Trump and Authoritarianism

[kmoney]

I came across an article I found interesting. It's about Trump and authoritarianism. One of the main points is that Trump is just a symptom, not a cause. There has been an authoritarian current running in our country for a while and a perfect storm has formed where a candidate like Trump can thrive. Win or lose, there may be other Trumps in the future. It's a long article but I think worth it.

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism
The rise of American authoritarianism
A niche group of political scientists may have uncovered what's driving Donald Trump's ascent. What they found has implications that go well beyond 2016. by Amanda Taub on March 1, 2016
...
MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.

So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump.

He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator. He later repeated the same poll in South Carolina, shortly before the primary there, and found the same results, which he published in Vox:

....

What we found is a phenomenon that explains, with remarkable clarity, the rise of Donald Trump — but that is also much larger than him, shedding new light on some of the biggest political stories of the past decade. Trump, it turns out, is just the symptom. The rise of American authoritarianism is transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well beyond this election.

It reminded me of a RedState piece about why he won't vote for Trump. After giving several things that could be his reason but aren't he says this:

http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/03/18/will-never-vote-trump-loses-hillary-will-fault-mine/

No, the thing that makes me unwilling to vote for Trump under any circumstances is that the man is rather obviously a genuine authoritarian at heart, based on a lengthy record of public rhetoric dating back to before the Tiananmen Square massacre and continuing through his recent and completely unveiled threats against the press for daring to report the truth about him and his political enemies for daring to disagree with him.

And like most authoritarians who have come before him, Trump shows no indication that, if elected, he would use his authoritarian impulses in any sort of benevolent manner, but would rather resort to regular self-dealing and political retribution against anyone who dared speak out against him. We have seen the damage the IRS alone can wreak in the hands of an unscrupulous President; in the hands of President Trump, no American who dared speak out against him would be safe from government abuses both petty and great.

Nope. Not an America I’m interested in living in. Not a man I can in good conscience support with a vote.

I don't want to live in Trump's America either.

And somewhat related, I'll repost an article that Rex posted a few weeks ago about how we are ripe for a tyrant.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

Political discourse has been bad for a long time but it seems to be reaching a new low with Trump. And it isn't just about political correctness. I generally dislike the PC police too, but Trump has turned a presidential campaign into a middle school playground.

Trump's policy positions are enough to send my vote somewhere else but what a Trump presidency would mean for America is an even stronger force pushing me away.

However, both the Vox and NyMag articles give some legitimate reasons why Trump's supporters are so frustrated. If the rest of us don't pay attention and show some real concern then it might only get worse. Being dismissive is not the right approach. To quote the Vox article again:

It is conventional wisdom to ascribe the rise of first the Tea Party right and now Trump to the notion that working-class white Americans are angry.

Indeed they are, but this data helps explain that they are also under certain demographic and economic pressures that, according to this research, are highly likely to trigger authoritarianism — and thus suggests there is something a little more complex going on than simple "anger" that helps explain their gravitation toward extreme political responses.

Working-class communities have come under tremendous economic strain since the recession. And white people are also facing the loss of the privileged position that they previously were able to take for granted. Whites are now projected to become a minority group over the next few decades, owing to migration and other factors. The president is a black man, and nonwhite faces are growing more common in popular culture. Nonwhite groups are raising increasingly prominent political demands, and often those demands coincide with issues such as policing that also speak to authoritarian concerns.

Some of these factors might be considered more or less legitimately threatening than others — the loss of working-class jobs in this country is a real and important issue, no matter how one feels about fading white privilege — but that is not the point.

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

That is not to dismiss white working-class concerns as invalid because they might be expressed by authoritarians or through authoritarian politics, but rather to better understand why this is happening — and why it's having such a profound and extreme effect on American politics.

 

[annabenedetti]

Thanks for posting this, kmo. I've read the Vox piece and thought it was very good. Very thought-provoking.

I haven't read the other two articles you linked, so I'm going to do that now.

 

[annabenedetti]

From RedState, this:

“But Leon,” say a bunch of people who are interested in the Republican party winning just for the sake of winning. “If enough people take this approach, then Hillary will win!”
I’m sure she will, and that’s not my fault. I have no obligation to vote for Donald Trump or anyone else. I never signed a contract to do so, or received any great favor from the GOP that commits me morally from doing so. I find Donald Trump to be unqualified, unfit for office, repugnant, and a tyrant in waiting, so I won’t vote for him. The end.


​

And from Sullivan, this:

But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.” And so Trump launched his campaign by calling undocumented Mexican immigrants a population largely of rapists and murderers. He moved on to Muslims, both at home and abroad. He has now added to these enemies — with sly brilliance — the Republican Establishment itself. And what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.

