Authoritarian? You mean like when the governor of my state closed schools for TWO YEARS? Like when the federal government required toddlers in Head Start programs to wear masks for 3 years?
Authoritarian? Do you mean like when we were under some sort of health emergency for years also ( both here and in Europe) even after the covid virus had either mutated, or always been, nothing more than a bad flu for most people. ( If you disagree, tell me, how dangerous is covid today, because its still circulating btw!).
Authoritarian? Do you mean like forcing pregnant women to either get the covid vaccine or lose their jobs in healthcare? ( this policy was approved by governments in democrat run states).....
And speaking of conspiracies and your uncle... Do you mean conspiracies like that the covid virus was due to a lab leak? That was a racist and far right conspiracy according to the mainstream media..until it wasn't.
A friend of mine was hospitalized--in serious condition--from your "nothing more than a bad flu."
If you want to criticize the response to Covid, have the decency not to lie about it. Don't say that Covid wasn't so bad, don't deny how many lives the vaccine saved, admit that it wasn't a plot by THEM to permanently control us. The restrictions have been lifted; compare that to how people are still taking off their shoes in airports because of one guy a quarter century ago.
Totally agree about the over reaction to terrorism. That was government over reach, the security state never wants to give up prerogatives. Never wants to reduce their budget, never admits a risk they are in charge of, is now not much of a risk.
I am sorry for your friend. I think the statistics were always pretty clear that covid was about twice or three times as dangerous as a flu for the very old, and for vulnerable people. But the trade offs were never honestly measured. Sweden never closed schools nor locked down. Before you accuse me of lying, think about when our president said " You get the vaccine and you become a dead end for the virus.".
It was 10-20x times more dangerous for the old for sure. You can debate the lockdowns, or you can debate the vaccine efficiency, but the virus was pretty bad. You should have seen NYC during the peak.
Also the president was not lying intentionally, even if it turned out to be untrue. Now we have a president who lies 90% of the time, what do you think about that?
To split hairs, Trump is a bullshitter more than a liar. His bullshit isn't meant to fool you it's just his way of crowing. In some ways he's the most honest POTUS since Truman. His impromptu press conferences -- he just tells you exactly what he's thinking without spin or script. A Biden or a Harris can't answer a question honestly and can't answer it at all without being prepped. And Trump's agenda? He is doing *exactly* what he promised the electorate that he'd do.
I kind of get what you are saying but it is NOT a redeeming factor for me and I don't consider him honest at all. I don't care what he promised. He promised deficit reduction for instance, which is not going to happen.
I detest Trump. But I'm not confined to binary thinking. I have no problem giving him credit where it is due -- such as cancelling DEI -- and as to his personality, tho I consider him deplorable, yet I do enjoy his news conferences because one does not have to guess what he 'really means' -- he tells you point blank what he really means. No, he's not going to be able to reduce the deficit, nor is America about to enter a new golden age, etc. etc. -- yet, I put these things in the bullshit category, they are bravado, not serious.
When Biden claimed that the vaccine stopped transmission, there had been months of evidence that it did not. Some research was already out, the Provincetown MA outbreak had happened among vaccinated people about 6 months earlier. And again, I need to emphasize that this claim was not anodyne. Young people, pregnant women, were being mandated to get vaccines to keep jobs and stay in college.
As for Trump lying 90% of the time, I don't know, I doubt its 90% But I dont have a lot of sympathy for such claims anymore. Think about this: The president of the USA ( Joe Biden) was running TWO WARS ( in Ukraine and in Gaza) - he is commander in chief. All the while he was senile and the American people were being lied to. Jake Tapper has a book out now ( self justifying ) about the cover up. So even the democrat establishment admits this. So the whole " Trump's a liar thing" doesn't really resonate with me anymore.
In fairness to Mark, he did say he was limiting himself to right authoritarians, while acknowledging that there are authoritarians on the left. Maybe he should write the B side of the record now, just to level the playing field. Like you, Isabelle, I dislike the "progressive" impulse. I finally understood it when I discovered Jen Psaki said out loud what most of her Obamaite fellows were thinking: Woodrow Wilson was peachy keen.
