Authoritarianism on the Rise

[Eric the Green]

Those who glibly throw around the word "freedom," whether it now consists of not wearing a mask or going to gatherings in the middle of a pandemic, or the ability by a few to boss other people around for their own benefit in non-profit organizations, which I myself have experienced while volunteering at a fraudulent "people's radio" station, a fake "community of spirit" or a phony secret generations facebook forum, or whether it's business bosses seeking to "free" themselves from their responsibility to pay taxes and observe regulations that protect the public from their greed, or whether it's political rulers who justify tyranny with prejudice or with the promise of getting things done when the only ones who really benefit from their ironclad rule are themselves and their cronies, had better take note of this book. If we are really interested in "freedom," then we'd better rise up and depose these new right bosses wherever they are, instead of creating a culture of obedience to false authorities. We'd better notice what freedom really is, and how fragile it is if we cave in to the destruction of it.
TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY
THE SEDUCTIVE LURE OF AUTHORITARIANISM
BY ANNE APPLEBAUM ‧ RELEASE DATE: JULY 21, 2020
Equal parts memoir, reportage, and history, this sobering account of the roots and forms of today’s authoritarianism, by one of its most accomplished observers, is meant as a warning to everyone.
Known for her historically grounded commentary and such well-received histories as the Pulitzer Prize–winning Gulag (2003), Atlantic staff writer Applebaum, a reflective, deep-thinking conservative, explores the “restorative nostalgia” and “authoritarian predisposition” of the far right in the U.S. and Europe. Her motivation in writing is a fear of the possible “fall of liberal democracy.” Sadly, she writes, “given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.” Well-acquainted with many of the figures she discusses, Applebaum analyzes the forces that have caused so many of them to turn ugly, revanchist, and unreasoning. She takes her examples mostly from Europe—Hungary, Poland, Spain, and Britain in particular—but also from Trump’s America. Sometimes too discursive, sometimes overlong (as on Laura Ingraham), the book is nevertheless critically important for its muscular, oppositionist attack on the new right from within conservative ranks—and for the well-documented warning it embodies. The author’s views are especially welcome because she is a deliberate thinker and astute observer rather than just the latest pundit or politico. In the spirit of Julien Benda, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno, Applebaum seeks to understand what makes the new right “more Bolshevik than Burkean.” Needless to say, any attack that places Viktor Orbán, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump in the company of Lenin and Stalin is worthy of close attention. The author is highly instructive on what is happening in the increasingly grim realm of the far right: a hardening of bitterness and unreasoning vengefulness and a resulting shift of the spectrum that puts a growing number of conservatives like Applebaum in the center.
A knowledgeable, rational, necessarily dark take on dark realities.

[David Horn]

It's interesting that Anne Applebaum is a Republican, or was when she lived in the US. It's also interesting that she looks left to find autocrats, when all the autocrats rising now are on the right. Yes, there are autocrats that originated on the left: mostly Marxist in origin but God knows what they are today. To her credit, she sees the autocrats on the right, acknowledges them as such, and discusses them at length.

Poland is of special interest because her husband is a Polish politician. Here, she has personal knowledge of how this happens and why. That's the essence of the book, as far as I can tell. I have mine on order.

[pbrower2a]

(08-05-2020, 09:18 AM)David Horn Wrote: It's interesting that Anne Applebaum is a Republican, or was when she lived in the US.  It's also interesting that she looks left to find autocrats, when all the autocrats rising now are on the right.  Yes, there are autocrats that originated on the left: mostly Marxist in origin but God knows what they are today. To her credit, she sees the autocrats on the right, acknowledges them as such, and discusses them at length.  

Poland is of special interest because her husband is a Polish politician. Here, she has personal knowledge of how this happens and why.  That's the essence of the book, as far as I can tell.  I have mine on order.

Aside from Raul Castro and Nicolas Maduro, the authoritarians really are on the Right (and in view of China abandoning Marxism and North Korea becoming an absolute monarchy in all but name, I can consider neither on the Left). 

People have learned almost everywhere that Marxism-Leninism is a fraud more effective at creating a body count than at improving lives. Fascists have often incorporated Leftist memes as in National Socialism and even National Bolshevism. Adopting the methods and ruthlessness of Marxism-Leninism or Stalinism in the service of a reactionary agenda is fascism.

[Eric the Green]

She does specifically mention that her book is mostly about "the new right"

[Bob Butler 54]

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.

[David Horn]

(08-05-2020, 04:34 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: She does specifically mention that her book is mostly about "the new right"

... but reluctantly.  To her credit, she is fact driven and willing to admit error.  Nonetheless, she started as a Republican, and still sees that philosophy as superior.  We started elsewhere, but admit that the Maduros of this world just as bad or worse in some cases.  It's a rare personal characteristic on the right, but it does exist for a few.

[David Horn]

(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.

