The Eliminationist Minority

by Sara
Bob Altemeyer is writing a book. And, happily for those of us who have been intrigued by his ideas ever since John Dean introduced him to us in Conservatives Without Conscience, he's posting the chapters online as he gets them done.

There's a lot in the book that touches on the stuff we discuss here at Orcinus -- but the most striking discussion I found was his dissection (you'll find it in Chapter 5) of the psychology of prejudice and hate crimes within authoritarian groups. If you've read either John Dean's book or my two series (Cracks In the Wall and Tunnels And Bridges, both linked in the left margin) that riffed on it, you'll recall that authoritarians are wired differently than the rest of us; and that this wiring takes two distinct forms.

To recap: Authoritarian followers tend to be highly conforming, deeply invested in their own righteousness, absolutely trusting in their authorities, and extremely aggressive when they believe those authorities are threatened. Altemeyer developed a scale to assess people's tendency toward right-wing authoritarianism; he calls those with high scores "high RWA." There's also a very distinct -- and fortunately, much smaller -- group of authoritarians who are driven by their high need for social dominance. This group tends to be manipulative, amoral, mean, and driven by their unquenchable thirst for power. Altemeyer calls these "high-social-dominance (or "high SDO") types. And, finally, a very small percentage of the population are "double highs" -- people who manage to combine the worst traits of both. The thesis of Dean's book was that the Bush Administration is staffed, almost top to bottom, with double highs -- and that this fact has profound implications for our future as a democracy.

Altemeyer says that racial, ethnic, and gender prejudice -- and the will to act violently on these feelings -- is built right into both the high-RWA and high-SDO trait sets. But, he explains, both the roots and the expression of their eliminationist impulses are different:

[The] difference between authoritarian leaders and followers comes into view when you untangle the roots of their hostility. Social dominators show greater prejudice against minorities and women than high RWAs do, but the followers are much more hostile toward homosexuals. Why should this be the case?

…High RWAs are especially likely to aggress when they feel established authority approves of the aggression, when they are afraid, and because they are self-righteous. Since the Bible condemns homosexuality in several places, and “giving” rights to homosexuals seems to right-wing authoritarians yet another nail in the coffin of moral society, aggression against homosexuals is aroused and blessed. Similarly, high RWAs are more likely than social dominators to impose stiff sentences….and more likely to help the government persecute radicals when it’s time to round up a “posse.”

However, when it comes to racial and ethnic minorities, right-wing authoritarians will still aggress--overtly or sneakily, physically or verbally--but such attacks are less clearly supported by religious and civic authorities than they used to be. So their prejudice in these cases has dropped some. But not that of social dominators.

So authoritarian followers hate who their authorities tell them to hate; and will usually let off the brakes and act on that hatred only when their authorities give them permission to. Because they rely on external authority to guide their actions, and fear the loss of social order, social and legal sanctions are often effective at curbing their tendencies toward violence. And, left on their own, they will generally remain fairly benign.

On the other hand…

Why are social dominators hostile? Well, unlike high RWAs who fear an explosion of lawlessness, they already live in the jungle that authoritarian followers fear is coming, and they’re going to do the eating. They do not ask themselves, when they meet someone, “Is there any reason why I should try to control this person?” so much as they ask, “Is there any reason why I should not try to gain the upper hand with him right now?” Dominance is the first order of business with them in a relationship, like dogs encountering each other in a school yard, and vulnerable minorities provide easy targets for exerting power, for being mean, for domination.

….Dominators aren’t usually afraid that civilization might collapse and lawlessness ensue. Laws, they think, are not something you should necessarily obey in the first place, so much as things you should not get caught disobeying. And as for self-righteousness, it’s pretty irrelevant to people as amoral as most social dominators tend to be. They may speak of the righteousness of their cause, but that’s usually just to assure and motivate their followers. Might makes right for social dominators.

…. It doesn’t bother the social dominator that masses of people are poor. That’s their tough luck. And some racial groups are just naturally inferior to others, he says. Justice should not be applied equally to all. The rich and powerful should have advantages in court, even if that completely violates the concept of justice. Who cares if prejudice plays a role in the justice system? He certainly doesn’t. The “right people” should have more votes than everybody else in elections. And so on.

