shared by Thompson in her more oracular moments, that some people are born with Good Characters, whilst others are Bad Eggs. Who wins decides whether we live in a comedy and tragedy. A third, somewhat unfashionable view, is that most people, being left to their own devices, fail to produce strong kinds of character whatsoever. In the words of Marcuse, they become ‘One-Dimensional Men.’
We are frequently deceived into following the optimistic first view, or the pessimistic Rousseuean premise, by a certain statistical fallacy. Some people have strong, innate personalities and appear to ‘march to the beat of their own drum.’ It would surely be wrong to suppress these bright sparks, and aren’t we all, deep down, the same as them? Perhaps, but perhaps not. What if we are calibrating on a minority, one more noticeable precisely because of its strong traits and confident self-expression? For the rest, a lack of structure is not liberation but purgatory. They must drift around aimlessly, devoid of anchoring customs. The passive fall into depression, the active, into aimless frustration:
The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling (That Hideous Strength)
Manifestly," I repeated, as if scolding myself, "no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!" Chance found me that day having worked for a living all morning, broken a shoelace, chatted with Tina, urinated successfully in a corporate setting, washed my face, eaten half of a bag of popcorn, bought a new set of shoelaces, eaten a hot dog and a cookie with some milk; and chance found me now sitting in the sun on a green bench, with a paperback on my lap. What, philosophically, was I supposed to do with that? (The Mezzanine)
The morality plays of Stevenson v LBJ, and most Capra films, are absent in contemporary life. The reason, I think, is because none of us have any power. We do not make meaningful decisions, nor do we face serious challenges. Life, for the bourgeoise middle class adult, has been smoothed out. No war, no famine, no drought, no political upheaval, no crime, no sickness, no boredom. Insulated socially from all the coercive institutions of the state – funeral homes, the police, the military, discipline in the schoolroom, the asylum – don’t tell me, I don’t wanna know! Decisions are made in committee or otherwise obfuscated in the opaque and obscure intricacies of bureaucracy. Virtually all legal impediments to achieving professional success have been removed. The only thing in the way of your dream job and dream partner is their rejection of you. People are assumed to be mostly the same and to have relatively few fixed traits. No-one is bound to anyone – neither parents nor a future generation to come. Most, if all, of our characteristics are the product of an environment within our control provided the right ‘mindset’ and ‘re-roll on social environment.’
It is the difference between the 21st century, passive, and introspective protagonist, defined by passing preferences, vague traits, and superficial labels, and the 19th century Thick Character, who, whilst having self-determination, has a character filled in by local origin, class, parentage, gender, profession, power, religion, and numerous other sources. The former has never been tested, and thus barely knows herself. She feels like she has not grown up yet and that her ‘real life’ has not started. The latter has been tested countless times, as her parents before her, her siblings, and local friends, and thus knows a great deal about herself and them.
It would be unfair to say that, through their lack of character, most people today would “Go Nazi.” I think it is accurate to say some, perhaps many, who wouldn’t have gone Nazi in the 1950s would do so today. Some people are born to go Nazi, some to resist them; many, however, are somewhere in between, and it is culture which pushes decides which way they go. Thompson describes these as the ‘Nazi[s] made by conditions of democracy.’ Mr. C is Thompson’s brilliant southern intellectual, twisted and deformed by petty prejudices of class. Had he worked with ‘H’ and ‘Mr. K’, would Mr.C have become a great ally in the fight for freedom and justice? Almost certainly. Instead, he has become the sort of worm who would ‘rise far in the Nazi party.’ We prefer the individualistic view because it absolves us of our responsibility for shaping culture, and because it implies we can become Good People without talking to anyone. In contrast, the Thompsonian view imposes powerful social obligations on us, obligations we may wish others to experience in the abstract, but which we cannot bear ourselves.
I think it is reasonable to suggest that, although not Evil, many of the Modern People today would simply be incompetent and fail in resisting a fascist movement. They would fail for much the same reason that, today, we fail to resist encroaching bureaucracy and omnivorous capitalism. We lack the backbone, and we lack the moral clarity to stand up for ourselves. Contrast the willingness to just cut through the nonsense when peace is on the line in the post-war origins of Erasmus. The moment peace was mentioned, all bureaucratic obstacles melted away: yes, of course, right away! Similar dynamism can be found in the willingness to countenance new technologies and enormous proposals (like a suspension bridge over the Atlantic, or irrigating all of southern Texas), in the service of ‘progress.’ Arguably, today’s third-value, our ‘red-shape cutter’, is the claim of victimhood or oppression, but such an ideal, without character and submerged in pluralism, is too weak to produce systematic change. In practice, our movements bounce off officials and quickly become exhausted or bored. That is because those rejecting them, and sometimes even those pushing for them, lack consistency and a unified social base. They understand there are no real stakes. I could always just walk away from this tomorrow without a single disruption to my immediate lifestyle or those of my friends. Both protest and political service become a form of LARPing. Urgency does not live within me, so I suppose I’ll just follow the dictates of the system.
Perhaps all of this is merely to return to the point of Raymond Williams and Frederick Jameson. Do not expect to be able to resist capitalism as a ‘pathetic dot’ :
And do not expect for things to improve unless people with integrity get into positions that matter. Awkward, again, because as we all know deep down, integrity is not something you can just wake up and decide to have. It is revealed by difficult choices and, where absent, takes time to acquire – often by learning from example. A requirement for integrity – like everything I have described above about character – cannot be easily freely willed. It requires commitment, time, trade-offs with preferences, and restriction of freedom. We must reject the misconception that introspection alone can magically give us beneficent character and strength, just as we must realise that our flat world of undisturbed mediocrity is not one without evil. Merely one where neither good nor evil are clearly revealed.
The American Way to solving these problems is not strict discipline, nor is it repression of free speech. It is a confidence in the power of individuals in groups to solve problems. The Baghotian, and, frankly, European, view is that the masses can only be brought together with ‘flourish, pomp, and majesty’ (and a little class-based leadership). The American view is that whilst such things are necessary, they are far less important than the principles we share. The beauty of this view is that it changes: we can collectively learn from our mistakes. Ideologies need not percolate forever until War or Disaster ‘cleanses’ them: people can admit when they’re wrong, just as they can observe the record of past generational successes and failure to improve. This is not recriminatory: it is refreshing. Edgar, resting on his deathbed at the end of King Lear, does not despair when his schemes and lies are revealed, but relaxes.