Absolutely. I like to say that I am not right wing or left wing. I am just anti-authoritarian. I am not libertarian either, I don't think free markets are the answer to everything. I believe that citizens are adults and we should not be treated as such.
I certainly think the government overstepped during covid and that school closures went on for far too long in some places. This upset me as a public health professional and as a former teacher.
That said, my focus for this piece was right-wing authoritarians- their unique personalities, and the ways that they act out when “triggered.”
My larger point is that authoritarians can/will become their worst selves unless we learn how to live with them (i.e. by emphasizing our similarities, for right-wing authoritarians), per Karen Stenner’s research.
I agree that we all need to find common ground as human beings and as Americans. The divisiveness and the name calling is a threat to our democracy. I like the suggestion by another reader that a piece on left wing authoritarians by a left leaning writer, would be valuable. I would love to see the left rediscover its anti-authoritarian roots ! Trumps over reach on anti-semitism is helping the left to reaffirm the value of free speech, and its about time.
An honest question or two from someone who's wondered about authoritarians and authoritarianism for quite a while. First, are the people who are eager to follow an authoritarian also 'authoritarians,' or are these two differing classes of people. Your uncle, for example, seems to be a person more eager to protect those he loves and identifies with from harm, than to bend the knee, per se. While authoritarian figures seem bent on acquiring and wielding power over others to prop themselves up. While it's true that both types of people have anxiety at their core, in the first case it's fear of losing those close to them, as well as losing the role of protector and provider. In the second case, it's anxiety about not being 'better,' stronger, richer, etc., than other people. If this is true, then any analysis had best make the distinction clear. Personally, while my experience as a person and a therapist has suggested, people who value sameness and security and the roles that a society which also values those things are a large part of the population, but people with a great drive to lord it over others, no matter how much change ensues in the process, are relatively rare. And I believe that you can find people like them under character disorders in the DSM V. Look especially at conduct disorders, anti-social personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorders--maybe with some aspects of paranoid personality disorder thrown in.
“Are the people who are eager to follow an authoritarian also 'authoritarians?”
This is a great question. Some are, but one doesn’t have to be an authoritarian to find authoritarian leadership appealing. Nor does a leader have to be an authoritarian to appeal to those who are. (I don’t know if Trump is an authoritarian, psychologically speaking, but he certainly knows how to appeal to those who are.) What makes him unique is his ability to cast a wide net. By emphasizing things like “law and order,” especially as it pertains to immigration, he appeals to right-wing authoritarians, but also a large segment of the electorate, left, right, and center, concerned with this issue.
Re: your comment about this being rare:
Authoritarians make up about a third of us, with roughly 20% as right-wing, and about 15%(I think) as left-wing authoritarians, per Karen Stenner’s research. I think you're right that there's considerable overlap with RWA and some of these character disorders.
“If we don’t offer than a place to belong, someone else will”
Julius Caesar is supposed to have noted that, “If mankind does not control itself, something else will,” To myself, born exactly five months to the day before the Enola Gay opened her bomb bay doors over Hiroshima and really did change the world forever, Caesar was frighteningly prescient.
Mr. Hasman’s piece is a very interesting one. But I think he may have missed something crucial to his argument. Democracy by its very nature is a very messy and often quite inefficient system. That messiness and the ensuing inefficiency is only increased in a situation such as ours which is increasingly diverse; politically, socially, religiously, financially, and racially.
The Founders understood the potential problems of this increase. One of their most serious concerns was that a Republic would be hard to maintain once it reached and then exceeded a certain size and diversity. For all their political savvy (and it was considerable at the time) theirs was, by current American standards a remarkably homogeneous society, especially in terms of those who had full citizenship rights, including, most importantly, the franchise, which was pretty much limited to white male property owners over 21, most of them Christian and Anglo-Saxon.