And so after demonizing most undocumented Mexican immigrants, he then vowed to round up and deport all 11 million of them by force. “They have to go” was the typically blunt phrase he used — and somehow people didn’t immediately recognize the monstrous historical echoes. The sheer scale of the police and military operation that this policy would entail boggles the mind. Worse, he emphasized, after the mass murder in San Bernardino, that even the Muslim-Americans you know intimately may turn around and massacre you at any juncture. “There’s something going on,” he declaimed ominously, giving legitimacy to the most hysterical and ugly of human impulses.

To call this fascism doesn’t do justice to fascism. Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.

His response to his third vaunted enemy, the RNC, is also laced with the threat of violence. There will be riots in Cleveland if he doesn’t get his way. The RNC will have “a rough time” if it doesn’t cooperate. “Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him,” Trump has said. “And if I don’t? He’s gonna have to pay a big price, okay?” The past month has seen delegates to the Cleveland convention receiving death threats; one of Trump’s hatchet men, Roger Stone, has already threatened to publish the hotel rooms of delegates who refuse to vote for Trump.

And what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans. At rallies, whenever a protester is hauled out, you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict on an individual. Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyper*democracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.
​

Here's Juan Linz's model of an authoritarian political system:

1. limited political pluralism; that is, such regimes place constraints on political institutions and groups like legislatures, political parties and interest groups;
2. a basis for legitimacy based on emotion, especially the identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems" such as underdevelopment or insurgency;
3. minimal social mobilization most often caused by constraints on the public such as suppression of political opponents and anti-regime activity;
4. informally defined executive power with often vague and shifting powers

 

[patrick jane]

Trump is back !! He used a tele-prompter yesterday for the first time and it was magic.

Trump can't be stopped now !!

 

[northwye]

Trump has taken up some of the talking points of the alternative media. For example, Trump was on the Michael Savage talk show some time before he decided to run for president. Some of the ideas that Trump has used successfully in his campaign agree with those of Michael Savage. Savage wrote "Government Zero: No Borders, No Language, No Culture” which came out in 2015. Savage says in this book that "unprecedented and barbaric revolutions.......threaten our most fundamental freedoms.” Savage says there is in America "zero leadership, zero strategy against the Islamic State, zero military, zero education, zero culture — and right on down the line." He says Western civilization is threatened by Islam.

Trump appeared on the Alex Jones show a few months ago. And Larry Nichols has been a regular on the Alex Jones Show. Nichols was a former Green Beret officer and became an insider, some say handler, for the Clintons going back to the time when Bill was governor of Arkansas. Apparently, it was Larry Nichols who got word to Trump to talk about the "suicide" of Vince Foster in 1993, and Trump did do that. Larry Nichols was in part behind The Clinton Chronicles: An Investigation into the Alleged Criminal Activities of Bill Clinton, a 1994 film. And Larry Nichols played a role in getting the House to impeach Bill Clinton for perjury in 1998.

Trump got some of his ideas he has used successfully in his campaign from the contemporary patriots who use the alternative media. However, as Larry Nichols has pointed out, Trump needs to support State's Rights. A fundamental part of the ideology of the present day patriot movement - in part from Ron Paul - is the need to reduce the power of the federal government and bring more power back to the local and state levels. Texas governor Greg Abbott has called for a Constitutional Convention, authorized by Article V - "or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states..."

Abbott wants a Constitutional Convention initiated by the states together to enact amendments that would Prohibit administrative agencies from creating federal law, Allow a two-thirds majority of the states to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Restore the balance of power between the federal and state governments by limiting the former to the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution, Give state officials the power to sue in federal court when federal officials overstep their bounds and Allow a two-thirds majority of the states to override a federal law or regulation.

Several states have signed on to this Convention.

Would Trump support such a move to limit the power of the federal government? That would be one test of whether Trump is an authoritarian.

Another test of whether Trump is an authoritarian is to ask the many people who have worked for him. It sounds like most of them like him.

He may need the present day power of the Executive Office to carry out reforms in the system. But Trump might find that he would have to compromise greatly with the Establishment to get even a small part of this program carried out. If he is not an authoritarian then he might realize that bringing power back to the local and state levels could be used to reduce federal power and reform the system, including taking away much of the power of the American "nomenklatura," which was the name for the bureaucratic class of rulers in the Old Soviet Union.

The problem with such a Constitutional Convention is that those who want to weaken the Bill of Rights and help create a world Dictatorship by the present ruling elite could gain control of the Convention. Agreement on what new Constitutional amendments could be considered should take place before the Convention begins.

It may be that those who say Trump is an authoritarian are doing so because they do not like his personality or his political views. And in our present upside down world, being any kind of nationalist and opposing the Globalists is fascist authoritarianism.

 

[annabenedetti]

The concern isn't only whether Trump is an authoritarian, it's also how he attracts and encourages followers who have authoritarian personalities.

