In a chapter titled “The Return of the Demons,” Drucker addresses the psychological roots of Fascism. One of these was the experience of the Great War — “Modern war appeared to be the denial of all tenets on which the mechanical and rational conception of society is based. This was not because war is amechanical and arational, but because it reduces mechanization and rationalization to absurdity… the war showed the individual suddenly as an isolated, helpless, powerless atom in a world of irrational monsters.” Another factor was the Great Depression, which “proved that irrational and incalculable forces also rule peacetime society: the threat of sudden permanent unemployment, of being thrown on the industrial scrap heap in one’s prime or even before one has started to work. Against these forces the individual finds himself as helpless, isolated, and atomized as against the forces of machine war.” As a result of these factors, “The European masses realized for the first time that existence in this society is governed not by rational and sensible, but by blind, irrational, and demonic forces.”

In a later chapter, Drucker specifically addresses the rise of anti-Semitism: “The real explanation for racial anti-Semitism in German, and even more in Austria, is that the substitution of the Jews for the hostile forces of bourgeois capitalism and liberalism was made possible, if not mandatory, by the unique social structure of the German bourgeoisie… Unlike the middle classes in western Europe, it was liberated from above. Its emancipation was not a social end in itself; it was effected for the purpose of national unification. Politically and socially the bourgeoisie therefore never became a ruling class.” (He means prior to Weimar.) He then provides data indicating extensive intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in the German and Austrian middle classes, so that whereas the ruling classes before the war had been entirely non-Jewish, “the mixture with Jewish blood was the specified distinction of the new ruling class… When this class failed and when its rule led to the emergence of the demons, it became therefore ‘rational’ to hold the Jews responsible and to personify the demons as Jewish.”

Later: “Nazi anti-Semitism… has been caused precisely by the absence of any distinction, conflict, and strangeness between the German Jews and a large part of the German people — to wit, the liberal middle classes. The Nazis did not persecute the Jews because they remained a foreign body within Germany, but actually because they had become almost completely assimilated and had ceased to be Jews.”

And “(Anti-Semitism) has nothing to do with any qualities of the Jews themselves, but exclusively with what the internal tension in Naziism requires the Jews to look like… The real enemy is not the Jew, but the bourgeois order which is fought under the name of the Jew. Nazi anti-Semitism stems from the failure of Naziism to replace the bourgeois order and the bourgeois concept of man with a new constructive concept. And this makes it imperative to denounce bourgeois liberalism and capitalism, yet impossible to resort to class war.”

Later: “It must be understood that for the convinced Totalitarian the personification of the demons and their persecution and oppression appear not only justified but alone reasonable. He is genuinely unable to understand why the outside world does not see the demons.”