Authoritarianism

[Jolly_Penguin]

With Donald Trump literally having people shout "heil Trump" in churches, explicitly praising oppressive dictators like Kim and oppressive regimes like Saudi Arabia, and pondering aloud how wonderful it would be if he had that same sort of control over America, authoritarianism is clearly on the rise on the right. I believe authoritarianism has been firmly entrenched in right wing politics since as long as I can remember, but now seems an especially fevered pitch of it.

Lately, I have also been seeing more and more authoritarianism on the left, demanding censorship, forced speech, deplatforming of conservative speakers, pressured firings of people based on accusations, group think, and increased reliance on and obedience to authority figures. This isn't the left that I consider myself to be or that I have seen around me throughout most of my life. I see a change in this and it is alarming to me. It struck me when I noticed some on the left excusing violence against those on the right for holding an ideology they find deplorable, but that isn't physically harming anyone (as the article linked to in the following post puts it). I expect it on the right (that's my bias), but seeing it rise on the left makes me fear that there may come a time when nobody is left to stand against authoritarianism itself, with them disagreement only in its political flavour.

All on the rise: Attacking and undermining the media as "fake news", pointing at scapegoats, weakening checks on power, and reducing politics to a question of friends and enemies, us and them, while refusing to listen to the other through labeling ("Racist!"; "Socialist!") or by claiming dog whistling despite not having heard them out.

I've started this thread as a place to collect thoughts, my own and those of others from here and elsewhere, and to link to articles and events as they happen showing authoritarianism growing or (crossing fingers) shrinking on the right and the left, and to consider strategies of how to oppose it on both. I will ignore any bickering about who is worse or claims that it exists only on one side, etc. The political flavour of it isn't the topic. Authoritarianism itself is.

- - - Updated - - -

https://medium.com/@GappyTales/the-rise-of-the-authoritarian-left-2ed8a1a94e6d

On first hearing the shouts of, “Punch a Nazi,” I will confess it did not immediately occur to me that anything much was amiss, because I too despise the far right and everything they stand for. Who, that believes ultimately in the right to physically defend our communities from those who would actively endeavour to destroy them, and who has vowed never, ever again, has tears to spare for the likes of Richard Spencer? Still, the moral quandary soon came, straddling the line between self defence and the idea that one can ever be justified in attacking another whose ideology you find deplorable, yet is physically harming no one. I began to shift slightly in my seat.

...

Something was deeply wrong and so in my shock and confusion I began to search. The thought criminals I found were scattered all over, from the ex muslim women who dared speak their experiences of religiously justified oppression, to the free speech advocates and classical liberals; from the gender apostates and the radical feminists, to the wishy washy moderates: not one fascist among them, yet all had found themselves cast out as the window of acceptable Leftist thought had shrunk ever smaller, turning all outside it into a single, one dimensional monster.

Feminism has always been a political movement of the left, inherently collectivist and committed to justice and freedom. Yet in a cynical attempt to discourage others from engaging with what those of us who question the individualism of the third wave have to say, we are being portrayed by the new left as synonymous with the bigoted right. It isn’t true, but in a world without nuance, where anyone outside the acceptable thought window can be declared simply evil, there is no inconvenient voice cannot be dismissed out of hand.

...

What I am witnessing today are fine principles of progressivism and freedom being weaponised in order to attack peoples rights, silence those who object, and promote the very opposite of those values laid claim to.

It is upside down and back to front: an ideology that allows wealthy, famous, and influential men to paint me, a single mother on a perilously low income, who rents her home from the council and has been interested in progressive politics her whole life long, as a powerful, right wing oppressor. It is an ideology that allows a white trans woman to point the finger at a prominent Somalian FGM campaigner, and dismiss her as a “White Feminist”. It is an ideology rapidly gaining in political support and social power, and which has already forced changes to the application of equality legislation before any material change has been made to the law. As principled people, I believe we have a duty to ask ourselves what an ideology such as this, in full control of state power, might look like.

No matter from which direction it comes, an increasing authoritarianism ought always to alarm free thinking people. Those who are so convinced of their absolute moral superiority and unquestionable rightness, they believe themselves entitled to use violence and intimidation to push their political agenda, are not those to whom we should wish to give more power. Their windows of acceptable thought will always inevitably shift and shrink. Today we may be safe inside, but tomorrow who can tell?