 

[northwye]

Theodore W. Adorno and his people at Berkeley in the 1950 book, The Authoritarian Personality created the F Scale to measure prejudice toward Jewish people by Gentiles, and extended that to prejudice toward Blacks. They made up the questions on their F Scale to measure authoritarian attitudes of the "right-wing," not to measure authoritarianism itself.

Then in 1960 Milton Rokeach published his book, The Open and Closed Mind, and Rokeach created his Dogmatism Scale, an attempt to measure dogmatism, or authoritarianism, independently of the content of a political ideology, left or right, etc.

The 1950 F Scale was created to find empirical evidence to support the Frankfurt School's teaching that Christianity and the family are the cause of the right-wing authoritarian personality. It did not measure the dogmatism or authoritarianism of the American Communist Party people. Adorno and his crew had deceived people into thinking that authoritarianism was only a trait of the Right and not of the Left also.

Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale measured dogmatism or authoritarianism of the Left, so that it would be expected that hard core Marxists would score high on the Dogmatism Scale, like the hard core Right-Wingers like the KKK. Measuring dogmatism, or authoritarianism, as a set of attitudes independent of the content of political ideology, even though the method was not very rigorous - by use of paper and pencil questionnares - was better science that Adorno's F Scale geared only to measure right-wing authoritarianism.

Then there is also the point made by psychologist Keven MacDonald in The Frankfurt School of Social Research and the Pathologization of Gentile Group Allegiances. He said, for example, that "...another way of conceptualizing the Jewish advocacy of radical political movements...is that these political movements may be understood as simultaneously undermining Gentile intrasocietal group affiliations, such as Christianity and nationalism, at the same time allowing for the continuation of Jewish identification."

Keven MacDonald's work on the Frankfurt School: http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/chap5.pdf

Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale does not Undermine Gentile group affiliations - Christianity and the family - at the same time allowing for the continuation of Jewish identification as does Adorno's F Scale work.

And so the two current Leftist or Marxist Presidential Candidates for the Democratic Party would be expected to attract followers who have Dogmatic or Authoritarian personalities.

 

[kmoney]

And from Sullivan, this:

But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.” And so Trump launched his campaign by calling undocumented Mexican immigrants a population largely of rapists and murderers. He moved on to Muslims, both at home and abroad. He has now added to these enemies — with sly brilliance — the Republican Establishment itself. And what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.

And so after demonizing most undocumented Mexican immigrants, he then vowed to round up and deport all 11 million of them by force. “They have to go” was the typically blunt phrase he used — and somehow people didn’t immediately recognize the monstrous historical echoes. The sheer scale of the police and military operation that this policy would entail boggles the mind. Worse, he emphasized, after the mass murder in San Bernardino, that even the Muslim-Americans you know intimately may turn around and massacre you at any juncture. “There’s something going on,” he declaimed ominously, giving legitimacy to the most hysterical and ugly of human impulses.

To call this fascism doesn’t do justice to fascism. Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.

His response to his third vaunted enemy, the RNC, is also laced with the threat of violence. There will be riots in Cleveland if he doesn’t get his way. The RNC will have “a rough time” if it doesn’t cooperate. “Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him,” Trump has said. “And if I don’t? He’s gonna have to pay a big price, okay?” The past month has seen delegates to the Cleveland convention receiving death threats; one of Trump’s hatchet men, Roger Stone, has already threatened to publish the hotel rooms of delegates who refuse to vote for Trump.

And what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans. At rallies, whenever a protester is hauled out, you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict on an individual. Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyper*democracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.
​

I also thought the part about Hoffer and his book was interesting. "emotional hyperdemocracy". :think:

Here's Juan Linz's model of an authoritarian political system:

1. limited political pluralism; that is, such regimes place constraints on political institutions and groups like legislatures, political parties and interest groups;
2. a basis for legitimacy based on emotion, especially the identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems" such as underdevelopment or insurgency;
3. minimal social mobilization most often caused by constraints on the public such as suppression of political opponents and anti-regime activity;
4. informally defined executive power with often vague and shifting powers

I think we have protections for much of that. I can see #2 though. And partially the limited 2-party system we have.

 

[kmoney]

The concern isn't only whether Trump is an authoritarian, it's also how he attracts and encourages followers who have authoritarian personalities.

Right. That's how I'm seeing it also. I doubt anyone thinks that if Trump is elected he's going to become Hitler or Stalin and his followers the SS. The concern is about authoritarian tendencies.

I agree with one of the lines you quoted from the Sullivan article. Trump doesn't seem to be guided by any ideology. My view of Trump is that he's a pragmatist and will do what he thinks is necessary to get the job done. He and his followers are also driven by emotion. Which could lead to some authoritarian things when the threat seems big enough.

