Discussing authoritarianism has been extremely popular in the age of Trump. Tons of books have come out on it, but for me most miss the mark because they're focused on finding historic parallels but rarely do these parallels actually explain the mechanisms involved mentally.

In an American context, we have a tendency to view authoritarianism through the prism of the use and application of any power.

This doesn't actually make any sense however. This is why you see Republicans often make parallels about single payer and Hitler's healthcare programs.

The problem with Hitler wasn't his healthcare program or agricultural administration.

It was his focus on ethnic cleansing, genocide, and hyper martial imperialism.

This is why most American writings on authoritarianism are garbage, the obsession over the use of power COMBINED with focusing purely on the leaders of authoritariansm historically leaves a blind spot to your 99% lunch pail authoritarians.

Without them, Hitler has no power.

The two most insightful authors on authoritarianism to men are Eco and Bob Altemayer.

Bob is a Canadian professor who's been studying this for decades and has earned the highest possible honors in social science doing it.

This magnum opus "The Authoritarians" is a must read.

Bob's works focus on the individual psychology of authoritarians and has used a test for decades to help identify people with the authoritarian mindset. In fact, you can take his authoritarian test if you want right now: https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RWAS/ 

This test has had some wild results and is disturbingly accurate at predicting a variety of things. The test is not politically neutral, but it is politically consistent in it's findings

Bob has replicated his own studies (which anyone in academia knows is rare) to remain valid.

One replicated study is a model UN between people with high, low, and moderate "RWA" or "Right Wing Authoritarianism" scores.

The results are terrifying, while middle and low RWA scores perform relatively well at dealing with crisis and contention, high RWA groups end more often than not in total worldwide destruction and or world war.

In one such replicated test he did, full on world war broke out BEFORE THE FIRST UN VOTE.

Bob uses the term 'Right wing authoritarianism' not as a dig on conservatives, but because the specific authoritarian mindset is obsessed with tradition and enforcement of strict social norms.

The most stunning find to me personally in his work was that while the base of authoritarianism holds an extremely similar mindset, the leaders themselves are just a tad bit more likely to have a higher RWA test score than their RWA supporters.

So what you have are leaders who appeal to a RWAs base that is focused highly on tradition, strict social legal enforcement, and severe/violent enforcement of societal norms being run by people who probably don't care that much themselves on a personal level.

So for example, you could have a New York real estate developer who's organized abortions and fucked a bunch of porn stars and who's clearly never spent an hour in church worshiping becoming an icon to RWAs who are vehemently religious.

What's more, RWAs will often profess deep religious beliefs but they're often far less likely to be able to answer questions about their own religion correctly compared to non-RWA peers when surveyed.

This seems like a hippocracy, but it's not, because it's not about religion.

The authoritarian will never admit it, but their primary motivation is the strict need for control over social norms that must come from a place of authority, and as a result the two biggest pillars to them are political leaders and the certainty of religious beliefs.

They're not 'religious' because of some deep sense of piety or service they feel, they're religious and view themselves as religious because it's effectively pushing out absolute moral authority and they crave the idea of absolute moral authority.

They seek permission to strictly enforce societal norms violently from a position of power without consequence and the enforcement of those norms are not the means, but rather the ends. The enforcement is not in service to getting to their ideal landscape, it IS their utopia.

An author who's name I've forgotten discussed this when interviewing nazis and italian fascists who survived. He stumbled on this fact back in the 50s. He noted how many he interviewed thought of the rise as the greatest time of their life and not the 'work' to get somewhere else

I'm writing this because there's a huge belief people have that is incorrect, and my Katrina thread yesterday touched on it somewhat and I felt it needed expanding.

People really want to believe that everyone is the same and we all just have direct material concerns.

And I get it, who wants to think that a double digit percentage of their fellow Americans are ready to start just gunning down minorities as official policy the moment they control enough levers of power to ensure they will never be punished for it?

But the fact is there ARE people who have that mindset.

They seek three things: Permission from a person of extreme power to violently enforce racial/social norms, validation for doing so, and the ability to do so without life ending consequences for them personally.

This mindset is wildly uncritical and you can not 'logic' this mindset out of existence because it doesn't really care about the logical implications of beliefs, their god is permission to act and submission to a leader, especially one with Social Dominance Orientation.

This is what the 'cuck' obsession is all about. Much like non-RWAs project onto RWAs by trying to 'reason them' out of their beliefs, RWAs project onto non-RWAs that if they're not with them it's because their submission is coming elsewhere.

There's also a huge fallacy about authoritarians that they're always wildly aggressive.

This is often true of their leaders because their leaders tend to have a social dominance orientation, but those same leaders actually score lower than their followers on RWA tests.

The RWA is at their heart more often than not EXTREMELY strategic in the application of force. Much like I pointed out in the Katrina thread, they lie dormant most of their life but the moment they believe they have permission and cover, they absolutely will start killing people.

This is why the permission is so important, if they have permission from someone with the power to back them up they'll absolutely jump on it the first chance they get, and it's why RWAs can create momentum so fast that they're all activated within a single 24 hour period.

RWAs will monitor their speech and actions if societal norms are working against them and their organized groups lack the power and permission to do things.

This is why they hate 'political correctness' so much and why it's a driving force. It's a sign they don't have control.

The changes in the followers of the Republican party from Romney to Trump was not a reflection of shifts in attitude or belief, but rather it was demonstrative of their feelings of powerlessness and their lack of permission.

If you want to get to the heart of why so many people LOVE Trump in a way they could never love Romney despite them being 99% similar politically, it's because Romney refused to tell them that racist beliefs are okay and not shameful. Racist policy yes, but not belief

Trump did.

The high RWA personality cares far more about permission to act and to enforce than it does about actual individual policy goals.

This is why they don't give a shit about Trump calling Bush a hawk or even having beliefs that break former Republican orthodoxy.

So now the question comes "Well what do we do about this?" and the answers are complex. The most important thing is typically fighting to keep power out of the hands of people who activate RWAs wherever you can.

The RWA is at their heart submissive to power as well, so shows of force in the context of getting actual people to show up against them wherever they gather is also important as it limits their power.

They care about numbers.

Bob's book is available for free for anyone who wants it for free. The audiobook ain't half bad either, though it does cost money.

https://www.theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/

Also, Kudos to Prester Jane. She broke down this clip once in a way that I'll never forget and by the time she was done explaining the convergence of RWA narratives, it went from watching something illogical to something that made total sense:

Also, if this just all sounds weird, I'd recommend reading Eco's Ur-Fascism/Eternal Fascism first followed by Foucault's Pendulum, all of which talk about these themes but with a more compelling meta-narrative break down as opposed to this dry shit.