6 ms·

The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left

37 points by dr_dshiv 5y ago

shusaku 5y ago
The article feels a little to self congratulatory, to the point of a straw man. It’s like they’re saying “look how enlightened I am for understanding that liberals can be bad guys too”. Everybody gets that. The only issue seems to have been the measurement scale, for which I wish they went into more detail.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  There is a link to the paper, but I’m not going to try to read it on my phone. I’m wondering if the reason it was overlooked before is because it was a very small phenomena before the rise of social media.
  - dfxm12 5y ago
    Other researchers have concluded that the number of strident conservatives in the U.S. far exceeds the number of strident progressives and that American conservatives express more authoritarian attitudes than their counterparts in Britain, Australia, or Canada. At least in the context of the U.S., progressivism is small enough and has little enough political power that it can be overlooked, so any subsets of this group are easily overlooked as well. On the flip side, conservative authoritarians have reached the highest political offices, so that is not only hard to overlook but also quite easy to notice.
    - chuckee 5y ago
      > in the context of the U.S., progressivism is small enough and has little enough political power that it can be overlooked On the other hand, Coca-Cola had training urging workers to be less white [1], the US Army lectured soldiers on white privilege [2], the most allegedly xenophobic US president didn't put a dent in legal immigration numbers [3], academia is not only overwhelmingly liberal, but also openly hostile to conservatives [4], and the University of California required (or still requires?) specific plans to advance diversity from job applicants [5]. You are correct that if you measure progressivism by e.g. worker's rights, universal healthcare, or stopping the military-industrial complex, it has been an utter failure. And if your imagined conservative is someone that is opposed to these things, they will appear very powerful. But if you pick a different test by which you measure, you get very different results. [1] https://nypost.com/2021/02/23/coca-cola-diversity-training-urged-workers-to-be-less-white/ https://nypost.com/2021/02/23/coca-cola-diversity-training-u... [2] https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-documents-reveal-us-army-indoctrinated-soldiers-on-dangers-of-white-privilege/ https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-... [3] https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2019/table1 https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2019/tab... [4] https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/study_liberaltoconservative_faculty_ratio_in_academia_will_blow_your_mind.html https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/study_liberalto... [5] https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diversity-initiative-berkeley/ https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diver...
- lowmagnet 5y ago
  I'd call it 'Doing a paper on what I'd like to call "the political compass" without checking for prior art.'
fearfulofview4 5y ago
From your friendly shills at the American Enterprise Institute. You know they’re scared if they feel the need to ignore clear and present dangers to write this distraction.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bronzeage 5y ago
It must be so hard to notice left authoritarians when almost all authoritarian regimes in the world are communistic far left.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  And then you remember the big boogeyman of left actually had word socialist proudly in their names... And somehow that didn't or does not count. I say they are the same as current left.
- bell-cot 5y ago
  > almost all authoritarian regimes in the world are communistic far left. From a brief on-line search for lists of the world's most-authoritarian regimes, this seems to be false. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism#Current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism#Current
jlkuester7 5y ago
Serious question: how is this a novel idea given the historical context of people like Stalin and Mao? I feel like I am missing something here. Are Stalin and Mao not considered authoritarians or are they not considered "leftists"?
- me_me_me 5y ago
  I think at this stage leftist and righist are meaningless. Stalin by all means run almost theocratic totalitarian regime. Communism was used as a slogan and means of rallying his followers. Same with Mao.
  - justinmchase 5y ago
    That's why most political compasses are 2 dimensional. Most left v. right discussions are essentially a projection of some opinionated vector across the 2d landscape into a 1d line which they can then use to slander either end of the vector as authoritarian or communist or whatever. But these actual definitions lose a lot of information in that projection. The 2d map has left (socialism) v right (capitalism) and up (authoritarianism) v down (anarchism). Its probably even more complicated than that, you could at least add a 3rd dimension of time but projecting everything into a 1d line is nearly meaningless at this point.
    - jlkuester7 5y ago
      +1 for multi-dimensional analysis! Binary thinking on complex issues (like politics) is a recipe for fanaticism.
    - me_me_me 5y ago
      yes, and also things should be described by the actions not labels. N.Korea labels itself as democratic and people's but we all know thats not true.
    - OkayPhysicist 5y ago
