Fascist rule shrinks the autonomous ego in tandem with middle-class expropriation.

Evidence

In fascism, however, the final rationalistic illusion appears: the ego organized for a lifetime, the synthetic unity of the person. The ego is shrinking. This tendency towards shrinkage is identical with the process of expropriating the middle classes. The logical conclusion is the decay of culture, as de Sade and Nietzsche predicted it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 319

Categorization

• XREF: Links the shrinking bourgeois ego to the culture-industry argument and to Adorno’s later reading of de Sade and Nietzsche in Dialectic of Enlightenment.
• QUESTION: Is the claim that ego-contraction tracks expropriation meant as causal, parallel, or identity (“identical with”)? Horkheimer’s wording slides between all three.