If you stare deeply into the souls of social dominators, they believe “equality” is a sucker word. Only fools believe in it, they say. And if people took equality seriously, if society did try to provide equal opportunity for all, and if the playing field really were made level so that bootstraps could be pulled up and multitudes of lives bettered, the social dominator knows he would get less. And he very much dislikes that notion. He says so.

Separately, neither group is a particular social threat. (Obnoxious and annoying, perhaps, but not a threat.) But together, Dr. Bob says, they're toxic.

[RWA's] image of themselves as the good people leaves no room for believing they are cold-blooded, ruthless, immoral manipulators after power at almost any cost. So social dominators might incite authoritarian followers to commit a hate crime, but the dominators and followers probably launch the attack for different reasons: the dominator out of meanness, as an act of intimidation and control; the follower out of fear and self-righteousness in the name of authority.

…This is now called the “lethal union” in this field of research. When social dominators are in the driver’s seat, and right-wing authoritarians stand at their beck and call, unethical things appear much more likely to happen. True, sufficiently skilled social dominators served by dedicated followers can make the trains run on time. But you have to worry about what the trains may be hauling when dominators call the shots and high RWAs do the shooting. The trains may be loaded with people crammed into boxcars heading for death camps.

And of course this lethal union is likely to develop in the real world. Authoritarian followers don’t usually try to become leaders. Instead they happily play subservient roles, and can be expected to especially enjoy working for social dominators, who will (you can bet your bottom dollar) take firm control of things, and who share many of the followers’ values and attitudes. The “connection” connects between these two opposites because they attract each other like the north and south poles of two magnets. The two can then become locked in a cyclonic death spiral that can take a whole nation down with them.

Altemeyer tested this theory by running a three-hour Risk-type global simulation game with various combinations of high and low RWAs, high and low SDOs and double highs. The results confirmed his earlier observations: double-highs will always put their own prestige and power over every other concern, even if the fate of the world is at stake. They're more interested in wheeling and dealing and driving the other guy to the wall -- fine if you're in business, but not so fine if you're trying to establish programs or institutions aimed at solving large-scale problems like overpopulation, pollution, or global warming. They're also far more interested in military might and bullying than they are in diplomacy or compromise (if you're a double high, you can't count it as a win until the other guy is writhing on the ground in front of you, begging for his life. Any other outcome is a loss.) In these simulations, their prejudices translated in a predictable ethocentrism that often blinded them to their own best interests. Predictably -- and chillingly -- putting double-highs in charge guaranteed ecological catastrophe, mass starvation, and global nuclear war.

In summary, then:

-- Yes, Virginia, there really is a "them." Most of us are genuinely not predisposed toward eliminationist violence; and even the large minority that is won't indulge in it without permission and a push. But prejudice and the use of force are foundational to the double-high character; and much of the discrimination and violence that we do see occurs at the instigation of this toxic one to two percent of the population.

-- Because they have absolutely no concept of the common good (or any good that doesn't relate to their own pursuit of power), double-high leaders are constitutionally incapable of thinking of the future in ways that any of the rest of us are likely to find acceptable. In fact, they will almost certainly try to dismantle the existing common infrastructure if they believe it threatens their own quest for glory.

-- The more of this authoritarian minority we allow in power -- particularly the double-highs -- the higher the risk of inequality, discrimination, and eliminationist violence; and the bleaker our odds of doing anything constructive about our common future. Unfortunately, these people are far and away the most likely of us all to seek out leadership positions.

We're looking ahead into a new century in humanity will, increasingly, be operating closer to the margins of our planet's carrying capacity. Whether or not we survive this transition will almost certainly depend on ability to move past prejudice and eliminationist violence, and build bonds of trust that enable us to solve our problems cooperatively.

After reading Altemeyer, it's probably not hyperbole to say that our entire human future depends on getting whole lot better at seeing these guys (and yes, they are almost exclusively guys) early on for what they are, and keeping them far, far away from the levers of power.

Update: Driftglass says pretty much the same thing, only a hell of a lot more poetically.

