Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

So many bastards, so little time.

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about it’s history.”

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: Something To Think About

Open Thread: Something To Think About

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This post is in: ,

CaseyL wrote something really smart and thoughtful in a comment this week, and I think it’s important enough promote it here.

Authoritarianism attracts people who have no internal code to speak of.  People empty of anything but solipsistic appetite.

It’s a natural fit for psychopaths and sociopaths – they attain leadership positions.

It’s also a natural fit for people who feel profoundly lost and alienated – they attain community.

And, since they have no internal compass, they take on the values of that community, as promulgated by its leadership…whatever those values are at any given moment, subject to change at the whim of the leaders.

Being in an authoritarian mindset also relieves the leadership of having to “live up to” espoused values – the lower orders not only don’t expect it from them, they get a vicarious thrill seeing their adored leaders break conventional moral/ethical boundaries.  It shows how powerful their leaders are, validating their choice to follow them.

This makes perfect sense to me.  How about you?

Open thread.

Reader Interactions

218Comments

  2. 2.

    wonkie

    Authoritarianism also attracts the fake heroes, the armchair warriors, the faux outrage addicts who love to perceive themselves as heroically fighting when they aren’t actually suffering and are, in fact, enjoying their daily wallow in hate/fear propaganda. I think a lot of MAGAs are like that. How many of the attackers on Jan 6 had any real issues at stake? None. And how many expected to pay any price for their behavior? None. It is typical of Republicans who get consequences for their crimes to first be surprised and then be outraged and only when the reality sinks in to start whining. Entitlement is a core Republican value. The MAGA movement is really about people who sit smugly and securely in their living rooms watching Faux and imagining themselves as under attack and heroically fighting back–while living on socialist programs and government subsidies and enjoying what’s left of the middle class.  It’s true that MAGGOTs are mostly under educated men, but it is not true that they are the working poor. Trump’s appeal is to people who can afford to piss away their lives on the self-indulgence of hysteria over nothing.

  3. 3.

    Tim C.

    Yup.  All correct, it can self-reinforce as those who oppose the authoritarian are more like to keep their heads down and not talk about it at all out of fear.

  4. 4.

    Baud

    It’s a natural fit for psychopaths and sociopaths – they attain leadership positions.

    What am I doing here then?

  5. 5.

    RaflW

    My partner has preached on Authoritarianism (and won an award recently for one of those sermons!). He introduced me, and many congregants in several cities, to the work of U Mass doctoral candidate Matthew MacWilliams.

    MacWilliams posits that authoritarian tendencies can be searched out through a person’s attitudes towards child rearing, rather than via political party affiliation. Per WaPo:

    “With each question, respondents were asked which of two traits were more important in children:

    – Independence or respect for their elders;
    – Curiosity or good manners;
    – Self-reliance or obedience;
    – Being considerate or being well-behaved.

    Psychologists use these questions to identify people who are disposed to favor hierarchy, loyalty and strong leadership — those who picked the second trait in each set — what experts call ‘authoritarianism.’

    …When it comes to politics, authoritarians tend to prefer clarity and unity to ambiguity and difference.

    …MacWilliams checked to make sure that his questions about child-rearing were in fact predictive of authoritarian political attitudes. In the poll, respondents were also asked whether they thought that it is sometimes necessary to keep other groups in their place, whether opposition from the political minority sometimes needs to be circumscribed, and whether they think the minority’s rights must be protected from the majority’s power.

    Trump’s supporters were much more likely to oppose protections for the minority, while the other candidates’ supporters didn’t have strong opinions one way or another.”

  6. 6.

    Omnes Omnibus

    This is why someone like GEN Flynn could function and succeed in a structured environment like the army but then floundered so spectacularly once that structure was gone.

  9. 9.

    H.E.Wolf

    Thank you to CaseyL for highlighting this.

    The hunger for certainty is a perennial strand in the human temperament, found more strongly in some individuals than others… and tending to resurge (is that a word?) in societies during times of rapid change or trauma.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_personality

    University of Manitoba emeritus professor Bob Altemeyer did a lot of research on this topic, and noted two distinct types: authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders. His work used to be available online; and he had a dry sense of humor which I appreciated.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Altemeyer

  11. 11.

    Miss Bianca

    @RaflW: Well, I don’t know. I happen to think, for example, that independence *and* respect for elders are both important. I think curiosity *and* good manners are both important traits to cultivate in children.

    Probably a good thing I didn’t have any, I would have just confused them, evidently.

  14. 14.

    RaflW

    @H.E.Wolf: As our slow-roll climate emergency accelerates, I think the human desire for certainty will lead to more grave authoritarian power grabs. It may be a rough century.

    Though I do believe we can avoid some of this. It’s not pre-ordained. But we have to be clear-eyed that scarcity and the fear of scarcity is an easy tool for autocrats to pick up and run with.

    It is one of the reasons that I find climate doomism so caustic. It disempowers people from taking collective actions now, and it hands more potential power to demagogic types.

  16. 16.

    RaflW

    @Miss Bianca: @zhena gogolia: Indeed this is a not-uncommon response by more progressive types!

    And I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that for rule-bound people, your both-and is itself not tenable. We have to try to grok that the people who are Trumpy just flat our think differently.

    ie: for a lot of people, ‘good manners’ come from a nun whacking you on the hand with a ruler if you don’t follow convention (or big sky g-d will whack you, etc).

  18. 18.

    Miss Bianca

    @zhena gogolia: Yeah, some of these questions strike me as false dichotomies, but then again, as a flaming liberal/anti-authoritarian from the time I could think for myself *but* raised in a pretty strict authoritarian-parenting type of household, perhaps I see these things differently than others would.

  19. 19.

    Raoul Paste

    So much  for this performative nonsense about “freedom“.
    Didn’t the Cheshire cat say something about “words mean what I want them to mean “?

  20. 20.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Miss Bianca:  @zhena gogolia: I think that the big difference is that authoritarians prioritize the forms of good manners over the substance of consideration for others.  And that carries over to other aspects of life.

  22. 22.

    WaterGirl

    @Miss Bianca: My mom deliberately raised her 3 daughters to be independent, but I’m not sure she was altogether pleased with the results when she was successful in that.

    Be careful what you wish for!

  23. 23.

    narya

    @Miss Bianca: I had exactly the same reaction to those two; I don’t think those traits are mutually exclusive.

    I was struck by the comment when I first saw it, and I think it points to an important point. More than one person has said to me, upon finding out that I’m an atheist (and was raised that way), well, why would you ever be good/do the right thing/be moral? If you only do the right thing because you’re afraid of punishment, either in this life or some next life, then your “morals” are pretty empty.

  24. 24.

    Brachiator

    Authoritarianism attracts people who have no internal code to speak of.  People empty of anything but solipsistic appetite.

    I don’t think I agree with this. Using biblical mythology as a quick example, the Israelites had the 10 Commandments and all the laws, but after entering their new land still said to their prophets “let us have a king, so that we can be like other nations.”

    I don’t take this as history, but as a useful metaphor for how some groups voluntarily choose authoritarianism.

    I also think some people accept authority, law, etc and make it part of their internal code.

    I also think that many people don’t have much of a code at all, and will accept whatever society they live in.

  26. 26.

    BR

    Hannah Arendt wrote something similar in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

    “The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

  28. 28.

    Ruckus

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I believe that works in all levels of the military. So much that any human being needs to decide on a daily basis is removed from possibility. I’m not saying that it doesn’t need to do this – it absolutely does to function at the worst of times. But that is not true of most non military life. And it changes, as your example of General Flynn clearly shows. What I’m saying for those without military experience is that any life can require some structure to function but the military requires far more structure to function at all.

  29. 29.

    Miss Bianca

    @WaterGirl: My mother didn’t raise me to be independent, but she led by very contradictory example, shall we say. Almost all her girls turned into liberal social justice warriors, all her boys the epitome of unexamined white male GOP privilege.

    As she used to say, “All my *boys* turned out fine. My *girls*…”

    You gotta laugh till.you cry. Or cry till you laugh. Or something.

  31. 31.

    WaterGirl

    @Miss Bianca: I agree with you. I don’t see the choices as diametrically opposed.  In many cases both are good.  But if I have to choose between them?  It’s italics for me.

    – Independence or respect for their elders;
    – Curiosity or good manners;
    – Self-reliance or obedience;
    – Being considerate or being well-behaved.

    What’s interesting to me is what happens when I put the various phrases together.

    If you make me choose between these two for myself or for my children, or what we should be encouraging in schools, there’s no contest.

    Independence, curiosity, self-reliance, being considerate

    respect for elders, good manner, obedience and being well-behaved

  33. 33.

    West of the Rockies

    I think it’s weird that Trump’s supporters accept from him behavior they presumably would not accept from their children, colleagues, neighbors, brothers-in-law, etc.  To me, it’s a rather confounding thing.

  34. 34.

    Miss Bianca

    @Omnes Omnibus: Let’s just say…I know what the correct fork *is*. And, if pressed, where to place it in a setting. Hey, my momma raised me *right*! (With the accent on the “right”!)

  36. 36.

    Brachiator

    The newly elected leader of Argentina, Milei, describes himself as an “anarcho-capitalist,” and yet espouses all kinds of 19th century views about society and is against abortion. These people claim to love freedom and minimal regulations, and yet espouse authoritarianism in order to”save the state” from liberal or socialist elites.

    Argentina has massive economic problems, but the impulse to control the population, especially women, is a huge non sequitur. And yet voters bought into a big chunk of this nonsense.