What authoritarians of all stripes value most is some form of order and consistency. Clean, crime free neighborhoods, a government that operates with efficiency and with necessary force to create and to sanction their perspective on what constitutes national values, laws which validate their concepts of religion and morality, and a strong military to protect all of that. They tend to be far less concerned with social, political, religious, and racial (and yes, sexual) nuances, yet those nuances are at the heart of democracy.
At this point, someone is almost sure to say, “Fine, but there have to be some sort of legal, social, moral, and religion boundaries; too much ‘democracy’ is likely to allow too much license, too much ‘relative' morality in which any kind of behavior can be tolerated. This is precisely the argument, for example, that is often leveled by conservatives against our public educational system in the name of opposition to ‘liberal indoctrination of our kids’.
I don’t deny that need, and I’m fully aware that too much tolerance of some kinds of behavior can be and often is a problem.
Every philosopher since Socrates has been consumed in the attempt to find some solid moral ground on which to define the most functional legal and the moral boundaries of human behavior. None can be said to have completely succeeded.
But perhaps the Founders did, in an entirely new way. They launched what is still the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human society and government ever attempted. When one gets through all the verbiage, they provided us with a framework within which ‘We the People’ might together find just enough of the courage, the honesty, the compassion, the tolerance, the humility, the humor, the wisdom, the hope, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up with as much equity and justice as is humanly possible.
I understand the authoritarian impulse, if only because I’ve spent my working life as an elementary school teacher, and god knows the number of times I’ve wanted to clobber some kid over the head for disrupting my vision of classroom decorum. But authoritarians have to understand that they are not just the would-be teachers, but also fully members of the class, still struggling with that old Socratic question, “How should men live?”
Two millennia later, America was designed as the ongoing experiment to answer that question, to fulfill "the great task remaining before us” and so to be ‘the last best hope of earth’.
Allowing high numbers of immigrants has resulted in right wing authoritarians winning elections. This is true not only in the US but also in Western Europe. Only Denmark has been able to avoid this sweeping authoritarianism because it has sustained very strict immigration policies. Strict immigration policies enhance the "we" of belonging to a nation.
If allowing high numbers of immigrants generally resulted in elections won by right wing authoritarians, we would have been a dictatorship long ago.
What so often gets left out of our ‘discussions’ about immigration, legal or otherwise, is that most immigrants to our shores (or borders) is that it is most often driven by the need to flee countries that are already the kinds of places of repression and corruption that Donald Trump would love to create here if he could, and is attempting to do as we write.
People in liberal countries who vote for obviously authoritarian figures in order to achieve the kind of order they believe they want often find that in doing so, they have invited the tinpot dictator in along with the order.
The number of immigrants entering the US went from approximately 20 million in 1985 to approximately 48 million in 2020 more than doubling. Fortunately in France the right wing Front National is strong but not a majority. In Germany the Afd is also strong but not a majority. Hopefully these countries will not become authoritarian.
Sally, your statement about the number of immigrants entering the US is incorrect. In 2020, there have been less than 2 million immigrants entering the US. The numbers you provided show the total immigrant population in the US, i.e. the number of foreign-born US residents.
Of course you’ve neglected to mention that Trump himself torpedoed the last bi-partisan attempt to resolve the border issue so that he could continue to use it in his campaign attacks.
It is not immigration that gets authoritarians elected. It is the short-sightedness of voters who think they are the solution rather than a long term problem.
Uncle David, like most authoritarians, is also a narcissist. If he can find his humanity, he’ll find where he belongs. If he continues to believe he’s better than everyone else, he’ll stay lost and lonely. I have empathy for all lost souls, but no sympathy for white men unwilling to grow up.
This moral equivalency attempt misses the mark by a mile.
It conflates the right/conservative moral filters of Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression... with a left/liberal propensity to demand an enforced rules-based society related to their generally only moral filter of Care/Harm... and often related to their own self-interest.