Cracks In The Wall, Part I: Defining the Authoritarian Personality

by Sara Robinson


We need to stop this. We have gone on too long assuming that our right-wing opponents are, in all times and places, unchangeable and unchanging. Yes, their arguments are confoundingly short on evidence and fact. Yes, their logic loops are closed up so tight as to be frustratingly impervious to reason. Yes, they absolutely do mean to do us -- and our democracy -- grievous harm.

Here's the good news. That Great Wall that separates our little reality-based community from The Fantasyland Next Door is not a monolith. Nor are the inmates of that Otherworld necessarily locked in there for all time and eternity. There's evidence -- from scientists, from experience, from history -- that there are cracks in that wall. They are small and subtle, to be sure (that's why nobody's ever noticed them before): at this point, they are mere hairlines, faint traces that are hard to spot without a good flashlight in the hands of someone who knows where to look. But, as someone who's spent much of her life pacing one side or the other of this wall, I am here to tell you: there are places where it fails. People do cross it, and survive to tell the tale. And, rather than continue to wallow in our frustration, it's high time we mapped those cracks, find effective ways to widen them, and eventually exploit them to help both afflicted individuals and our larger culture break through the insanity.

It will be slow, thoughtful, methodical work. What I'm offering here is just an opening tour of the rockwork, an explanation of where the cracks are and why they formed. At first, actual opportunities to exploit these weaknesses will be small and fleeting. But my hope is, with time and practice, we'll get more observant, and more creative, and more adroit in taking advantage of them when they appear. That's the goal of this series.

This first installment summarizes some pertinent ideas culled from John Dean's new book, Conservatives Without Conscience. These are some of the basic ideas and definitions I'll be using as a springboard in the posts that follow.

Dean wrote this book with the express goal of using his own status as a bestselling author to popularize decades of social science research that should be -- but isn't -- common knowledge among politically-literate Americans. If I had to bet, I'd guess that grousing, joking, analyzing, and commiserating over the confounding nature of the non-reality-based community probably accounts for a quarter of all the words ever produced in Left Blogistan. For several years now, we've been trying to puzzle this riddle out on our own, with limited success. But, happily, it turns out that social psychologists have had the map to the right-wing authoritarian mindset nailed down for years. Dean wants us all to know what they know.

Research into "authoritarian personalities" began in the aftermath of WWII, as scientists tried to figure out how otherwise civilized people succumbed to the charisma of Hitler and Mussolini and allowed themselves to be willingly led into committing notorious atrocities. The inquiry continued through Milgram's famous experiments at Stanford in the early 60s; later, some of it became subsumed in the work of The Fundamentalism Project convened by Martin Marty at the University of Chicago in the 1980s and early 90s. Long story short: there is now over 50 years of good data on these people coming from every corner of the social sciences; but since almost none of this has been common knowledge outside the academy, nobody on the progressive side has really been putting it to use. Dean clearly wrote the book hoping to change all that.

The bulk of Conservatives Without Conscience is based on the research of Dr. Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, a social psychologist specializing in the psychology of authoritarianism. Altemeyer received the prestigious Association for the Advancement of Science prize for behavioral sciences for this research, and it is widely accepted in academia (though, as you might imagine, not so much among conservatives!). What follows is my brief synopsis of Dean's brief synopsis of some of Altemeyer's findings.

Leaders and Followers
Authoritarians come in two flavors: leaders and followers. The two tiers are driven by very different motivations; and understanding these differences is the first key to understanding how authoritarian social structures work.

Leaders form just a small fraction of the group. Social scientists refer to this group as having a high "social dominance orientation (SDO)" -- a set of traits that can be readily identified with psychological testing. "These are people who seize every opportunity to lead, and who enjoy having power over others," says Dean -- and they have absolutely no qualms about objectifying people and breaking rules to advance their own ambitions. High-SDO personalities tend to emerge very early in life (which suggests at least some genetic predisposition): you probably remember a few from your own sandbox days, and almost certainly have known a few who've made your adult life a living hell as well.