  37. 37.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @Miss Bianca: and what are you doing there [ETA with your elbows] under the table?  [Don’t answer that.]

    @Baud: What am I doing here then?

    The Cheshire Cat’s reply:

    “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
    “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
    “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
    “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

  39. 39.

    Miss Bianca

    @WaterGirl: The way I see it, when you put it like that, is that if *parents* taught the non-italicized values, so that schools were expected and encouraged – and therefore, *free* – to teach the italicized ones, then, in the words of the old Sam Cook song, “what a wonderful world this would be.”.

  40. 40.

    Ruckus

    @WaterGirl:

    My sisters were taught to be tougher because that was what mom had experienced as the oldest of 5 and having to help her mom feed and raise the other kids when her father died at a young age. One of them went on to take that need to be tougher to heart and the other one had to join a weird religion to take that need away. Guess which one was more successful as an independent person. Guess which one mom gave more grief to.

  42. 42.

    AM in NC

    @RaflW:  Very interesting.  I was reading an article about Christianist homeschooling in the WAPO today, and I kept thinking, these people are authoritarians who are raising their children to be authoritarians. EVERYONE knows their place in the hierarchy; that hierarchy is enforced through violence and surveillance; and nobody challenges the head.

    They profiled two parents who broke with their families to send their kids to public school. They were raised in strict, fundamentalist Christian homes and were homeschooled themselves, and from their perspective, the way they were kept in the fold was to be locked away and never have contact with anyone outside the bubble.  They were traumatized by the violence they thought was normal and were initially shocked to learn everything they’d been taught was basically BS.

    They were raised in an authoritarian cult. And Christianist homeschooling is on the rise all over America so that their kids/property never have to be exposed to anything outside the cult.

    Republicans are simultaneously going full out on removing ANY AND ALL oversight of these “homeschools” – either to make sure the kids are actually learning anything or to do basic welfare checks on kids cloistered away.   Plus passing laws to give tax dollars to homeschoolers instead of supporting public education. This is bleeding public schools dry in many rural areas.

    Republicans want us ignorant, controllable, and under the thumb of a rightwing, white-supremacist, Christian Nationalist regime.  Destroying public schools is a good way to get us there.

  43. 43.

    Mike in Pasadena

    CaseyL’s summary seems well-reasoned and unusual in its clarity when writing about authoritarianism.

  44. 44.

    WaterGirl

    @Miss Bianca: That’s very telling.

    Sounds like maybe the boys got unearned privilege, just because they were boys, and they expect it.

    The girls saw injustice and they could see that it was wrong, and they wanted to do something about it.

    Smart and passionate girls unite!

  46. 46.

    wjca

    @wonkie:  It is typical of Republicans who get consequences for their crimes to first be surprised and then be outraged and only when the reality sinks in to start whining. Entitlement is a core Republican value.

    The first two (surprise and the outrage) sound exactly like Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings.  Too bad he dodged the reality check.

  49. 49.

    WaterGirl

    @AM in NC:

    I kept thinking, these people are authoritarians who are raising their children to be authoritarians.

    Either that, or, more likely, they are teaching their children to follow authoritarians.  A few of them will rebel against authoritarianism, but not enough of them will

    edit: Now I’ll go back and read beyond your first couple of sentences.

    edit 2: Yes, to everything you wrote.

  50. 50.

    Miss Bianca

    @AM in NC: I wonder if I read the same or similar article. Sobering to.me personally, as there is a lot of (presumably Christianist) homeschooling going on in my county. Even the authoritarian Christianist Board of Education hereabouts is worried about that trend.

  51. 51.

    way2blue

    Very succinct and insightful—as I struggle to understand why friends I’ve know since high school vote for Trump.  Which of Trump’s many ‘unique qualities’ resonate with them?  I think a big part of the equation is that my friends’ information stream is extremely attenuated.  And perhaps they lack basic curiosity about the wider world.

    I know we like to bash Musk (with good reason), but I attended a keynote interview he gave in the before times, and the final question was—what advice would he give to students (this was at a large geophysical conference in San Francisco).  His answer was—to learn how to separate ‘signal & noise’ as there is an overwhelming flood of information pounding us all.  Decent answer I thought at the time.

  53. 53.

    wjca

    @narya: More than one person has said to me, upon finding out that I’m an atheist (and was raised that way), well, why would you ever be good/do the right thing/be moral? If you only do the right thing because you’re afraid of punishment, either in this life or some next life, then your “morals” are pretty empty. 

    I have a somewhat similar reaction when people start trashing sociopaths as a class.

    Certainly a lot of sociopaths fit the stereotype.  But it is entirely possible to be a decent person, and considerate of others, while essentially lacking empathy.  (That is, putting oneself in others’ shoes is useless because one’s reactions are simply different.)  But competent parents can produce a decent human being, even if he lacks any sense of what others’ feelings are like.  It’s just a matter of knowing how others will react emotionally, without feeling those emotions oneself.

  55. 55.

    Ruckus

    @Brachiator:

    I believe that when a society as a whole is having a lot of human problems one of the first remedies considered is authoritarianism. Because while it brings a huge amount of problems that can take decades to overcome, it can, at least to a minimal extent give structure. Of course that huge amount of problems ends up in the long run being worse for the entire structure.

    It’s humans. Humans have a range of issues and many of the solutions over the ages have proven to be ineffective at anything more than creating an entire set of different problems.

  58. 58.

    Ruckus

    @Brachiator:

    I believe that when a society as a whole is having a lot of human problems one of the first remedies considered is authoritarianism.

    Because while it brings a huge amount of problems that can take decades to overcome, it can, at least to a minimal extent give structure. Of course that huge amount of problems ends up in the long run being worse for the entire structure.

    Humans have a range of issues and many of the solutions over the ages have proven to be ineffective at anything more than creating an entire set of different problems.

  60. 60.

    bbleh

    Ok I’m a bleeding-heart, but I think another very important indicator for authoritarianism is fear.  I think people who are scared — scared of difference, of complexity, &/or of ambiguity — are prone to authoritarianism precisely because it provides an antidote to those things.  It provides and enforces sameness (of thought, behavior, and identity), simplicity, and certainty.  It’s no mystery to me that contemporary American evangelism — which is much less Christian than Christianist, and which is saturated with authoritarianism and even cultism — appeals to the same people as Republican / Trumpist politics.  And while I agree that a lot of its leaders are sociopaths and even psychopaths, and a lot of its followers lack much if any moral code and are motivated more by a will to power, I think a lot of them also DO have something of a moral code, and they MIGHT object to some of the behaviors and requirements of the group, but they’re too damn scared of the big wide complicated world and they’re too afraid of being excluded from the nice safe group.

  61. 61.

    RaflW

    @AM in NC: “hierarchy is enforced through violence and surveillance” Yeah, that’s pretty much the deal they make with G-d, too. He’s made it clear (well, people who wrote books made it clear that they think) that he’s a violent s.o.b. who sees everything all the time.

  62. 62.

    Ruckus

    First it didn’t show up, now it shows up twice.

    I think I’ll go back to bed, even if it is getting on towards lunch….

  65. 65.

    Betsy

    It’s probably all because of suburban sprawl. Loss of community, age and income segregation, all free time spent driving or being driven, no societal places, only commodified activities and places.

    Eat chips and slurp drinks standing up or on the go and buy sports memorabilia and hate your job and watch screens – put a disney vacation in the credit card then teach your kiddos to do the same

  66. 66.

    schrodingers_cat

    It is the fear and anxiety of loss of privilege that drives many. It is also easy to blame others for your problems than to introspect

    The Republican party has been a party of white privilege for a long time and now it has morphed into a party of outright racism..

  67. 67.

    Fraud Guy

    No wonder why they constantly point to external sources of punishment as brakes on behaviour; they have no internal ones that would stop them.

  68. 68.

    wjca

    I think that where authoritarian follows are coming from is simply that they are very uncomfortable with change.  Any change — doesn’t matter if it helps them or hurts them; if it’s change, they’re against it.  And they feel, probably correctly, that authoritarianism is the only thing that has even a remote chance of stopping changes.

    That dislike of change is IMHO a factor in the nostalgia for the 1950s.  They were mostly too young (or not born yet) to notice how much change was actually happening.  Plus, since then the pace of change has accelerated.  And they need, not just want but need, less of it.

    That dislike of change is also why they tend to embrace changes which benefit them . . . after a decade or two to get accustomed to it.  See “Government hands off my Medicare!” or the greatly increased acceptance of Obamacare (if not the name) a decade on — those are now things which they don’t want to change.  It may also be, for at least some, a reason to object to Dobbs: it’s another change to their world.

    EDT Complexity, per se, doesn’t bother them.  Even lack of structure doesn’t bother them.  It’s change.

  69. 69.

    AM in NC

    @West of the Rockies:  And the even more horrific one about the 11 year old abused and killed by his home-schooling parents. I went down a bit of a “homeschooling stories in the WAPO” rabbit hole after reading that one.  Really glad they have a reporter on the homeschooling beat. It is genuinely a terrifying thing that is happening.

  70. 70.

    Betty Cracker

    A friend of my sister’s whom I’ve known since middle school joined a cult in college. After that blew up, over the years, I’ve seen her find new tribes where someone tells her what to think. Thankfully those groups have proven less exploitative than the original cult.

    Ginny Thomas had a similar but less benign trajectory. She left a cult and became a movement conservative. Like my sister’s old friend, she’s an enthusiastic team member but maybe not strong enough to think for herself.