      I've never really liked the standard 2D political compass, and I think the issue is that the two axes aren't actually independent. Right v. Left basically boils down to one's opinion on hierarchies. If one views hierarchies as good, they're on the right, if they see them as evil, they're on the left, and there's a whole spectrum of "necessary evil", "acceptable", etc, in between. Then you've got the Authoritarian v. Libertarian axis, which essentially boils down to "how much power should higher-ups in the hierarchy have over those who are lower?". With Monarchies and Dictatorships being "guy on top controls everything" to Anarchism saying "no one should control anyone". The problem is that, defined that way, certain areas in the space become absurd. What does it mean to completely reject hierarchies as evil, but think that people on top of the hierarchies ought have absolute power? What does it mean to think that hierarchies are good and just, but that there should be no power vested in them? This manifests outside the philosophical, in the real world as well. As you look at increasingly authoritarian ideologies, the differences between left-leaning and right-leaning ideologies shrink. Comparing the conditions of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR reveals far less difference than you see even amongst the spread of Liberal states today. Likewise, the number of hierarchies you hear objections to shrinks as you move right amongst Libertarians, until you basically only hear complaints about the government.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jlkuester7 5y ago
Side-topic: I often wonder how much political affiliation drives personal ideology (and not the other way around). Particularly in the US with its crazy 2-party system, there does not really seem to be the option of choosing a party that actually aligns with your personal ideals. Instead, most people seem to end up compromising at some point and joining the party they perceive is "closest" to them. However, I wonder how much of this decision is driven by ideology and how much is driven by social pressure ("all my family/friends" belong to this one..."). Then, once you have aligned to a party, does the Stockholm Syndrome set in? How much of that party's platform do you start to rationalize and acclimate to when previously you would never have agreed with some of the ideas?
- jdpedrie 5y ago
  Anecdata, but in my experience most normal people (i.e. not extremely politically engaged) understand they're usually choosing between imperfect (often even less-bad) options. I don't get the sense that there's a ton of cognitive dissonance required until you get into the Very Online subset of people for whom politics is their life. I think where the phenomenon you describe is extremely visible is in elected officials, especially at the federal level. You see an example now with Liz Cheney, who is in the process of transforming from a fairly generic Republican into a fairly generic Democrat as her political incentives change. The same can be observed going the other way with JD Vance moving from generic institutional Republican into post-liberal Trumpist (though perhaps the signs were there for those with eyes to see). The question then is whether the convictions were real or merely convenient.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  I think this is not an uncommon phenomenon, but I still think the more common (and charitable) situation is simply that people don't feel a strong need to explicitly agree with everything the representatives, talking heads, and/or majority voters of "their" political party believe. To be sure, there is a lot of dishonest/self-deceiving side-taking, but a big part of the image of that ridiculous situation is actually just that: An image, conjured by the extrapolation of those observations onto the whole. In general, people understand that a political party is 10s of millions of people, and see no hypocrisy in voting for party A or B without agreeing with all of that party's apparently popular opinions.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Well, it's unfortunate, but not surprising. It's not like there are any examples of left authoritarianism in recent history
bell-cot 5y ago
Note the Atlantic article's sub-title - "Many psychologists wrongly assumed that coercive attitudes exist only among conservatives". The key word is "psychologists". At best, that field's WEIRD problem ( https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/non-weird-science/202004/psychologys-weird-problem https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/non-weird-science/20... ) leaves them poorly qualified on this issue. At worst...why the h*ll would anyone think that psychologists qualify as "The Experts"?
dr_dshiv 5y ago
I'm writing a book advocating for the integration of socialism and capitalism, because socialism works best with markets and vice versa. I call it "Social Capitalism". The point of the book is that this is already the dominant system, despite the fact that no party actually advocates for it directly. It emerged out of compromise not philosophy. And that's A OK.
bArray 5y ago
> The Trump era likely deepened psychology’s conventional wisdom that authoritarians are almost always conservatives; the insurrection at the Capitol earlier this year showed the urgency of understanding the phenomenon. I suggest people to watch the recently released footage from inside the Capitol. You could call them idiots, fools, etc, but I don't think you can call them insurrectionists. They just bumbled in and took selfies for the most part. The FBI have been investigating these people for months, and the best they found for some form of plot was a Lego model. It's exactly this kind of inflammatory talk about your fellow Countrymen that is causing greater division. > In the U.S., though, Costello hypothesizes that right-wing authoritarians outnumber left-wing ones by roughly three to one. In the US, the left-wing (Democrat voters) clearly dominate the cities and Universities, and thereby have a much higher probability of being more educated. I would suggest people to consider that on average, the right-wing is less able to elegantly express themselves. For example, when you hear "immigrants are bad", when you nail them down, what they actually mean is "current immigration is unsustainable and affects my local community". There is currently this really dangerous assumption of assuming the political opposition are fundamentally evil, rather than people who want to see the betterment of their Country, but through different means. P.S. If you're going to downvote, at least do me the courtesy to explain why.