Several studies correlating personal traits to political positions has demonstrated the attraction of both groups to authoritarians.  Conservatives tend to be traditionalists and lean toward authoritarians when traditional social models are under attack, as they are today.  Liberals only lean that way when the society becomes so sclerotic that change is impossible.  Therefore, lefty authoritarians tend to assume power by overthrowing the prevailing systems and imposing a "better one", that rarely is. Rightwing authoritarians tend to seize power by corruption of the current system.  Of the two, the latter is easier and more common.  It's also true that the prevalence of authoritarian tendencies is much higher on the right.  I'll take a swing at that and say that resentment of change is vastly more common, because change is constant.

[Eric the Green]

(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.

It seems historically to be a 4T trait as well, at least until the progressive faction wins out.

In the French Revolution 4T, though, the progressive faction won and then became too authoritarian and was itself deposed. But the Revolution did have some lasting results and progressive changes that survived in the long run.

In America, there were plenty of tories that supported the King during the Revolution. In the 1850s and 1860s 4T, of course, the South supported the authority of slavery and the plantation system. By the 1930s, the turnings are more consistent across the world, as we have become a world civilization and the "clocks" are synchronizing. We saw the rise of the Nazis and fascists very prominently. And the New Deal was in some respects tending toward authoritarianism in its collectivist emphasis, or at least a much stronger government.

Now, this author speaks of the rise in authoritarianism in the USA, but also in Europe and other places. It has certainly been rising. In the USA though, and in the anglo-american saeculum cycle, the progressive side has always won out.

We are seeing a trend that I predicted using the astrocycles of increasing authoritarianism in this era. But I also predict a progressive era for the 2020s. So, stay tuned.

[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.

[pbrower2a]

U.S. Conservatives Are Uniquely Inclined Toward Right-Wing Authoritarianism Compared to Western Peers

Global Morning Consult data reveals a distinctive authoritarian bent in the American right

(adapted for purposes of discussion)

Quote:

• A scale measuring propensity toward right-wing authoritarian tendencies found right-leaning Americans scored higher than their counterparts in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
  
• 26% of the U.S. population qualified as highly right-wing authoritarian, Morning Consult research found, twice the share of the No. 2 countries, Canada and Australia.
  
• The beliefs that voter fraud decided the 2020 election, that Capitol rioters were doing more to protect than undermine the government and that masks and vaccines are not pivotal to stopping COVID-19 were similarly prevalent among right-leaning Americans and those that scored high for right-wing authoritarianism.
  

This article is part of a deep dive on the Jan. 6 riot in Washington and creeping authoritarianism in America. See all of our work here.

The Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol gave the country a striking wake-up call to the alarming rise in undemocratic behavior on the right side of the political aisle, and new global Morning Consult research underscores the prevalence of authoritarian attitudes among U.S. conservatives.

The research, which used longtime authoritarian researcher Bob Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarianism test and scale and builds on recent work he conducted with the Monmouth University Polling Institute, found that U.S. conservatives have stronger right-wing authoritarian tendencies than their right-of-center counterparts in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.[/font]

I too have grave concerns. Authoritarian politics almost never works well. Maybe even I have some ideas of how I would change things if I had the power to enact and enforce them. Maybe that would not work so well, and it certainly would not be popular. Many of my view might seem cranky... worse, they might even be cranky. 

Liberal democracy implies that practically nobody will get everything that he wants in the political system.  That has typically proved just as well for checking failure... and latent despotism. 

Quote:Altemeyer defines authoritarianism as the desire to submit to some authority, aggression that is directed against whomever the authority says should be targeted and a desire to have everybody follow the norms and social conventions that the authority says should be followed. Those characteristics were all on display in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, culminating earlier this year in the attack on the Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. 

The findings come from Morning Consult polling conducted from late April into early May in seven foreign countries, which in addition to the aforementioned trio included France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Responses were gathered among 1,000 adults in each of the seven countries, and were compared with a domestic poll of 1,001 U.S. adults conducted concurrently. (See more about how we conducted the study and produced our findings here.)

 (I'm not going to show the international comparisons. I will say that Americans on the whole are more authoritarian, especially on the Right, than are their European, Canadian, and Australian counterparts.    

Quote:The test found a number of other striking results: The 39-point gap in right-wing authoritarian scores between America’s left and right was more pronounced than it was in any of the other countries included, though the test also revealed a 30-point gap between the right and left in Canada and 28-point differences between the two groups in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morning Consult also used the Altemeyer scale to categorize segments of the surveyed populations in each country as scoring high or low on the right-wing authoritarianism scale. Adults in each country who scored in the top 15th percentile among all respondents in all countries were defined as “high RWA,” while respondents who scored in the bottom 15th percentile were defined as “low RWA.”

A comparison across the eight countries polled showed that the share of the U.S. population that scored as “high RWA” was twice the size of the next largest population: 26 percent of U.S. respondents met that designation, compared with 13 percent of Canadians and Australians and 10 percent of those in the United Kingdom.

