Defeating fascism left its root causes intact beneath a ticket mentality
Evidence
Finally, Horkheimer and Adorno took little comfort in the “defeat” of anti-Semitism brought by the victory of the Allies over Hitler. Overt antagonism to the Jews might have been successfully extirpated, but its underlying cause had been preserved in what might he called a “ticket mentality,” which threatened to destroy all vestiges of individuality in Western culture. “Anti-Semitic psychology,” they wrote, “has largely been replaced by a mere “yes” to the fascist ticket, to the list of slogans of quarrelsome heavy industry.” Implicitly, of course, this applied to all advanced industrial societies in the West, including the United States. As Horkheimer had written to Lowenthal, in theoretical speculation “the principle of the lesser evil is even more dangerous than in politics.” Hitler’s conquerors might have eliminated the more obvious effects of anti-Semitism, but they had done little to destroy its root causes. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 703
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Adorno’s later work on the ‘administered world’ and one-dimensional thought, and to broader critiques of Cold War liberal consensus. — connects to: Anti-Semitism functions as an interchangeable, replaceable programmatic label under Fascism; Ticket-thinking remobilizes defused anti-Semitic impulses into persecution — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 164; Defeating Fascism does not guarantee freedom will replace it. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 195 (+1 more)