High-SDO people are characterized by four core traits: they are dominating, opposed to equality, committed to expanding their own personal power, and amoral. These are usually accompanied by other unsavory traits, many of which render them patently unsuitable for leadership roles in a democracy:

Typically men
Intimidating and bullying
Faintly hedonistic
Vengeful
Pitiless
Exploitative
Manipulative
Dishonest
Cheat to win
Highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic)
Mean-spirited
Militant
Nationalistic
Tells others what they want to hear
Takes advantage of "suckers"
Specializes in creating false images to sell self
May or may not be religious
Usually politically and economically conservative/Republican

Dean notes: "Although these collations of characteristics…are not attractive portraits, the are nonetheless traits that authoritarians themselves acknowledge." In other words, these guys know what they are, and are often quite unabashedly proud of it.

High-SDO people are drawn to power, and will seek it ruthlessly and relentlessly, regardless of the consequences to others. Many cultures (including ours, up until a few decades ago) have found these people so dangerous that they've evolved counterweights and backstops that conspire to either keep them away from the levers of power, or mitigate the damage they can do (and I'll discuss some of those in the last installment). However, modern America seems to have lost all vestiges of this awareness. Now, we celebrate our most powerful social dominants, pay them obscene salaries, turn them into media stars, and hand over the keys to the empire to them almost gratefully. They have free rein to pursue their ambitions unchecked, with no cultural brakes on their rapacity. They will do whatever they can get away with; and we'll not only let them, but often cheer them on.

We’re now at the point where these sleek Machivellian manipulators are recognized around the world as the face of American business and governmental authority. While the bulk of "Conservatives Without Conscience" goes on to explain the ways in which various members of the Bush administration have demonstrated classic high-SDO behavior, I'd also argue that our willingness to accept high-SDO leadership also accounts for toxic bosses, incompetent business planning, crooked accounting, political graft, and many of the other dysfunctions that afflict American corporate life as well.

And yet, while these leaders are compelling, they will not be the main focus of my discussion of authoritarians. As I said: these personality traits emerge as early as three or four, and people who have them are almost always well beyond the reach of change. They have always been with us, and probably always will be. Since they represent a very small slice of the population, dealing with them effectively will, in practice, largely involve strategies to recognize them, isolate them, and prevent them from aggregating large hordes of followers.

It's those followers that we need to look at -- because they are sometimes capable of change, if you know where the leverage points are. The next two parts of this series will focus exclusively on them; for now, let's look at what Dean and Altemeyer have to say.

While the high-SDO leaders are defined by Dean as dominating, opposed to equality, desirous of personal power, and amoral, right-wing authoritarian followers have a different but very complementary set of motivations. The three core traits that define them are:

1. Submission to authority. "These people accept almost without question the statements and actions of established authorities, and comply with such instructions without further ado" writes Dean. "[They] are intolerant of criticism of their authorities, because they believe the authority is unassailably correct. Rather than feeling vulnerable in the presence of powerful authorities, they feel safer. For example, they are not troubled by government surveillance of citizens because they think only wrongdoers need to be concerned by such intrusions. Still, their submission to authority is not blind or automatic; [they] believe there are proper and improper authorities…and their decision to submit is shaped by whether a particular authority is compatible with their views."

2. Aggressive support of authority. Right-wing followers do not hesitate to inflict physical, psychological, financial, social, or other forms of harm on those they see as threatening the legitimacy of their belief system and their chosen authority figure. This includes anyone they see as being too different from their norm (like gays or racial minorities). It's also what drives their extremely punitive attitude toward discipline and justice. Notes Dean: "Authoritarian aggression is fueled by fear and encouraged by a remarkable self-righteousness, which frees aggressive impulses."

3. Conventionality. Right-wing authoritarian followers prefer to see the world in stark black-and-white. They conform closely with the rules defined for them by their authorities, and do not stray far from their own communities. This extreme, unquestioning conformity makes them insular, fearful, hostile to new information, uncritical of received wisdom, and able to accept vast contradictions without perceiving the inherent hypocrisy.

Conformity also feeds their sense of themselves as more moral and righteous than others -- a perception that's usually buttressed by the use of magical absolution techniques that they use to "evaporate guilt," in Dean's words. Because they confessed, or are saved, or were just following orders, they can commit heinous crimes and still retain a serene conscience and sense that they are "righteous people." On the other hand, when it comes to outsiders, there is no absolution. Their memory for even minor transgressions is nothing short of elephantine (as Bill Clinton knows all too well).