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

An article from the Guardian about how to resist an Authoritarian regimes. I don't support with the entirety of what this author has written, but the core of it is good. I think that a key component is to oppose authoritarians without becoming authoritarians of opposite stripe. And we need to be careful not to confuse one axis of the political compass with the other.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/20/authoritarianism-trump-resistance-defeat

Unarmed civilians using petitions, boycotts, strikes, and other nonviolent methods have been able to slow, disrupt and even halt authoritarianism. Civil resistance has been twice as effective as armed struggle. Americans will remember the historical examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and perhaps the peaceful east European revolutionaries of Solidarity in Poland and Otpor in Serbia. Many of us have overlooked the more recent examples of successful civil resistance in Guatemala, South Korea and Romania.

Civil resistance works by separating the authoritarian ruler from pillars of support, including economic elites, security forces, and government workers. It attracts diverse groups in society, whose collective defiance and stubbornness eventually elicits power shifts.

...

Mass, diverse participation empowers reformers and whistle-blowers and weakens the support base of hardliners. The best gauge of the health of a resistance movement, then, is whether the size and representativeness of active participation are growing.

Civil resistance is strategic. Movements articulate clear, achievable goals (achieving independent trade unions in the case of Solidarity; de-segregating public places during US civil rights movement) and know when and how to declare small victories. They must endure inevitable set-backs – like arrests, large counter-mobilizations by regime supporters, and legislative defeats – while maintaining momentum.

...

Movements that devise and sequence a broad repertoire of tactics, including those that bring people together for concentrated actions (rallies, sit-ins, blockades) and those that involve dispersed acts of resistance (consumer boycotts, stay-aways, go slow tactics), are more likely to endure and grow.

Repeating the same tactics is boring, predictable, and unlikely to move the needle. Gene Sharp has identified 198 methods of nonviolent action grouped according to the level of risk, preparation, and forcefulness associated with them.

Authoritarian regimes often seek to provoke violence by opposition elements in order to justify repressive counter-measures. Nonviolent movements have invested in training, they have devised codes of conduct and designated marshals to enforce nonviolent discipline at protests. Scholars have found that the stronger the organization of a movement, the more likely it is to avoid responding to violence with violence, which weakens the resistance by decreasing the level of citizen participation.

Successful movements need to be able to inspire hope and optimism in order to sustain popular participation in the resistance and focus people on building alternative systems. Authoritarians thrive on popular fear, apathy, resignation, and a feeling of disorientation. Movement leaders need to assure people that their engagement and sacrifices will pay off, something Solidarity leader Adam Michnik understood well: “Above all, we must create a strategy of hope for the people, and show them that their efforts and risks have a future.”

...

Another social change collective, The Majority, brings together activists, organizers, and groups with different missions. Meanwhile, sanctuary cities are popping up across the US to protect undocumented immigrants from forceful arrest and deportation.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

I read this quite some time ago, and found it interesting. I agree with the writer that authoritarians of opposite politics feed off of each other, and that authoritarianism takes root with alienization and a sense of losing control of oneself. I again don't agree with all of the author's article, but the follow excerpts I see value in.

https://fee.org/articles/authoritarians-to-the-right-of-me-authoritarians-to-the-left/

Broadly, authoritarianism is the desire to impose one’s own worldview on others in one’s society by institutionalized coercion. Authoritarians, therefore, see punishment as an appropriate response when members of the group with which they identify (the United States, in this case) diverge too far from values that the authoritarian believes are best for society – even if the punished person has neither caused direct harm to another nor infringed another’s rights.

Those of us who don’t believe that’s an effective or moral way to run society raised flags of warning in response to Trump’s suggestions, when he was campaigning, that media outlets that publish things he doesn’t like should be shut down; that whistleblowers should be executed, or that businesses should be penalized for not making widgets where the dear leader thinks they should, to name just a few.

It goes without saying that authoritarians often have good intentions regarding the ends they wish to achieve, but neither the intentions nor the ends make their political methods any less coercive.

...

Political authoritarianism is a political preference for infringing on people’s rights to enforce political and societal norms – which can be progressive or conservative. It arises when conditions of normative threat trigger protective reactions by those with the disposition. This term, normative threat, refers to the perception that the range of behaviors and views that are tolerated in a society is too wide for the society to continue to exist in a form that the person can identify with.

In short, normative threat is experienced as moral or cultural alienation from the group with which one identifies.

...

