Outdated middle-class moral codes become authoritarian when severed from lived conditions

Evidence

This is reflected by popular culture. The accents on inwardness, inner conflicts, and psychological ambivalence (which plays so large a role in earlier popular novels and on which their originality rests) have given way to unproblematic, cliche-like characterization. Yet the code of decency that governed the inner conflicts of the Pamelas, Clarissas and Lovelaces remains almost literally intact. The middle-class ‘ontology’ is preserved in an almost fossilized way, but is severed from the mentality of the middle classes. By being superimposed on people with whose living conditions and mental make-up it is no longer in accord, this middle-class ‘ontology’ assumes an increasingly authoritarian and at the same time hollow character. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 232

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: moral codes that outlive their material basis don’t merely fade — they harden into authoritarian rule. A meditation on what modern American or British ‘family values’ discourse would look like through this lens.
• XREF: connects to: Neoliberalism’s weakening of democratic values enables neoconservative moralism and authoritarianism — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 169; Reality TV’s bourgeois gaze morally moralises working-class deficit as lack of will — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 710; Vigilante justice enforced elite moral codes rather than neutral popular will — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2152

Related

• Fossilized middle-class morality becomes hollow and authoritarian when severed from its social basis. (similarity 0.92)