    IMO, the decline of religion in the U.S. has been a net positive, but maybe it set a lot of weak-minded people adrift, and perhaps that partly explains how a foul moron like Trump has managed to create a cult of personality that numbers in the millions.

  71. 71.

    Brachiator

    @Ruckus:

    I believe that when a society as a whole is having a lot of human problems one of the first remedies considered is authoritarianism.

    But aren’t authoritarians opportunists?

    A society may not be having huge problems, but authoritarians always offer simple solutions.

    In the US and the UK, conservatives are blaming a host of problems on immigration, even though this is a big lie. And even more in the UK than here a servile right wing press lies about the real problems.

    And here we have right wing zealots who love to control people. They believe that if you stifle women, persecute gays and transgender people, and have children pray to baby Jesus in public schools, all will be right with the world.

  72. 72.

    West of the Rockies

    @AM in NC:

    Oh, that’s the one I read.  The mom slowly poisoned her step-son with salt.  15-to life… i hope she never sees the light of day.

  73. 73.

    Geminid

    @Omnes Omnibus: Also, while in the Army Michael Flynn was an efficient intelligence officer when he worked for General McCrystal, who was a strong leader. But then Flynn was given an independent command, of the Defense Intelligence Agency. It did not take Flynn long to piss off everyone who worked with him, so he got the hook.

  74. 74.

    Brachiator

    @Ruckus:

    I think I’ll go back to bed, even if it is getting on towards lunch….

    I had a similar idea. Unfortunately, I have to go out and run some errands.

  79. 79.

    Ruckus

    @WaterGirl:

    It didn’t show up for me at all. Then when I finished it and posted it, after checking twice to see if it was there and now it’s there twice. In the original that I didn’t post and the revised that I did post.

    So I have no idea what happened. Maybe it’s old fartitus, maybe it’s the phase of the moon, maybe it’s witchcraft, maybe it’s BJ, maybe it Safari. Maybe it’s all of the above….

  81. 81.

    Chris

    I mean, if nothing else, you see this in the popularity of far-right politics in places that used to be communist.  (And probably for that matter the rise of communism in places that used to be reactionary autocracies).

    And in the seemingly universal affinity between police forces and far-right movements.

    And in the ease with which police forces, also near-universally, are comfortable coming to arrangements with crime syndicates but absolutely lose their shit at the sight of political protesters.

  82. 82.

    trollhattan

    @Miss Bianca: ​
    Two things I promised my young self to never do as practiced by my parents: spanking and smoking.

    Glad to say I’m two for two on those. TBF they made we kids promise not to smoke.

  83. 83.

    Brachiator

    @Betty Cracker:

    A friend of my sister’s whom I’ve known since middle school joined a cult in college. After that blew up, over the years, I’ve seen her find new tribes where someone tells her what to think.

    When I was an ignorant youth, I used to think that religion made people narrow minded and rigid.

    Later, I came to realize that some people embrace conservative religion or other rigid belief systems because they want, as you note, someone to tell them what to think.

    IMO, the decline of religion in the U.S. has been a net positive, but maybe it set a lot of weak-minded people adrift, and perhaps that partly explains how a foul moron like Trump has managed to create a cult of personality that numbers in the millions.

    And yet, the decline of religion may have led to the rise of other extremist groups, because the urge to control and to be controlled is a human flaw.

    Here in Southern California, many of the MAGA crowd I have run across are not deeply or conventionally religious. But they see Trump as getting revenge for them against… something. Who knows what. And they love that he promises to hurt the people they don’t like.

  84. 84.

    trollhattan

    @Betty Cracker: I’ve long believed some folks are innately joiners, with a strong desire to belong and little capacity to filter out places to NOT join. And my god, the list of traps is so very long.

  85. 85.

    Suzanne

    It also attracts people who are losers. Not successful in their endeavors, and especially people who are unsuccessful relative to their peers’ expectations. They gain status from aligning themselves with authoritarian structures.

  86. 86.

    Ruckus

    @wjca:

    That dislike of change is IMHO a factor in the nostalgia for the 1950s

    As you state that change started then but has greatly accelerated in I’d say the last 3, possibly last 4 decades. TV and radio accelerated a lot of change because it allowed more and more people to see that change was possible and considering the starting point, very necessary. I believe the war of my generation – Vietnam and TV is what really accelerated the change. The communications that became possible in the 50s-80s really changed what people could see and understand and broke down barriers. The internet enhanced that change dramatically. Look at what we are doing here on this one site. Most of us have never met in person and likely never will. But we can communicate to a far, far, far wider audience than was even thought possible 40-50 yrs ago. It changes the look of  racism and selfish limitations based upon gender. Both of which, while not gone are lessened. We discuss things as humans. Many of us have not exposed our gender so that doesn’t as often enter into communications unless we want it to. Most of us likely don’t know the gender of those we are communicating with unless we want it to be known, and we’ve found out, even if we don’t realize it, that it doesn’t matter. Sure we are sometimes going to come at an issue based upon gender but that doesn’t disrupt the actual point and communication.

    This world is still made up of animals, minerals and plants. We can see and experience dramatically more of it dramatically easier and faster. We can communicate from most anywhere in the world both verbally and visually at a rather cheap cost. We can see/read about breaking news moments after it happens, or before, not weeks/months/years later.

    This is a far different world than when I was born, and much of it is actually better. And yes some of it isn’t.

  87. 87.

    Brachiator

    @RaflW:

    …MacWilliams checked to make sure that his questions about child-rearing were in fact predictive of authoritarian political attitudes. In the poll, respondents were also asked whether they thought that it is sometimes necessary to keep other groups in their place, whether opposition from the political minority sometimes needs to be circumscribed, and whether they think the minority’s rights must be protected from the majority’s power.

    I can understand and agree with some of the analysis with respect to child rearing, but this seems to kind of stack the deck.

    That is, what makes these people see “the minority” as the Other, as opposed to part of their own group?

  88. 88.

    Betty Cracker

    @Brachiator: & @trollhattan: It’s interesting that evangelicals were resistant to Trump at first but then became some of his most enthusiastic supporters. Mormons were skeptical and remain so, but they voted for him. That might signify something about the strength of their respective communities.

  89. 89.

    Ruckus

    @Brachiator:

    I don’t disagree with you at all.

    Humans come in many types and levels of comprehension. On thing breaking that down is communication, like we are doing now. And I believe that there are some that will always want authoritarianism, even if they are on the receiving side. And change on the level that we are seeing takes a very long time, generations of time. But I see it as happening. Will it end up positive? It sure is possible. But then we are discussing humans, and some will always throw a wrench into the works, if for no other reason than to see it break.

  90. 90.

    R'Chard

    I have never seen it wrapped up so neatly and precisely. Could be the best piece of writing I’ve seen all year.

  91. 91.

    Chris

    Authoritarianism attracts people who have no internal code to speak of.  People empty of anything but solipsistic appetite.

    Dorothy Thompson’s “Who Goes Nazi” article had similar things to say.

    I really started believing this in  the Trump years, mostly from watching what happened to two friends, one Ron Paul supporting non-voter with weird and idiosyncratic beliefs who went Democrat in 2020, the other an ordinary Democratic voter who went non-partisan, then fell down the anti-anti-Trump rabbit hole, and then, while I’d cut her off before that, I’m positive voted Trump in 2020.

    Two differences that really stood out;

    One, the Ron Paul guy… to put it crudely, just wasn’t an asshole.  He was always a generally nice and friendly person by nature.  He also did always have a basic core of community-mindedness, not one that translated to liberal politics, but at least the basic “be kind to other people” “be your brother’s keeper” thing.  He wouldn’t vote for universal health care, but he’d always be there to help his neighbors, church, friends, and general community whenever they needed help with something.  The ex-Democrat… despite putting in ten years in the Navy, I never really got any sense of public-mindedness from her.  And while this wasn’t all there was to her, she always had a really strong streak of self-righteousness and a strong streak of Internet troll.  Which could be hilarious at times, but the fact remains.

    Two, and related to the above: one of them was Extremely Online, the other really really wasn’t.  Three guesses which was which, and the first two don’t count.  The former Ron Paul guy used to be on social media, but sometime in the 2010s got pretty turned off by the online discourse and cut himself off from it altogether for the sake of his own mental health.  The ex-Democrat… well, this was her literal self-description: “I meme and know things.”  You know the “someone on the Internet is WRONG” guy from XKCD?  That was here.  And the more the 2010s went on, the longer, angrier, and more self-righteous her rants got.  Blaming the Internet for Trump voters is going too far, but there’s no denying that it’s a great reflector and amplifier of your basic personality.  If things like Musk-era Twitter, Trump-era Twitter, and their predecessors gross you out, you’ll probably drop out altogether.  If they appeal to you, though, they’re going to end up consuming your entire life.

    So, yeah.  If you’ve got some values and sense of ordinary decency that outweighs your sense of grievance and your inner narcissist, chances are good that you won’t turn into a brownshirt.  If, on the other hand, these things are outweighed by the grievance narcissist?  You’re most of the way there.  And the Internet has been great at amplifying these traits.  (We all have an inner narcissist; but some people’s inner narcissists get fed a lot more than others).

  92. 92.

    Salty Sam

    @Baud:  What if you support sexual freedom but draw a line at elbows on the table?

    Yours or your sexual partner’s?

  93. 93.