The right view of rules and enforcement is to minimize them to only what is needed to support basic individual liberty, The right view is one that matches the concept of libertarian paternalism, where rules exist for those that need them, but people should be free to opt out of specified arrangements if they choose to do so as long as it does not include nor result in material harm to others.
The left view is outcome-based. It is fine with the elimination of individual liberty for some if they think it will benefit the care or harm reduction of others... generally others they see as victims or potential victims needing their advocacy.
The right view is one of system framework and guideposts where people are free to live their lives within a limited set of common and understood rules. Right leaning people believe that people in general will better figure things out themselves and make a better society than will top-down bureaucrats trying to engineer outcomes.
The left view is one of endless new top-down rules, regulations and enforcement to attempt to engineer outcomes to reduce harm or provide care... that THEY see as a priority. Left leaning people believe that people in general are stupid and incapable of making good enough decisions, and thus need to be controlled.
There is no right-side authoritarianism, except for interest in rules and enforcement to prevent left-side authoritarianism... which is the only real authoritarianism.
The constitution says we should have a unitary executive aka king? If you think Curtis Yarvin is constitutional in any way, you need to learn how to read.
I really liked this piece. I'll try to keep it in mind this week.
I think you're right: I try to push people away from this tendency instead of praising people for using it well and trying to get them to change to a good use when they use it for ill. I've heard that every psych textbook and every (good) dog training book say not to try to wring permanent qualities out of someone you care about. I'll keep pushing for liberalism, but part of that means finding good places for EVERYONE to use their traits as best they can.
Authoritarian? You mean like when the governor of my state closed schools for TWO YEARS? Like when the federal government required toddlers in Head Start programs to wear masks for 3 years?
Authoritarian? Do you mean like when we were under some sort of health emergency for years also ( both here and in Europe) even after the covid virus had either mutated, or always been, nothing more than a bad flu for most people. ( If you disagree, tell me, how dangerous is covid today, because its still circulating btw!).
Authoritarian? Do you mean like forcing pregnant women to either get the covid vaccine or lose their jobs in healthcare? ( this policy was approved by governments in democrat run states).....
And speaking of conspiracies and your uncle... Do you mean conspiracies like that the covid virus was due to a lab leak? That was a racist and far right conspiracy according to the mainstream media..until it wasn't.
A friend of mine was hospitalized--in serious condition--from your "nothing more than a bad flu."
If you want to criticize the response to Covid, have the decency not to lie about it. Don't say that Covid wasn't so bad, don't deny how many lives the vaccine saved, admit that it wasn't a plot by THEM to permanently control us. The restrictions have been lifted; compare that to how people are still taking off their shoes in airports because of one guy a quarter century ago.
Is that too much to ask?
People are hospitalized and die of the flu every year, but we do not shut down schools and destroy families and small businesses over it.
Totally agree about the over reaction to terrorism. That was government over reach, the security state never wants to give up prerogatives. Never wants to reduce their budget, never admits a risk they are in charge of, is now not much of a risk.
I am sorry for your friend. I think the statistics were always pretty clear that covid was about twice or three times as dangerous as a flu for the very old, and for vulnerable people. But the trade offs were never honestly measured. Sweden never closed schools nor locked down. Before you accuse me of lying, think about when our president said " You get the vaccine and you become a dead end for the virus.".
It was 10-20x times more dangerous for the old for sure. You can debate the lockdowns, or you can debate the vaccine efficiency, but the virus was pretty bad. You should have seen NYC during the peak.
Also the president was not lying intentionally, even if it turned out to be untrue. Now we have a president who lies 90% of the time, what do you think about that?
To split hairs, Trump is a bullshitter more than a liar. His bullshit isn't meant to fool you it's just his way of crowing. In some ways he's the most honest POTUS since Truman. His impromptu press conferences -- he just tells you exactly what he's thinking without spin or script. A Biden or a Harris can't answer a question honestly and can't answer it at all without being prepped. And Trump's agenda? He is doing *exactly* what he promised the electorate that he'd do.