Americans who feel alienated by a society in which their culture, most of the media, those held up as the great and the good, call them “racists” because they want to know who is coming into their country – even they don’t experience themselves as racist at all; “transphobes” because they think that a man with a deep voice in a dress struggling with a gender transition isn’t the exact same thing as a woman; “sexists” because they believe the data that show that the wage gap is more a result of choices made by different genders in the aggregate than by employers’ voluntary reducing their profit by paying for more expensive male employees when they could get the same work done for less by women; or “fascists” because they believe that whereas people have a moral duty to be kind to others, free speech, even when unkind, shouldn’t be met with force, such as occurs when the government compels a certain expression of that kindness or university authorities exclude from campus a speaker with a minority view.

All of the moral put-downs included in the above labels, of which Clinton’s “deplorable” comment was a one-word summary, constitute the “otherization” of regular people by others – often with status. That otherization creates the normative threat, referred to above, which is experienced by those on the receiving end as, “I don’t know this society anymore” – or more to the point, “this society doesn’t know me anymore.”

Authoritarianism will continue to rise in America in a vicious cycle as long as the authoritarian left feeds off perceived threats to society from the impositions of the authoritarian right – and vice versa.

...

Fearing the ascendency of a strident, socially conservative political grouping that it cannot understand, let alone tolerate, the cultural Left feels threatened. The threat meets the high threshold for an authoritarian response for many reasons. First, Trump as figurehead not only fails to share many of the progressive cultural concerns that are of particular importance to the left today: he doesn’t even pretend to respect them. Second, the degree and nature of support he received were shocking to millions of people who were caught off-guard, heightening the sense of threat and uncertainty. Third, Trump is extremely personally distasteful and unlikeable to many of his opponents; this makes it even harder for them to relate to the people who voted for him.

With their own authoritarian elements triggered (used advisedly), many SJW progressives follow basically the same political playbook as “the enemy” – but they step it up. They claim to be under threat; they use that perceived threat as justification for wielding the force of the state and legal institutions to coerce behaviors. And most Orwellian of all, whereas Trump can be rightly accused of spreading falsehoods to generate support for policy, they (re)define words to compel behaviors.

...

Specifically, the fact that “X is morally right” is a long, long way from, “It is morally right to compel people to do X,” because the latter actually means, “It is morally right to harm someone for not doing X”… and whether that is true can only be determined by an unprejudiced comparison of the harm caused by not doing X vs. the harm done by the enforcement. That which can take many forms, such as loss of a job for a professor with the wrong views, or even fines or imprisonment for someone who deploys their honestly earned limited resources in the “wrong” way.

...

In Orwell’s dystopia, a collectivist authoritarian regime actually created words and forced people to speak them on pain of physical punishment. The purpose was to force people to interact with each other and perceive the world in a way that conformed to the wishes of the political leaders.

To my Left-wing friends, Orwell was one of you. He cared about what you care about. He devoted his life to the values of equality and eliminating privilege. He fought the real fascists when there were real fascists. He fought the real Nazis when there were real Nazis.

And this is what he wants you to learn: a philosophy of equality that seeks to treat everyone fairly and kindly will not deliver if it has to be imposed by force on people whose honest feelings and views it ignores. You can do it if you insist, but then you will be authoritarians, however progressive the values that drive you.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

I believe that money in politics is a big part of the problem. Until just recently, we've rarely heard much criticism from politicians about Saudi Arabia, because that's where the oil comes from, and the politicians are bought by oil interests. Same with the misdeeds of Israel. No politician, Republican or Democrat, can truly criticize Israel without being tarred and feathered as an anti-semite.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...strophe/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a61e0bbc297e

At present, the authoritarianism business is booming. According to the Human Rights Foundation’s research, the citizens of 94 countries suffer under non-democratic regimes, meaning that 3.97 billion people are currently controlled by tyrants, absolute monarchs, military juntas or competitive authoritarians. That’s 53 percent of the world’s population. Statistically, then, authoritarianism is one of the largest — if not the largest — challenges facing humanity.

...

Dictators and elected authoritarians, by contrast, get a free pass. The World Bank bails out repressive regimes on a regular basis. There is no anti-tyrant U.N. task force, no Sustainable Development Goals against tyranny, no army of activists.

...

If injustice and oppression aren’t bad enough, authoritarian governments bear an enormous social cost. Dictator-led countries have higher rates of mental illness, lower levels of health and life expectancy, and, as Amartya Sen famously argued, higher susceptibility to famine. Their citizens are less educated and file fewer patents. In 2016, more patents were filed in France than in the entire Arab world — not because Arabs are less entrepreneurial than the French, but because nearly all of them live under stifling authoritarianism. Clearly, the suppression of free expression and creativity has harmful effects on innovation and economic growth. Citizens of free and open societies such as Germany, South Korea and Chile witness advances in business, science and technology that Belarusans, Burmese and Cubans can only dream of.

