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This chapter lays out Adorno’s unconventional thoughts on democratic leadership. Reading the essay “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation” alongside his writings on education, it becomes clear that Adorno’s plan for democratic leadership is really a plan for a civic education project that operates through radically democratic forms of pedagogy: leadership is about education and education is a form of leadership. The duty of the leader or educator, for Adorno, is to focus the individual’s attention on these experiences of the nonidentical as a form of interruptive agency and work with him or her to identify the nascent critique of existing conditions—“countertendencies”—that is contained in these forces and feelings. In this essay he speaks of the need to communicate his ideas to the demos in a more direct and immediate way, to distribute these ideas on a large scale, working to translate and introduce a theory of democratic leadership that represents a nascent practice of negative dialectics to a broader audience. Adorno’s piece on democratic leadership provides an illuminating lens through which we can better understand the strategies he undertakes in texts such as Current of Music, The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses, and even The Stars Down to Earth.

This chapter shows how Adorno identifies small-scale, modest, less visible “substantive democratic forms” in the United States that act as countertendencies that might be drawn out as a vaccine against more prevalent fascistic elements of pseudo-democracy in America. In his writings on American culture, we see Adorno employing the same mode of critique that Marx applies to the commodity, but with a different object: Adorno’s critique is directed toward an exploration of the radio or the Los Angeles Times’s astrology column, for example, as microcosms of the larger modern capitalist culture in the United States. But Adorno aims to illuminate how even seemingly insignificant cultural objects actually contain important nonidentical qualities—countertendencies—that protest against and can be used to unsettle the problematic conditions that they otherwise participate in and uphold. Adorno’s writings on American culture must be read in terms of his theory and practice of negative dialectics for our picture of him to avoid the problematic distortions it has been subjected to in the past. In this way, Adorno sees the potential for change—what might be—arising from the tensions and contradictions—the countertendencies—that exist within a problematic status quo.