    Ruckus

    @Chris:

    Police are trained and that training is often reenforced to maintain the status quo. When the change nudges or beats the status quo silly, the police are always going to try to stop it, even if the status quo is complete and utter bullshit. If society is going to change, and in my opinion it does need to in many ways, the police have to be trained and motivated to change as well. And they have over my lifetime. But that change will always be behind any change in society, it’s the structure of the job.

  94. 94.

    taumaturgo

    We are bamboozled by biases, fooled by fallacies, entrapped by errors, hoodwinked by heuristics, deluded by illusions.” Koen Smets

    This applies to all of us. Very few have the ability to be mindful when the mind is grasped by a bias or fallacies, most of us by genetic design will fight to defend our beliefs which with time become part of who we are. Ideologies become part of our essence, whether we acknowledge it or not. This is a reason why facts are not enough to change a person’s mind, since it will be tantamount to stripping a chunk of their personality.

  95. 95.

    Martin

    I would also argue that a lot of people that have delegated their own moral code to a religious figure fall into this category – the ‘how do you act morally if you’re an atheist’ folks.

  97. 97.

    WaterGirl

    @Betty Cracker: When you say that might signify something about the strength of the communities. Do you mean lack of strength, since they seemingly tossed their values out the door and followed him or at leave voted for him?  Or maybe you mean something different?

  98. 98.

    Redshift

    @wonkie:

    The MAGA movement is really about people who sit smugly and securely in their living rooms watching Faux and imagining themselves as under attack and heroically fighting back–while living on socialist programs and government subsidies and enjoying what’s left of the middle class.

    After J6, I read some discussion about the idea that part of what drives people to get involved with something like that is that once a society is successful at taking care of peoples’ needs (at least the better-off ones, in this country), there’s a need to feel like you’re a part of something big. And because of this, modern liberal democracies inherently contain potential seeds of their own destruction. That’s why it’s not the people who are actually struggling who do this.

    I don’t know how true it is, but it seems plausible, and also fits the very online leftists who disdain progress by Democrats because only a revolution will fix things, and also Musk fanbois who feel like they’re part of the great project to colonize Mars.

  99. 99.

    Chris

    @Redshift:

    After J6, I read some discussion about the idea that part of what drives people to get involved with something like that is that once a society is successful at taking care of peoples’ needs (at least the better-off ones, in this country), there’s a need to feel like you’re a part of something big. And because of this, modern liberal democracies inherently contain potential seeds of their own destruction. That’s why it’s not the people who are actually struggling who do this.

    George Orwell had this whole paragraph about how people like Hitler and Stalin understood that people wanted more than just the material satisfaction that social-democracy or liberalism offered them, they also wanted the meaning that they found in blood and struggle.

    Which isn’t wrong, but to me it’s like… liberalism and social-democracy aren’t trying to satisfy that part of the equation, because the whole point of individual freedom is that you make your own meaning.  You can always embrace a grand political cause if that’s what you want; there’s never any shortage of these.  Or your meaning could be excelling at your job, or just being a homemaker, or whatever.  The state owes you a lot of things, but a sense of purpose isn’t one of them.

  100. 100.

    Anoniminous

    @taumaturgo:

    It’s possible to learn Critical Thinking Skills either ‘on the cheap’ at a Community College or ‘on the cheaper’ by buying a book and then reading it.  Have to want to learn, tho’, and that’s where most people fall on their butt.

  101. 101.

    Ruckus

    @Chris:

    We all have an inner narcissist; but some people’s inner narcissists get fed a lot more than others

    That inner narcissist is what’s known as survival. One has to be a touch self centered to survive. That doesn’t mean that survival takes complete narcissism, it means that to survive one has to think of themselves at least somewhat, you can’t help others if you are dead. Unless of course you are a dictator, or jump off a building to brake a child’s fall. But you won’t/can’t help others if utter narcissism is your guiding premise. Like a lot in life compromise from extremes is necessary.

  102. 102.

    CaseyL

    Hey, and wow.  WG let me know she had front-paged my comment, and I feel a little verklempt.  I am so happy to see it kicked off a good discussion, too!

    Authoritarianism is very much linked to cultism.  I don’t know of too many authoritarian societies that weren’t and aren’t also personalty cults.  It was fascinating (in a horrified sort of way) seeing how quickly and completely North Koreans transferred their fervent emotional attachment from Kim Jung Il to Kim Jung Ung.

    @Baud:

    What am I doing here then?

    …slumming?

  104. 104.

    Martin

    @Brachiator:

    Here in Southern California, many of the MAGA crowd I have run across are not deeply or conventionally religious. But they see Trump as getting revenge for them against… something. Who knows what. And they love that he promises to hurt the people they don’t like.

    Yeah, but I think there’s a category of people that aren’t deeply or conventionally religious that are deeply invested in the cultural status quo which is strongly shaped by white Christianity.

    My mom hasn’t attended a church service since she was a kid, and  to talk to her you’d never consider her to be religious but she was incredibly upset that I didn’t believe in God. Like, it took a good year to get back on good terms over that. She’s terrified of a more secular society, of minorities in more positions of power, of having more cultural influence, etc. So she fully team WASP and wants it to stay that way, and to her, a strongman is safer than Obama.

    And I _think_ I’ve walked her back from that line, but I’m honestly not sure. She’s 75 and she’s been marinating in white grievance pretty much her whole life.

    So, there may also be a generational element to this. She remembers Goldwater’s campaign well. And Nixon’s. And Reagan’s welfare queens make regular appearances in our discussions. And my generation of voters doesn’t have that in the same way. Reagan, yeah, but not Nixon/Goldwater.

  105. 105.

    Marc

    @Ruckus:  In my lifetime it has always been the party of racism. Possibly it is just being more vocal now.

    I’m just old enough (69) to remember when the Democrats were the party of racism.

  106. 106.

    Brachiator

    @CaseyL:

    Hey, and wow.  WG let me know she had front-paged my comment, and I feel a little verklempt.  I am so happy to see it kicked off a good discussion, too!

    It was a great starting point. You deserve to take a bow.

    It was fascinating (in a horrified sort of way) seeing how quickly and completely North Koreans transferred their fervent emotional attachment from Kim Jung Il to Kim Jung Ung.

    But this is part of their system. Devotion to the Dear Leader is mandatory. And even failure to be sufficiently worshipful can bring severe punishment.

  107. 107.

    wjca

    @Marc: I’m just old enough (69) to remember when the Democrats were the party of racism.

    Likewise.  But it was (most prominently) Southern Democrats, aka Dixiecrats.

  108. 108.

    smith

    @Anoniminous: It’s possible to learn Critical Thinking Skills

    One thing that has surprised me about the ongoing saga of the prosecution of TFG is the paucity of incisive thought in the motions his lawyers bring.

    Maybe I’m expecting too much, but I would have hoped that people who managed to pass the bar would have more sophisticated takes than “If you commit a crime by talking, you can’t be prosecuted because First Amendment,” or, “Running for office makes you immune from prosecution because anything else is election interference.” These are the kinds of arguments that might make sense to his cultists, but can they really imagine they would convince a judge? Even the Dirty Six on SCOTUS? I suppose they may be true believers themselves — certainly some of TFG’s lawyers now under indictment are — but it’s hard to square their deficiency in critical thinking with the ability to make a living arguing before a judge.

  111. 111.

    Martin

    @Ruckus: Trump’s narcissism has been explained to me as their internal sense of self-worth being so busted that they have to fabricate a new persona and seek external validation for that persona because they’re unable to do it themselves.

    Most people can balance that internally but Trump can’t. He needs the crowds, the reviews, the adulation – like literally to survive. And he’ll say anything in that moment to get it, even if that undercuts his ability to get it in the future. But there’s a segment of the public that too much loves someone who will tell them whatever they want to hear in exchange for some claps and red hat sales. So there’s this symbiotic relationship at work.

    And this is why I think if you throw the guy in prison, that cycle will break. DeSantis may be inclined to say the same things when campaigning, but he doesn’t have the same dependency on the audience so it probably won’t function like Trumps thing does. At least, that’s how I understand it.

  112. 112.

    Redshift

    Something I’ve been pondering a lot lately is community, and how modern movement conservatism is anti-community (no matter how they preen about small town values and church.)

    It’s about unrestrained capitalism where money is the only measure of value, and you should only care about how well you’re doing no matter how much it screws other people. It’s about defining “being a man” as being completely self-sufficient, denying that even your family is part of your success, much less any government program or service.

    I think that helps create authoritarians. I don’t necessarily think that was deliberate (because I don’t think oligarchs are that smart), but I do think it’s a factor.

    But it is making people miserable, because we’re evolved to be social creatures, and pure individualism is just harmful. I read about longitudinal research on teenage boys, and how many of them are unhappy because they would like to have close friends, and they don’t have any. And a big part of the reason is they’ve learned this form of masculinity in their teenage years. And also that it’s an American thing, which we’re now exporting through our cultural power, even though it makes people’s lives worse.

    It makes me want to figure out a way to counter this, though I don’t know how. Conservatives will fight it tooth and nail, of course, but maybe it can be another thing that the next generation embraces even though their parents hate it.

  113. 113.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Martin: My Dad is like this.  Long time, Buckley-worshipping Republican, loved St. Ronnie and hated Obama.  Trump made him ditch the GOP but he would still never in a million years admit Dems are right about anything, let alone vote for them.  Says he believes in God, which was a surprise to me since he hasn’t been to a church more than a dozen times in his adult life (as far as I know) but conveniently agrees with the Xtian Right on just about everything.  I suspect that he really loves White Supremacy (but won’t admit it) because of the position it’s given him, and that’s really as deep as it gets.

