Democracy and the Threat of Authoritarianism: Politics Beyond Barack Obama

by Henry A. Giroux

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”
- Hannah Arendt¹

A Turn to the Dark Side of Politics

The American media, large segments of the public and many educators widely believe that authoritarianism is alien to the political landscape of American society.

Authoritarianism is generally associated with tyranny and governments that exercise power in violation of the rule of law. A commonly held perception of the American public is that authoritarianism is always elsewhere. It can be found in other allegedly “less developed/civilized countries,” such as contemporary China or Iran, or it belongs to a fixed moment in modern history, often associated with the rise of twentieth century totalitarianism in its different forms in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Even as the United States became more disposed to modes of tyrannical power under the second Bush administration – demonstrated, for example, by the existence of secret CIA prisons, warrantless spying on Americans and state-sanctioned kidnapping – mainstream liberals, intellectuals, journalists and media pundits argued that any suggestion that the United States was becoming an authoritarian society was simply preposterous. For instance, the journalist James Traub repeated the dominant view that whatever problems the United States faced under the Bush administration had nothing to do with a growing authoritarianism or its more extreme form, totalitarianism.² On the contrary, according to this position, America was simply beholden to a temporary seizure of power by some extremists, who represented a form of political exceptionalism and an annoying growth on the body politic. In other words, as repugnant as many of Bush’s domestic and foreign policies might have been, they neither threatened nor compromised in any substantial way America’s claim to being a democratic society.

Against the notion that the Bush administration had pushed the United States close to the brink of authoritarianism, some pundits argued that this dark moment in America’s history, while uncharacteristic of an aspiring democracy, had to be understood as temporary perversion of American law and democratic ideals that would end when George W. Bush concluded his second term in the White House. In this view, the regime of George W. Bush and its demonstrated contempt for democracy was explained away as the outgrowth of a serendipitous act of politics – a corrupt election and the bad-faith act of a conservative court in 2000, or a poorly run election campaign in 2004 by an uncinematic and boring Democratic candidate.

According to this narrative, the Bush-Cheney regime exhibited such extreme modes of governance in its embrace of an imperial presidency, its violation of domestic and international law, and its disdain for human rights and democratic values that it was hard to view such anti-democratic policies as part of a pervasive shift towards a hidden order of authoritarian politics, which historically has existed at the margins of American society. How else to label such a government other than shockingly and uniquely extremist, given its political legacy that included the rise of the security and torture state; the creation of legal illegalities in which civil liberties were trampled; the launching of an unjust war in Iraq legitimated through official lies; the passing of legislative policies that drained the federal surplus by giving away more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the rich; the enactment of a shameful policy of preemptive war; the endorsement of an inflated military budget at the expense of much-needed social programs; the selling off of as many government functions as possible to corporate interests; the resurrection of an imperial presidency; an incessant attack against unions; support for a muzzled and increasingly corporate-controlled media; government production of fake news reports to gain consent for regressive policies; use of an Orwellian vocabulary for disguising monstrous acts such as torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques”); furtherance of a racist campaign of legal harassment and incarceration of Arabs, Muslims and immigrants; advancement of a prison binge through a repressive policy of criminalization; establishment of an unregulated and ultimately devastating form of casino capitalism; the arrogant celebration and support for the interests and values of big business at the expense of citizens and the common good, and the dismantling of social services and social safety nets as part of a larger campaign of ushering in the corporate state and the reign of finance capital.

Authoritarianism With a Friendly Face

In the minds of the American public, the dominant media and its accommodating pundits and intellectuals, there is no sense of how authoritarianism in its soft and hard forms can manifest itself as anything other than horrible images of concentration camps, goose-stepping storm troopers, rigid modes of censorship, and through chilling spectacles of extremist government repression and violence. That is, there is no sense of how new modes of authoritarian ideology, policy, values and social relations might manifest themselves in degrees and gradations so as to create the conditions for a distinctly undemocratic and increasingly cruel and oppressive social order. There is no sense, as the late Susan Sontag suggested in another context, how emerging registers of power and governance “dissolves politics into pathology.”³

It is generally believed that in a constitutional democracy, power is in the hands of the people, and that the long legacy of democratic ideals in America, however imperfect, is enough to prevent democracy from being subverted or lost. And, yet, the lessons of history provide clear examples of how the emergence of reactionary politics, the increasing power of the military, and the power of big business subverted democracy in Argentina, Chile, Germany and Italy. In spite of these histories, there is no room in the public imagination to entertain what has become the unthinkable – that such an order in its contemporary form might be more nuanced, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent – what one might call a mode of authoritarianism with a distinctly American character.⁴

Historical conjunctures produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they all share a hatred for democracy, dissent and civil liberties. It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly categorizes a country as either authoritarian or democratic, which leaves no room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both systems.

American politics today suggests a more updated if not different form of authoritarianism. In this context, it is worth remembering what Huey Long said in response to the question of whether America could ever become fascist: “Yes, but we will call it anti-fascist.”⁵ Long’s reply indicates that fascism is not an ideological apparatus frozen in a particular historical period, but a complex and often shifting theoretical and political register for understanding how democracy can be subverted, if not destroyed, from within.

This notion of soft or friendly fascism was articulated in 1985 in Bertram Gross’ book “Friendly Fascism,” in which he argued that if fascism came to the United States it would not embody the same characteristics associated with fascist forms in the historical past. There would be no Nuremberg rallies, doctrines of racial superiority, government-sanctioned book burnings, death camps, genocidal purges or the abrogation of the Constitution. In short, fascism would not take the form of an ideological grid from the past simply downloaded onto another country under different historical conditions. Gross believed that fascism was an ongoing danger and had the ability to become relevant under new conditions, taking on familiar forms of thought that resonate with nativist traditions, experiences and political relations.⁶

Similarly, in his “Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert O. Paxton argued that the texture of American fascism would not mimic traditional European forms, but would be rooted in the language, symbols and culture of everyday life. He wrote, “No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.”⁷

It is worth noting that Umberto Eco, in his discussion of “eternal fascism,” also argued that any updated version of fascism would not openly assume the mantle of historical fascism; rather, new forms of authoritarianism would appropriate some of its elements, making it virtually unrecognizable from its traditional forms. Like Gross and Paxton, Eco contended that fascism, if it comes to America, will have a different guise, although it will be no less destructive of democracy. He wrote:

Ur-Fascism [Eternal Fascism] is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances – everyday, in every part of the world.⁸

The renowned political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in “Democracy Incorporated,” updates these views and argued persuasively that the United States has produced its own unique form of authoritarianism, which he called “inverted totalitarianism.”⁹ Wolin claimed that under traditional forms of totalitarianism, there are usually founding texts such as “Mein Kampf,” rule by a personal demagogue such as Adolph Hitler, political change enacted by a revolutionary movement such as the Bolsheviks, the Constitution rewritten or discarded, the political state’s firm control over corporate interests and an idealized and all-encompassing ideology used to create a unified and totalizing understanding of society. At the same time, the government uses all of the power of its cultural and repressive state apparatuses to fashion followers in its own ideological image and collective identity.

Wolin argued that, in the United States, an emerging authoritarianism appears to take on a very different form.¹⁰ Instead of a charismatic leader, the government is now governed through the anonymous and largely remote hand of corporate power and finance capital. That is, political sovereignty is largely replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reigns of governance. The dire consequence, as David Harvey pointed out, is that “raw money power wielded by the few undermines all semblances of democratic governance. The pharmaceutical, health insurance and hospital lobbies, for example, spent more than $133 million in the first three months of 2009 to make sure they got their way on health care reform in the United States.”¹¹ The more money influences politics, the more corrupt the political culture becomes. Under such circumstances, holding office is largely dependent on having huge amounts of capital at one’s disposal, while laws and policies at all levels of government are mostly fashioned by lobbyists representing big business corporations and commanding financial institutions. Moreover, as the politics of the health care reform indicate, such lobbying, as corrupt and unethical as it may be, is now carried out in the open and displayed by insurance and drug companies as a badge of honor – a kind of open testimonial to the disrespect for democratic governance and a celebration of their power. The subversion of democratic governance in the United States by corporate interests is captured succinctly by Chris Hedges in his observation that

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the US Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.¹²

Rather than forcing a populace to adhere to a particular state ideology, the general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education and other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public values, civic consciousness and critical citizenship is also the result of the work of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological and financial interests,¹³ a dominant media that is largely center-right and a market-driven public pedagogy that reduces the obligations of citizenship to the endless consumption and discarding of commodities. In addition, a pedagogy of amnesia works through celebrity culture and its counterpart in corporate-driven news, television, radio and entertainment to produce a culture of stupidity, censorship and diversionary spectacles.

Depoliticizing Freedom and Agency

Agency is now defined by a market-driven concept of freedom, a notion that is largely organized according to narrow notions of individual self-interest and limited to the freedom from constraints. Central to this concept is the freedom to pursue one’s self-interest independently of larger social concerns. For individuals in a consumer society, this often means the freedom to shop, own guns and define rights without regards to the consequences for others or the larger social order.