37 points by dr_dshiv 5y ago

The article feels a little to self congratulatory, to the point of a straw man. It’s like they’re saying “look how enlightened I am for understanding that liberals can be bad guys too”. Everybody gets that. The only issue seems to have been the measurement scale, for which I wish they went into more detail.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
There is a link to the paper, but I’m not going to try to read it on my phone. I’m wondering if the reason it was overlooked before is because it was a very small phenomena before the rise of social media.
- dfxm12 5y ago
  Other researchers have concluded that the number of strident conservatives in the U.S. far exceeds the number of strident progressives and that American conservatives express more authoritarian attitudes than their counterparts in Britain, Australia, or Canada. At least in the context of the U.S., progressivism is small enough and has little enough political power that it can be overlooked, so any subsets of this group are easily overlooked as well. On the flip side, conservative authoritarians have reached the highest political offices, so that is not only hard to overlook but also quite easy to notice.
  - chuckee 5y ago
    > in the context of the U.S., progressivism is small enough and has little enough political power that it can be overlooked On the other hand, Coca-Cola had training urging workers to be less white [1], the US Army lectured soldiers on white privilege [2], the most allegedly xenophobic US president didn't put a dent in legal immigration numbers [3], academia is not only overwhelmingly liberal, but also openly hostile to conservatives [4], and the University of California required (or still requires?) specific plans to advance diversity from job applicants [5]. You are correct that if you measure progressivism by e.g. worker's rights, universal healthcare, or stopping the military-industrial complex, it has been an utter failure. And if your imagined conservative is someone that is opposed to these things, they will appear very powerful. But if you pick a different test by which you measure, you get very different results. [1] https://nypost.com/2021/02/23/coca-cola-diversity-training-urged-workers-to-be-less-white/ https://nypost.com/2021/02/23/coca-cola-diversity-training-u... [2] https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-documents-reveal-us-army-indoctrinated-soldiers-on-dangers-of-white-privilege/ https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-... [3] https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2019/table1 https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2019/tab... [4] https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/study_liberaltoconservative_faculty_ratio_in_academia_will_blow_your_mind.html https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/study_liberalto... [5] https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diversity-initiative-berkeley/ https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diver...
lowmagnet 5y ago
I'd call it 'Doing a paper on what I'd like to call "the political compass" without checking for prior art.'

fearfulofview4 5y ago

From your friendly shills at the American Enterprise Institute. You know they’re scared if they feel the need to ignore clear and present dangers to write this distraction.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bronzeage 5y ago

It must be so hard to notice left authoritarians when almost all authoritarian regimes in the world are communistic far left.

Ekaros 5y ago
And then you remember the big boogeyman of left actually had word socialist proudly in their names... And somehow that didn't or does not count. I say they are the same as current left.
bell-cot 5y ago
> almost all authoritarian regimes in the world are communistic far left. From a brief on-line search for lists of the world's most-authoritarian regimes, this seems to be false. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism#Current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism#Current

jlkuester7 5y ago

Serious question: how is this a novel idea given the historical context of people like Stalin and Mao? I feel like I am missing something here. Are Stalin and Mao not considered authoritarians or are they not considered "leftists"?

me_me_me 5y ago
I think at this stage leftist and righist are meaningless. Stalin by all means run almost theocratic totalitarian regime. Communism was used as a slogan and means of rallying his followers. Same with Mao.
- justinmchase 5y ago
  That's why most political compasses are 2 dimensional. Most left v. right discussions are essentially a projection of some opinionated vector across the 2d landscape into a 1d line which they can then use to slander either end of the vector as authoritarian or communist or whatever. But these actual definitions lose a lot of information in that projection. The 2d map has left (socialism) v right (capitalism) and up (authoritarianism) v down (anarchism). Its probably even more complicated than that, you could at least add a 3rd dimension of time but projecting everything into a 1d line is nearly meaningless at this point.
  - jlkuester7 5y ago
    +1 for multi-dimensional analysis! Binary thinking on complex issues (like politics) is a recipe for fanaticism.
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    yes, and also things should be described by the actions not labels. N.Korea labels itself as democratic and people's but we all know thats not true.
  - OkayPhysicist 5y ago
    I've never really liked the standard 2D political compass, and I think the issue is that the two axes aren't actually independent. Right v. Left basically boils down to one's opinion on hierarchies. If one views hierarchies as good, they're on the right, if they see them as evil, they're on the left, and there's a whole spectrum of "necessary evil", "acceptable", etc, in between. Then you've got the Authoritarian v. Libertarian axis, which essentially boils down to "how much power should higher-ups in the hierarchy have over those who are lower?". With Monarchies and Dictatorships being "guy on top controls everything" to Anarchism saying "no one should control anyone". The problem is that, defined that way, certain areas in the space become absurd. What does it mean to completely reject hierarchies as evil, but think that people on top of the hierarchies ought have absolute power? What does it mean to think that hierarchies are good and just, but that there should be no power vested in them? This manifests outside the philosophical, in the real world as well. As you look at increasingly authoritarian ideologies, the differences between left-leaning and right-leaning ideologies shrink. Comparing the conditions of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR reveals far less difference than you see even amongst the spread of Liberal states today. Likewise, the number of hierarchies you hear objections to shrinks as you move right amongst Libertarians, until you basically only hear complaints about the government.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jlkuester7 5y ago