Using these “high RWA” and “low RWA” designations, Morning Consult was able to parse how respondents on either side of America’s right-wing authoritarian divide view the events of Jan. 6, the conduct of the country’s former president and other political flashpoints — and how those views compared with those of self-identified liberals and conservatives. There was significant overlap between respondents on the left and those who scored low on RWA, and among the right and those who scored high on RWA, as indicated by a demographic profile.

[pbrower2a]

So how does right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)manifest itself here in the Good Old U S of A? Graph:




Well, as we can see, men are more likely than women to be right-wing authoritarians, but that matters less than:

1. Age. People over 45 are more likely to be right-wing authoritarians (RWA's). There are plenty of reasons for that. People over 45 are rarely cannon fodder in war, and youth recognize who can be killed in some War for Profit. Young adults might be willing to pay any price to make a workable world instead of a dystopian nightmare in the wake of some military or economic disaster, but they do not want to die for market share for "American interests overseas".

2. Ideology. The big one. People decidedly to the Left and in the center generally reject right-wing authoritarianism. Few on the Right can reject right-wing authoritarianism on principle. Maybe the likes of George Will and Elizabeth Cheney get cold feet when they recognize the craziness of the Hard Right, especially when it claims that "Trump really won", conducts a Putsch at the Capitol, or entangles itself with the Q-anon cult.  But those are rare.

3. Urban-rural divide: Although right-wing authoritarians are to be found in urban, suburban, and rural areas alike, rural people are more likely to be right-wing authoritarians. Rural America may be far more of an echo-chamber for the Right (although I would be leery of saying that less-rustic areas do not have their own equivalent of echo chambers). I have seen this in the continuing presence of Trump banners and signs in the rural area in which I live. These people may know practically nobody who voted for Biden except perhaps for that crazy, overeducated, cancel-culture Marxist-Leninist science teacher (well, really that teacher is none of those, but in contrast to someone on the Hard Right, someone in the political center is an extremist.

It's like this. Water is everywhere, and because oxygen is an excellent solvent but otherwise generally unreactive we define it as neutral in the acid-base spectrum. To a substance like sulfur trioxide it is a very strong base, and that for metallic potassium water is a very strong acid. Commies have seen me as a fascist, and neo-Nazis have seen me as a typical Jewish Bolshevik even if I am not Jewish (I concur with its moral standards, but I could never follow kosher dietary laws; as a German-American I have much in common culturally with some Jewish populations). Extremists, like strong bases and acids, are dangerous.  

4. Ethnicity: Non-whites are much less likely to be RWA's... but also their antithesis. I cannot tell whether the "non-white" category includes all Hispanics, some of whom are white.

5. Education: people with college and especially post-grad/professional degrees are less likely to fall for RWA ideology.


JANUARY 6, 2021:



People left-leaning (89%) and low on the RWA scale (93%) see the Capitol Putsch as an abomination (unless they see it as the final destruction, as extreme leftists often do, of the myth of a benign liberal-capitalist order).  Right-leaning Americans may think that the Putsch did less to undermine American institutions (OK -- it failed) than to call attention of the alleged inadequacies of liberalism as opposed to some right-wing dream. RWA's than right-leaning Americans were more likely to recognize that the Putsch undermined the political order... but maybe they thought that a good idea. Go figure. The vast majority of both left-leaning adults and low RWA's surely found the Putsch an abomination for purpose as well as for possible consequences. 

But such is my interpretation.



   
Right-leaning adults and RWA's are not a perfect match, but all in all the perception that the President that we have is an usurper who did not win an election fairly and squarely is ominous in the extreme. In fact we have about an equal number of wins for the more conservative nominee and the more liberal nominee since 1980 (6-5 beginning in 1980), so most of us are going to end up with some Presidents that we disagree with. If I can accept that Bush won fairly in 2000 and that even if Trump won with the aid of dirty tricks that he did not understand but was not involved in, maybe conservatives might recognize that a Presidential winner who got a larger share of the overall popular vote than did Ronald Reagan really did win. Maybe one must look beyond a narrow circle of like-minded people, especially if one is in rural America, or if one relies largely upon FoX Propaganda Channel and Newsmax (let alone Infowars) as sources. 