Dean lists other traits of right-wing authoritarian followers, most of which flow directly from the three core traits above:

Both men and women
Highly religious
Moderate to little education
Trust untrustworthy authorities
Prejudiced (particularly against homosexuals, women, and followers of religions other than their own)
Mean-spirited
Narrow-minded
Intolerant
Bullying
Zealous
Dogmatic
Uncritical toward chosen authority
Hypocritical
Inconsistent and contradictory
Prone to panic easily
Highly self-righteous
Moralistic
Strict disciplinarian
Severely punitive
Demands loyalty and returns it
Little self-awareness
Usually politically conservative/Republican

Remember this list, because these specific characteristics form the foundation of the discussion that will unfold in the next two posts. It is these traits that we will find the cracks in the wall.

As a final point: Dean's book puts to rest once and for all the right-wing shibboleth of "liberal fundamentalists" and "liberal authoritarians." Altemeyer and his colleagues have found, through decades of research, that authoritarians almost universally skew toward the far reactionary right on the political scale. This very much includes Stalinists and other "left-wing" totalitarians: though these men used socialist rhetoric to create "Communist" political orders, they're classic examples of high-SDO leaders taking control by whatever means they had at hand, and using them to create archetypal far-right authoritarian states. Dean and Altemeyer make it clear that authoritarianism is, by long-accepted definition, overwhelmingly a right-wing personality trait.

Dean is also emphatic that authoritarianism, in all its forms, is completely antithetical to both classical conservatism (he still considers himself a Goldwater conservative), and to the founding ideals of America. We must be clear: when right-wingers threaten liberals, they are directly threatening the seminal political impulse that created our nation. An operative democracy depends on having a populace that is open to new ideas, able to think for itself, confident in its abilities, willing to take risks, and capable of mutual trust. America was founded as the world's first radically liberal state. History has shown us that the nation's best moments, past and future, are created by people with a strong liberal orientation.

Authoritarians aren't merely constitutionally incapable of this kind of cultural and political openness; they are actively hostile to it, and seek to stamp it out wherever they find it. Everything in their souls drives them to dismantle the democratic impulse, and bring people under the heel of hierarchical authority -- which is why history has also shown us that the nation's worst moments, past and future, are created by people with a strong right-wing authoritarian orientation.

In my next post, I'll move away from Dean's book, and into a deeper look at the psychology of right-wing followers. We'll take a brief look at some of the reasons people are drawn into right-wing authoritarian belief systems -- and a longer look at the events that cause some of these same followers to eventually choose to abandon those systems.

It's in those reasons that we'll begin to find the cracks of daylight. See you Saturday.

Dr. Bob Has The Map

by Sara Robinson
It's been long enough now that nobody probably remembers this, so let me recap:

"Cracks In The Wall" and "Tunnels and Bridges" found their genesis in John Dean's summer blockbuster, Conservatives Without Conscience. Dean, in turn, based his book largely on the work of Dr. Bob Altemeyer, the University of Manitoba social psychologist who has spent the past several decades researching the social contour of authoritarianism.

Yesterday, both Dean and Altemeyer were at Firedoglake's Sunday book club discussion. Several participants asked Dr. Bob (as he likes to be called) what the odds are that right-wing authoritarian (RWA) followers can actually change their beliefs. Here's his reply:

Is there really nothing that we can do to change authoritarian followers? Well as I said, some things seem to work. I mentioned how high RWAs want to be like everyone else in many regards. Another thing that “works,”–and this truly astounds me–is that authoritarian followers do get affected by their experiences when you’d swear there was not chance. So I have found, both in surveys and in an experiment I ran one time using myself as the “target,” that once high RWAs meet a homosexual or learn that someone they knew was a homosexual, their attitude toward homosexuals becomes more favorable. (I’m not gay, but I told a class of my students one year that I was for the purpose of this experiment.) So despite all their preconceptions, the highs saw reality and changed. Another thing that works is higher education. Students at my large public university drop in RWA scale scores about 10% on the average over the course of a 4-year undergraduate education. But the students who drop the most are the ones who came in being very high. (I don’t think it’s the profs who cause this to happen, but simply the highs meeting a much wider variety of people than ever before.)