 

[kmoney]

It may be that those who say Trump is an authoritarian are doing so because they do not like his personality or his political views. And in our present upside down world, being any kind of nationalist and opposing the Globalists is fascist authoritarianism.

What do you mean by 'nationalist' and 'globalist'?

 

[ok doser]

Trump is back !! He used a tele-prompter yesterday for the first time and it was magic.

is it programmed to make automatic random racist and misogynist statements?

 

[northwye]

The Trump campaign has introduced the issue of the globalist elite into national politics in a way that has never been done before. Those who are familiar with the messages of the alternative media, mostly on the Internet now, know what this issue is. It may be that many people in the churches do not know what this issue is about.

The Bilderbergers are now meeting in Dresden, Germany - June 9-12. How many in the churches know what the Bilderbergers are? You can find out on the Internet.

They were a secret group of the elite of the world of huge international corporations, big bankers, and some heads of state until recent years. A reporter from the pre-Internet alternative media, Jim Tucker, of the Old School of Journalism who grew up with only typewriters before the Internet, went to the Bilderberger meetings year after year and reported on what they were talking about from his inside sources. The mainstream media said this was all conspiracy theory and there was no such group as the Bilderbegers. But in the era of the Internet other alternative media people took up the work of Old Jim Tucker and now their existence is not a conspiracy theory.

The Bilderbergers represent the international elite, the Globalists. In Bible prophecy their can be identified as the "King of the North" in Daniel 11 - the industrialized northern nations who are under usury banking, while the "King of the South' is mostly the Islamic nations. The division between the two is being confused by Isis - embedded in the "refugees" from the Middle East - being allowed and actually invited to come into the nations of Western Europe and the U.S. in large numbers.

On Jim Tucker wikipedia says "James P. (Jim or Big Jim) Tucker, Jr.,1934-2013, was an American journalist and author of Jim Tucker's Bilderberg Diary, who, since 1975, has focused on the Bilderberg Group. Tucker died on April 26, 2013, from complications due to a fall." Tucker was just barely a member of the Korean War generation age group. The youngest Korean War veterans, who did not lie about their age, were probably born in about 1934, and would have been 19 the last year of that war.

 

[patrick jane]

I don't want to live in Trump's America either.

:

Move

 

[kmoney]

Move

British Columbia seems nice.

 

[Traditio]

For what it's worth: I am angry. I feel threatened. And I am almost certainly voting for Trump.

 

[patrick jane]

is it programmed to make automatic random racist and misogynist statements?

I thought you were a Trump voter ?

 

[northwye]

I think the term authoritarianism is being used here in the sense of fascist or right-wing authoritarianism.

Trump is opposed to the policies of the Globalist elite, who are bringing in numbers of Muslims who will not assimilate with American or Western culture and will oppose it and Americans. The elite have been taking our jobs away to third world countries and promoting an internationalist order. They are using a form of Marxism to dumb down and manipulate our attitudes and culture to weaken the influence of Christianity and the family and the values associated with both.

The slogan mentality of the dumbed down protesters at Trump rallies has turned violent recently. This violence may have been planned to take place. The elite often make use of the Hegelian dialectic in their operations, so that they may anticipate an "authoritarian" reaction to this violence done by people aligned with the Leftist Marxists.

The opposition between the Marxist Obama-Clinton faction and the resistance to that now led effectively by Trump is a matter of control over the people versus encouraging individual freedom and individual rights. And the Trump faction is now for a policy which would benefit the American people more than the elite bankers and large corporations. This is called a nationalist policy. Its also called populism. That is, the Obama-Clinton faction, being Marxist, is moving into collectivism and a greater amount of control over the people. If elected, Clinton will probably be successful in destroying the First and Second Amendments. This is Leftist authoritarianism, not fascist authoritarianism. I know that Clinton is motivated by more than just Marxist ideology, but she is motivated by a Leftist form of control which does not agree with the Bill of Rights or individual freedom.

The "authoritarian" reaction to the violence toward Trump supporters could be in the form of a massive biker move to protect Trump supporters, and the bikers may prove to be tougher than the Leftist dumbed down protesters. Are the bikers fascist authoritarians? I don't know. But if there is violence by the bikers in protecting Trump supporters in today's upside down world this violence will be spun by the Clinton people and by the mainstream media as "authoritarian" fascism which could work against Trump.

 

[patrick jane]

The "authoritarian" reaction to the violence toward Trump supporters could be in the form of a massive biker move to protect Trump supporters, and the bikers may prove to be tougher than the Leftist dumbed down protesters. Are the bikers fascist authoritarians? I don't know. But if there is violence by the bikers in protecting Trump supporters in today's upside down world this violence will be spun by the Clinton people and by the mainstream media as "authoritarian" fascism which could work against Trump.

Bikers for Trump !!