When applied to economic institutions, this notion of freedom often translates into a call for removing government regulations over the market and economic institutions. This notion of a deregulated and privatized freedom is decoupled from the common good and any understanding of individual and social responsibility. It is an unlimited notion freedom that both refuses to recognize its social consequences and has no language for an ethic that calls us beyond ourselves, that engages our responsibility to others. Within this discourse of hyper-individualized freedom, individuals are not only “liberated from the constraints imposed by the dense network of social bonds,” but they are also “stripped of the protection which had been matter-of-factly offered in the past by that dense network of social bonds.”¹⁴

Freedom exclusively tied to personal and political rights without also enabling access to economic resources becomes morally empty and politically dysfunctional. The much heralded notion of choice associated with personal and political freedom is hardly assured when individuals lack the economic resources, knowledge and social supports to make such choices and freedoms operative and meaningful. As Zygmunt Bauman pointed outs, “The right to vote (and so, obliquely and at least in theory, the right to influence the composition of the ruler and the shape of the rules that bind the ruled) could be meaningfully exercised only by those ‘who possess sufficient economic and cultural resources’ to be safe from the voluntary or involuntary servitude that cuts off any possible autonomy of choice (and/or its delegation) at the root…. [Choice] stripped of economic resources and political power hardly assure[s] personal freedoms to the dispossessed, who have no claim on the resources without which personal freedom can neither be won nor in practice enjoyed.”¹⁵ Paul Bigioni has argued that this flawed notion of freedom played a central role in the emerging fascist dictatorships of the early 20th century. He wrote:

It was the liberals of that era who clamored for unfettered personal and economic freedom, no matter what the cost to society. Such untrammeled freedom is not suitable to civilized humans. It is the freedom of the jungle. In other words, the strong have more of it than the weak. It is a notion of freedom that is inherently violent, because it is enjoyed at the expense of others. Such a notion of freedom legitimizes each and every increase in the wealth and power of those who are already powerful, regardless of the misery that will be suffered by others as a result. The use of the state to limit such “freedom” was denounced by the laissez-faire liberals of the early 20th century. The use of the state to protect such “freedom” was fascism. Just as monopoly is the ruin of the free market, fascism is the ultimate degradation of liberal capitalism.¹⁶

This stripped-down notion of market-based freedom that now dominates American society cancels out any viable notion of individual and social agency. In embracing a passive attitude toward freedom in which power is viewed as a necessary evil, a conservative notion of freedom reduces politics to the empty ritual of voting, and is incapable of understanding freedom as a form of collective, productive power, which enables “a notion of political agency and freedom that affirms the equal opportunity of all to exercise political power in order to participate in shaping the most important decisions affecting their lives.¹⁷

This merging of the market-based understanding of freedom as the freedom to consume and the conservative-based view of freedom as a restriction from all constraints refuses to recognize that the conditions for substantive freedom do not lie in personal and political rights alone; on the contrary, real choices and freedom include the individual and collective ability to actively intervene in and shape both the nature of politics and the myriad forces bearing down on everyday life – a notion of freedom that can only be viable when social rights and economic resources are available to individuals.

Of course, this notion of freedom and choice is often dismissed either as a vestige of socialism or simply drowned out in a culture that collapses all social considerations and notions of solidarity into the often cruel and swindle-based discourse of instant gratification and individual gain. Under such conditions, democracy is managed through the empty ritual of elections; citizens are largely rendered as passive observers as a result of giving undue influence to corporate power in shaping all of the essential elements of political governance and decision making; and manufactured appeals to fear and personal safety legitimate both the suspension of civil liberties and the expanding powers of an imperial presidency and the policing functions of a militaristic state.

I believe that the formative culture necessary to create modes of education, thought, dialogue, critique and critical agency – the necessary conditions of any aspiring democracy – is largely destroyed through the pacification of intellectuals and the elimination of public spheres capable of creating such a culture. Elements of a depoliticizing and commodifying culture become clear in the shameless propaganda produced by the so-called “embedded” journalists, while a corporate-dominated popular culture largely operates through multiple technologies, screen cultures and video games that trade endlessly in images of violence, spectacles of consumption and stultifying modes of (il)literacy.

Funded by right-wing ideological, corporate and militaristic interests, an army of anti-public intellectuals groomed in right-wing think tanks and foundations dominate the traditional media, police the universities for any vestige of critical thought and dissent and endlessly spread their message of privatization, deregulation and commercialization, exercising a powerful influence in the dismantling all public spheres not dominated by private and commodifying interests. These “experts in legitimation,” to use Antonio Gramsci’s prescient phrase, peddle civic ignorance just as they renounce any vestige of public accountability for big business, giant media conglomerates and financial mega-corporations.

Under the new authoritarianism, the corporate state and the punishing state merge as economics drives politics and repression is increasingly used to contain all those individuals and groups caught in the expanding web of extreme inequality and powerlessness that touches everything from the need for basic health care, food and shelter to the promise of a decent education. As the social state is hollowed out under pressure from free-market advocates, right-wing politicians and conservative ideologues, the United States has increasingly turned its back on any semblance of social justice, civic responsibility and democracy itself. How else to explain the influential journalist Thomas Friedman’s shameless endorsement of military adventurism in a New York Times article? Friedman argued, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the US Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”¹⁸ Freedom in this discourse is inextricably wedded to state and military violence, and is a far cry from any semblance of a claim to democracy.

Zombie Politics and the Culture of Cruelty

Another characteristic of an emerging authoritarianism in the United States is the correlation between the growing atomization of the individual and the rise of a culture of cruelty, a type of zombie politics in which the living dead engage in forms of rapacious behavior that destroy almost every facet of a substantive democratic polity. There is a mode of terror rooted in a neoliberal market-driven society that numbs many people just as it wipes out the creative faculties of imagination, memory and critical thought. Under a regime of privatized utopias, hyper individualism and ego-centered values, human beings slip into a kind of ethical somnolence, indifferent to the plight and suffering of others. Though writing in a different context, the late Frankfurt School theorist Leo Lowenthal captures this mode of terror in his comments on the deeply sedimented elements of authoritarianism rooted in modern civilization. He wrote:

In a system that reduces life to a chain of disconnected reactions to shock, personal communication tends to lose all meaning…. The individual under terrorist conditions is never alone and always alone. He becomes numb and rigid not only in relation to his neighbor but also in relation to himself; fear robs him of the power of spontaneous emotional or mental reaction. Thinking becomes a stupid crime; it endangers his life. The inevitable consequence is that stupidity spreads as a contagious disease among the terrorized population. Human beings live in a state of stupor, in a moral coma.¹⁹

Implicit in Lowenthal’s commentary is the assumption that as democracy becomes a fiction, the moral mechanisms of language, meaning and morality collapse and a cruel indifference takes over diverse modes of communication and exchange, often as a register of the current paucity of democratic values, identities and social relations. Surely, this is obvious today as all vestiges of the social contract, social responsibility and modes of solidarity give way to a form of social Darwinism with its emphasis on ruthlessness, cruelty, war, violence, hyper modes of masculinity and a disdain for those considered weak, dependent, alien or economically unproductive.

This culture of cruelty is especially evident in the hardships and deprivations now visited upon many young people in the United States. We have 13.3 million homeless children; one child in five lives in poverty; 17,000 have died in the last decade because they lacked health insurance; too many are now under the supervision of the criminal justice system, and many more are unemployed and lack any hope for the future.²⁰

Moreover, we are subjecting more and more children to psychiatric drugs as a way of controlling their alleged unruly behavior while providing huge profits for drug companies. As Evelyn Pringle pointed out, “in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion”²¹ Needless to say, the drugging of American children is less about treating genuine mental disorders than it is about punishing so called unruly children, largely children of the poor, and creating “lifelong patients and repeat customers for Pharma!”²² Stories abound about poor young people being raped, beaten and dying in juvenile detention centers, needlessly trafficked into the criminal justice system as part of a profit-making scheme cooked up by corrupt judges and private correction facilities administrators, and being given powerful antipsychotic medicines in schools and other state facilities.²³

Unfortunately, this regression to sheer Darwinism is not only evident in increasing violence against young people, cutthroat reality TV shows, hate radio and the Internet, it is also on full display in the discourse of government officials and politicians and serves as register of the prominence of both a kind of political infantilism and a culture of cruelty. For instance, the Secretary of Education, Arnie Duncan, recently stated in an interview in February 2010, “The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.”²⁴ Duncan’s point, beyond the incredible inhumanity reflected in such a comment, was that it took a disaster that uprooted thousands of individuals and families and caused enormous amounts of suffering to enable the Obama administration to implement a massive educational system, pushing charter schools based on market-driven principles that disdain public values, if not public schooling itself.

This is the language of cruelty and zombie politicians, a language indifferent to the ways in which people who suffer great tragedies are expelled from their histories, narratives and right to be human. Horrible tragedies caused in part by government indifference are now covered up in the discourse and ideals inspired by the logic of the market. This mean and merciless streak was also on display recently when Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor in South Carolina, stated that giving people government assistance was comparable to “feeding stray animals.” The utterly derogatory and implicitly racist nature of his remark became obvious in the statement that followed: “You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”²⁵

Lowenthal’s argument that in an authoritarian society “stupidity spreads as a contagious disease” is evident in a statement made by Michele Bachmann, a Republican Congresswoman, who recently argued, “Americans should purchase [health] insurance with their own tax-free money.”²⁶ That 43 million Americans are without health insurance because they cannot afford it seems lost on Bachmann, whose comments suggest that these uninsured individuals, families, unemployed workers and children are not simply a disposable surplus, but actually invisible and therefore unworthy of any acknowledgment.