  114. 114.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @smith: … the kinds of arguments that might make sense to his cultists, but can they really imagine they would convince a judge?

    It amazes me too. To some extent Trump is scraping the bottom of the barrel for lawyers these days. “Not everyone graduated in the top half of the class.” Still, there are some with what appear to be good credentials, Chris Kise for example. He had the good sense to demand payment up front.

  115. 115.

    Torrey

    I think the following counts as a confession re the points made above about authoritarians, except that Andrew Sullivan ascribes the characteristics to conservatives in general. The Conservative Soul begins with the claim, “All conservatism begins with loss,” and Sullivan then proceeds, in the rest of the book, to make the point that it’s really the fear of loss. He more or less comes out and makes the point that several people have made here, when he says, “Adults face this”–by which he means the apparently terror-inducing feeling that things change–“first of all as they try to bring up children. They look around them in the twenty-first century and they increasingly see no stable cultural authorities to tell them what virtues to instill in the next generation.”

  116. 116.

    Brachiator

    @Martin:

    Yeah, but I think there’s a category of people that aren’t deeply or conventionally religious that are deeply invested in the cultural status quo which is strongly shaped by white Christianity.

    I agree with you on the white part, but not so much on the Christianity. American Christianity is loosely goosey. At times, obviously, bigots didn’t see Catholics as real Christians. This may be why some right wing zealots settle on “Western Values” instead of religion as part of their supposed American values.

    I worked in an office building with some stereotypical Orange County conservatives who were into Trump early on. They would often articulate a fear that Democrats would let undeserving minorities come into their neighborhoods and take their stuff. Their values as hard working Americans set them apart from the rabble. But this sense of their own entitlement didn’t have much of a religious component.

    But I do know some people who appear to believe that God will reward America if Trump gets elected.

  118. 118.

    Redshift

    @smith: One thing to remember is that for most of these cases, if it was a normal client they would have sought a plea bargain way before this, and never would have gone to trial. But you can’t do that unless the client agrees, and he won’t. So they don’t really have winning arguments, and many of the less ludicrous arguments probably require him to accept things that he refuses to.

    The other is that he is may not expect to win in court (though he probably tells himself it’s because he’s being persecuted, not because it’s a legitimate charge), and is purely using it as part of his campaign because the only way to survive it is to get elected and make it go away. So whatever riles up his base is what he demands.

    The third is that good lawyers won’t work for him because he doesn’t pay and he’s guilty as sin, so he only gets lawyers who are looking for a wingnut career.

  119. 119.

    Marc

    @wjca: Likewise.  But it was (most prominently) Southern Democrats, aka Dixiecrats.

    Having grown up black in the Boston area, I’ll say that the Northern Democrats were often just as racist, just quieter about it than the Dixiecrats.  Odd little factoids from my extended family: Franklin Roosevelt was considered racist, whereas Eleanor Roosevelt was the committed anti-racist.  And that JFK fellow was viewed initially with a lot of skepticism, as his father was very well known to be racist.

  122. 122.

    narya

    @Torrey:

    They look around them in the twenty-first century and they increasingly see no stable cultural authorities to tell them what virtues to instill in the next generation.

    To which I say: first, take the golden rule SERIOUSLY, truly consider it. Second, be kind. Those two things will get you very far.

  123. 123.

    RevRick

    I don’t quite agree with CaseyL’s assertion that authoritarianism attracts people with no moral code. I say they have one, but it’s sick and sickening.
    I’m thinking particularly about the last century’s fascisms, and the one that threatens to overtake us.

    Mussolini boasted that he would Make Italy Great Again ( the bundled fasces being a symbol of Rome).

    Hitler growled that he would Make Germany Great Again .

    The Japanese militarists snapped that they would Make Japan Great Again.

    There’s a common thread running through them.

    First, the obvious one of harkening back to some time of glory. We once were, but something went awry. But underneath that claim of past glory is an assertion of racial/ethnic superiority. That top-dog position is our due. We are destined to master others, inferior to us. This is often attached to some sort of obsession with purity of blood.
    Second, behind this there’s the claim that nefarious forces, both within and without, have hindered, blocked, sabotaged this greatness. With Mussolini and the Japanese militarists, it was the betrayal by the victorious Big Three Allied Powers after WW1, along with the weak democratic regimes which allowed it. With Hitler, it was the Stab-in-the-Back by Jews and Socialists, which allowed the Allies to win, the Allies who have stolen German lands of the Saar and Rhineland and handed huge chunks to those Poles and imposed unjust reparations.

    We are prone to all this garbage, because we’re heirs to the Western European notion of white supremacy. Our history is rife with the evidence: The Trail of Tears. Slavery and Jim Crow. The Mexican War.
    Far from being a solipsistic indulgence of egoistic desires, MAGA is a celebration of past racial group brutality as serving some higher good. It is the abolition/submergence of self into a super identity.
    Perhaps Casey and I are talking past each other.

  125. 125.

    smith

    @Torrey: they increasingly see no stable cultural authorities to tell them what virtues to instill in the next generation.

    As a liberal atheist who has raised children, I have to ask: Why is an external authority essential? Isn’t that the same thing as was discussed above, where people have to have an angry sky-daddy to keep them in line, rather than developing their own inner moral compass?

    Of course, there are commonly-agreed community standards — and they have not disappeared, since we still mostly agree that it’s not nice to kill, injure, or cheat other people, regardless of how well those standards are observed in practice.  Maybe he’s referring to that sort of authority, but it could also be that he has taken as his default modern human a RW authoritarian who feels lost without the sky-daddy or the equivalent.

  126. 126.

    wjca

    @Mr. Bemused Senior: To some extent Trump is scraping the bottom of the barrel for lawyers these days. “Not everyone graduated in the top half of the class.”

    Another factor may be that there simply aren’t any better defenses available.  A first year law student would (at least should) know they won’t fly.  But combine a lack of anything better with a client who persists in shooting himself in the foot as publicly as possible.  What’s to do?  (Except, as noted, charge all the mark(et) will bear and insist on being paid in advance.

  128. 128.

    Redshift

    @Chris:

    Which isn’t wrong, but to me it’s like… liberalism and social-democracy aren’t trying to satisfy that part of the equation, because the whole point of individual freedom is that you make your own meaning.  You can always embrace a grand political cause if that’s what you want; there’s never any shortage of these.  Or your meaning could be excelling at your job, or just being a homemaker, or whatever.  The state owes you a lot of things, but a sense of purpose isn’t one of them.

    Yeah, I’m not necessarily arguing that it’s something the state should be doing, more that it could be something that other organizations could be doing more effectively. Making what they’re doing a grand cause that gives a sense of purpose, rather than something good to support if you’re a good person. It does exist to some extent, but maybe not enough.

    Like the climate change fight, for example. There are plenty of young people who (correctly) see that as their great cause, but for most of the rest, dealing with it is a chore, and something that we’re worried will make our lives less pleasant or more expensive (even where that’s not true.) I don’t know how to make it a Great Purpose, but it seems like the more we can offer people projects that are positive and give a sense of purpose, the less likely they are to get caught up in ones that are destructive both to themselves and the world.

  130. 130.

    Ruckus

    @Marc:

    I’m older than you and I believe that depends on where you live. In CA, where I was born and live it was republicans who were at least the most obviously racist. But this was a racist country for a very long time after it was created. And I’d agree that it was really both sides of the political arena but where I grew up and have lived most of my life it was republicans that were more racist. And I think we have to remember that racism was far more dominate 75 yrs ago in every single part of this country. So I wouldn’t doubt that in some areas both or one or the other could be seen as the most racist.

    But in this day and age the conservatives seem to be the party that really want to conserve all the bad aspects of history, including racism.

  131. 131.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, … DSquared on Substack:

    […]

    If you’re ever in my ancestral neck of the woods, one of the things you might visit when it’s raining (the words “when it’s raining” might be considered unnecessary in context) is the National Slate Museum. One of the things I learned when I went there last was that the decline and demise of the Welsh slate industry was hastened in many cases by a somewhat curious industrial problem.

    Some of the quarries closed not because they were worked out, or because they couldn’t produce at the prevailing world price, but due to the placement of past spoil heaps.

    In general, the annoying tendency of physical objects to exclude other physical objects from occupying the same space at the same time is surprisingly difficult to plan for. (There’s a passage in my Brompton book where the company has to shut down operations in order to deal with the fact that some containers of parts have needed to be brought in from the yard because it was raining, and this is causing chaos on the factory floor). But the spoil heaps of Dinorwic seem like such a special example to me.

    At the very start of a quarry operation, it must seem like it hardly matters what you do with the waste material; the site is wide open and there isn’t enough spoil to interfere with anything. As time goes on, the heaps get more noticeable and have to be worked around; they start becoming the objects of planning and thought. Then a while after that, they have become bigger and more obtrusive, and they’re increasingly an important constraint on the business. Finally, you reach the point at which you have to accept that you have huge mountains of unstable rock, which can collapse without warning if blasting work is carried out nearby and which can’t be moved; however much valuable slate remains to be extracted, the whole quarry is now too dangerous to operate.

    The problem here is that optimal planning of the spoil heaps requires almost complete knowledge of how the quarry is going to operate from start to finish, which isn’t something that you can necessarily know at the beginning. (As the joke goes, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself”). There might be better or worse ways to guess where you ought to put the spoil heaps, but once you’ve made the initial choice, you’ve closed down a lot of possible futures.