I kind of get what you are saying but it is NOT a redeeming factor for me and I don't consider him honest at all. I don't care what he promised. He promised deficit reduction for instance, which is not going to happen.
I detest Trump. But I'm not confined to binary thinking. I have no problem giving him credit where it is due -- such as cancelling DEI -- and as to his personality, tho I consider him deplorable, yet I do enjoy his news conferences because one does not have to guess what he 'really means' -- he tells you point blank what he really means. No, he's not going to be able to reduce the deficit, nor is America about to enter a new golden age, etc. etc. -- yet, I put these things in the bullshit category, they are bravado, not serious.
When Biden claimed that the vaccine stopped transmission, there had been months of evidence that it did not. Some research was already out, the Provincetown MA outbreak had happened among vaccinated people about 6 months earlier. And again, I need to emphasize that this claim was not anodyne. Young people, pregnant women, were being mandated to get vaccines to keep jobs and stay in college.
As for Trump lying 90% of the time, I don't know, I doubt its 90% But I dont have a lot of sympathy for such claims anymore. Think about this: The president of the USA ( Joe Biden) was running TWO WARS ( in Ukraine and in Gaza) - he is commander in chief. All the while he was senile and the American people were being lied to. Jake Tapper has a book out now ( self justifying ) about the cover up. So even the democrat establishment admits this. So the whole " Trump's a liar thing" doesn't really resonate with me anymore.
I think Trump is senile. It is pointless to argue about this.
Bravo Isabelle! That's a model of a measured response to a hostile and slightly irrational attack.
In fairness to Mark, he did say he was limiting himself to right authoritarians, while acknowledging that there are authoritarians on the left. Maybe he should write the B side of the record now, just to level the playing field. Like you, Isabelle, I dislike the "progressive" impulse. I finally understood it when I discovered Jen Psaki said out loud what most of her Obamaite fellows were thinking: Woodrow Wilson was peachy keen.
Absolutely. I like to say that I am not right wing or left wing. I am just anti-authoritarian. I am not libertarian either, I don't think free markets are the answer to everything. I believe that citizens are adults and we should not be treated as such.
I certainly think the government overstepped during covid and that school closures went on for far too long in some places. This upset me as a public health professional and as a former teacher.
That said, my focus for this piece was right-wing authoritarians- their unique personalities, and the ways that they act out when “triggered.”
My larger point is that authoritarians can/will become their worst selves unless we learn how to live with them (i.e. by emphasizing our similarities, for right-wing authoritarians), per Karen Stenner’s research.
I agree that we all need to find common ground as human beings and as Americans. The divisiveness and the name calling is a threat to our democracy. I like the suggestion by another reader that a piece on left wing authoritarians by a left leaning writer, would be valuable. I would love to see the left rediscover its anti-authoritarian roots ! Trumps over reach on anti-semitism is helping the left to reaffirm the value of free speech, and its about time.
Hindsight as my father used to say, is always 20-20.
An honest question or two from someone who's wondered about authoritarians and authoritarianism for quite a while. First, are the people who are eager to follow an authoritarian also 'authoritarians,' or are these two differing classes of people. Your uncle, for example, seems to be a person more eager to protect those he loves and identifies with from harm, than to bend the knee, per se. While authoritarian figures seem bent on acquiring and wielding power over others to prop themselves up. While it's true that both types of people have anxiety at their core, in the first case it's fear of losing those close to them, as well as losing the role of protector and provider. In the second case, it's anxiety about not being 'better,' stronger, richer, etc., than other people. If this is true, then any analysis had best make the distinction clear. Personally, while my experience as a person and a therapist has suggested, people who value sameness and security and the roles that a society which also values those things are a large part of the population, but people with a great drive to lord it over others, no matter how much change ensues in the process, are relatively rare. And I believe that you can find people like them under character disorders in the DSM V. Look especially at conduct disorders, anti-social personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorders--maybe with some aspects of paranoid personality disorder thrown in.