The regressive politics and moral stupidity are also evident in the emergence of right-wing extremists now taking over the Republican Party. This new and aggressive political formation calls for decoupling market-driven financial institutions from any vestige of political and governmental constraint, celebrates emotion over reason, treats critical intelligence as a toxin possessed largely by elites, wraps its sophomoric misrepresentations in an air of beyond-interrogation, “we’re just folks” insularity, and calls for the restoration of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America.²⁷ Such calls embody elements of a racial panic that are evident in all authoritarian movements and have increasingly become a defining feature of a Republican Party that has sided with far right-wing thugs and goon squads intent on disrupting any vestige of the democratic process. This emerging authoritarian element in American political culture is embodied in the presence of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck – right-wing extremists who share a contempt for reason and believe in organizing politics on the model of war, unconditional surrender, personal insults, hyper-masculine spectacles and the complete destruction of one’s opponent.

Authoritarianism feeds on such excesses and the moral coma that accompanies the inability of a society to both question itself and imagine an alternative democratic order. Unfortunately, the problems now facing the United States are legion and further the erosion of a civic and democratic culture. Some of the most glaring issues are massive unemployment; a rotting infrastructure; the erosion of vital public services; the dismantling of the social safety net; expanding levels of poverty, especially for children; and an imprisonment binge largely affecting poor minorities of color. But such a list barely scratches the surface. In addition, we have witnessed in the last 30 years the restructuring of public education as either a source of profit for corporations or an updated version of control modeled after prison culture, coupled with an increasing culture of lying, cruelty and corruption, all of which belie a democratic vision of America that now seems imaginable only as a nostalgic rendering of the founding ideals of democracy.

Dangerous Authoritarianism or Shrinking Democracy

Needless to say, many would disagree with Wolin’s view that the United States is in the grip of a new and dangerous authoritarianism that makes a mockery of the country’s moral claim to being a model of democracy at home and for the rest of the world. For instance, liberal critics such as Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, refers to America’s changing political landscape as a “shrinking democracy.”²⁸ For Reich, democracy necessitates three things: “(1) Important decisions are made in the open. (2) The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate them, so the decisions can be revised in light of what the public discovers and wants. And (3) those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters,”²⁹ If we apply Reich’s notion of democracy, then it becomes evident that the use of the term democracy is neither theoretically apt nor politically feasible at the current historical moment as a description of the United States. All of the conditions he claims are crucial for a democracy are now undermined by financial and economic interests that control elections, buy off political representatives and eliminate those public spheres where real dialogue and debate can take place. It is difficult to imagine that anyone looking at a society in which an ultra-rich financial elite and mega-corporations have the power to control almost every aspect of politics – from who gets elected to how laws are enacted – could possibly mistake this social order and system of government for a democracy.

A more appropriate understanding of democracy comes from Wolin in his claim that:

democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs. What is at stake in democratic politics is whether ordinary men and women can recognize that their concerns are best protected and cultivated under a regime whose actions are governed by principles of commonality, equality, and fairness, a regime in which taking part in politics becomes a way of staking out and sharing in a common life and its forms of self-fulfillment. Democracy is not about bowling together but about managing together those powers that immediately and significantly affect the lives and circumstances of others and one’s self. Exercising power can be humbling when the consequences are palpable rather than statistical – and rather different from wielding power at a distance, at, say, an “undisclosed bunker somewhere in northern Virginia.”³⁰

Wolin ties democracy not merely to participation and accountability, but to the importance of the formative culture necessary for critical citizens and the need for a redistribution of power and wealth, that is, a democracy in which power is exercised not just for the people by elites, but by the people in their own collective interests. But more importantly, Wolin and others recognize that the rituals of voting and accountability have become empty in a country that has been reduced to a lockdown universe in which torture, abuse and the suspension of civil liberties have become so normalized that more than half of all Americans now support the use of torture under some circumstances.³¹ Torture, kidnapping, indefinite detention, murder and disappeared “enemy combatants” are typical practices carried out in dictatorships, not in democracies, especially in a democracy that allegedly has a liberal president who ran on the promise of change and hope. Maybe it’s time to use a different language to name and resist the registers of power and ideology that now dominate American society.

While precise accounts of the meaning of authoritarianism, especially fascism, abound, I have no desire, given its shifting nature, to impose a rigid or universal definition. What is to be noted is that most scholars agree that authoritarianism is a mass movement that emerges out of a failed democracy, and its ideology is extremely anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-socialistic.³² As a social order, it is generally characterized by a system of terror directed against perceived enemies of the state, a monopolistic control of the mass media, an expanding prison system, a state monopoly of weapons, political rule by privileged groups and classes, control of the economy by a limited number of people, unbridled corporatism, “the appeal to emotion and myth rather than reason; the glorification of violence on behalf of a national cause; the mobilization and militarization of civil society; [and] an expansionist foreign policy intended to promote national greatness.”³³ All of these tendencies were highly visible during the former Bush administration.

With the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, there was a widespread feeling among large sections of the American public and its intellectuals that the moment and threat of authoritarianism had passed. And, yet, there are many troubling signs that, in spite of the election of Obama, authoritarian policies not only continue to unfold unabated within his administration, but continue outside of his power to control them. In this case, anti-democratic forces seem to align with many of the conditions that make up what Wolin calls the politics of inverted totalitarianism.

I think it is fair to say that authoritarianism can permeate the lived relations of a political culture and social order, and can be seen in the ways in which such relations exacerbate the material conditions of inequality, undercut a sense of individual and social agency, hijack democratic values and promote a deep sense of hopelessness, cynicism and, eventually, unbridled anger. This deep sense of cynicism and despair on the part of the polity in the face of unaccountable corporate and political power lends credence to Hannah Arendt’s notion that at the heart of totalitarianism is the disappearance of the thinking, dialogue and speaking citizens who make politics possible. Authoritarianism as both an ideology and a set of social practices emerges within the lives of those marked by such relations, as its proponents scorn the present while calling for a revolution that rescues a deeply anti-modernist past in order to revolutionize the future.

Determining for certain whether we are in the midst of a new authoritarianism under the leadership of Barack Obama is difficult, but one thing is clear: any new form of authoritarianism that emerges in the current time will be much more powerful and complex in its beliefs, mechanisms of power and modes of control than the alleged idealism of one man or one administration. The popular belief, especially after Bush’s defeat, was that the country had made a break with its morally transgressive and reactionary past and that Obama signified not just hope, but political redemption. Such views ignored both the systemic and powerfully organized financial and economic forces at work in American society, while vastly overestimating the power of any one individual or isolated group to challenge and transform them. Even as the current economic meltdown revealed the destructive and distinctive class character of the financial crisis, the idea that the crisis was rooted in systemic causes that far exceeded a few bailouts was lost even on liberal economists such as Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz.

Within such economic analyses and narratives of political redemption, the primacy of hope and “critical exuberance” took precedence over the reality of established corporate power, ideological interests and the influence of the military-industrial complex. As Judith Butler warned soon after Obama’s victory, “Obama is, after all, hardly a leftist, regardless of the attributions of ‘socialism’ proffered by his conservative opponents. In what ways will his actions be constrained by party politics, economic interests, and state power; in what ways have they been compromised already? If we seek through this presidency to overcome a sense of dissonance, then we will have jettisoned critical politics in favor of an exuberance whose phantasmatic dimensions will prove consequential.”³⁴ In retrospect, Butler’s comments have proven prescient, and the hope that accompanied Obama’s election has now been tempered by not simply despair, but, in many quarters, outright and legitimate anger.

If Bush’s presidency represented an exceptional anti-democratic moment, it would seem logical that the Obama administration would have examined, condemned and dismantled policies and practices at odds with the ideals of an aspiring democracy. Unfortunately, such has not been the case under Obama, at least up to this point in his administration. Within the past year, Obama has moved decidedly to the right, and, in doing so, he has extended some of the worst elements of the counterterrorism policies of the Bush administration. He has endorsed the use of military commissions, argued for the use of indefinite detention with no charges or legal recourse for Afghan prisoners, extended the USA Patriot Act,³⁵ continued two wars while expanding the war in Afghanistan and largely reproduced Bush’s market-driven approach to school reform.³⁶

As Noam Chomsky pointed out, Obama has done nothing to alter the power and triumph of financial liberalization in the past 30 years.³⁷ He bailed out banks and financial investment institutions at the expense of the 26.3 million Americans who are either unemployed or do not have full time jobs along with the millions who have lost their homes. His chief economic and foreign policy advisers – Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers and Robert Gates – represent a continuation of a military and big business orientation that is central to the ideologies and power relations of a undemocratic and increasingly bankrupt economic and political system. While claiming to enact policies designed to reduce the federal deficit, Obama plans to cut many crucial domestic programs while increasing military spending, the intelligence budget and foreign military aid. Obama has requested a defense budget for 2011 of $708 billion, in addition to calling for $33 billion to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This budget is almost as large as the rest of the entire world’s defense spending combined. Roger Hodge provides a useful summary of Obama’s failings, extending from the perversion of the rule of law to the authoritarian claim of “sovereign immunity” He wrote:

Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantanamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass. As president, with few exceptions, Obama either has embraced the unconstitutional war powers claimed by his predecessor or has left the door open for their quiet adoption at some later date. Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has declared that the right to kidnap (known as “extraordinary rendition”) foreigners will continue, just as the Bush administration’s expansive doctrine of state secrets continues to be used in court against those wrongfully detained and tortured by our security forces and allies. Obama has adopted military commissions, once an unpardonable offense against our best traditions, to prosecute terrorism cases in which legitimate convictions cannot be obtained. … The principle of habeas corpus, sacred to candidate Obama as “the essence of who we are,” no longer seems so essential, and reports continue to surface of secret prisons hidden from due process and the Red Cross. Waterboarding has been banned, but other “soft” forms of torture, such as sleep deprivation and force-feeding, continue – as do the practices, which once seemed so terribly important to opponents of the Bush regime, of presidential signing statements and warrantless surveillance. In at least one respect, the Obama Justice Department has produced an innovation: a claim of “sovereign immunity” in response to a lawsuit seeking damages for illegal spying. Not even the minions of George W. Bush, with their fanciful notions of the unitary executive, made use of this constitutionally suspect doctrine, derived from the ancient common-law assumption that “the King can do no wrong,” to defend their clear violations of the federal surveillance statute.³⁸

Moreover, by giving corporations and unions unlimited freedom to contribute to elections, the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission provided a final step in placing the control of politics more firmly in the hands of big money and large corporations. In this ruling, democracy, like everything else in American culture, was treated as a commodity and offered up to the highest bidder. As a result, whatever government regulations are imposed on big business and the financial sectors will be largely ineffective and will do little to disrupt casino capitalism’s freedom from political, economic and ethical constraints. Chris Hedges is right in insisting that the Supreme Court’s decision “carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power…. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.”³⁹

In light of his conservative, if not authoritarian, policies, Obama’s once inspiring call for hope has been reduced to what appears to be simply an empty performance, one that “favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time.”⁴⁰ What once appeared as inspired rhetoric has largely been reduced to fodder for late-night television comics, while for a growing army of angry voters it has become nothing more than a cheap marketing campaign and disingenuous diversion in support of moneyed interests and power. Obama’s rhetoric of hope is largely contradicted by policies that continue to reproduce a world of egotistic self-referentiality, an insensitivity to human suffering, massive investments in military power and an embrace of those market-driven values that produce enormous inequalities in wealth, income and security. There is more at stake here than a politics of misrepresentation and bad faith.

There is an invisible register of politics that goes far beyond the contradiction between Obama’s discourse and his right-wing policies. What we must take seriously in Obama’s policies is the absence of anything that might suggest a fundamental power shift away from casino capitalism to policies that would develop the conditions “that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs.”⁴¹

In Obama’s world, cutthroat competition is still the name of the game, and individual choice is still simply about a hunt for bargains. Lost here is any notion of political and social responsibility for the welfare, autonomy and dignity of all human beings, but especially those who are marginalized because they lack food, shelter, jobs, and other crucial basic needs. But, then again, this is not Obama’s world; it is a political order and mode of economic sovereignty that has been in the making for quite some time and now shapes practically every aspect of culture, politics and civic life. In doing so, it has largely destroyed any vestige of real democracy in the United States.

I am not suggesting that in light of Obama’s continuation of some of the deeply structured authoritarian tendencies in American society that people should turn away from the language of hope, but I am saying that they should avoid a notion of hope that is as empty as it is disingenuous. What is needed is a language of critique and hope that mutually inform each other, and engagement in a discourse of hope that is concretely rooted in real struggles and capable of inspiring a new political language and collective vision among a highly conservative and fractured polity.

Maybe it is time to shift the critique of Obama away from an exclusive focus on the policies and practices of his administration and develop a new language, one with a longer historical purview and deeper understanding of the ominous forces that now threaten any credible notion of the United States as an aspiring democracy. As Stuart Hall insisted, we “need to change the scale of magnification” in order to make visible the anti-democratic relations often buried beneath the hidden order of politics that have taken hold in the United States in the last few decades.⁴² It may be time to shift the discourse away from focusing on either Obama’s failures or urging progressives and others to develop “the organizational power to make muscular demands”⁴³ on the Obama administration. Maybe the time has come to focus on the ongoing repressive and systemic conditions, institutions, ideologies and values that have been developing in American society for the last 30 years, forces that are giving rise to a unique form of American authoritarianism. I agree with Sheldon Wolin that the “fixation upon” Obama now “obscures the problems” we are facing.⁴⁴ Maybe it is time to imagine what democracy would look like outside of what we have come to call capitalism, not simply neoliberalism as its most extreme manifestation. Maybe it is time to fight for the formative culture and modes of thought and agency that are the very foundations of democracy. And maybe it time to mobilize a militant, far-reaching social movement to challenge the false claims that equate democracy and capitalism.

If it is true that a new form of authoritarianism is developing in the United States, undercutting any vestige of a democratic society, then it is equally true that there is nothing inevitable about this growing threat. The long and tightening grip of authoritarianism in American political culture can be resisted and transformed. This dystopic future will not happen if intellectuals, workers, young people and diverse social movements unite to create the public spaces and unsettling formative educational cultures necessary for reimagining the meaning of radical democracy.

In part, this is a pedagogical project, one that recognizes consciousness, agency and education as central to any viable notion of politics. It is also a project designed to address, critique and make visible the common-sense ideologies that enable neoliberal capitalism and other elements of an emergent authoritarianism to function alongside a kind of moral coma and political amnesia at the level of everyday life.

But such a project will not take place if the American public cannot recognize how the mechanisms of authoritarianism have impacted on their lives, restructured negatively the notion of freedom and corrupted power by placing it largely in the hands of ruling elites, corporations and different segments of the military and national security state. Such a project must work to develop vigorous social spheres and communities that promote a culture of deliberation, public debate and critical exchange across a wide variety of cultural and institutional sites in an effort to generate democratic movements for social change.

Central to such a project is the attempt to foster a new radical imagination as part of a wider political project to create the conditions for a broad-based social movement that can move beyond the legacy of a fractured left/progressive culture and politics in order to address the totality of the society’s problems. This suggests finding a common ground in which challenging diverse forms of oppression, exploitation and exclusion can become part of a broader challenge to create a radical democracy. We live at a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy, but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory.

Notes:

The Practice of Ritual Defamation

How values, opinions and beliefs are controlled in democratic societies.

Laird Wilcox
1990

Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and “insensitivity” or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.

Ritual Defamation is not ritualistic because it follows any prescribed religious or mystical doctrine, nor is it embraced in any particular document or scripture. Rather, it is ritualistic because it follows a predictable, stereotyped pattern which embraces a number of elements, as in a ritual.

The elements of a Ritual Defamation are these:

1. In a ritual defamation the victim must have violated a particular taboo in some way, usually by expressing or identifying with a forbidden attitude, opinion or belief. It is not necessary that he “do” anything about it or undertake any particular course of action, only that he engage in some form of communication or expression.

2. The method of attack in a ritual defamation is to assail the character of the victim, and never to offer more than a perfunctory challenge to the particular attitudes, opinions or beliefs expressed or implied. Character assassination is its primary tool.

3. An important rule in ritual defamation is to avoid engaging in any kind of debate over the truthfulness or reasonableness of what has been expressed, only condemn it. To debate opens the issue up for examination and discussion of its merits, and to consider the evidence that may support it, which is just what the ritual defamer is trying to avoid. The primary goal of a ritual defamation is censorship and repression.

4. The victim is often somebody in the public eye – someone who is vulnerable to public opinion – although perhaps in a very modest way. It could be a schoolteacher, writer, businessman, minor official, or merely an outspoken citizen. Visibility enhances vulnerability to ritual defamation.

5. An attempt, often successful, is made to involve others in the defamation. In the case of a public official, other public officials will be urged to denounce the offender. In the case of a student, other students will be called upon, and so on.

6. In order for a ritual defamation to be effective, the victim must be dehumanized to the extent that he becomes identical with the offending attitude, opinion or belief, and in a manner which distorts it to the point where it appears at its most extreme. For example, a victim who is defamed as a “subversive” will be identified with the worst images of subversion, such as espionage, terrorism or treason. A victim defamed as a “pervert” will be identified with the worst images of perversion, including child molestation and rape. A victim defamed as a “racist” or “anti-Semitic” will be identified with the worst images of racism or anti-Semitism, such as lynchings or gas chambers.

7. Also to be successful, a ritual defamation must bring pressure and humiliation on the victim from every quarter, including family and friends. If the victim has school children, they may be taunted and ridiculed as a consequence of adverse publicity. If they are employed, they may be fired from their job. If the victim belongs to clubs or associations, other members may be urged to expel them.

8. Any explanation the victim may offer, including the claim of being misunderstood, is considered irrelevant. To claim truth as a defense for a politically incorrect value, opinion or belief is interpreted as defiance and only compounds the problem. Ritual defamation is often not necessarily an issue of being wrong or incorrect but rather of “insensitivity” and failing to observe social taboos.

An interesting aspect of ritual defamation as a practice is its universality. It is not specific to any value, opinion or belief or to any group or subculture. It may be used for or against any political, ethnic, national or religious group. It may, for example, by anti-Semites against Jews, or by Jews against anti-Semites; by rightists against leftists or by leftists against rightists, and so on.

The power of ritual defamation lies entirely in its capacity to intimidate and terrorize. It embraces some elements of primitive superstitious belief, as in a “curse” or “hex.” It plays into the subconscious fear most people have of being abandoned or rejected by the tribe or by society and being cut off from social and psychological support systems.

