They want action that is big and punishing

I visited the Livonia Pride this afternoon. Livonia is a Detroit suburb near me and closer (and with easier parking) than the big Motor City Pride. There was a stage for entertainers. It featured a tap-dance team while I was there. There were a few food trucks off to the side. And there were about twenty booths of organizations that want to get the attention of LGBTQ people: Livonia human resources office. Democratic Party. Republican Party. LGBTQ friendly churches of a variety of denominations. A mental health organization. A save the library group. A booth with crafts to keep children busy. And a few more similar organizations. I stayed all of 20 minutes. Eliza Mazel of the Daily Kos community wrote that authoritarianism works the same way as cults. Both are based on a narcissistic abuser. There is a lot of material on that kind of relationship, including why a person will stay in its thrall and how to extract a person from it. Alas, Mazel, who is a practicing therapist in political psychology, doesn’t know how to extend extracting a person from a narcissistic abuser to extracting a large group from such a person. And those in thrall of the nasty guy are a very large group. Mazel then linked to an article on Vox. That article discusses the rise of American authoritarianism, written by Amanda Taub in 2016, before the nasty guy got into the Oval Office. It’s a lengthy article (it delves into the research), so I’ll only discuss major points. Stanley Feldman was a professor of political science at SUNY Stonybrook. He developed a way to test for authoritarian tendencies, that could develop into full authoritarianism given the right triggers. I had written several years ago that Feldman came up with four simple questions that proved to be quite reliable:

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

In each of these pairs of choices I see one that is very much in support of the social hierarchy and the other isn’t. For example, respect for elders is the same for respect for those higher in the hierarchy. Those questions also mean parents want to make sure their children grow up to honor the hierarchy.

There was now a way to identify people who fit the authoritarian profile, by prizing order and conformity, for example, and desiring the imposition of those values.

People turn to authoritarianism in response to experiencing certain kinds of threats. The threats can be physical (terrorism) or abstract and social, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes. As expected, physical threats can turn people to authoritarianism faster than social threats. A combination of the two could make the number of authoritarians swell rapidly. A survey in 2016 showed 19% were very highly authoritarian and another 25% were high authoritarian. For the American population that’s a lot of people – tens of millions. 55% of Republicans scored as high or very high authoritarians while 75% of Democrats were non-authoritarian. Starting in the 1960s and the Southern Strategy Republicans became the party that promised to stave off social change and impose order. That spoke to authoritarian voters. Democrats became the party of the things (such as civil rights) that repel authoritarians. The population sorted itself accordingly and Republicans could not ignore the voting preferences of authoritarians. The threat of social change might not act as fast as a physical threat, but it’s effect could be a great deal stronger. These threats could be a change in traditional gender roles, demographic changes from immigration, or any changes “that disrupt social hierarchies.” I’ve talked about the power of the social hierarchy and here is research that agrees. Authoritarians want someone strong who will suppress the scary changes and preserve their place in the hierarchy.

The increasingly important political phenomenon we identify as right-wing populism, or white working-class populism, seems to line up, with almost astonishing precision, with the research on how authoritarianism is both caused and expressed.

A non-authoritarian, when told about a specific threat, will mostly say they’re not worried about it. An authoritarian told about the specific threat will be quite worried. They are susceptible to messages of threats and will lash out at those identified as a worry. Which means they are susceptible to the messages of a demagogue. And that explains why the nasty guy speaks only about threats and why his followers grab onto every conspiracy theory they hear. Authoritarians were asked what policies they most support. I won’t list them, only that...

What these policies share in common is an outsize fear of threats, physical and social, and, more than that, a desire to meet those threats with severe government action — with policies that are authoritarian not just in style but in actuality. The scale of the desired response is, in some ways, what most distinguishes authoritarians from the rest of the GOP.

Things such as tax cuts for the rich or international trade agreements were not seen as threats and did not call for a protective government response. Candidates (and in 2016 there were a lot of Republicans in the race) that tried to also declare they were for the nasty guy’s policies didn’t get far because they couldn’t match his style...

The way he reduces everything to black-and-white extremes of strong versus weak, greatest versus worst. His simple, direct promises that he can solve problems that other politicians are too weak to manage. And, perhaps most importantly, his willingness to flout all the conventions of civilized discourse when it comes to the minority groups that authoritarians find so threatening.

And those simple messages are in terms of hierarchy. To summarize the authoritarian goal: They want action. They want it from the government. They want it big. They want it punishing. They want the threat to be vanquished. Most concerning, these authoritarians will not fade away if the nasty guy loses in 2024. They may well begin to act like a third party, though within the Republican Party (for now). While one faction or the other might determine the choice of candidate the authoritarian faction would be too small to win a national election.