But as John Dean mentioned, normal approaches to changing someone’s mind (reason, discourse, exposure to scientific evidence) do not work with authoritarian followers, but instead provoke a dogmatic response. (The comment from the person from Cincinnati who says the conservatives he knows will change slowly, but not if they are treated with disrespect and humiliated) applies here, I think.) The dogmatism goes back to the way the followers have formed their beliefs, which has basically been to copy the beliefs of the authorities in their lives. They really don’t know why those are the right ideas; they’re taking other people’s word for it. Most people have done more figuring-things-out-for-themselves, so when they get challenged they can go back to the reasons they believe what they do. And if better reasons leading elsewhere come along, why not follow them? But the high RWA is poorly equipped to handle such a challenge. He can respond with the counter-arguments he has been inoculated with, but if they get swatted aside he is lost. And not only is that particular point lost, but the whole shooting match is now in jeopardy because of the simplistic way (”It’s all right or it’s all wrong”) he thinks. So dogmatism is his best defense, and he’s perfectly willing–as I suspect many of you have found–to end an argument he has lost by saying, “OK, you believe what you want, and I’ll believe what I want.”

That's a pretty strong corroboration of what I've been saying here. "High RWAs" are those who score high on Dr. Altemeyer's scale of right-wing authoritarian orientation -- the committed followers. As we've seen, reason doesn't reach them. But, he goes on to say, the very recipe I've been describing -- education, exposure to other people, better skills that enable them to process complexity, and experience in using and trusting their own judgment -- does.

And, yes, says the good doctor: RWA followers have more mental flexiblity than we tend to give them credit for. Just because they don't have great reasoning skills, it doesn't mean they're incapable of acquiring them.

It's a nice confirmation: we really do have good reason to hope that, with the right kind of support, these people can be persuaded to join the reality-based world.

Just A River In Egypt

--by Sara

It's been a hell of a summer for social conservatives. Their religious and political leadership has been caught with its pants down -- literally or figuratively -- at the rate of about one per week for the past couple months now. David Vitter. Bob Allen. Glenn Murphy. Larry Craig. (And that's just on the sex front: we're not even getting into the financial improprieties of Ted Stevens and his gang from Alaska.)

Glenn Greenwald's Thursday piece describes the predictably self-serving and tortured twisting and turning that's going on as the right-wing blogosphere tries to reconcile their cherished "moral values" with the requirement to support Republicans at all costs. After all, there comes a point where denial just doesn't work anymore -- and some of them, at least, apparently realize they're just about there.

But for quite a few conservative subgroups, that point is still way off in the distance -- and denial is just a river in Egypt. I'd like to talk a bit about how that's shaking out.

News Flash: Hypocrisy Is Morally Wrong
Those of us in the reality-based world have a very clear and logical response to hypocrisy. The comments thread in Dave's post below on Larry Craig showed this reaction in full bloom. We expect people to walk their talk. People whose actions don't square with their stated moral code cannot, and should not, be trusted. We understand that people of good will can have moments of weakness where they miss the intended mark (I'm talkin' to you, Bill Clinton); but when people have built their entire careers demonizing people in public for the exact same stuff they're doing themselves in private, we reserve the right to call them out as hypocrites.

Beyond that: We actually think hypocrisy is morally wrong. The right-wing bloggers seem to be having a real hard time with this idea; but out here on our side, we're quite clear about it. Hypocrisy bespeaks a lack of self-awareness and self-knowledge -- a loose relationship with objective truth that's unacceptably dangerous in anyone with power. A person who can lie to himself that blatantly can reasonably be expected to lie the electorate as well. A person who lets their ideology blind them to the honest truths of the human condition cannot make good policy for the rest of us to live by. A person who carves the rest of the world into "good" and "evil" based on criteria they refuse to apply to themselves is completely incapable of understanding, let alone enforcing, equal rights under law. Hypocrisy is the enemy of wisdom and compassion; and, no matter what your form of government, it leads to disastrous decision-making and epic folly. A continued history of overt hypocrisy with no evidence of subsequent growth should, all on its own, automatically disqualify anyone from public office.

This is what "moral clarity" looks like on the progressive side. But, as I said, out on the right, they're really struggling. This struggle is playing out in three different ways -- at least two of which are non-intuitive, and all of which have implications for what could happen next.