The weakness of ritual defamation lies in its tendency toward overkill and in its obvious maliciousness. Occasionally a ritual defamation will fail because of poor planning and failure to correctly judge the vulnerability of the victim or because its viciousness inadvertently generates sympathy.

It’s important to recognize and identify the patterns of a ritual defamation. Like all propaganda and disinformation campaigns it is accomplished primarily through the manipulation of words and symbols. It is not used to persuade, but to punish. Although it may have cognitive elements, its thrust is primarily emotional. Ritual Defamation is used to hurt, to intimidate, to destroy, and to persecute, and to avoid the dialogue, debate and discussion upon which a free society depends. On those grounds it must be opposed no matter who tries to justify its use.

I think you will find it most fascinating reading:

Laird Wilcox on Extremist Traits

[The Hoaxer Project Report, pp. 39-41]

Robert F. Kennedy wrote:

“What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.”

In analyzing the rhetoric and propaganda of several hundred militant “fringe” political and social groups across the political spectrum, I have identified a number of specific traits or behaviors that tend to represent the extremist “style”…

1. CHARACTER ASSASSINATION.

Extremists often attack the character of an opponent rather than deal with the facts or issues raised. They will question motives, qualifications, past associations, alleged values, personality, looks, mental health, and so on as a diversion from the issues under consideration. Some of these matters are not entirely irrelevant , but they should not serve to avoid the real issues.

Extremists object strenuously when this is done to them, of course!

2. NAME-CALLING AND LABELING.

Extremists are quick to resort to epithets (racist, subversive, pervert, hate monger, nut, crackpot, degenerate, un-American, anti-semite, red, commie, nazi, kook, fink, liar, bigot, and so on) to label and condemn opponents in order to divert attention from their arguments and to discourage others from hearing them out. These epithets don’t have to be proved to be effective; the mere fact that they have been said is often enough.

3. IRRESPONSIBLE SWEEPING GENERALIZATIONS.

Extremists tend to make sweeping claims or judgments on little or no evidence, and they have a tendency to confuse similarity with sameness. That is, they assume that because two (or more) things, events, or persons are alike in some respects, they must be alike in most respects. The sloppy use of analogy is a treacherous form of logic and has a high potential for false conclusions.

4. INADEQUATE PROOF FOR ASSERTIONS.

Extremists tend to be very fuzzy about what constitutes proof, and they also tend to get caught up in logical fallacies, such as post hoc ergo propter hoc (assuming that a prior event explains a subsequent occurrence simply because of their before and after relationship). They tend to project wished-for conclusions and to exaggerate the significance of information that confirms their beliefs while derogating or ignoring information that contradicts them. They tend to be motivated by feelings more than facts, by what they want to exist rather than what actually does exist. Extremists do a lot of wishful and fearful thinking.

5. ADVOCACY OF DOUBLE STANDARDS.

Extremists generally tend to judge themselves or their interest group in terms of their intentions, which they tend to view very generously, and others by their acts, which they tend to view very critically. They would like you to accept their assertions on faith, but they demand proof for yours. They tend to engage in special pleading on behalf of themselves or their interests, usually because of some alleged special status, past circumstances, or present disadvantage.

6. TENDENCY TO VIEW THEIR OPPONENTS AND CRITICS AS ESSENTIALLY EVIL.

To the extremist, opponents hold opposing positions because they are bad people, immoral, dishonest, unscrupulous, mean-spirited, hateful, cruel, or whatever, not merely because they simply disagree, see the matter differently, have competing interests, or are perhaps even mistaken.

7. MANICHAEAN WORLDVIEW.

Extremists have a tendency to see the world in terms of absolutes of good and evil, for them or against them, with no middle ground or intermediate positions. All issues are ultimately moral issues of right and wrong, with the “right” position coinciding with their interests. Their slogan is often “those who are not with me are against me.”

8. ADVOCACY OF SOME DEGREE OF CENSORSHIP OR REPRESSION OF THEIR OPPONENTS AND/OR CRITICS.

This may include a very active campaign to keep opponents from media access and a public hearing, as in the case of blacklisting, banning or “quarantining” dissident spokespersons. They may actually lobby for legislation against speaking, writing, teaching, or instructing “subversive” or forbidden information or opinions. They may even attempt to keep offending books out of stores or off of library shelves, discourage advertising with threats of reprisals, and keep spokespersons for “offensive” views off the airwaves or certain columnists out of newspapers. In each case the goal is some kind of information control. Extremists would prefer that you listen only to them. They feel threatened when someone talks back or challenges their views.

9. TEND TO IDENTIFY THEMSELVES IN TERMS OF WHO THEIR ENEMIES ARE: WHOM THEY HATE AND WHO HATES THEM.

Accordingly, extremists may become emotionally bound to their opponents, who are often competing extremists themselves. Because they tend to view their enemies as evil and powerful, they tend, perhaps subconsciously, to emulate them, adopting the same tactics to a certain degree. For example, anti-Communist and anti-Nazi groups often behave surprisingly like their opponents. Anti-Klan rallies often take on much of the character of the stereotype of Klan rallies themselves, including the orgy of emotion, bullying, screaming epithets, and even acts of violence. To behave the opposite of someone is to actually surrender your will to them, and “opposites” are often more like mirror images that, although they have “left” and “right” reversed, look and behave amazingly alike.

10. TENDENCY TOWARD ARGUMENT BY INTIMIDATION.

Extremists tend to frame their arguments in such a way as to intimidate others into accepting their premises and conclusions. To disagree with them is to “ally oneself with the devil,” or to give aid and comfort to the enemy. They use a lot of moralizing and pontificating, and tend to be very judgmental. This shrill, harsh rhetorical style allows them to keep their opponents and critics on the defensive, cuts off troublesome lines of argument, and allows them to define the perimeters of debate.

11. USE OF SLOGANS, BUZZWORDS, AND THOUGHT-STOPPING CLICHES.

For many extremists shortcuts in thinking and in reasoning matters out seem to be necessary in order to avoid or evade awareness of troublesome facts and compelling counter-arguments. Extremists generally behave in ways that reinforce their prejudices and alter their own consciousness in a manner that bolsters their false confidence and sense of self-righteousness.

12. ASSUMPTION OF MORAL OR OTHER SUPERIORITY OVER OTHERS.

Most obvious would be claims of general racial or ethnic superiority–a master race, for example. Less obvious are claims of ennoblement because of alleged victimhood, a special relationship with God, membership in a special “elite” or “class,” and a kind of aloof “highminded” snobbishness that accrues because of the weightiness of their preoccupations, their altruism, and their willingness to sacrifice themselves (and others) to their cause. After all, who can bear to deal with common people when one is trying to save the world! Extremists can show great indignation when one is “insensitive” enough to challenge these claims.

13. DOOMSDAY THINKING.

Extremists often predict dire or catastrophic consequences from a situation or from failure to follow a specific course, and they tend to exhibit a kind of “crisis-mindedness.” It can be a Communist takeover, a Nazi revival, nuclear war, earthquakes, floods, or the wrath of God. Whatever it is, it’s just around the corner unless we follow their program and listen to the special insight and wisdom, to which only the truly enlightened have access. For extremists, any setback or defeat is the “beginning of the end!”

14. BELIEF THAT IT’S OKAY TO DO BAD THINGS IN THE SERVICE OF A “GOOD” CAUSE.

Extremists may deliberately lie, distort, misquote, slander, defame, or libel their opponents and/or critics, engage in censorship or repression , or undertake violence in “special cases.” This is done with little or no remorse as long as it’s in the service of defeating the Communists or Fascists or whomever. Defeating an “enemy” becomes an all-encompassing goal to which other values are subordinate. With extremists, the end justifies the means.

15. EMPHASIS ON EMOTIONAL RESPONSES AND, CORRESPONDINGLY, LESS IMPORTANCE ATTACHED TO REASONING AND LOGICAL ANALYSIS.

Extremists have an unspoken reverence for propaganda, which they may call “education” or “consciousness-raising.” Symbolism plays an exaggerated role in their thinking, and they tend to think imprecisely and metamorphically. Harold D. Lasswell, in his book, *Psychopathology and Politics*, says, “The essential mark of the agitator is the high value he places on the emotional response of the public.” Effective extremists tend to be effective propagandists. Propaganda differs from education in that the former teaches one what to think, and the latter teaches one how to think.

16. HYPERSENSITIVITY AND VIGILANCE.

Extremists perceive hostile innuendo in even casual comments; imagine rejection and antagonism concealed in honest disagreement and dissent; see “latent” subversion, anti-semitism, perversion, racism, disloyalty, and so on in innocent gestures and ambiguous behaviors. Although few extremists are clinically paranoid, many of them adopt a paranoid style with its attendant hostility and distrust.

17. USE OF SUPERNATURAL RATIONALE FOR BELIEFS AND ACTIONS.

Some extremists, particularly those involved in “cults” or extreme religious movements, such as fundamentalist Christians, militant Zionist extremists, and members of mystical and metaphysical organizations, claim some kind of supernatural rationale for their beliefs and actions, and that their movement or cause is ordained by God. In this case, stark extremism may become reframed in a “religious” context, which can have a legitimizing effect for some people. It’s surprising how many people are reluctant to challenge religiously motivated extremism because it represents “religious belief” or because of the sacred-cow status of some religions in our culture.