Finally on something that should have absolutely no connection to partisan politics:


   

Here I cite the pollster's analysis:

Quote:The divides over the use of masks, especially, illustrate the challenges involved in de-escalating the right-left tension in American society and lowering the authoritarian temperature. 
In the interview, Altemeyer raised a number of potential long- and short-term solutions that could reduce authoritarian tendencies in the populace. One of those short-term solutions he mentioned was “superordinate goals, where you have things where everybody has to cooperate and work with each other.”
“You can’t solve problems independently, and that has a remarkable effect on letting people who are enemies understand each other better and decrease the tension,” he said. “The business of masks could have been that, but it was effectively trumped by Trump, who made wearing masks a sign of weakness.”
These divides all seem to stem from the same dynamic: leaders in the political and media spaces exacerbating tensions and differences for political gain. That’s a difficult problem to stop, especially when the political incentives and inertia of the moment suggest that voters may just move on to “the craziest son of a bitch in the race,” as dubbed by conservative Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) in a March 2017 Washington Examiner article.
Thomas Costello, a psychological scientist at Emory University who studies authoritarianism, said “it seems like there is just a small minority of the population that is really sensitive” to alienation and fear toward people of different ethnicities and political and religious views, and “it exacerbates latent authoritarian tendencies.”
“I don’t know if you can change that in the same way that I don’t know that you can change someone’s height, or their level of extraversion,” he said. “But what you can do is try to mitigate the sense of the threat and the sense of difference that exacerbates authoritarianism.”
 
Rachel Venaglia, Laura Maxwell and Joanna Piacenza contributed. Special thanks to Monmouth University Polling Institute Director Patrick Murray and Bob Altemeyer, who each provided feedback to the study, and again to Murray, who also shared Monmouth’s data.

[Eric the Green]

Thanks for these posts, brower. I suspect that more people need to realize that the political divide today is a real crisis, and the choice we need to make is to reject and outvote the authoritarians who have made the Republican Party their home, and have used the system to expand their power and influence. We need to act and make this choice, lest we succumb not only to greater authoritarian rule, restricted to older white christian males, but fail to address the needs of society, which is the great danger that our authoritarian, reactionary ideology poses. Our right-wing is focused on the determination not to meet those needs, because to use government or cooperate to meet them is against their ideology. Yet only government has the ability to restrain these authorities. The apparent paradox of this, that our government is the tool to restrain authoritarianism, is played up to the hilt by the right wing, who use slogans of "freedom" to disguise their intent to destroy it. Those slogans themselves, I contend, is the greatest threat we in the USA face today.

[Bob Butler 54]

I can acknowledge the threat, but stick to the perspective that it is a futile one. The conservative faction that wants to not solve problems but keep things the same has lost influence in every crisis. No kings. No slaves. No dictators. Government regulation of the economy. Not solving the major problems is just not an option. Don't cure Covid? Continue racism and sexism? Defeat democracy? If you look at the historical trend of getting rid of the major flaws of the Agricultural and Industrial Ages, does authoritarianism stand a chance? Are they not headed for a ghetto of their own making?

Right now they are hard rudder to the right, ever so much fanatic about ever more so ridiculous conspiracy theories, shedding more reasonable people as they go. They are counting on obstructing Biden's for the people plans, and therefore they will win votes for the obstructors?

At the same time I am not against taking the threat seriously.

[beechnut79]

(06-29-2021, 07:08 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I can acknowledge the threat, but stick to the perspective that it is a futile one.  The conservative faction that wants to not solve problems but keep things the same has lost influence in every crisis.  No kings.  No slaves.  No dictators.  Government regulation of the economy.  Not solving the major problems is just not an option.  Don't cure Covid?  Continue racism and sexism?  Defeat democracy?  If you look at the historical trend of getting rid of the major flaws of the Agricultural and Industrial Ages, does authoritarianism stand a chance?  Are they not headed for a ghetto of their own making?

Right now they are hard rudder to the right, ever so much fanatic about ever more so ridiculous conspiracy theories, shedding more reasonable people as they go.  They are counting on obstructing Biden's for the people plans, and therefore they will win votes for the obstructors?

At the same time I am not against taking the threat seriously.

You mean that the passing of Rush Limbaugh along with one of the infamous Koch brothers failed to turn the tide?

[beechnut79]

(06-29-2021, 11:41 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Thanks for these posts, brower. I suspect that more people need to realize that the political divide today is a real crisis, and the choice we need to make is to reject and outvote the authoritarians who have made the Republican Party their home, and have used the system to expand their power and influence. We need to act and make this choice, lest we succumb not only to greater authoritarian rule, restricted to older white christian males, but fail to address the needs of society, which is the great danger that our authoritarian, reactionary ideology poses. Our right-wing is focused on the determination not to meet those needs, because to use government or cooperate to meet them is against their ideology. Yet only government has the ability to restrain these authorities. The apparent paradox of this, that our government is the tool to restrain authoritarianism, is played up to the hilt by the right wing, who use slogans of "freedom" to disguise their intent to destroy it. Those slogans themselves, I contend, is the greatest threat we in the USA face today.

 One to think of it, we are only a few weeks away from the golden anniversary of the infamous Powell memorandum, which didn’t really rear its ugly head until a full decade later with Reagan’s assault on the air traffic controllers. Many at the time consider RWR to be the greatest thing to come along since sliced bread. There are no doubt many who still do.

