'Recent social science offered one major reflection on the character of the working class, Lipset's 1959 essay "Working-Class Authoritarianism." Fascism had put authoritarianism, understood as a personality trait, on the sociological agenda. Anti-communism kept it alive as an issue in the fifties, especially for scholars like Lipset who saw fascism and communism as two manifestations of the same slavish predilection on the part of the masses. In his analysis, the working class was responsible for totalitarianism of all varieties, at all times, because working-class people were inherently narrow-minded, intolerant, and most of all, "authoritarian." The paradoxical--and, one might say, self-serving--implication was that the only people with any talent for democracy were elites. In Lipset's words, "Acceptance of the norms of democracy requires a high level of sophistication," an indefinable quality possessed only by the professional middle class and well-read members of the aristocracy of wealth.
Lipset's description of the working-class personality, which, even at the time, at least some sociologists rejected as fanciful, has since ben painstakingly refuted. Thanks to the work of historian Richard F. Hamilton, we know now, that Nazism was not a movement of the "masses" but received its strongest backing from wealthy urbanites and the rural gentry.
Similarly, Hamilton has shown that other notorious outbreaks of "authoritarianism" and intolerance, such as lynchings in the American South or McCarthyism in the 1950s, tended to be initiated by the wealthy and only later embraced by the lower classes. In an exhaustive analysis of American survey and voting data from the late forties through the sixties, he found no significant or consistent evidence for any inherent working-class authoritarianism, intolerance, or hostility to democratic norms.
Lipset's study is still valuable, however, as a summary of middle-class prejudices. The "lower-class individual," Lipset wrote...is a bundle of "deep-rooted hostilities expressed by ethnic prejudice, political authoritarianism, and chiliastic transvaluational religion." The blame for these exotic-sounding personality defects lay less with the individual himself than with the company he kept--namely, other working-class individuals. His parents had exposed him to "punishment, lack of love, a general atmosphere of tension and aggression." In school, his associations with "others of similar background" canceled the efforts of his teachers. At work, the bad influences continued: "He is surrounded on the job by others with a similarly restricted cultural, education, and family background."
The working class, in short, is bad company. Lipset noted the 1926 book Social Differentiation to establish that the working-class social environment operates to "limit the source of information, to retard the development of efficiency in judgment and reasoning abilities, and to confine the attention to more trivial interests in life." For Lipset, the limited intellect of the working-class individual--especially "trivial interests," "an impatience with talk, " and "a desire for immediate action"--accounted for the class's historic predilection for left-wing political movements. There was a catch, however, which Lipset readily acknowledged: Left wing working-class movements, both in Europe and America, have historically fought not only for "trivial" bread-and-butter goals but for political freedoms, such as suffrage and freedom of speech and association, which were often bitterly resisted by the more "sophisticated" elites. For this apparent anomaly, Lipset offered two explanations. First, the leaders of working class movements were usually better educated and more middle class in their values than their followers.
Second, the witless rank and file did not understand what they were fighting for anyway: "The fact that the movement's ideology is democratic does not mean that its supporters actually understand the implications."
Alas, the members of this beknighted group could do nothing right! If they supported "extremist" movements, it was because they were more or less impelled to by their "authoritarian personalities." If they supported liberal, civil-libertarian causes, it was because they didn't know what they were doing. And when they had the right attitude, according to the fashion of the day, it was for the wrong reason. Thus in the 1981 edition of Political Man, Lipset had to confront a recent study showing that the working class had been more opposed to Korean and Vietnamese wars than the middle class. The explanation? Working-class opposition reflected not pacifist feelings but archaic and conservative "isolationist sentiments." Presumably, the relatively prewar stance was an expression of a healthy, concerned interventionism or something to that effect. <...> By the seventies, the Middle American blue-collar backlash began to introduce an uneasy element of self-consciousness into sociological generalization. It was clear that, though the blue-collar person might be authoritarian, one kind of authority he did not respect was that of the middle-class expert. Thus we find, in a 1976 introductory text, the somewhat bad-tempered observation that the working-class person
appears reluctant to accept new ideas and practices
and is suspicious of innovators....Their limited
edcuation, reading habits, and associations isolate
the lower class from a knowledge of the reason for
these changes, and this ignorance together with
their class position makes them suspicious of
middle and upper-middle class experts and do-
gooders who promote these changes. <...> One text went so far as to suggest that the official stereotype might have their own real existence in the eye of the sociological observer. First, the student is given the familiar summary of working class traits: "He usually has little ability to take another person's point of view" (as opposed, of course, to the middle-class author). "His perspective is limited, and so is his ability to understand the world around him," He is "traditionalist, 'old-fashioned'...'patriarchal.' In fact,'not many of these people are given to "listening to reason.'"
more at: _Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class_ Barbara, not marxist enough, moralizing, Ehrenreich