By their strategies shall you know them.

No Conscience, No Hypocrisy, No Problem
Longtime readers may remember that I once wrote a taxonomy of authoritarians that separated them into three groups. The smallest group, as Bob Altemeyer told us last year, is the high-social dominance (high-SDO) leaders -- the handful of amoral tyrant wannabes who think equality is for suckers and other people are there to be manipulated out of whatever they can be taken for. In his 2006 book, Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean guessed that most of the people now being caught with their hands in the cookie jar would fall into this category.

These people aren't going to feel genuine remorse for their actions...mainly because they're constitutionally incapable of feeling remorse at all. While most of us -- left and right -- feel tremendous internal tension when our actions don't square with our personal beliefs, that's not a problem these guys have. Because that dissonance requires that one actually have personal beliefs in the first place. And they're simply not burdened by that issue.

Being untroubled by a conscience makes it easy for them to tell people whatever they want to hear. If what people want to hear is "God hates fags," they'll sell that line with the required conviction -- even when they're personally cruising public restrooms and paging pages in their off hours. There's no dissonance there to be felt. Their lives are governed by one consistent and unwavering interest: to manipulate others in order to get their needs met. Since that's the only real priority there is -- and all their actions serve that end -- there's no conflict in their minds at all.

I've written before that we need to get a whole lot better about identifying high-SDO types early, and keeping them away from the levers of power. Unfortunately, they're obsessively drawn to both political and religious leadership -- so the rest of us need get lightening fast at knowing 'em when we see 'em, and act swiftly and surely to end their careers before they get too far along. (Some pointers for how to do this are here.)

A high SDO's first instinct is to defend anyone with power...right up until the moment that his own interests might be furthered by betraying his erstwhile friends. Right now, you can hear their voices loudly and clearly in the right-wing conversation: they're the ones trying hardest to minimize these scandals. "It's not so bad," they say. "After all, Clinton was a pervert, too" -- an attempt at moral equivalency that reveals their complete incompetence at moral calculus. Since most high-SDOs have personal lives that don't brook too much examination, they're also very eager to change the subject. "Um...uh...oh, look! Mexicans! Terrorists! Iran!"

Our Leader Said It. I Believe it. That Settles It.
The second group is the hard-core right-wing authoritarian followers (RWA followers, for short), also identified through Altemeyer's work and described in Dean's book. Because their first impulse is to follow their high-SDO leaders implicitly, they can be expected to discount the truth of the allegations and savagely blame the victims -- all while wrapping themselves in the mantle of their own victimhood.

For these people, it's all about denial. The allegations were bogus. Craig's taped confession was faked. They also get to work their cherished stabbed-in-the-back meme: the Democrats set these guys up -- you know they're always out to get us. The subtext, now as always, is: our leaders can do no wrong. And besides, however fucked up they are, they're still moral paragons compared to those scheming libruls. The logic of high-RWA followers is essentially tribal, and more than a bit paranoid. Anybody who believes like us gets a pass. Anybody who doesn't is out to get us.

Those of us on the progressive side who think that this wave of scandal is finally going to bitch-slap these people back to reality are doomed to be very disappointed. Just give it up now, because it's not gonna happen. The only kind of assault these people register is direct, personal, deep betrayal that creates an obvious, tangible loss for them. Politicians and preachers can (and routinely do) rape their daughters and swindle their mothers' fortunes away; but even that's not quite close enough to home for most of them. Until there's a betrayal that creates a quantifiable personal hit to their own well-being, they'll almost always find ways to wave it all off.

Even more frustrating: among the Christianist RWAs, these kinds of troubles generally tend to raise a leader's stock, not tank it. Fundamentalist Christians know in their bones that all humans are essentially depraved. They can't possibly cast stones at these guys; because there, but for the grace of God, go any of us. Their entire religion rests on stories of humiliation, loss, and redemption by faith. Such testimonies are the staple of every fundamentalist worship service, and they never fail to move people to tears.