[pbrower2a]

(06-29-2021, 07:38 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(06-29-2021, 11:41 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Thanks for these posts, brower. I suspect that more people need to realize that the political divide today is a real crisis, and the choice we need to make is to reject and outvote the authoritarians who have made the Republican Party their home, and have used the system to expand their power and influence. We need to act and make this choice, lest we succumb not only to greater authoritarian rule, restricted to older white christian males, but fail to address the needs of society, which is the great danger that our authoritarian, reactionary ideology poses. Our right-wing is focused on the determination not to meet those needs, because to use government or cooperate to meet them is against their ideology. Yet only government has the ability to restrain these authorities. The apparent paradox of this, that our government is the tool to restrain authoritarianism, is played up to the hilt by the right wing, who use slogans of "freedom" to disguise their intent to destroy it. Those slogans themselves, I contend, is the greatest threat we in the USA face today.

 One to think of it, we are only a few weeks away from the golden anniversary of the infamous Powell memorandum, which didn’t really rear its ugly head until a full decade later with Reagan’s assault on the air traffic controllers. Many at the time consider RWR to be the greatest thing to come along since sliced bread. There are no doubt many who still do.

The Skowronek cycle is but one half-Saeculum, each cycle ending with a President damned to failure  at the end (Carter, Trump) who does everything in accordance with "the book" as began the then-current phase. Even with a President who is smart, innovative, cautious, and moral, like Carter, diminishing returns to public policy ensure failure; FDR started the New Deal cycle of American politics that lasted until the New Deal constituency started to die off and the youngest part reached retirement age. That is a generational angle to Skowronek's cycle. 

This is from a law journal, so it might be tough reading and it comes from when the Trump Presidency had begun. 

https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/c...ontext=ilj

Quote: the current Republican President, Donald Trump, is in an especially precarious position in the life cycle of the Reagan regime. To explain this point, I will need to describe in some detail Skowronek’s analysis of the different political situations in which successive Presidents find themselves during the life cycle of regimes. Skowronek calls the progress of these various situations political time. 40 Skowronek classifies the political situation Presidents face—and therefore the kind of Presidents they are likely to become—according to whether they take office when a regime is robust or debilitated, and whether they are allied to the existing regime or opposed to it.41 

Donald Trump is a Republican who becomes President during the Reagan regime. According to Skowronek, Trump may have inherited one of four possible political situations. Reconstructive Presidents successfully overturn a weakened regime and begin a new one.42 They lead the opposition party to become the newly dominant party. Examples of reconstructive Presidents are the first Presidents in each new regime: Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. Presidents who achieve such a reconstruction are usually considered as among our most successful. 43 If Trump is a reconstructive President, then he would be trying to overturn Reaganism and the conservative movement and create a new Trumpist regime.

 Affiliated Presidents are allied with the regime and take office later in political time.44 They try to keep faith with the regime’s commitments under changing circumstances. Skowronek describes them as “orthodox-innovators.”45 Examples in the New Deal/Civil Rights regime would be Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson; examples in the Reagan regime would be George H.W. Bush and George W Bush.46 If Trump were an affiliated President, he would present himself as an orthodox Reaganite who is trying to keep the factions in his party united. 

Preemptive Presidents come from opposition parties; they swim against the tide of a still powerful regime, so they must compromise, triangulate, and find a “third way.”47 Examples in the New Deal/Civil Rights regime would be Eisenhower and Nixon; examples in the Reagan regime would be Clinton and Obama.48 If Trump were a preemptive President, he would be opposed to Reaganism and the conservative movement and seek to find a third way between the two political parties. 

The final category, disjunctive Presidents, are leaders who come from the dominant party but have the misfortune to take over when the regime is on its last legs.49 Here the President tries to repair and reform a decrepit regime that has lost its coherence and legitimacy; the leader attempts this by selectively breaking with party orthodoxy in specific ways to shore up public support and reform the party’s base. But because the coalition has become so debilitated and weakened, the leader is not up to the task, and therefore presides over the regime’s dissolution.50 Jimmy Carter, the last Democrat in the New Deal/Civil Rights regime, and Herbert Hoover, the last Republican in the long Republican regime, are key examples. Disjunctive presidencies are usually regarded as failures. The following diagram sums up Skowronek’s account of the different styles of presidential leadership: 

(I can't copy the chart, so I will need to paraphrase it. Basically:

1. when the previous era is falling apart, when everything that it tries fails, then Americans have a tendency to support major, pervasive change that repudiates what preceded with extensive reforms that clear out the recent failures. Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, F. Roosevelt, and Reagan exemplify this. These Presidents establish new eras. To be sure there may be major faults, but the Presidents on this list clearly got away with what would be serious faults of their eras (as with Jackson's Trail of Tears and the expansion of slavery). These are the Reconstructive Presidents. Four of the five appear on commonly-circulating currency -- the five, twenty, and fifty bills, and the one-cent, five-cent, and ten-cent pieces. (Lincoln appears twice, so I am not double-counting). 