...

Tragically, world institutions and organizations have failed to properly address authoritarianism. Western governments sometimes protest human rights violations in countries such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea — but routinely ignore them in places such as China and Saudi Arabia, in favor of upholding trade deals and security agreements. The United Nations, established to bring peace and justice to the world, includes Cuba, Egypt and Rwanda on its Human Rights Council. Here, a representative from a democracy carries the same legitimacy as a representative from a dictatorship. One acts on behalf of its citizens, while the other acts to silence them. Between June 2006 and August 2015 the Human Rights Council issued zero condemnations of repressive regimes in China, Cuba, Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

...

Citizen journalists Abdalaziz Alhamza and Meron Estefanos found that few people in peaceful, free countries were interested in reporting on Syria and Eritrea, so they took it upon themselves to do so, despite the enormous danger this put them in. Hyeonseo Lee defected from North Korea to find that victims of sex trafficking in China are often abandoned and ignored, so she started pressuring the Chinese government herself. When Rosa María Payá’s father, Cuban democracy leader Oswaldo Payá, died in mysterious circumstances in 2012, it fell to her to demand a formal investigation and fair treatment for dissidents in Cuba. Such individuals are in constant need of support, because in their home countries there is no legal way to protest, no ACLU, no Washington Post and no opposition party to stand up for their rights.

 

[steve_bank]

Mussolini is a good comparison, with Trump limited so far by cultural norms and COTUS.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Mussolini is a good comparison, with Trump limited so far by cultural norms and COTUS.

Joe Biden said a foreign leader mentioned being reminded of Mussolini when this happened:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...h-aside-montenegro-pm-at-nato-photocall-video

That's absolutely nothing compared to what Trump has now said and done, yet still funny and so very very Trump.

 

[steve_bank]

Mussolini is a good comparison, with Trump limited so far by cultural norms and COTUS.

Joe Biden said a foreign leader mentioned being reminded of Mussolini when this happened:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...h-aside-montenegro-pm-at-nato-photocall-video

That's absolutely nothing compared to what Trump has now said and done, yet still funny and so very very Trump.

Trump poses like Mussolini. Nationalism, populism, and a few enemies to focus people on. Unrestrained and with a country in serious economic trouble a Trump could take a lot of powerpower. The report was it took effort to dissuade Trump from invading Venezuela. The republicans act like trained dogs pissing themselves. IMO if not for our vigorous free press countering the propaganda we could be in a lot of trouble.

Mussolini was Hitler's mentor.

 

[Derec]

Another social change collective, The Majority, brings together activists, organizers, and groups with different missions. Meanwhile, sanctuary cities are popping up across the US to protect undocumented immigrants from forceful arrest and deportation.

What's "authoritarian" about enforcing immigration law?
Is anything but open borders considered "authoritarian" by the Guardian editors?

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Another social change collective, The Majority, brings together activists, organizers, and groups with different missions. Meanwhile, sanctuary cities are popping up across the US to protect undocumented immigrants from forceful arrest and deportation.

What's "authoritarian" about enforcing immigration law?
Is anything but open borders considered "authoritarian" by the Guardian editors?

Sanctuary cities are a complicated case, because that's one elected authority fighting another. It is a sign of rebellion rather than obedience. I'm not sure if the writers of the Guardian are saying enforcing immigration law is authoritarian or if they are saying it is displaying the opposite spirit (rebellion against authority).

 

[lpetrich]

Authoritarianism may be interpreted as wanting to violate others' freedoms.

A big problem with the notion of freedom is that different freedoms can conflict. My freedom to move to spot X will conflict with your freedom to move to spot X. Some people try to argue that some possible freedoms are not "true" freedoms, but that seems to me to be sophistry.

Conflicts of freedoms must be resolved by rejecting some freedoms, and doing so thus makes everybody at least a little authoritarian.

But some people are more authoritarian than others, and The rise of American authoritarianism - Vox discusses efforts to measure authoritarianism.

MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.

So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump.

He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator.

Likewise, two researchers made an interesting discovery when researching authoritarianism.

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

...
If you were to read every word these theorists ever wrote on authoritarians, and then try to design a hypothetical candidate to match their predictions of what would appeal to authoritarian voters, the result would look a lot like Donald Trump.