“Are the people who are eager to follow an authoritarian also 'authoritarians?”
This is a great question. Some are, but one doesn’t have to be an authoritarian to find authoritarian leadership appealing. Nor does a leader have to be an authoritarian to appeal to those who are. (I don’t know if Trump is an authoritarian, psychologically speaking, but he certainly knows how to appeal to those who are.) What makes him unique is his ability to cast a wide net. By emphasizing things like “law and order,” especially as it pertains to immigration, he appeals to right-wing authoritarians, but also a large segment of the electorate, left, right, and center, concerned with this issue.
Re: your comment about this being rare:
Authoritarians make up about a third of us, with roughly 20% as right-wing, and about 15%(I think) as left-wing authoritarians, per Karen Stenner’s research. I think you're right that there's considerable overlap with RWA and some of these character disorders.
I would direct you to Stenner's work for more info, if interested: https://polpsy.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Stenner-Haidt-2018-pt.-1.pdf
“If we don’t offer than a place to belong, someone else will”
Julius Caesar is supposed to have noted that, “If mankind does not control itself, something else will,” To myself, born exactly five months to the day before the Enola Gay opened her bomb bay doors over Hiroshima and really did change the world forever, Caesar was frighteningly prescient.
Mr. Hasman’s piece is a very interesting one. But I think he may have missed something crucial to his argument. Democracy by its very nature is a very messy and often quite inefficient system. That messiness and the ensuing inefficiency is only increased in a situation such as ours which is increasingly diverse; politically, socially, religiously, financially, and racially.
The Founders understood the potential problems of this increase. One of their most serious concerns was that a Republic would be hard to maintain once it reached and then exceeded a certain size and diversity. For all their political savvy (and it was considerable at the time) theirs was, by current American standards a remarkably homogeneous society, especially in terms of those who had full citizenship rights, including, most importantly, the franchise, which was pretty much limited to white male property owners over 21, most of them Christian and Anglo-Saxon.
What authoritarians of all stripes value most is some form of order and consistency. Clean, crime free neighborhoods, a government that operates with efficiency and with necessary force to create and to sanction their perspective on what constitutes national values, laws which validate their concepts of religion and morality, and a strong military to protect all of that. They tend to be far less concerned with social, political, religious, and racial (and yes, sexual) nuances, yet those nuances are at the heart of democracy.
At this point, someone is almost sure to say, “Fine, but there have to be some sort of legal, social, moral, and religion boundaries; too much ‘democracy’ is likely to allow too much license, too much ‘relative' morality in which any kind of behavior can be tolerated. This is precisely the argument, for example, that is often leveled by conservatives against our public educational system in the name of opposition to ‘liberal indoctrination of our kids’.
I don’t deny that need, and I’m fully aware that too much tolerance of some kinds of behavior can be and often is a problem.
Every philosopher since Socrates has been consumed in the attempt to find some solid moral ground on which to define the most functional legal and the moral boundaries of human behavior. None can be said to have completely succeeded.
But perhaps the Founders did, in an entirely new way. They launched what is still the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human society and government ever attempted. When one gets through all the verbiage, they provided us with a framework within which ‘We the People’ might together find just enough of the courage, the honesty, the compassion, the tolerance, the humility, the humor, the wisdom, the hope, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up with as much equity and justice as is humanly possible.
I understand the authoritarian impulse, if only because I’ve spent my working life as an elementary school teacher, and god knows the number of times I’ve wanted to clobber some kid over the head for disrupting my vision of classroom decorum. But authoritarians have to understand that they are not just the would-be teachers, but also fully members of the class, still struggling with that old Socratic question, “How should men live?”
Two millennia later, America was designed as the ongoing experiment to answer that question, to fulfill "the great task remaining before us” and so to be ‘the last best hope of earth’.