    And obviously, this generalises from the actual physical heaps of dangerous stone, to other ways in which the initial stages of a project can set up structures that are hard to remove or restructure when they get in the way later. […]

    Yup.

    Sometimes one really does have to stop, move on, and start over. It’s not necessarily a failure to do so – it’s the way solid geometry and human systems work.

    [ insert witticism about the GQP here. ]

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  132. 132.

    Betty Cracker

    @WaterGirl: Relative lack of strength — vast majorities of both groups support Trump, but the Mormons seem less enthusiastic than evangelicals. Maybe there’s an inverse relationship between the cohesiveness of the communities and willingness to drink the orange Koolaid. I don’t know.

  133. 133.

    RevRick

    @RaflW: One could say that statements about the character of “generations” reflect the child-rearing practices of the day.

    The Silents were highly policed and told to shut up and behave. Naturally, they were outraged that the Dr. Spock Baby Boomers got away with murder in their eyes (far fewer constraints.)

    Gen X was basically feral.
    The Millennials got car seats.

    Gen Z… helicopter parents, anyone. Padded playgrounds.

  135. 135.

    citizen dave

    @Citizen Alan: I think I cribbed my nym from you–the model.  When I joined here in Dec 2016–think BJ was on a long list of blogs at LGM or somewhere (I had googled something like “most liberal blog”, looking for sanity at that time), I was “mad citizen”, a reference to the movie Network (I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any longer!).

    At some point, probably after Biden/Harris won, I decided to take the “mad” out of my nym, just to get the angry out.

    I like the way Nick Cave sings/says the word “citizen” on Bob Dylan’s “Death is Not the End” collaboration with other singers: (https://tinyurl.com/55fkmzkr).  RIP Shane.

    Verse is:

    When you search in vain to find

    Some law-abiding citizen

    Just remember that death is not the end

  136. 136.

    Ruckus

    @Martin:

    I agree. SFB has been a broken human his entire adult life, and likely longer. He has seemingly always thought he was king shit, but that first word never applied, he has always been just plain shit. He’s only 3 years older than me and I’ve seen his name for decades, because his personality is, at the very least, deficient and desires adulation way beyond any deserved. But his father had money, and one son who was a greedy fuck and a shitty human. His siblings seem(ed) to be rather reasonable people.

  137. 137.

    lowtechcyclist

    @RaflW: ​
     

    – Being considerate or being well-behaved.

    I grokked the first three choices in the list, but I don’t see a lot of daylight between these two. If you’re being considerate of others, you’re going to behave well towards them. And we teach our kids to behave well as part of being considerate towards others.

  139. 139.

    BeautifulPlumage

    @Marc:

    @wjca:

    I grew up in the PNW near Seattle to very democrat parents but I still heard a lot of casual racism growing up. White Democrats in the north in the 60’s could definitely be racist.

  143. 143.

    BeautifulPlumage

    @lowtechcyclist: this thread has reminded me that authoritarian people pay more attention to what something looks like versus what it actually is. Good behavior is an outside appearance and consideration is an internal characteristic, if that makes sense.

  145. 145.

    Ruckus

    @Redshift:

    It was also easier when the population was smaller and communications were far less rapid and accessible than today. What we are doing for example.

    @WaterGirl:

    The past is the past.

    It will repeat itself over and over unless the present is changed.

    And it will most often change slowly. Less slowly today because of things like what we are doing here, right now, today. And for a lot of humans that do not walk, run or think that change is possible to be better, the past is the present. But this world does not in any way look like the world that I was born into just shy of 3/4 of a century ago. And 3/4 of a century ago a person my age would say the world was maybe somewhat different. The changes come faster because we talk about them, find fellow travelers and see that change always happens, it just happens far faster now. Those that can not accept change or agree with the direction of that change will always fight back, but the longer we live in a world that has personal level communications like this we are doing, the better the world will get.

  146. 146.

    BeautifulPlumage

    @RaflW:

     

     

    “With each question, respondents were asked which of two traits were more important in children:

    – Independence or respect for their elders;
    – Curiosity or good manners;
    – Self-reliance or obedience;
    – Being considerate or being well-behaved.

    And of course, one of the problems here is the false black & white nature of the question. I understand that studies have to limit parameters, but this would be an “easier” set of questions for an authoritarian-minded black/white thinker. It’s the difference between presenting a set of words as a list (which implies hierarchy) versus other ways such as a sound cloud image.

  147. 147.

    Ruckus

    @Redshift:

    The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

    This. 100000% this.

  148. 148.

    LiminalOwl

    @AM in NC: Many years ago, I was assistant editor for a weird little Catholic periodical. When I joined the staff, it was conservative on some social issues (yes, reproductive rights, I’m sorry) while promoting the economic and ecological social-justice teachings.  There were some good people on the editorial board.  Over the years, it grew more and more cranky-conservative. I finally quit over an article promoting what claimed to be a Catholic school, which stated, “the primary function of education is to render children docile.”  IIRC the idea was Catholic homeschooling for primary and maybe middle school, and then high schools like the one the author ran  I’m pretty sure he was Opus Dei.

    (To my shame, I later returned, after the owner/editor told me that unless I did so he would deny that I had ever worked there.  It was by far the longest entry on my resume, and I feared I would never find another job. Well, I didn’t, in that field; I gained some measure of sanity and changed occupation.)

  150. 150.

    cmorenc

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    authoritarians prize the form of good manners over consideration for others

    Ever notice how the leader of whatever the evil enterprise is in eg James Bond films or “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” behaves with exquisitely good manners and formal politeness, even as they carry out despicably evil, harmful schemes?  IMO this plot device draws off the distinction you made above.

  151. 151.

    CaseyL

    @RevRick: ​

    It is the abolition/submergence of self into a super identity.

    But there it is. Why do people need to submerge themselves into a super identity? Why can’t they develop their own identity? Why do they need that enormity, and fervency, of external validation?

  154. 154.

    Martin

    @raven: Yeah, I’m not saying it’s universal by any means. My dad is a year older than her and didn’t buy it either – and they were married. But I really strongly believe that we are products of the cultural moment that we’re in. And those moments are bounded by geography – sometimes on surprisingly small scales – towns, neighborhoods even – and time. My city 30 years ago was WAY more racist than it is now. And how the people around you shape what your cultural influences are – you grow up in a cop family, you probably think cops are a lot better than people who grow up in a family that has been adversely affected by the police – even in the same neighborhood at the same time. People are simply bad at carving out a purely independent identity. Why is the god you believe in largely predicted by where you were born? Isn’t that amongst the most fundamental aspects of a personality?

    So my argument is that either the likelihood you grew up in an environment like my mom did is higher, or the particular intensity of that environment was higher. I turned out a lot different than her despite there still being a fair overlap in our experiences. My grandparents were pretty racist, but I didn’t see that – she did. That had been sheltered from me, and I’m sure that shaped my values and my moms. I had more cultural independence to be exposed to and to seek out other ideas – cable TV, for instance. The more radical works from the 60s and 70 were available to me when I was young and didn’t realize they were radical, but to her they were radical. I grew up with Maria and Gordon on Sesame Street that surely insulated me a little bit from ‘scary brown urban people’ such that it was harder for those arguments to work on me. And I remember having friends that weren’t allowed to watch the show because there were non-villain black people on the show.

    So you were exposed to all of the same stuff, for the most part, but you maybe had more antibodies to it thanks to your parents, or your own experiences, or your own willingness to be a skeptic or where you lived, etc. Same for my dad. And in my family there was a seismic split with my grandmother (my dad’s mom) being disowned by the rest of the family because she allowed her daughter to date a black man. Most of my extended family is MAGA but we were isolated off from them, and that isolated branch means I have a black cousin and had a gay out cousin in the 80s, and so on – which my branch accepted and embraced, but which my extended family rejected. All that credit goes to my grandmother (she was the Army nurse). She did the hard work of being a better person, and taught us how to be better people – and we have this shared set of values as a result. The rest of the family largely didn’t go down that path, and have a different set of shared values that we, 50 years later, still largely detest.

    I don’t think people are particularly independent actors in the world. Yeah, we’re all going to color outside the lines here and there, but the lines are handed to us, and it’s REALLY hard to say ‘fuck it, I’m not going to conform to the picture you want me to color in, I’m going to do something completely different’. And I’d argue that’s still true of us today, at whatever age we are now. So yeah some people will value conforming so well that they become absolute down-the-middle supporters of whatever cultural space they currently occupy, and in the process reinforce that space and may even police it. And other people are like, you know, this ain’t for me and head for the exits (and I’d argue we might have a few more of those folks in this community). But it’s a stochastic process, and heading for the exit is still limited. There was ZERO chance I would reject my dad’s catholic family and my mom’s protestant family and take up Hausa animism because that simply wasn’t available to me, and even if it was, it was probably too radical a thing for my personality to embrace. So the ability of me to deviate from that cultural line, such as it was in my specific environment, was always limited no matter how independently minded I might have been.

    So my thesis is not remotely predictive of any individual, except to say what you were never going to embrace, simply because it was effectively impossible for you to even know about it. But it is statistically predictive of the degree to which a population of people may deviate from the place they start out in, and how they’ll respond to crises that arise.

