Claudia Leeb’s study is an important contribution to the literature that seeks to explain why right-wing populist movements and parties in Europe and the United States have been so successful in recent times, although she opts for the term “far right” to describe them, in order to preserve what she sees as the progressive possibilities of left-wing populism (pp. 6–7). Her book is also an important intervention in ongoing debates about the contemporary relevance of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. The dominant tendency among so-called “second” and “third” generation critical theorists is to adopt a “normative” approach and to focus on questions of liberal-democratic political and legal theory. By contrast, Leeb returns to the first generation of the Frankfurt School, who focused on the rise of historical fascism and offered rich analyses of authoritarian tendencies in modern capitalist societies, which they were convinced continued to exist even after the military defeat of fascism in 1945. Not surprisingly, Leeb finds many helpful theoretical resources for understanding the contemporary resurgence of authoritarian far right movements in the theoretical writings and empirical studies of the early Frankfurt School and she makes a compelling case for their relevance today. Most simply, early Critical Theory had three essential components: Marxian historical materialism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and a commitment to carrying out theoretically informed empirical social research—the latter, in order to remain in constant contact with current social developments. One finds all three of these elements in Leeb’s book as well.
The study is divided into four main parts. The first three chapters lay out the Freudian-Marxist theoretical framework. The next two chapters draw upon that framework to analyze the rise of Trump and the recruitment tactics of the Alt-Right in the United States. The last two chapters focus on the far right Freedom Party and the even more extreme Identitarian Movement in Austria. The substantive conclusion discusses strategies for countering the powerful and still growing appeal of the far right in the US and Europe. Although Leeb never loses sight of the social preconditions of this appeal, the great strength and main focus of the book is its psychoanalytically informed analysis of the mechanisms involved in the creation and reproduction of far right movements. She dedicates the entire third chapter to a nuanced elaboration of the psychoanalytic concepts she uses, before applying and developing them in her case studies from the US and Austria.
The central argument of the book is that far right movements prey upon the tension between individuals’ egos and their ego ideals or, in other words, the inability of most people to live up to unrealistic social expectations of economic success, interpersonal relations, and physical appearance. Drawing upon Freud’s theory of group psychology, Leeb demonstrates how far right leaders employ various techniques in order to alleviate this tension, such as encouraging their followers to replace their own ego ideal with that of the leader, in order to participate in their power and the power of the movement as a whole.
With regard to Trump, Leeb skillfully employs the psychoanalytic concepts of mourning, melancholia, and mania to explain the power he exercises over his followers. Drawing upon, but also criticizing, Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Leeb argues that Trump’s devotees are not mourning, which involves a gradual removal of libidinal energies from a love object and an acceptance of its loss (pp. 94–95). Instead, they suffer from the melancholia that results from an inability to mourn, in this case, a refusal to accept their inability to attain the standards of success defined by the ideology of the “American Dream.” Trump offers such people an opportunity to avoid mourning by slipping into a state of mania, in which they can feel good about themselves once again through an identification with the leader and the movement. Instead of addressing the socio-economic sources of their suffering in neoliberal—or what Leeb calls “precarity”—capitalism, they redirect their libidinal energies to the leaders themselves. He also gives them permission to express their aggressive impulses—against designated “enemies” of the movement—more freely. Leeb suggestively compares the psychological state of the followers to sleep and dreaming, when the prohibitions of the ego on the unconscious are relaxed. At the same time, she argues that followers consciously choose to join and remain in such a quasi-hypnotic state, and thus must be held responsible for the violent acts committed by members of the far right, usually against the most vulnerable members of their societies (pp. 245–46).
In her chapter on the Alt-Right in the U.S. she draws upon Freud’s distinction between humor and tendentious jokes in order to show how the latter neutralize the super-ego in order to make it possible for young white men, in particular, to give free rein to repressed aggressive impulses against women and minorities. The Alt-Right uses jokes to make it seem like prejudice is socially acceptable. Here, though, and in other places within the text, she seems to dehistoricize Freud’s drive theory, positing aggression as a static unconscious force, constantly striving for release. On this point, her approach diverges from early Frankfurt School thinkers, such as Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, who emphasized the wide variability of aggression depending upon historically specific social relations. Here, also, she presents neo-fascism as a simple release of the id (p. 47), whereas—as she herself points out later in the text (p. 75)—Adorno argued that authoritarian leaders establish new and stricter forms of repression that strengthened unconscious forces, which could in turn be mobilized for the fascist collective. Fascism runs more on aim-inhibited than freely expressed libido. Or, as Marcuse—following Charles Fourier—argued, “surplus repression” of libidinal energies enhances or even creates aggressive impulses.
Leeb’s discussion of the rise of the far right Freedom Party is the most historically oriented chapter in the book. Through analyses of a documentary film about the failure of Austrians to face up to their Nazi past, and of debates about the opening of a new House of History in Vienna, which would document this past, she describes the persistence of national myths—for example, that Austria was the “first victim of Nazism,” rather than a willing accomplice—that have been passed down from one generation to the next. Such myths maintain the cultural preconditions for the success of the far right, whose appeal also lies in its promise to keep the door closed on self-critical reckonings with the past.
Her final chapter on the extreme right Austrian Identitarian Movement focuses on a book published by one of its most important leaders, Martin Seller. Insightfully updating Prophets of Deceit—Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman’s 1949 study of proto-fascist agitators in the U.S.—Leeb analyzes a wide variety of “tricks” used by Sellner and other pied pipers to emotionally bind followers to their movement for an “ethnically pure” “white homeland” in Europe. Reinforcing her earlier arguments, Leeb shows how young men—many of them unemployed—are most susceptible to identitarian propaganda, because they have failed to live up to internalized social ideals of success and the identitarian movement offers them a spurious opportunity to restore their “manhood.”
But Leeb also goes beyond Lowenthal and Guterman in her justified insistence that it is not enough to expose the tricks of agitators. In her conclusion she outlines at least four interrelated strategies for undermining the growing appeal of the far right which, as the recent reelection of Donald Trump has proven once again, shows no signs of abating. If, as Leeb—following Adorno—suggests, all of our lives are damaged, we must be willing to reflect upon the subjective scars created by the objective conditions we have inherited, in order to break the compulsion they create to cause more damage in the future. Such conditions are both social and historical. Leeb calls for a new workers’ movement to put an end to neoliberal, “precarity” capitalism, but also a willingness to recover and preserve an awareness of the many violent episodes in our national histories, in order to develop empathy for the past, present, and future victims of far right movements. Finally, she argues we must also reject unrealistic ideals of success, in order to neutralize the spurious feelings of inadequacy mobilized by far right leaders. Her study deserves careful attention from anyone interested in understanding and combatting the terrifying rise of far right political movements and parties around the world in recent decades; she focuses on the US and Austria, but many of her insights are easily applicable to other countries in Europe and other parts of the world.