18. PROBLEMS TOLERATING AMBIGUITY AND UNCERTAINTY.

Indeed, the ideologies and belief systems to which extremists tend to attach themselves often represent grasping for certainty in an uncertain world, or an attempt to achieve absolute security in an environment that is naturally unpredictable or perhaps populated by people with interests opposed to their own. Extremists exhibit a kind of risk-aversiveness that compels them to engage in controlling and manipulative behavior, both on a personal level and in a political context, to protect themselves from the unforeseen and unknown. The more laws or “rules” there are that regulate the behavior of others–particular their “enemies”–the more secure extremists feel.

19. INCLINATION TOWARD “GROUPTHINK.”

Extremists, their organizations , and their subcultures are prone to a kind of inward-looking group cohesiveness that leads to what Irving Janis discussed in his excellent book Victims of Groupthink. “Groupthink” involves a tendency to conform to group norms and to preserve solidarity and concurrence at the expense of distorting members’ observations of facts, conflicting evidence, and disquieting observations that would call into question the shared assumptions and beliefs of the group.

Right-wingers (or left-wingers), for example, talk only with one another, read material that reflects their own views, and can be almost phobic about the “propaganda” of the “other side.” The result is a deterioration of reality-testing, rationality, and moral judgment. With groupthink, shared illusions of righteousness, superior morality, persecution, and so on remain intact, and those who challenge them are viewed with skepticism and hostility.

20. TENDENCY TO PERSONALIZE HOSTILITY.

Extremists often wish for the personal bad fortune of their “enemies,” and celebrate when it occurs. When a critic or an adversary dies or has a serious illness, a bad accident, or personal legal problems, extremists often rejoice and chortle about how they “deserved” it. I recall seeing right-wing extremists celebrate the assassination of Martin Luther King and leftists agonizing because George Wallace survived an assassination attempt. In each instance their hatred was not only directed against ideas, but also against individual human beings.

21. EXTREMISTS OFTEN FEEL THAT THE SYSTEM IS NO GOOD UNLESS THEY WIN.

For example, if they lose an election, then it was “rigged.” If public opinion turns against them, it was because of “brainwashing.” If their followers become disillusioned, it’s because of “sabotage.” The test of the rightness or wrongness of the system is how it impacts upon them…

Fascist America II: The Last Turnoff

Writing about fascism for an American audience is always a fraught business. Invariably, a third of the readers will dismiss the topic (and your faithful blogger’s basic sanity) out of hand. Either they’ve got their own definition of fascism and whatever’s going on doesn’t seem to fit it; or else they’re firm believers in a variant of Godwin’s Law, which says (with some justification) that anyone who invokes the F-word is a de facto alarmist of questionable credibility. I get letters, most of which say something to the effect of, “Calm down. You’re overreacting. We’re nowhere near there yet.”

Another third will pepper me with missives that are every bit as dismissive — for exactly the opposite reason. To them, anyone who’s been paying the barest amount of attention should realize that America has been a fascist state since (choose one): 1) 9/11; 2) Reagan; 3) McCarthy; 4) The Civil War; 5) July 4, 1776. For them, my careful analysis and worried warnings are dangerously naive — clear evidence that I’m simply not seeing the full horror of America as it truly is, and always has been, at least since (insert date here).

Given this general crankiness, I probably wouldn’t bother with the subject at all — except for that final third who keep me going. From them, I’ve gotten a blizzard of anecdotes, questions, meditations, ideas, suggestions, manifestos, and love letters (including lots of link love). The piece sparked a lot of conversation all across Left Blogistan about what fascism is and what it ain’t and what we need to be watching for. And that kind of thoughtful discussion is exactly what I hoped for. I wanted people to start paying attention.

In the previous post, I pointed out that the most insidious part of fascism is that by the time it’s finally obvious to absolutely everyone that these people are dangerously out of control, it’s too late to do anything about it. Early warnings are even more valuable here than they are in most domains. And since futurists are — more than anything — in the business of early warnings, it falls to me to step up here and point out that according to at least a few of the more reputable atlases in the glove box, this looks a lot like the last turn into the parking lot of downtown Fascist Hell.

The good news is: we’re not yet parked and locked, let alone committed to entering the building (which is good, because the doors appear to be all one way, just like in the Hotel California). We’ve still got a few minutes left to change our minds, back out of this, and go spend our future somewhere else. But we are now actively in the process of choosing, whether we’re aware of it or not. There are things happening now that are setting us on a course that may prove impossible to change.

How do we turn back? A few basic principles:

First: The teabaggers must not win this one.

Back in elementary school, most of us learned that when a bully learns that intimidation and threats work, he’ll will keep doing more of it. In fact, the longer he goes without comeuppance, the bolder and badder he becomes, and the harder it is to make him stop. Every success teaches him something new about how to use terror for maximum effect, and tempts him to push the envelope and see what else he can get away with. Do nothing, and he’ll soon take over the whole playground.

And it happens like this for bullies in groups, too. Living in a fascist regime is just like living in a town dominated by the Mob, a street gang, the KKK, or a corrupt sheriff. It only takes a small handful of thugs to terrorize people into giving up their civil rights, abandoning democracy, and doing what they’re told, just so they can keep their jobs, windows, and families intact. The main imperative in life becomes staying off the goons’ radar. All the enforcers need to do is make a horrific example out of one or two troublemakers every now and then — and the resulting fear will keep everybody else quietly in line.

Conservatives have tried to subdue other Americans this way for centuries, so there’s nothing new going on here. And this is the way they’ve always done it: they used race (and yes, the birthers and anti-health care rioters are, at root, all about race) and economic calamity to whip up a posse of terrified, well-armed vigilantes, and then turned them loose on society to “enforce order.” Given their colossal investment in organizing and indoctinating the teabaggers, we’d be stupid to believe that this is all going to go away when Congress returns to D.C. in September. Having had a taste of power and publicity, these newly-empowered mobs are very likely to stick around town and see what else they can do to keep the muck stirred up.

Our choice now is a stark one: knock them back while they’re still new, small, and not yet entrenched; or deal with them later, when they’ve got some real power to fight back with, and the cost to all of us will be so much higher.

Second: Think nationally, fight locally.

The conservatives are running this effort as a national campaign — but that’s not where the real fight is. The terror that fuels fascism is always intensely, intimately local in scale. Fascist goon squads always recruit from the neighborhood — they’re built on people you know. Since that’s where they start, that’s where they have to be stopped.

This is why all the best tactics involve community-level action. The high-level fight in Congress and the media is already underway, and the Democratic leadership is fighting it with unusual elan. But anybody who sits this one out because they assume that the folks in D.C. have it all handled for them shouldn’t be surprised when they start getting “special treatment” from longtime neighbors, or discover that they can’t park their car downtown any more without having it vandalized. That’s just the next baby step up from where we are now; and in some places, it’s already started to happen. Winning this means getting out there and defending our community’s standards and boundaries now, while they’re still there to be defended.

Third: Brush up on our non-violent resistance — but leave the heavy lifting and rough enforcement to the cops.

It’s true that the only way to stop a bully is to stand up to them. But there are ways to stand up to them that don’t involve getting down to the eye-for-an-eye level.

Back home, we had a saying: Never mudwrestle a pig. You will lose, and the pig enjoys it. If we meet thuggery with thuggery, we will lose, because they’re just plain better at it. And make no mistake: they will enjoy it. Right now, the right wing is looking — hard — to make the case that they’re the innocent victim, and the left instigated this whole thing. This quote from religious right organizer Gary Bauer is typical of the genre:

“My fear, given the stakes and emotions on both sides, is that union thugs, ACORN activists and leftwing anarchists (who ransacked the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul during last year’s Republican National Convention) will turn violent and innocent people will get hurt. If that happens, the radical Left will bear the responsibility for demonizing free speech.”

The Nazis used this kind of victim-blaming to tremendous effect as they built up their party. We must not —

must not

— give our proto-brownshirts any basis to make the same kind of argument. (Of course, the absence of evidence will only drive them to make up fake victims; but then we get to call them out as whining liars with a big fat persecution complex, which is always a fun way to spend a news cycle or two.)

It’s about the moral high ground, people. Any choices we make must be consistent with our own values, or we betray both ourselves and the country. Standing up for health care reform is important; but before that, the country needs to see us standing up for civil discourse and the right to democratic free speech. Since we’re defending the rule of law, our best tactic is to use that law. You have a right to attend a public meeting and speak your mind in a civil, respectful manner. You do not have a right to be disruptive, or deprive other people of their right to be heard. And most jurisdictions have laws about disturbing the peace and creating a public nuisance — laws, let’s not forget, that the Bush regime didn’t hesitate to stretch until the elastic gave out against people who merely showed up at meetings with the wrong bumper stickers or T-shirts.

Since we’re not Bush goons, we can’t go around arresting people who haven’t yet broken any laws. But when people — from either side — cross that line, it’s time for the cops and prosecutors to make the point for us: bullying people in a public meeting (or anywhere else) is illegal, and will not be tolerated in this country.

Fourth: We need to make absolutely sure that the media get the story right.

The teabaggers would run out of power with the flick of a switch if the media would just turn off their cameras. But the cold reality is that this kind of drama is a real ratings-booster. It would be like telling lions to lay off that dead elephant carcass. Left alone, the media (local news in particular) will turn these people into cultural heroes. They couldn’t turn their backs on this if the republic depended on it.