Not surprisingly, The Authoritarians mentions Donald Trump's followers in this context. Why do they follow him so eagerly even when he does things contrary to their claimed values?

 

[untermensche]

Another social change collective, The Majority, brings together activists, organizers, and groups with different missions. Meanwhile, sanctuary cities are popping up across the US to protect undocumented immigrants from forceful arrest and deportation.

What's "authoritarian" about enforcing immigration law?
Is anything but open borders considered "authoritarian" by the Guardian editors?

What is authoritarian is saying you are going to build a stupid unneeded wall and Mexico will pay for it.

What is authoritarian is saying that you are doing this because Mexico is sending it's undesirables.

Authoritarians do not tell you the facts. They do not tell you the truth. They lie and use thick rhetoric to achieve power.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

What is authoritarian is saying you are going to build a stupid unneeded wall and Mexico will pay for it.

What is authoritarian is saying that you are doing this because Mexico is sending it's undesirables.

The Trump phenomenon does have a lot of authoritarianism in it. The post above yours shows that well. But what you write here isn't authoritarian. If anything it is xenophobic.

 

[Derec]

If anything it is xenophobic.

It's not xenophobic to have immigration laws and want to enforce them. Migrant caravans, sanctuary cities, etc. is bullshit!

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

If anything it is xenophobic.

It's not xenophobic to have immigration laws and want to enforce them.

No. But firing people up about building a giant game of thrones wall is.

 

[untermensche]

What is authoritarian is saying you are going to build a stupid unneeded wall and Mexico will pay for it.

What is authoritarian is saying that you are doing this because Mexico is sending it's undesirables.

The Trump phenomenon does have a lot of authoritarianism in it. The post above yours shows that well. But what you write here isn't authoritarian. If anything it is xenophobic.

I explain it with the third paragraph that you somehow discarded.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

OFFS!

With Donald Trump literally having people shout "heil Trump" in churches, explicitly praising oppressive dictators like Kim and oppressive regimes like Saudi Arabia, and pondering aloud how wonderful it would be if he had that same sort of control over America, authoritarianism is clearly on the rise on the right. I believe authoritarianism has been firmly entrenched in right wing politics since as long as I can remember, but now seems an especially fevered pitch of it.

Lately, I have also been seeing more and more authoritarianism on the left, demanding censorship, forced speech, deplatforming of conservative speakers, pressured firings of people based on accusations, group think, and increased reliance on and obedience to authority figures. This isn't the left that I consider myself to be or that I have seen around me throughout most of my life. I see a change in this and it is alarming to me. It struck me when I noticed some on the left excusing violence against those on the right for holding an ideology they find deplorable, but that isn't physically harming anyone (as the article linked to in the following post puts it). I expect it on the right (that's my bias), but seeing it rise on the left makes me fear that there may come a time when nobody is left to stand against authoritarianism itself, with them disagreement only in its political flavour.

All on the rise: Attacking and undermining the media as "fake news", pointing at scapegoats, weakening checks on power, and reducing politics to a question of friends and enemies, us and them, while refusing to listen to the other through labeling ("Racist!"; "Socialist!") or by claiming dog whistling despite not having heard them out.

I've started this thread as a place to collect thoughts, my own and those of others from here and elsewhere, and to link to articles and events as they happen showing authoritarianism growing or (crossing fingers) shrinking on the right and the left, and to consider strategies of how to oppose it on both. I will ignore any bickering about who is worse or claims that it exists only on one side, etc. The political flavour of it isn't the topic. Authoritarianism itself is.

- - - Updated - - -

https://medium.com/@GappyTales/the-rise-of-the-authoritarian-left-2ed8a1a94e6d

On first hearing the shouts of, “Punch a Nazi,” I will confess it did not immediately occur to me that anything much was amiss, because I too despise the far right and everything they stand for. Who, that believes ultimately in the right to physically defend our communities from those who would actively endeavour to destroy them, and who has vowed never, ever again, has tears to spare for the likes of Richard Spencer? Still, the moral quandary soon came, straddling the line between self defence and the idea that one can ever be justified in attacking another whose ideology you find deplorable, yet is physically harming no one. I began to shift slightly in my seat.

...

Something was deeply wrong and so in my shock and confusion I began to search. The thought criminals I found were scattered all over, from the ex muslim women who dared speak their experiences of religiously justified oppression, to the free speech advocates and classical liberals; from the gender apostates and the radical feminists, to the wishy washy moderates: not one fascist among them, yet all had found themselves cast out as the window of acceptable Leftist thought had shrunk ever smaller, turning all outside it into a single, one dimensional monster.

