Source
Thompson (1941), LIT-055, “Who Goes Nazi?” (Harper’s, August 1941), read in NOTE-056. Section labels are the essay’s: an unnumbered opening, then II and III.
What was actually shown
Nothing is shown. The only evidence is the author’s experience: “I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types.” The essay then sorts the guests at an imagined party, calling itself a “macabre parlor game”.
- The thesis (§III). “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi.” “Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.” What protects is having “anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t”.
- Those who would. Mr. B, the banker, early, once the movement looks likely to win. Mr. C, the humiliated scholarship-boy intellectual, “the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery”. Young D, the spoiled son. Mrs. E, humiliated and looking for a hero who proclaims women’s subordination. L, the labour leader.
- Those who would not. Mr. A, an editor from an old family with his own code (set against B’s code, which “is not his own; it is that of his class”). Mrs. F, a happy former actress. James the butler. Bill, an engineering student. H, a historian who “will grab a gun and fight”. A German émigré, a former Reichsbanner member. Mr. K, a Southern Jewish writer.
- Against race as criterion. “I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis”; Mr. J, a Jewish financier, “agrees with Mr. C wholly”.
What could have come out otherwise. Nothing could, in the essay. A study of who joined could show class or status predicting support better than disposition does.
What this does not say
- That any case is real. The sketches are composites or inventions at a hypothetical party (NOTE-056, C2).
- That the typology is coherent. D is “the only born Nazi in the room” and L “the strongest natural-born Nazi”. G “will never be a Nazi” and “would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications”.
- That class is not the criterion, on her own evidence. B, C, L, James and Bill are drawn by class position and class resentment (C7), and the portrait of L reads as an attack on union “compulsion”.
- That disposition is all of it. She also calls Nazism “the disease of a generation” (C5) and floats “direct biological factors” of feeding and training (C6), neither integrated with the typology.
- That later research confirms it. NOTE-056 did not check the authoritarian-personality, status-anxiety or voting-data literatures. Its reading says any document using the essay as evidence about who supports authoritarian movements should cite that literature instead.
Connections
- THEORY-440, competitive authoritarianism, is an account of how an incumbent tilts the field. This one is about who goes along. Thompson’s Mr. B, who joins once the movement looks likely to win, is the accommodation Drezner attributes to fear in LIT-022; the two documents give different motives for it.
- The disposition that protects, a standard that is one’s own and not one’s class’s, is close to the record’s questions on what makes a will-organization the agent’s own (QUESTION-011). The essay does not argue for it in those terms, and it is not an answer.