    This is why kids that go off to university become more liberal – as a group. It’s not because the university indoctrinates them, but because the university, by virtue of how it was designed and functions – forces kids out of their old cultural space and into a new one. If you came out of small town good ‘ol boy Oklahoma and get thrown into a dorm with one black gay roommate and one Chinese national roommate, there’s no fucking way, purely as a function of survival in that environment, you’re not coming out with a much different perspective on being gay in America, being black in America, and being Chinese is. In all likelihood within 6 months you will be infinitely more receptive and compassionate toward arguments from the gay community, the black community, and the experience of immigrants, of what it might be like to have nationalized health care, etc. And it happens really fast, simply by that change of environment. 4 years later, they are different people in ways that they just couldn’t have achieved staying in Oklahoma – even in liberal parts of Oklahoma, even with liberal parents. Your experiences matter.

    So all I’m saying is that statistically, your generation is more likely to be culturally conservative in certain ways by virtue of the culture and norms of the time, and opportunities or lack thereof to stray. Of course, your generation also hit your formative years in the 60s and had that counterculture opportunity. But I think you also know a lot of people your age didn’t join that movement. I don’t think you can definitively predict who would or wouldn’t have gone one way or another, but I think you can make certain prediction about groups based on their background how likely they were to go one way or another.

    Understand, this was a BIG part of my job doing college admissions. I can’t predict if this student or that student will choose to attend, but I could absolutely predict to a level of accuracy that to this day I don’t fully understand, what percentage of students with this characteristic or that characteristic would choose to attend. I could pick a set of 14,000 students out of a population of 120,000 and hit 100 different enrollment targets within 5%, and the big ones within 1% – with 75% of the pool not accepting the offer. And every single time it felt like a fucking miracle that it worked. I’m willing to bet if I ever applied that to voting patterns, I could do it just as accurately.

    And holding the idea that ‘people have agency and are largely unbounded in what they can achieve’ which is sort of the entry fee for working at a university alongside ‘I can predict the behavior of this group of people to within 1%’ is fucking hard to resolve, let me tell you.

    I could be totally wrong about this (and about every single other thing I’ve said on this website) but I don’t have better explanations for why I was able to do population prediction that accurately. I certainly don’t think it’s because I’m a genius. I think there’s a collective mechanism there that we have some ability to escape, but not really with the degree of agency we believe we actually possess.

    This is one of my favorite videos, and I watch it a couple of times per year because it sits right at that contradiction.

  155. 155.

    Martin

    @Redshift:

    It’s about unrestrained capitalism where money is the only measure of value, and you should only care about how well you’re doing no matter how much it screws other people. It’s about defining “being a man” as being completely self-sufficient, denying that even your family is part of your success, much less any government program or service.

    I think Reagan really fucked a lot of us up more than we realize. Even those of us really critical of Reagan are probably letting him off easy.

  157. 157.

    WaterGirl

    @BeautifulPlumage: That’s what was interesting about the results mentioned in the study above.  People with authoritarian tendencies tended to choose one response over another.

    The non-authoritarian respondents were more evenly split between the two.

  159. 159.

    trollhattan

    @Martin: ​
     I think Reagan really fucked a lot of us up more than we realize. Even those of us really critical of Reagan are probably letting him off easy.

    Thanks (I guess) to Reaganland I developed a new and white-hot hatred of Reagan I didn’t even possess when he was in office. And he was really bad in real time.

    Then Newt showed up to break the House in ways it has never recovered from.

  160. 160.

    raven

    @Martin: Oh I wasn’t disputing your post, I really struggle with how many Nam vets are Trumpers. I was just reflecting on my situation.

  161. 161.

    Torrey

    @smith: ​
     
    You’re right, of course. Sullivan is famously a Roman Catholic, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he thinks he needs an external authority. I yield to those who know more about the religion, but what I’ve heard from Catholics (including priests) is that that religion claims to be the right one because the RC church is considered to have God-given authority.

  163. 163.

    Martin

    @Brachiator: I don’t think it’s _that_ loosy goosy. I think I know where you’re coming from, but there’s that question of ‘where do atheists get their morals from’ that always needs to be brought back in.

    Like, why do we believe the American family structure is the correct family structure? That’s widely held by Democrats as well. We have much broader cultural concepts of work, and sin, and redemption, and evil, and responsibility that are VERY directly influenced by Catholicism or Protestantism that are very deeply ingrained in US culture even beyond people’s faith. I can see that in myself and I have no recollection of ever believing in God, but my dads family is catholic and my moms is protestant and I see the stuff I got from my dad and from my mom and it’s very clear where they came from.

    Orange County conservatives are very mainline protestant in sensibility, IMO. Where catholics often deviate from the MAGA line is in support for immigrants, at least once they are realized as immigrants. They may oppose them coming into the country, but once they’re here, they’re more inclined to help them – in my experience. So how they interact with them as immigrants to my eye is different and is at least shaped by the religious sensibilities they see as ‘normal’.

    But I’ve lived in Amish/mennonite communities (anabaptist) and concentrated Greek (greek orthodox Catholic) and predominantly Jewish communities, and now this dogs breakfast of people in Orange County with sizable Chinese, Korean, Palestinian, Russian/Ukrainian, Persian, Jewish, and Mormon subgroups all within 2 miles of me, so I’m certainly not without my biases.

  164. 164.

    dnfree

    @Martin: I’m 77 and white, and the Civil Rights movement of the later 1950s and 1960s absolutely changed my life.  I wanted to go south and help register voters, but my parents wouldn’t “let” me.  (I still wasn’t really old enough to defy them.)  Then the three workers in Mississippi turned up dead, and I realized why my parents were concerned.  That was the start of being “woke”, and it continued from there into women’s rights, gay rights, trans rights, whatever.

    But I was not “marinated” in white supremacy.  I never heard either parent utter a racist word.  When I was about four years old, I came home with the version of  “Eenie meenie miney mo” that included the n-word.  I had no idea what it meant; it was just part of the rhyme.  My mom gave me such a lecture I have never forgotten it.  “That word is hurtful to some people.  Never ever say it again.  You can say ‘catch a tiger by the toe’ instead.”  I still can’t say the n-word, which is fine.

  166. 166.

    Dan B

    @Omnes Omnibus: My SIL is definitely in the polite / good manners camp.  Weak people suffering is of no concern compared to “their betters” being respected.  If their is disrespect then society breaks down and all will suffer.  It’s also weakness if you have too much empathy.  Too much is typically any empathy.

  169. 169.

    DavidG

    I searched the comments for Eric Hoffer and did not find it.  Well stated, Casey.  You and maybe other commenters should read Hoffer book from 50+ years ago, The True Believer.

  170. 170.

    Ruckus

    @raven:

    I think a lot of that is where you grew up and who you hung out with. A lot has changed in many parts of the US (and the world) in the last 60 yrs.

  172. 172.

    Redshift

    @Martin:

    I think Reagan really fucked a lot of us up more than we realize. Even those of us really critical of Reagan are probably letting him off easy.

    Absolutely. I used to remark a lot on Xitter about how often news articles would talk about some bad trend starting “over the past several decades” or “beginning around 1980,” without ever mentioning Reagan. Like it was something that just happened, even in some cases where it could be easily connected to some Reagan administration policy.

  174. 174.

    Tony Jay

    @BeautifulPlumage:

    Yup. I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that absolutism is one of the major levers cranking us as a culture towards extremism. Not the only lever, of course, because that would be absolutist, but a very clear one.

    And by absolutism I mean the tendency to insist that there are only ever two options in any given situation. One right, one wrong. And you have to choose between them. Want someone to do something they shouldn’t? Just present them with a choice between that and something worse. Don’t like Option A? Then you must love Option B and approve of everything about it, even if Option B includes awful things you definitely don’t agree with. It’s Us or Them. Me or Him. Black or White. Pick your team.

    It’s bullshit and it’s everywhere. There are almost never just two options in any given situation. There are always different ones to choose between, and no matter how similar two situations may appear to be at first glance, that doesn’t mean that the options for dealing with them are going to be the same. Everything is always different, and no one is flawless.

    Authoritarians love absolutes. That’s why they’re one of the reasons they’re bad guys.

  175. 175.

    Baud

    @Tony Jay:

    You have to be careful, though.  In the US two-party system, there are those who use that anti-absolutist thinking to deter people from fighting the fascists.

  176. 176.

    smith

    @Tony Jay: Authoritarians love absolutes.

    I’d go further, and say authoritarians need absolutes because the requirement frequently experienced in adulthood to resolve ethical dilemmas makes their heads explode. They need a rule book or a guru to tell them what to do.

  177. 177.

    lowtechcyclist

    @narya: ​
     

    To which I say: first, take the golden rule SERIOUSLY, truly consider it. Second, be kind. Those two things will get you very far.

    I’ll add in Pratchett’s dictum: don’t treat people as things.

  178. 178.

    Another Scott

    @Tony Jay: +1

    Even the Jesus (famously) wasn’t into absolutes:

    3 And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,

    4 They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.

    5 Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?

    6 This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.

    7 So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

    8 And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

    9 And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

    10 When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?

    11 She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

    Hey, Moses said what the law is, gotta follow the law – who cares if it is weaponized against the powerless, amirite??

    (Jesus really, really didn’t like the Pharisees.)

    Thanks.

    Grr…,
    Scott.

  179. 179.

    trollhattan

    @Tony Jay: Seems just right.

    If only every issue could be reduced to “Death, or cake?” {Those refusing cake will be placed on the iceflow.}

  180. 180.

