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According to Robert Altemeyer, 20-25% of Americans fit a Right Wing Authoritarian personality profile.
After World War II, a lot of psychologists wanted to know what would drive entire nations (Germany and Italy) to complete madness. They came up with the Fascism Scale (the "F" Scale). A lot of "conservatives" today score very high on the F-Scale as well as Altemeyer's RWA personality test.
It seems to me that the new definition of "conservatism" is a blend of White nationalist/resentment politics, Christian fundamentalism, and authoritarianism. Oh and they love Big Government spending but only only as long as it's just for White people. They have no qualms with propping up Iowa's dying farm industry via endless subsidies but heaven forbid they spend money on the Ziva virus rampaging Florida and Puerto Rico. Who cares if a few Brown babies are born with deformed heads right?
I guess I am not a conservative anymore. I think I will go join the Libertarians, at least they have a brain.
Well then you wouldn't support Zika funding or farm subsidies. You'd let Zika and other infectious diseases like Dengue run rampant if you were a Libertarian. If you get an infectious disease, no government to try to quarantine you to protect the public's health. No government epidemiology department to prevent the disease before it even comes here. No government to access and research health data to determine outbreaks... This is something that doesn't work in the private sector because it doesn't create money, it works for the public's good but isn't a profit-driven item. This is why we pay taxes and attempt to enforce vaccines to prevent this, I don't see how infectious diseases could be prevented by the private sector in the slightest.
According to Robert Altemeyer, 20-25% of Americans fit a Right Wing Authoritarian personality profile.
After World War II, a lot of psychologists wanted to know what would drive entire nations (Germany and Italy) to complete madness. They came up with the Fascism Scale (the "F" Scale). A lot of "conservatives" today score very high on the F-Scale as well as Altemeyer's RWA personality test.
While it's sort of obvious this is true, it's interesting that they actually made a scale.
It seems to me that the new definition of "conservatism" is a blend of White nationalist/resentment politics, Christian fundamentalism, and authoritarianism. Oh and they love Big Government spending but only only as long as it's just for White people. They have no qualms with propping up Iowa's dying farm industry via endless subsidies but heaven forbid they spend money on the Ziva virus rampaging Florida and Puerto Rico. Who cares if a few Brown babies are born with deformed heads right?
I guess I am not a conservative anymore. I think I will go join the Libertarians, at least they have a brain.
You would do good to look at the proposal put forward for the Zika virus and all the garbage the Dems added to the bill!
Nice post. There've always been two conflicting wings of the GOP - the authoritarian conservatives, and the libertarian conservatives. The strength of the party in the 80s and 90s (and to some degree the early 2000s) depended on the skills of people like Atwater, Rollins, and Rove in keeping those uncomfortable factions in a state of balance. But it could never last forever, and we saw the uneasy marriage of convenience begin to unravel during the W administration. The authoritarian conservatives seem to have taken control of what's left of the GOP, and the party of "mind your own business" has metastasized into the party of "you can't do that!"
I agree. Buckley conservatives have been overtaken by socially exclusive big republicanism.
While it's sort of obvious this is true, it's interesting that they actually made a scale.
Do you have a source?
Quote:
In 1998 I tried to explain why social scientists who are worried about our freedoms have focused on the crowd that would lift a dictator aloft rather than the autocrat himself.
“Wanna-be tyrants in a democracy are just comical figures on soapboxes when they have no following. So the real…threat lay coiled in parts of the population itself, it was thought, ready someday to catapult the next Hitler to power with their votes.”
That apprehension was well-founded, it turns out. Research suggests that 20-25% of the adults in North America are highly vulnerable to a demagogue who would incite hatred of various minorities to gain power. These people are waiting for a tough “man on horseback” who will supposedly solve all our problems through the ruthless application of force. When such a man gains prominence, you can expect the authoritarian followers to mate devotedly with the authoritarian leader, because each gives the other something they desperately want: the feeling of safety for the followers, and the tremendous power of the modern state for the leader.
There are certain characteristics associated with an authoritarian personality. Perhaps the most important is fear and the perception of a very dangerous world ("Oh my God, the Muslims are coming in!" "The inner cities are going crazy!"). Another is a desire to punish in the name of established authority. These are people who actually enjoy inflicting pain on others. Authoritarians also are more likely to accept the curtailment of individual liberties.
Among the most significant of Altemeyer's findings--both implicit and explicit in what we've seen above--was the fearful nature of the RWA worldview, "High RWAs stand about ten steps closer to the panic button than the rest of the population," he concluded, "They see the world as a more dangerous place than most others do, with civilization on the verge of collapse and the world of Mad Max looming just beyond." This fearfulness is a good explanation for many of the tendencies listed above.
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