2. if the political era is still robust, one gets an affiliated President who offers more of the same, perhaps more finely-tuned. These are reformers generally associated with the current order. Examples include Madison, Monroe, Polk, Grant, T. Roosevelt, Taft, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, and George H W Bush. These are mixed in results, but even if they are political failures in getting re-elected such may reflect the tiredness of their agenda. They are as a strict rule Establishment leaders. Grant appears on the fifty-dollar bill, and Kennedy appears on the fifty-cent piece. Grant is on his fifty-dollar bill for being the most effective Union general in the Civil War. These are "affiliated".

3. if the political order shows a few cracks, then someone from the Loyal Opposition tends to become the President. They offer an alternative that tries to smooth some excesses and mitigate some neglect. Such Presidents include Tyler, Fillmore, Cleveland, Wilson, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Clinton. The author did not mention Obama, but I see him here. He may be a mirror image of Ike in being clearly liberal in contrast to Ike being conservative, having no military career in contrast to the Hero General Ike, and being rather young for a President instead of being old (one's sixties were old as late 1960). This is a mixed lot. 

4. finally the disjunctive Presidents are the last gasp of an aging phase of political life, one loyal to orthodoxies of his partisan coalition but generally ineffective. The previous phase disintegrates under such Presidents (diminishing returns to stale policies?)  The Federalists went into a political death spiral under John Adams; the Whigs did much the same under John Q. Adams. The Union came close to dissolution under Buchanan, and capitalism itself came close to dissolution under Hoover due to the Depression. 

There was no clear disjunctive or reconstructive President in this pattern in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  

Quote:Where are we in political time? To decide this question, we should ask which description of presidential leadership best fits Trump’s situation.52 It is unlikely that Trump is a reconstructive President. He did not run against the philosophy of Reaganism or claim that he sought to displace it. Like other Republican primary candidates, he sought to compare himself to Reagan, and his primary campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, originated with Reagan.53 He has strongly supported the religious right and nominated conservative pro-life judges vetted by the Federalist Society.54 With only a few important exceptions (to be discussed later), his policies and his judicial appointments have been very conservative and characteristic of a conservative Republican President. 55

 For the same reasons, Trump is not a preemptive President; he did not come into office from an opposition party, trying to swim against the tide of Reaganism and seeking to find a way to compromise with the dominant party or triangulate between the two parties’ positions. He is the leader of the regime’s dominant party, the Republicans. The members of his party have strongly supported him, not because they like his personal behavior or his political principles (he doesn’t seem to have many settled principles), but rather because his policies have been largely consistent with those of a very conservative Republican.56 The President he most sought to repudiate was not Ronald Reagan but Barack Obama, and if Obama was a preemptive President in the Reagan regime, it’s hard to see how Trump could be one too.57 

Trump might well be an affiliated President like George W. Bush. As noted above, after his election, Trump and his appointees have acted like very conservative Republicans on a wide range of issues. On the other hand, Trump has departed from Republican orthodoxy in several ways: his rejection of free trade, his defense of middle-class entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, and his repeated calls for huge public works and infrastructure projects. During the campaign Trump also criticized George W. Bush’s hawkish foreign policy, distanced himself from the Iraq War, and even blamed Bush for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks.58 Trump’s opposition to free trade and his draconian rhetoric on immigration suggest that although he is not abandoning the regime’s commitments to deregulatory capitalism, low taxes, and the culture wars, he is trying to renovate and repair the regime. 

He is adapting it to a changing Republican base of white, working class voters, especially those without college degrees. Trump, in other words, seems to be trying to give the Reagan regime a new lease on life, or a new shot of legitimacy, by pushing it in a strongly populist and nativist direction.59 And he is offering himself as a nonideological outsider who has the special talents to fix things. According to Skowronek’s model, this style of leadership makes him most like a disjunctive President. As Skowronek puts it:

Quote: [O]ne of the great ironies of the politics of disjunction is that the Presidents who come to office in these sorts of situations tend to have only the most tenuous relationship to the establishments they represent. Long-festering problems within the regime tend to throw up leaders only nominally affiliated with it, and in their efforts to address the issues of the day, these affiliates often press major departures of their own from the standard formulas and priorities set in the old agenda. The political effect of these departures is disjunctive: they sever the political moorings of the old regime and cast it adrift without anchor or orientation.