Feminism has always been a political movement of the left, inherently collectivist and committed to justice and freedom. Yet in a cynical attempt to discourage others from engaging with what those of us who question the individualism of the third wave have to say, we are being portrayed by the new left as synonymous with the bigoted right. It isn’t true, but in a world without nuance, where anyone outside the acceptable thought window can be declared simply evil, there is no inconvenient voice cannot be dismissed out of hand.

...

What I am witnessing today are fine principles of progressivism and freedom being weaponised in order to attack peoples rights, silence those who object, and promote the very opposite of those values laid claim to.

It is upside down and back to front: an ideology that allows wealthy, famous, and influential men to paint me, a single mother on a perilously low income, who rents her home from the council and has been interested in progressive politics her whole life long, as a powerful, right wing oppressor. It is an ideology that allows a white trans woman to point the finger at a prominent Somalian FGM campaigner, and dismiss her as a “White Feminist”. It is an ideology rapidly gaining in political support and social power, and which has already forced changes to the application of equality legislation before any material change has been made to the law. As principled people, I believe we have a duty to ask ourselves what an ideology such as this, in full control of state power, might look like.

No matter from which direction it comes, an increasing authoritarianism ought always to alarm free thinking people. Those who are so convinced of their absolute moral superiority and unquestionable rightness, they believe themselves entitled to use violence and intimidation to push their political agenda, are not those to whom we should wish to give more power. Their windows of acceptable thought will always inevitably shift and shrink. Today we may be safe inside, but tomorrow who can tell?

 

[Bomb#20]

Authoritarianism may be interpreted as wanting to violate others' freedoms.

A big problem with the notion of freedom is that different freedoms can conflict. My freedom to move to spot X will conflict with your freedom to move to spot X. Some people try to argue that some possible freedoms are not "true" freedoms, but that seems to me to be sophistry.

Conflicts of freedoms must be resolved by rejecting some freedoms, and doing so thus makes everybody at least a little authoritarian.

But some people are more authoritarian than others, and The rise of American authoritarianism - Vox discusses efforts to measure authoritarianism.

MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders.

You appear to be endorsing two orthogonal definitions of authoritarianism. That is an equivocation fallacy.

There are an awful lot of other people's freedoms you can violate besides their freedom to be disorderly and their freedom to come from outside. The Code of Federal Regulations is about 190,000 pages long and still growing. It is consequently physically impossible for anyone in America to know when he's committing a crime. Anyone who is favor of this state of affairs is more than a little authoritarian, some academic's politically slanted narrow criterion for authoritarianism notwithstanding. Authoritarians of every political stripe do not perceive themselves as authoritarian because to them the freedoms they want to violate don't count. Only the freedoms their opponents want to violate count.

 

[lpetrich]

Then about measuring authoritarianism. Early efforts often involved asking people if they were villainous in some way. But even the biggest villains don't consider themselves villains.

But the real problem for researchers was that even if there really were such a thing as an authoritarian psychological profile, how do you measure it? How do you interrogate authoritarian tendencies, which can sometimes be latent? How do you get honest answers on questions that can be sensitive and highly politicized?

As Hetherington explained to me, "There are certain things that you just can't ask people directly. You can't ask people, 'Do you not like black people?' You can't ask people if they're bigots."

But in the early 1990's, Stanley Feldman got an idea. If authoritarianism was a personality tendency, then one could measure it by asking about subjects that seem to have little to do with politics. He chose parenting. His test:

1. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders?
2. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance?
3. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?
4. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?

It has turned out to be a good test.


Authoritarian people are not authoritarian all the time. Their authoritarianism may need to be activated or else brought to the surface by social change or some sort of threat from outsiders.

Furthermore, non-authoritarian people who are sufficiently scared can behave in authoritarian ways.

But Hetherington and Suhay found a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out to be important, but it also meant that in times when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly.

Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.

...
Beyond being almost alarmingly prescient, this theory speaks to an oft-stated concern about Trump: that what's scariest is not the candidate, but rather the extent and fervor of his support.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

This is excellent. This is why Free Speech matters, even when you deem it "hate speech".

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zqfKWxrkXw[/youtube]

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Jordan Peterson about the anti-islamophobia motion from last year. This is Orwellian stuff. Je suis Charlie. Which side are you on? This isn't left/right. This is freedom/control.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VwpwP_fIqY[/youtube]