Since we can’t beat ‘em, we’ll have to join ‘em. The best cure for bad speech is always more speech. This means bringing cameras and documenting everything, getting it up on YouTube, and blogging it. It also means coordinating rapid-response letter-writing to the local paper, and keeping down-home reporters well-fed every single day with some new theme that reinforces the idea of concerned non-partisan citizens trying to keep control over their democratic discourse in the face of organized thugs. Since the media is watching, let’s make sure they see it all.

Fifth: Support legislators who don’t show fear.

The Democratic Party seems to be playing this just right (so far). The leadership has made it known that these noisy, scary people don’t represent the 73% of Americans who support health care reform. The GOP is running the risk of being marginalized as not only the Party of No, but the Party of Moonbat Crazy.

If you’ve never attended a public meeting in your life, August 2009 is the month you need to start. Your congressperson’s website probably lists a schedule, or at least a number you can call to inquire. But that’s just a first step. Do more. Write. Call. Find out where your local congressional office is, and just drop by when you’re in the neighborhood. Tell the staff how you feel — about health care reform, about the teabaggers, about your legislator’s brave stance in the face of this. If they’re showing stress, encourage them to stand firm. A constituent in the office counts for thousands writing e-mails, so an in-person visit is 15 minutes incredibly well-spent.

One visit or call is good. More is better. Put it in your schedule to contact your representatives at least once a week for the duration, and make sure they’re not buckling under the pressure.

Sixth: Shut down the hate talkers.

In most parts of the country, the teabaggers are coming straight out of right-wing talk radio audiences. For hours every day, they’re mainlining raw emotion and toxic misinformation. They’re going put your kids before “death panels!” They’re going to kill your granny! You’re going to have to call the White House to get a bone set! You’ll be a Real American Hero if you get out there and join the “resistance!” Cutting off this endless torrent of lies, fear-mongering, and validation will go a long way toward powering down the whole movement. Conversely, what happens when these kinds of radio instigators are left to spin it all the way out to the end can be summed up in two words: Radio Rwanda.

The basic recipe: Record their shows. Take notes of anything they say that is intimidating, threatening, or aimed at inciting violence against a named target. And while you’re at it, note every single advertiser they have.

Then: write a polite letter the CEOs of the sponsoring companies. Throw them some choice quotes from these shows, and ask them if this is the kind of thing they want their product associated with. (Point out that if their own employees said things like this at work, they’d be fired on the spot.) Often, the CEO has no clue that any of this is happening, and will pull the ads as soon as she finds out what’s being done in her name. This has worked extremely well — and quickly — at both the local and national level.

Finally: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Even if we succeed this time, let’s not kid ourselves that this is over. The conservatives are investing a lot of money and effort to build a mass movement that’s explicitly aimed at destroying a democratic government — and if we learned anything from the Clinton years, it’s that they’re not going to let up for a second as long as the Democrats are in control.

This is our new reality — and it comes straight out of Hitler’s playbook (check out chapter six of Mein Kampf). Their intention is to keep the outrage junkies high by giving them a never-ending supply of new made-up reasons to act out. When the birth certificate fracas cools, they’ll be standing by with “death panels.” When that one runs its course, there will be something else — over and over, every few weeks for as long as the Dems rule.

Which means that even if we win this round, we can’t stand down. We’re going to be pushing back against these bullies, over and over, for the next three to seven years.

There are only two outcomes here. Either we get very good at spotting and stopping these attempts at a brownshirt takeover the minute they crop up; or they’re going to get very good at public intimidation, and keep ratcheting it up further toward outright violence and goon rule. That’s how it’s going to be for the rest of this administration. The sooner we resign ourselves to the zero-sum nature of this fight, the sooner we can get on with getting good at it.

According to Robert Altemeyer, there are three characteristics of right wing authoritarians:

1. Authoritarian submission – a high degree of submission to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.

2. Authoritarian aggression – a general aggressiveness, directed against various persons, that is perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities.

3. Conventionalism – a high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.

These definitions are found on page 7 of The Authoritarian Specter, by Bob Altemeyer, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996.

Ktesibios uses these definitions without attribution but he then goes on to show how these characteristics fit conspiracy theorists very well. If you read the post, the acronym “PCT” stands for Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist.

Searching for more information on the link between right wing authoritarianism and conspiracy theory, I found a very interesting portal that has all kinds of information about conspiracy theories at the website for Political Research Associates, the Public Eye. At this site, there is information about Lyndon LaRouche, Webster Tarpley, Freemasonry, Waco, the Federal Reserve, and the John Birch Society.

Why am I interested in those who believe in conspiracy theories? Because if you listen to the followers of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and the other talking heads of right-wing radio, you will find plenty of believers in conspiracy theories. I have a feeling that the vast majority of the followers of Sarah Palin are avid conspiracy theorists also but I’ll have to do more research on that to verify my suspicions.

These are the people who are vigorously attacking President Obama’s plans to bring about a fairer, more just America and that concerns me greatly. I wrote an e-mail to my good friend’s sister, shortly after the election, in response to her wish that the followers of Sarah Palin would just go away. In that e-mail, I told her that they weren’t going to go hide under their rocks – that they would be back, stronger than ever. I was shocked to receive an e-mail from her some weeks ago that could be politely described as a vicious verbal assault against me. I was stunned to learn that she vigorously defended the John Birch Society and the other crackpot organizations that I cannot abide. I have since constructed a filter in my e-mail program that deletes her tirades so that I don’t have to see them in my inbox.

The world that I have introduced you to in this post is where these people live. Learn about them – they are dangerous and threaten the foundations of this country.

A friend recently sent me the link to this video on YouTube. I found it most fascinating to watch. I’m very much in the camp of those who believe that the decision to carry a baby to term or not is an intensely personal decision that should not be interfered with by those who claim to know better than the woman making the decision. Watch this video and see if you aren’t taken by surprise by the responses of the protesters:

The people interviewed in this video demonstrate the classic traits of the authoritarian personality. There is quite a bit of information available about this personality trait and Bob Altemeyer is recognized as an authority on the subject. The link in my sidebar entitled Robert Altemeyer provides the on-line text of his book, The Authoritarians.

In a series of posts in 2006, Paul Rosenberg wrote about this personality type. I am posting part 3 here and encourage the reader to go to Paul’s blog and read the other parts of the series. In addition, Sara Robinson has written an excellent series of posts on the subject over on David Neiwert’s blog, Orcinus. Sara’s posts are in the left sidebar and start with the series entitled “Cracks in the Wall” and continue with the series entitled “Tunnels and Bridges.” In her first post, Sara references Doug Muder’s essay “Red Family, Blue Family“, which is a fascinating explication of the idea of the opposing concepts of the Inherited Obligation Family and the Negotiated Commitment Family. If you want to start to understand how the Bush administration got away with its crimes, these sources will get you started. Here is Paul Rosenberg’s entry on Right Wing Authoritarianism:

Rightwing Authoritarianism and Conservative Identity Politics

by Paul Rosenberg, Wed Mar 01, 2006 at 10:44:06 AM EST

Rightwing authoritarianism (RWA) is one of two attitudinal constructs (along with social dominance orientation–SDO) that combine to account for a majority of group prejudice, which in turn is a major aspect of group identity politics. Both also correlate significantly with political conservatism. RWA is defined as the convergence of three attitudinal clusters:

* Authoritarian submission: A high degree of sub-
mission to the authorities who are perceived to be established and
legitimate in the society in which one lives.

* Authoritarian aggression: A general aggressiveness,
directed against various persons, that is perceived to be sanctioned by
established authorities.

* Conventionalism: A high degree of adherence to the
social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its
established authorities.

As might be guessed, RWA is associated with a high degree of hostility toward outgroups, a key characteristic that correlates with findings discussed in the previous post in this series, indicating that hard core conservatism correlates with a strong resistance to power-sharing with various outgroups–blacks, Jews, Catholics, unions and women.

The construct was developed empirically by Canadian researcher Robert Altemeyer, who started by examining the more elaborate, Freudian-based construct presented in The Authoritarian Personality, which contained nine factors. The three factors Altemeyer identified were among the original nine factors, but he refined the questions defining the traits over time, developing a scale over time with stronger inter-item correlation. His findings are based primarily on research using questionnaires administered to his students, and secondarily to parents, but they have been administered to others as well, including members of a large number of American state legislatures. His uses standard correlation analysis, as well as comparisons and analysis focusing on those who score in the upper 25%, termed “High RWAs” or simply “Highs.”

Altemeyer explains that “right-wing’” means a “psychological sense of submitting to perceived authorities in one’s life,” and is not identified with a specific political ideology. In the Soviet Union, “right-wing” meant a sense of submitting to communist authorities, and Altemeyer presented research showing this was so. This is what his RWA (right-wing authoritarianism) scale measured. It is obviously related to the perpetuation of hierarchy, and the use of force to impose “order.”

Altemeyer’s third book, The Authoritarian Specter reports and discusses Altemeyer’s extensive findings in considerable detail. He makes it quite clear that RWA explains statistical group tendencies, not individual behavior, and that environmental factors–such as being in a frightening emergency situation, like the United States just after 9-11–are far more powerful than attitude in predicting behavior.

Thus, he’s in no way trying to prejudge, stereotype and dismiss those who may be more conservative, or to praise those who are more liberal. Altemeyer himself scores about average on the RWA scale.