This description seems to fit Trump quite well. Trump fits the disjunctive pattern in a second way. As differences within the coalition become increasingly obvious and difficult to manage, disjunctive candidates argue that they are able to fix things because they have special technical abilities. For example, they might portray themselves as extremely skilled politicians (John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan), outstanding technocrats and problem solvers (Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter); or, as in Trump’s case, outstanding deal makers.61 They explain to the public that what is important is not ideological purity but the ability to get things done. As Skowronek puts it, in the last days of a regime, mastery of technique—in this case dealmaking and business acumen—“is a hallmark of the politics of disjunction.”62 Focusing on technique allows the new President to remain ambiguous about his or her positions, allowing everyone in the coalition to believe that it will get what it wants. We won’t really know if Trump is a disjunctive President until he leaves office. But many of the signs are present. And when we combine Skowronek’s account of Presidential leadership with the other pieces of evidence identified above, there is a very good chance that Trump does not represent the beginning of a new politics in America but the end of an older one.63

This is from "Winter 2019", so this article comes from about two years ago. Yes, I see Donald Trump as largely a disjunctive failure. He tried to meld ultra-conservative economics with an angry populism, and the contradictions which he did not recognize as potential trouble. He did get some reactionary judges on the Supreme Court and into federal judgeships, and he accelerated federal executions as his expression of "law and order". He is disjunctive in ways that Jimmy Carter wasn't; the warning signs should have been obvious in his business dealings, his personal life, and in rhetoric that could only divide. Trumpism is Reaganism on steroids, with none of the attempts to soothe feelings of the Opposition with kind words. Trump faulted people for failing to believe exactly what he believes. 

Trump offers the rhetoric of a shock jock such as the late Rush Limbaugh and his sybaritic indulgence as evidence of personal competence. Even his business dealings have best been described as "grazing"... putting huge amounts of effort and capital into some promising venture that he gives up on when he tires of it. Thus the Trump Shuttle as an airline (which he sold to another airline), the pitiable Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, and the dubious Trump Taj Mahal Casino. How someone can lose money in a casino without letting mobsters skim it (which, in view of his friendships with figures of organized crime, seems likely) is beyond my understanding. He made a venture into education as the for-profit Trump University, not to be confused with such private non-profit universities as Cornell, Vanderbilt, Rice, or Stanford where one is expected to show promise before attending and work one's tail off to get a degree. Diploma mills are worthless. He did sort-of-OK in reality television, which reflects what Henry Louis Mencken said about mass marketing and mass culture: "nobody ever goes broke underestimating the taste of the American people". The one reliable source of income has been as a landlord, Trump having the fortune of having heavily been invested in New York City as the Big Apple became desirable again. 

Donald Trump is the most authoritarian President in our history. He has stoked much taste for it, which includes causing people to lose their inhibitions against base bigotry on ethnicity and religion and crass elitism on economics. Reagan at least took swipes at the fascistic KKK and neo-Nazi types; Trump has failed at that minimum standard of human decency. He has abandoned one part of what has been usually associated with conservatism -- respect for protocol, precedent, and the rule of law (hardly anyone could have foreseen the definitive expression of contempt for the rule of law as he egged people on to storm the Capitol) -- because Obama co-opted that. Trump cast off the genuinely conservative aspect of the Obama Administration.

It's up to Americans to repudiate him. One promising sign is that Trump's base is decidedly old. If one has an elderly clientele and one's customer base isn't being replenished, then the enterprise that depends upon loyal customers already older than average is doomed.

[David Horn]

(06-29-2021, 07:34 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(06-29-2021, 07:08 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I can acknowledge the threat, but stick to the perspective that it is a futile one.  The conservative faction that wants to not solve problems but keep things the same has lost influence in every crisis.  No kings.  No slaves.  No dictators.  Government regulation of the economy.  Not solving the major problems is just not an option.  Don't cure Covid?  Continue racism and sexism?  Defeat democracy?  If you look at the historical trend of getting rid of the major flaws of the Agricultural and Industrial Ages, does authoritarianism stand a chance?  Are they not headed for a ghetto of their own making?

Right now they are hard rudder to the right, ever so much fanatic about ever more so ridiculous conspiracy theories, shedding more reasonable people as they go.  They are counting on obstructing Biden's for the people plans, and therefore they will win votes for the obstructors?

At the same time I am not against taking the threat seriously.

You mean that the passing of Rush Limbaugh along with one of the infamous Koch brothers failed to turn the tide?

It's not inconsequential that the New Authoritarian Right is still solidly grounded.  The movement, or whatever yo wish to call it, has a huge supporting media infrastructure and plenty of babbling heads to keep it fully engaged 24/7/365. As long as the financiers behind the infrastructure continue to pay the bills, I doubt this will end.  The Mercers and Sheldon Adelson's widow are rich enough to keep it afloat for a long time, and the Murdocks are actually profiting from it.

[pbrower2a]

(06-30-2021, 11:37 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(06-29-2021, 07:34 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(06-29-2021, 07:08 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I can acknowledge the threat, but stick to the perspective that it is a futile one.  The conservative faction that wants to not solve problems but keep things the same has lost influence in every crisis.  No kings.  No slaves.  No dictators.  Government regulation of the economy.  Not solving the major problems is just not an option.  Don't cure Covid?  Continue racism and sexism?  Defeat democracy?  If you look at the historical trend of getting rid of the major flaws of the Agricultural and Industrial Ages, does authoritarianism stand a chance?  Are they not headed for a ghetto of their own making?