    Dan B

    @West of the Rockies: Decades ago I was working with some progressive Christians.  There was a very good looking young guy at an event.  He could easily have been a model or a centerfold.  The event had a number of gay people there.  It was clear he was struggling with being gay and raised conservative Christian.  I felt very sorry for him that he’d be shunned by his family and friends but also would be like a lamb surrounded by wolves at most gay venues, especially gay bars, at least at the time.  That would confirm the horror stories he’d been told about gay men.  I wonder if he found his way to a safe haven.  He seemed like a sweet guy who wanted to find love and nurture.

  183. 183.

    Tony Jay

    @Baud:

    You always have to be careful (that’s not an absolutism, it’s just health and safety). Just because you’re asked to think more about what you’re doing it doesn’t mean you don’t have to make a decision.

    In a two-party system you go with the least worst option. That doesn’t and shouldn’t mean that you don’t get to say what’s wrong about that option or what needs to change about it for it to be better than least worst.

    Yes, wankers will try to both-sides the bad points to hammer in wedges, and that’s a problem, but constantly playing the “now is not the time” card when facing doubts and push-back is a very volatile tool that risks exacerbating the very doubts you’re trying to quash.

    Hey, if this shit was easy anyone could do it.

  184. 184.

    jonas

    @West of the Rockies: The whole point is that the Leader is the Leader because he isn’t beholden to those standards. He’s the Nietzschean superman. Sure *you* shouldn’t just grab women by the p*ssy or cheat on your wife with a porn star or steal classified documents, but he can because that’s what The Leader can do. QED.

  187. 187.

    Tony Jay

    @smith:

    That sounds right to me. Thinking and taking responsibility is hard. Admitting you’re wrong? Terrifying. If there’s someone telling you they’ll take on all that responsibility for you if you just trust them, and there’s lots of other people just like you saying it’s okay… tempting.

    @Another Scott:

    Smart guy that Jeebus.

    Paul, OTOH, utter fucker.

    @trollhattan:

    “What kind of cake?”

  189. 189.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @cmorenc: Ever notice how the leader of whatever the evil enterprise is in eg James Bond films or “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” behaves with exquisitely good manners and formal politeness, even as they carry out despicably evil, harmful schemes? IMO this plot device draws off the distinction you made above.

    Ever notice how minorities and impoverished people demanding more are just too rowdy and if they would just calmly explain their plight through the proper channels blah blah blah..

    ETA: Politeness, in the absence of consideration, is a weapon wielded mightily by authoritarians.

  191. 191.

    jonas

    @Omnes Omnibus:I think that the big difference is that authoritarians prioritize the forms of good manners over the substance of consideration for others.

    A pretension pierced with great aplomb in the character of Eddie Haskel on the old “Leave it to Beaver” show. See too Treacly “Hospitality”, Southern.

  193. 193.

    Ruckus

    @dnfree:

    I’m only 3 yrs younger than you and I was taught at a very young age that racism was wrong. And like you, while I heard the words outside of home, I never heard them there. And I saw that my father would hire anyone with skills – skin color, citizenship, language didn’t matter, skills needed on the job mattered, work ethic mattered. And those set the pay. A number of people worked there for decades because they got paid and treated well.

  195. 195.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Baud: A noteworthy state of affairs, as aristocrats don’t like to see turnaround on their perpetual state of revolt against peasants.

  196. 196.

    Another Scott

    @WaterGirl: No, the Pharisees were one of the higher-up sects at the time.

    But, it looks like my statement was probably too strong (I’m no expert). Wikipedia:

    The New Testament, particularly the Synoptic Gospels, presents especially the leadership of the Pharisees as obsessed with man-made rules (especially concerning purity) whereas Jesus is more concerned with God’s love; the Pharisees scorn sinners whereas Jesus seeks them out. (The Gospel of John, which is the only gospel where Nicodemus is mentioned, particularly portrays the sect as divided and willing to debate.) Because of the New Testament’s frequent depictions of Pharisees as self-righteous rule-followers (see also Woes of the Pharisees and Legalism (theology)), the word “pharisee” (and its derivatives: “pharisaical”, etc.) has come into semi-common usage in English to describe a hypocritical and arrogant person who places the letter of the law above its spirit.[70]

    […]

    Hyam Maccoby speculated that Jesus was himself a Pharisee and that his arguments with Pharisees is a sign of inclusion rather than fundamental conflict (disputation being the dominant narrative mode employed in the Talmud as a search for truth, and not necessarily a sign of opposition).[72] However, Maccoby’s views have been widely rejected by scholars.[73]

    Something something no one is more zealous than a convert something something.

    ;-)

    FWIW.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  197. 197.

    way2blue

    @Martin:

    My mom, after her second stroke, forgot to listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio.  The person renting my brothers’ bedroom said she was much happier no longer getting a daily dose of grousing about…   The big bad Democrats?  Obama?  Hoaxes?

  202. 202.

    YY_Sima Qian

    The most people are not committed democrats or committed authoritarians, or firmly committed to any ideology. If they are deeply disaffected from the status quo, they will acquiesce to forming of the alternative. If the status quo is liberal democracy (or at least perceived to be liberal democracy), they are more likely to opt for explicitly illiberal democracy or outright authoritarianism. If the status quo is authoritarianism, they are more likely to opt for democracy (although it may end up being an illiberal one). Widespread & deep disaffection from the status quo is the soil from which committed democrats or committed authoritarian can realize their goals. That is also the reason polities can swing back and forth.

    That is why, IMHO, asserting the righteousness of one’s cause is not enough, decrying acts of self-harm for failing to vote for the lesser of two evils is not enough, even if the cause is impeccable & the analysis unimpeachable. Committed democrats have to work on minimizing disaffection from the status quo (if status quo is liberal democracy) if they are to beat back forces of authoritarianism.

  204. 204.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @WaterGirl: Carrot cake is one of my favorites. One of the best applications of cream cheese and nutmeg I’ve ever encountered.

  205. 205.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Dan B: Thanks.  I’ve found a system that amounts to avoiding any contact with him except for maybe a couple times a year.  I feel sorta bad sometimes because he’s 80 and the clock is ticking but honestly, wtf are we gonna talk about.  He won’t even get vaccinated…

  206. 206.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Rose Weiss: ​
     

    Liberal airhead, huh? Well, I’m a whining rotter!

    There was one question that I found interesting to answer:

    Most people don’t realize how much our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places.

    I had to somewhat agree, because the answer to “how much our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places” is “not much at all, really” but a lot of people think otherwise, IOW, a lot of people incorrectly realize the extent to which our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places.

    If the question had read just “Our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places,” I’d have strongly disagreed.

  210. 210.

    Matt McIrvin

    @lowtechcyclist: Back when I was reading Daniel Davies’ stuff on Crooked Timber, he seemed generally smart (he’s famous for incisively criticizing the Bush administration’s rushes to war early) but one odd thing about him was his insistence that liberals were way too dismissive of conspiracy theories, that Hofstadter’s essay “The Paranoid Style” was bad and wrong, and that the world was in fact largely run on plots hatched in secret places.

    And I’m not gonna say it doesn’t happen. The rich and powerful do love their weirdo frolics at places like Bohemian Grove. But I do find these days that the worst of the powerful tend to brag about their plotting right out the open.

  211. 211.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony Jay: Then there’s the opposite danger that you’re going to become the monster to fight these guys.

    Like I said, Teri Kanefield saw a kind of left authoritarianism in the complaints that the DoJ was going too slow in prosecuting all the Trumpists and the demands to do something about that NOW. I think all that is basically driven by fear, the fairly legitimate fear that these people are going to turn the US into a totalitarian nightmare or just a slaughterhouse unless we crush them utterly and ASAP. I’ve got quite a lot of that fear myself, and a bigger, wider fear that Republicans and decent people simply cannot live in the same country, that at some point it’s us or them.

    But how do you extirpate that kind of threat without being a totalitarian yourself? Does the paradox of tolerance mean democracy is a suicide pact and the only thing that matters is who shoots first? If so, what’s the point?

  212. 212.

    Chris T.

    @Baud:

    What if you support sexual freedom but draw a line at elbows on the table?

    You can have sex on the table, but you must keep your elbows up?

  213. 213.

    Chris T.

    @trollhattan:

    I’ve long believed some folks are innately joiners, with a strong desire to belong and little capacity to filter out places to NOT join.

    I find the best filter is “avoid any club that would allow someone like me to join it”.

    (hat tip to Groucho Marx)

  214. 214.

    Chris T.

    @Martin:

    I think there’s a collective mechanism there that we have some ability to escape, but not really with the degree of agency we believe we actually possess.

    I hate posting “real stuff” to dead threads, but at least this is just a sort of +1 to the above. The real trick here is that we can only conceive of a limited set of things from the universe of possibilities. This idea finally got through to my conscious level when I was talking with someone about kids going to college, and how having a “college fund” for poor kids, even if it has just say $100 in it, actually matters to them.

  217. 217.

    Another Scott

    @WaterGirl: I think it’s a UKism.

    UrbanDictionary.com – Rotter:

    Someone who doesn’t do much. Lays in bed a lot. Nothing to live for. Probably NEET, coomer and gamer as well.

    […]

    A person who is a detriment to society, someone completely worthless.

    […]

    Someone who is generally subversive, deviant, shameless and attracted to the more gutter styles of existence.

    […]

    You get the idea.

    HTH!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  218. 218.

    BellyCat

    @Martin: Righteous rant and superb Ted talk linky!  You’ll likely not see this comment as I’m only 1.5 days behind the BJ churn given this has been one of the better threads in a while.

Comments are closed.