Authoritarianism on the Rise

[pbrower2a]

(08-05-2020, 04:59 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I have long thought authoritarianism is tied to the Agricultural Age approach of kings.  Leaders  like Hitler and Stalin took the newer industrialism, but left the culture more inclined to stick with kings by another name.  There is an argument between autocracy and democracy.  The argument between Republicans and Democrats is just a smaller difference within a democracy.  Both the Republicans and Democrats ought to reject the Hitlers and Stalins of the world.

I have begun to suspect that the recent popularity of authoritarianism is a 3T trait.  At least in America, a crisis where it is recognized that Trump is not the way to go might purge authoritarianism.  I am thus not so sure that authoritarianism is on the rise as the thread name suggests.  Ask me again after the election and it's aftermath.

The agricultural age looks simpler even if the hardships were more severe. It is easy to get nostalgic for rural life if one toils in a sweatshop factory under brutal management that exploits economic uncertainty at every turn and as a result one misses the certainties of the village. One may remember that one experienced less crowding at work and in the slum, that epidemics and conflagrations were rarer, and that if one got injured or ill one at lest had family more certain to give one shelter and aid. One faces the harshest demands of rugged individualism in an early-industrial era without having much room for expressing individuality. 

Nasty tyrants like Stalin, Mao, and Saddam Hussein were attempting to industrialize peasant societies, and they were able to make people more compliant by giving them rudimentary education. With such a rudimentary education they would be able to follow written instructions for industrial processes, do simple calculations, heed warning signs, and read newspapers and books that were essentially propaganda without seeing anything wrong with the content. (The sun rises in the east, thank you Stalin!). These tyrants took on many of the attributes of a god without claiming supernatural powers (contrast the Caesars and Pharaohs) Hitler sought to reduce the level of learning... not surprising that meant that the Jews had to be driven out because Judaism relies heavily upon critical thought incompatible with authoritarian rule. Thus the Frankfurt School, with a largely-Jewish faculty, had to relocate elsewhere, really scattering to (among other places) the USA.   

If Stalin, Mao, and Saddam were trying to 'liberate' peasants from the land, Hitler had a back-to-the-land movement as a Nazi ideal. That is the essence of Lebensraum in which the Germans would get prosperous farms analogous to homesteads on the American frontier.  But these homesteads already had farmers -- Poles, Belorussians, and Ukrainians who would have to be exterminated or enslaved after being dispossessed. German soldiers would ultimately be paid in homesteads or perhaps small businesses that recently had Jewish owners. 

It is telling that Hitler's abject puppets in the Vichy Regime of slightly-sovereign France had its own back-to-the-land movement on the ground that rural life was somehow more genuine than industrial capitalism and educated (thus corrupt often from Jewish influence) habits.  I often mock the racist Deep South in America in the Jim Crow era, but it was resolutely agrarian... the least urban, least industrial, and the least educated part of America. To be sure even the most mind-numbing of totalitarian regimes had some intellectual support, and even the American South had its intellectual dabblers as exponents. The "Great State of Mississippi" even had the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a secret police that enforced compliance with segregationist practice. Apartheid in South Africa had its strongest backing among white farmers.