Allowing high numbers of immigrants has resulted in right wing authoritarians winning elections. This is true not only in the US but also in Western Europe. Only Denmark has been able to avoid this sweeping authoritarianism because it has sustained very strict immigration policies. Strict immigration policies enhance the "we" of belonging to a nation.
If allowing high numbers of immigrants generally resulted in elections won by right wing authoritarians, we would have been a dictatorship long ago.
What so often gets left out of our ‘discussions’ about immigration, legal or otherwise, is that most immigrants to our shores (or borders) is that it is most often driven by the need to flee countries that are already the kinds of places of repression and corruption that Donald Trump would love to create here if he could, and is attempting to do as we write.
People in liberal countries who vote for obviously authoritarian figures in order to achieve the kind of order they believe they want often find that in doing so, they have invited the tinpot dictator in along with the order.
The number of immigrants entering the US went from approximately 20 million in 1985 to approximately 48 million in 2020 more than doubling. Fortunately in France the right wing Front National is strong but not a majority. In Germany the Afd is also strong but not a majority. Hopefully these countries will not become authoritarian.
Sally, your statement about the number of immigrants entering the US is incorrect. In 2020, there have been less than 2 million immigrants entering the US. The numbers you provided show the total immigrant population in the US, i.e. the number of foreign-born US residents.
Of course you’ve neglected to mention that Trump himself torpedoed the last bi-partisan attempt to resolve the border issue so that he could continue to use it in his campaign attacks.
It is not immigration that gets authoritarians elected. It is the short-sightedness of voters who think they are the solution rather than a long term problem.
Uncle David, like most authoritarians, is also a narcissist. If he can find his humanity, he’ll find where he belongs. If he continues to believe he’s better than everyone else, he’ll stay lost and lonely. I have empathy for all lost souls, but no sympathy for white men unwilling to grow up.
To that we may add all people of any gender, ethnicity, sex, color, etc. who refuse to grow up.
Agreed!
Uh... well... no.
This moral equivalency attempt misses the mark by a mile.
It conflates the right/conservative moral filters of Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression... with a left/liberal propensity to demand an enforced rules-based society related to their generally only moral filter of Care/Harm... and often related to their own self-interest.
The right view of rules and enforcement is to minimize them to only what is needed to support basic individual liberty, The right view is one that matches the concept of libertarian paternalism, where rules exist for those that need them, but people should be free to opt out of specified arrangements if they choose to do so as long as it does not include nor result in material harm to others.
The left view is outcome-based. It is fine with the elimination of individual liberty for some if they think it will benefit the care or harm reduction of others... generally others they see as victims or potential victims needing their advocacy.
The right view is one of system framework and guideposts where people are free to live their lives within a limited set of common and understood rules. Right leaning people believe that people in general will better figure things out themselves and make a better society than will top-down bureaucrats trying to engineer outcomes.
The left view is one of endless new top-down rules, regulations and enforcement to attempt to engineer outcomes to reduce harm or provide care... that THEY see as a priority. Left leaning people believe that people in general are stupid and incapable of making good enough decisions, and thus need to be controlled.
There is no right-side authoritarianism, except for interest in rules and enforcement to prevent left-side authoritarianism... which is the only real authoritarianism.
Authoritarian is a unique choice of words which actually may describe constitutionalists who are rooted in the moral traditions of our country.
None of the Trump supporters are technically constituionalists because they always support Trump over the constitution (e.g. birthright citizenship).
The constitution says we should have a unitary executive aka king? If you think Curtis Yarvin is constitutional in any way, you need to learn how to read.
In looking at Mark Hassan's post and the responses, I'd say he has struck a workable vein.
I really liked this piece. I'll try to keep it in mind this week.
I think you're right: I try to push people away from this tendency instead of praising people for using it well and trying to get them to change to a good use when they use it for ill. I've heard that every psych textbook and every (good) dog training book say not to try to wring permanent qualities out of someone you care about. I'll keep pushing for liberalism, but part of that means finding good places for EVERYONE to use their traits as best they can.
thanks. That is a thoughtful assessment of a fraught situation.