Right now they are hard rudder to the right, ever so much fanatic about ever more so ridiculous conspiracy theories, shedding more reasonable people as they go.  They are counting on obstructing Biden's for the people plans, and therefore they will win votes for the obstructors?

At the same time I am not against taking the threat seriously.

You mean that the passing of Rush Limbaugh along with one of the infamous Koch brothers failed to turn the tide?

It's not inconsequential that the New Authoritarian Right is still solidly grounded.  The movement, or whatever you wish to call it, has a huge supporting media infrastructure and plenty of babbling heads to keep it fully engaged 24/7/365. As long as the financiers behind the infrastructure continue to pay the bills, I doubt this will end.  The Mercers and Sheldon Adelson's widow are rich enough to keep it afloat for a long time, and the Murdocks are actually profiting from it.

Right-wing authoritarianism would fail quickly were it not for its alignment with the economic elites of the time.  It can buy media, PR firms, politicians, writers, and academics. Just think of the inordinate power that the slave-owning planters had without having the professional intellectual mercenaries that such entities as the tobacco business in recent times and the interests wrecking the environment for quick profits today. 

The history of many other countries has often shown that having command of the bulk of the assets and economic power as an elite does not ensure personal goodness, let alone moral choices with such power as one has. Hitler's Nazis and the Hungarian Arrow Cross fascists (who in the end made Hungary a slaughterhouse for its Jewish population when it got a short window of opportunity) drew early support from aristocratic landowners, business tycoons, and business executives. These people saw successful Jews, whether as educated professionals, small-business owners, or union organizers, as rivals or enemies. Obviously Sheldon Adelson or his widow would have never fallen for that because ... you know. 

OK, nobody is going to target any model minority and get away with it in America. Go after Chinese-Americans and you will find hostility from the Jews. Go after Jews and you will find the black bourgeoisie aligning with the Jews, and so on. Model minorities may have spared America of the menace of a soulless dictatorship under Donald Trump.   

Still, look at the opportunities that the Hard Right has to offer. It has publishing houses, and if one is a struggling writer but can write what the owners of some right-wing publishing house wishes to promote to a "conservative" audience (they buy books that they don't really read), then you might get a nice writing contract. Offending the liberals in the process by showing a distorted view of history or social reality is no problem. Liberals are a fussier audience. It has its own news media, and those can offer more for a sell-out journalist who says what is expected. If one is a quack academic, then maybe the Koch family can found a chair or "reform" critical departments (typically social studies and history) to the favor of a reactionary world view in which budding conservative "thinkers" can feel comfortable and liberals seek an early exit. Some people love to grab the big shiny objects... and if one gets paid well enough one can buy an expensive house, a pricey boat, some genuine jewels, and a high-end marque of vehicle or two. As for politics... the Tea Party pols found lavish support from the well-heeled heels. 

So Donald Trump leaves in ridicule by people able to think on their own, people whose place in society depends upon their skill and work-ethic instead of having sold out their souls for the big shiny objects in life.  Don't be fooled. We still have the tycoons, the business executives, the hack right-wing intellectuals, and the big landowners (whether large-scale slumlords or owners of great agricultural expanses) who still own the gold and who will use that gold to make the rules and get themselves even more gold. The Right used to be hostile to Big Government for putting welfare above maximal profits, but the Hard Right has found that it it can use Big Government to profiteer from crony capitalism and reward people for political support. 

It may be that white people on welfare are more likely to have supported Donald Trump than degreed professionals similarly white. This is the opposite of how things were when Bill Clinton was President twenty  to thirty years ago. Just take a look at the poorest states in the Union, and that with one notable exception (New Mexico) they typically vote Republican. The poor people in New Mexico are heavily First peoples and Mexican-Americans who have good cause to distrust the American Hard Right. (Tellingly, New Mexico is above average in inoculations for COVID-19).

The government owns assets that the Right would love to privatize  on the cheap for the opportunity of monopoly gouging, like the Interstate Highway System, water projects, and state universities. The Right also wants to eviscerate trade unions so that employers can dispense with collective bargaining (union dues are worth that alone) and exploit the bargaining weaknesses of workers while driving workers to work harder under harsher conditions for les. Remember that much of the appeal of Adolf Hitler was his promise to destroy the unions in German industry. It is easy to remember Hitler for his genocide, massacres, and aggressive war, but forget that Nazi Germany and its zone of power was a workers' Hell. Workers could not organize or maintain unions, do work stoppages, or even change employers without the consent of the employer. Employers could consign a low-performing worker to a labor camp in which the wretch would be sweated more severely than in the usual Hellhole of a German industrial plant... with some giant German firm profiteering off the toil of the helpless worker. Workplace serfdom? What could be more profitable: Simon Legree as the overseer of the most sophisticated industrial order of the time.