Horkheimer’s logic implied the USA carried a greater fascist potential than Germany.

Evidence

Horkheimer apparently did not dare to risk the consequences of openly stating this claim and the theoretical ideas he and Adorno had developed. If only a minority of the Germans had been anti-Semitic (as the report emphasized), if latent, smouldering anti-Semitism formed part of Western civilization, if the anti-Semitic minority in Germany had been able, within a few years, to push forward anti-Semitism to the stage of industrialized mass murder, must it not be feared that in the USAwith its far more advanced capitalist structures, which had not been called into question by any socialist labour movement, with its much more all-encompassing and frustrating culture industry, with its more pronounced ethnocentrism and with its history marked by open violencea far more extensive and severe anti-Semitic potential might already have become capable of suddenly turning into open, violent anti-Semitism, under far less critical political and economic conditions than in Germany? — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1546

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The causal chain is dense: if latent anti-Semitism is endemic to Western civilization and a small minority can industrialize mass murder, then the USA’s more advanced capitalism, weaker labor movement, and harsher racial history imply an equal or greater danger. It is a genuinely unsettling, paradigm-shifting inference rather than a summary.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s critical-theory knowledge of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment thesis that enlightenment reverts to mythic barbarism. — connects to: The Institute feared American antisemitic potential could exceed Germany’s — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1546; Horkheimer judged the USSR state capitalism purer than fascist mixed form — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1157; Adorno paradoxically hoped more for post-Hitler Germany than for the USA — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1645 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer judged the USSR state capitalism purer than fascist mixed form #corroborates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1157
• Adorno paradoxically hoped more for post-Hitler Germany than for the USA #complicates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1645
• Horkheimer’s fascism theory generalized beyond orthodox communist capitalism-as-agent doctrine. #expands (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1070
• Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany expecting greater practical impact. #complicates (0.70)