A Quick And Dirty Guide To RWA

Nonetheless, the group portrait of RWA is distinctly disturbing, as can be seen from the list of tendencies that Altemeyer compiled and listed at the end of The Authoritarian Specter as a sort of compressed summary. I’ve listed most of them in the tables that follow here, which provide some thematic coherence for them. The first is the one that goes most directly to the issue at hand–conservative identity politics, which is built around the “good us”/”demonized them” dynamic.

Table 1: Hostility & Fear Toward Outgroups

RWA’s are more likely to:

* Weaken constitutional guarantees of liberty, such as the Bill of Rights.

* Punish severely “common” criminals in a role-playing situation.

* Admit they get personal pleasure from punishing such people.

* But go easy on authorities who commit crimes and people who attack
minorities.

* Be prejudiced against many racial, ethnic, nationalistic, and linguistic
minorities.

* Be hostile toward homosexuals.

* Support “gay-bashing.”

* Be hostile toward feminists.

* Volunteer to help the government persecute almost anyone.

* Be mean-spirited toward those who have made mistakes and suffered.

* Be fearful of a dangerous world.

These items show broad and robust evidence of hostility toward designated outgroups. There’s also evidence of contempt and inability and unwillingness to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Systematically misunderstanding others is second nature with this sort of outlook, and is clearly related to the dynamics of an identity politics defined in opposition to groups of demonized others. The actual interior experience of others is something that such a mindset simply cannot dare to seriously consider. It is simply presumed to be “evil.”

On the flip side are the tendencies toward their group identity cohesion.

Table 2: Not-So-Healthy Ingroup Cohesion

RWA’s are more likely to:

* Strongly believe in group cohesiveness and “loyalty.”

* Insist on traditional sex roles.

* Use religion to erase guilt over their acts and to maintain their self-
righteousness.

* Be “fundamentalists” and the most prejudiced members of whatever
religion they belong to.

* Accept unfair and illegal abuses of power by government authorities.

* Trust leaders (such as Richard Nixon) who are untrustworthy.

The items in this table can be fairly be summarized as manifestations of tribalism: group cohesiveness and “loyalty” are core values, religion serves the purpose of tribal unity and self-justification, sex roles keep people in their place, and leaders are to be trusted and obeyed, no matter what. Tribalism and cultism are clearly closely related, as will be discussed more fully in a future post. This is a strong indication that the cultism surrounding Bush is indeed consistent with conservatism, rather than a departure from it, as Greenwald assumed in his post that sparked this series in the first place. Here I am showing that it is consistent with attitudinal underpinnings. But those attitudes clearly translate into overt ideology and policies positions as well.

Related to the fragile and unsupportable cartoon picture of the world shown in Table 1 (and less directly in Table 2) is a wide range of flawed reasoning as well.

Table 3: Faulty reasoning

RWA’s are more likely to:

* Make many incorrect inferences from evidence.

* Hold contradictory ideas leading them to “speak out of both
sides of their mouths.”

* Uncritically accept that many problems are “our most serious problem.”

* Uncritically accept insufficient evidence that supports their beliefs.

* Uncritically trust people who tell them what they want to hear.

* Use many double standards in their thinking and judgements.

One logical flaw which reflects both the misunderstanding of others and themselves, is the RWA’s elevated tendency to commit what’s called the “Fundamental Attribution Error” (FAE): over-explaining others’ actions in terms of personalities and under-explaining them in terms of situational factors. This what lies behind uncritically trusting people who tell them what they want to hear–they believe what the person is saying is a true expression of how they feel, and ignore the contextual evidence that they are simply pandering. This also helps to explain why they trust unscrupulous leaders, such as Nixon and Bush.

As for self-knowledge, although RWAs have a number of character flaws consistent with group identity politics generally and religious fundamentalism [already mentioned] specifically–see Table 4–they’re remarkably blind to their own failings–see Table 5.

Table 4: Profound Character Flaws

RWA’s are more likely to:

* Be dogmatic.

* Be zealots.

* Be hypocrites.

* Be bullies when they have power over others.

* Help cause and inflame intergroup conflict.

* Seek dominance over others by being competitive and destructive in
situations requiring cooperation.

Table 5: Blindness To Own Failings

RWA’s are more likely to:

* Believe they have no personal failings.

* Avoid learning about their personal failings.

* Be highly self-righteous.

* Use religion to erase guilt over their acts and to maintain their self-
righteousness.

The cumulative picture summarized in these five tables is clearly that of people who have a multifacted set of tendencies that work together to foster a conformist group identity that is maintained in part by demonizing others and expresses itself in a propensity or at least a tolerance for violence.

Last, we turn to the more specifically political tendencies, some of which have been mentioned before, but are included here for the sake of completeness.

Table 6: RWA’s Political Tendencies

RWA’s are more likely to:

* Weaken constitutional guarantees of liberty, such as the Bill of Rights.

* Accept unfair and illegal abuses of power by government authorities.

* Trust leaders (such as Richard Nixon) who are untrustworthy.

* Sometimes join left-wing movements, where their hostility distinguishes them.

* But much more typically endorse right-wing political parties.

* Be conservative/Reform party (Canada) or Republican Party (United
States) lawmakers who:

1. Have a conservative economic philosophy

2. Believe in social dominance

3. Are ethnocentric

4. Are highly nationalistic

5. Oppose abortion

6. Support capital punishment

7. Oppose gun-control legislation

8. Say they value freedom but actually want to undermine the Bill of
Rights

9. Do not value equality very highly and oppose measures to increase it

10. Are not likely to rise in the Democratic party, but do so among
Republicans

Three Broad Findings To Consider

I want to conclude this analysis by stressing three broad findings in addition to what’s gone before.

First, concerning RWA and fear: Among the most significant of Altemeyer’s findings–both implicit and explicit in what we’ve seen above–was the fearful nature of the RWA worldview, “High RWAs stand about ten steps closer to the panic button than the rest of the population,” he concluded, “They see the world as a more dangerous place than most others do, with civilization on the verge of collapse and the world of Mad Max looming just beyond.” This fearfulness is a good explanation for many of the tendencies listed above.

Second, concerning RWA and religion: The authoritarian relationship to religion is particularly troubling, as several different sorts of flaws tend to work together to blind authoritarians from seeing what they are doing. Perhaps most striking is the greater likelihood to compartmentalize their thinking, and not notice contradictions between compartmentalized beliefs. In a 1985 experiment, students were asked what they thought about two passages from the Gospels: “Do not judge, that you may not be judged. For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged.” (Matthew 7:1), and “Let he who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.” (John 8:2-11).

Altemeyer reports:

“Twenty Christian Highs said we should take the teachings literally. Twenty-seven other Christian Highs said we should judge and punish others, but none of them explained how they reconciled this view with Jesus’ teachings. Apparently, they ‘believed’ both (contradictory) things. But the kicker came when I looked at various measures of authoritarian aggression I had gathered from these students. No matter what they said they believed, both these groups of Highs were quick with the stones on the Attitudes toward Homosexuals Scale, the ethnocentrism Scale, and Posse-Homosexuals (Enemies of Freedom, pp. 222-224).”

Such compartmentalization also reflects problems with self-knowledge, already noted. Of course, it’s relatively easy for one religious group to see such flaws in another group. The really hard thing is to see it in yourself or in your group. It’s much, much easier for fundmentalists in different religions to inflame their followers against each other–and to put pressure on their more moderate co-religionists to join them. Naturally, this feeds into a number of different tendencies listed above.

Third, concerning RWA and politics: Altemeyer found that RWA becomes increasingly significant the more involved one is politically. Surprisingly, Altemeyer found that RWA only correlated modestly with party identification in Canada and America. It was always higher with the more conservative party (a 3-way comparison in most Canadian cases), but the differences were relatively modest. However, when he looked at how people perceived their elected representatives, the degrees of difference increased significantly. Then, when he looked at the representatives themselves, he discovered that they differed even more than their constituents thought they did.

In addition to Canada, he examined a large number of state legislatures in the United States. While a there were a few Democrats who scored very high on the RWA scale, the Republican Party as a whole scored dramatically higher on the scale, and showed far less variation than the Democrats did. Republicans in state government in every part of the country scored much closer to one another than did Democrats. In addition, the spectrum of American politics was higher on the RWA scale than the Canadian spectrum. That’s not to say there was no overlap, but the difference was striking, nonetheless.

These findings strongly suggest that RWA reflects something very fundamental about American politics, which cannot simply be overcome by wishing it away. It must be faced head-on and dealt with at a very fundamental level. Conservatives and the GOP are more unified, because they see the world more similarly–albeit not more accurately. It seems only logical to assume that this both reflects and reinforces the basic fact that their foundation is a form of identity politics, an expression of a shared identity, as opposed to the Democratic Party, which is openly and avowedly a coalition.

What About Leftwing Authoritarianism?

Altemeyer went looking for it. He didn’t find it. He didn’t find anyone who scored over 50% on the LWA scale he developed, which was a direct reflection of the RWA scale. In contrast, he found numerous people scoring close to 100% on the RWA scale. He concluded that LWAs are “as rare as hen’s teeth.” He did, of course, find authoritarianism among people on the left in the Soviet Union, as noted above. But this was due to their social conformity to the existing authorities in their society. And that’s what RWA is.

What’s Next: SDO

The next installment in this series concerns another attitudinal construct, known as social dominance orientation (SDO). As we shall see, it is even more directly associated with group identity.

============== ===

The underlying material in this diary comes from Robert Altemeyer’s third and most comprehensive book, The Authoritarian Specter.