Side-topic: I often wonder how much political affiliation drives personal ideology (and not the other way around). Particularly in the US with its crazy 2-party system, there does not really seem to be the option of choosing a party that actually aligns with your personal ideals. Instead, most people seem to end up compromising at some point and joining the party they perceive is "closest" to them. However, I wonder how much of this decision is driven by ideology and how much is driven by social pressure ("all my family/friends" belong to this one..."). Then, once you have aligned to a party, does the Stockholm Syndrome set in? How much of that party's platform do you start to rationalize and acclimate to when previously you would never have agreed with some of the ideas?

jdpedrie 5y ago
Anecdata, but in my experience most normal people (i.e. not extremely politically engaged) understand they're usually choosing between imperfect (often even less-bad) options. I don't get the sense that there's a ton of cognitive dissonance required until you get into the Very Online subset of people for whom politics is their life. I think where the phenomenon you describe is extremely visible is in elected officials, especially at the federal level. You see an example now with Liz Cheney, who is in the process of transforming from a fairly generic Republican into a fairly generic Democrat as her political incentives change. The same can be observed going the other way with JD Vance moving from generic institutional Republican into post-liberal Trumpist (though perhaps the signs were there for those with eyes to see). The question then is whether the convictions were real or merely convenient.
happytoexplain 5y ago
I think this is not an uncommon phenomenon, but I still think the more common (and charitable) situation is simply that people don't feel a strong need to explicitly agree with everything the representatives, talking heads, and/or majority voters of "their" political party believe. To be sure, there is a lot of dishonest/self-deceiving side-taking, but a big part of the image of that ridiculous situation is actually just that: An image, conjured by the extrapolation of those observations onto the whole. In general, people understand that a political party is 10s of millions of people, and see no hypocrisy in voting for party A or B without agreeing with all of that party's apparently popular opinions.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Well, it's unfortunate, but not surprising. It's not like there are any examples of left authoritarianism in recent history

bell-cot 5y ago

Note the Atlantic article's sub-title - "Many psychologists wrongly assumed that coercive attitudes exist only among conservatives". The key word is "psychologists". At best, that field's WEIRD problem ( https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/non-weird-science/202004/psychologys-weird-problem https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/non-weird-science/20... ) leaves them poorly qualified on this issue. At worst...why the h*ll would anyone think that psychologists qualify as "The Experts"?

dr_dshiv 5y ago

I'm writing a book advocating for the integration of socialism and capitalism, because socialism works best with markets and vice versa. I call it "Social Capitalism". The point of the book is that this is already the dominant system, despite the fact that no party actually advocates for it directly. It emerged out of compromise not philosophy. And that's A OK.

bArray 5y ago

> The Trump era likely deepened psychology’s conventional wisdom that authoritarians are almost always conservatives; the insurrection at the Capitol earlier this year showed the urgency of understanding the phenomenon. I suggest people to watch the recently released footage from inside the Capitol. You could call them idiots, fools, etc, but I don't think you can call them insurrectionists. They just bumbled in and took selfies for the most part. The FBI have been investigating these people for months, and the best they found for some form of plot was a Lego model. It's exactly this kind of inflammatory talk about your fellow Countrymen that is causing greater division. > In the U.S., though, Costello hypothesizes that right-wing authoritarians outnumber left-wing ones by roughly three to one. In the US, the left-wing (Democrat voters) clearly dominate the cities and Universities, and thereby have a much higher probability of being more educated. I would suggest people to consider that on average, the right-wing is less able to elegantly express themselves. For example, when you hear "immigrants are bad", when you nail them down, what they actually mean is "current immigration is unsustainable and affects my local community". There is currently this really dangerous assumption of assuming the political opposition are fundamentally evil, rather than people who want to see the betterment of their Country, but through different means. P.S. If you're going to downvote, at least do me the courtesy to explain why.