Thus, a political or religious leader who succumbs to temptation is typically made more credible, not less, by these events. He's now made a personal sojourn into the deepest abyss -- places few Christians have ever gone -- and met the Devil face-to-face. After a suitable period of rehabilitation (it only took Ted Haggard three short weeks) he'll be able to share his powerful new testimony with others -- for a hefty speaking fee, of course -- for the rest of his life. It's perverse, but true: the worse the depravity you can describe, the better and more marketable the tale.

Voters, of course, are less forgiving. Politicians like Craig and Vitter probably won't get elected again; and Allen and Murphy have probably worked their last campaigns. But they all stand to make out quite handsomely as a direct result of their troubles: the wonderful world of wingnut welfare and the fundamentalist talk circuit will soon provide enough money and ego candy to salve whatever disgrace they may feel now. (Access to that generous and accepting audience is one reason so many disgraced public figures "find Jesus" in the aftermath of scandal. It's the only market that will still pay up to buy their story.)

For both of the above groups, these scandals will create exactly zero long-term consequences. The high-SDO leaders will either return to the bosom of the faithful, or find other groups to exploit. The high-RWA followers will forgive and forget, as they always do. We could have another scandal every week until the 2008 election (and, the way things are going, we very well might) -- but it won't change a thing for any of these people.

Just Tell Us The Truth. Please.
But authoritarians comprise something less than one-third of all Americans; and the above two groups are only about half of that. Which means that there's a third group -- maybe 12-15% of the country -- that's looking at this moral meltdown, and may actually be taking the right lessons to heart.

In the posts linked to above, I've called these "soft-core authoritarians." They're usually people who didn't start life on the far-right; but somehow over the past 30 years ended up there. Hippies scared them, but they liked Reagan. They think the Democrats will tax them, and give their money away to people who don't work. They listened to Rush and Billo, because they were all that was on the radio and TV. Their friends at the bar, the community center, or the seniors home were all conservative. Very often, they hit a bad patch in life, and found the support they needed at a fundamentalist church. One way or another, they got pulled into the orbit of authoritarian religion and politics, and have stayed there ever since.

But, even though they're roused by the powerful emotional rhetoric and imagery of the far right, they also retain enough of a functioning conscience to know hypocrisy when they see it. And those people are taking serious notice of this growing mountain of malfeasance and scandal, as this discussion on Daily Kos makes evident.

It's not going down well. Across the country, there are decent, modest social conservatives who don't like folks who say one thing and do another; and have nothing but contempt for people who refuse to take responsibility for their own actions. (If you ask them, they'll tell you it's why they became Republicans in the first place.) Against the backdrop of Iraq and Katrina and the parade of lying Bush Administration officials, and against the failure of the promises they've been hearing from the GOP for 30 years, they're finally looking at the whole lying mess and wondering: "Who are these guys? And why should we continue to believe anything they say?"

Greenwald's post includes some of these voices, too: prominent right-wing bloggers whose remaining attachment to reason was finally strong enough that they could no longer ignore their faction's flaming hypocrisy problem. When the radical right's own spokespeople start fessing up in the face of mounting evidence, it's a good sign that this endless wave of scandal is making at least a small dent in the wall of IOKIYAR denial.

These are the people the progressive movement needs to be talking to -- and this moral meltdown is a tremendous opening that's making more than a few of them more open to hearing our side of the story. But we also need to bear in mind that there are limits to how far this can take us. We may be horrified now at the sheer volume of the hypocrisy. But we're probably going to be even more horrified later as we realize, in the weeks and months to come, that there are vast numbers of people who are still, in the face of everything, perfectly capable of denying that any of this matters at all.

Saturday Open Thread: Put Up or Shut Up, Continued....

-- by Sara

The thread on the "Put Up or Shut Up" post below got long and raucous, so I'm starting a new one so the show can go on...and maybe even move in some new directions. Longtime friend-of-the-blog Trefayne sets the terms:

This thread and the blog entry that spawned it remind me of what Mrs. Robinson was telling us a while back about Prof. Altemeyer's book "The Authoritarians." We often find in politics leaders and followers, and the people in each of these two groups have personality traits that complement the other group's role. The dynamic he describes is worth considering in this struggle to prevent more bloodshed.

The Right-Wing Authoritarian followers have been measured as having difficulty with critical thinking, a tendency toward "us-versus-them" perception, and following the leader because he is the leader and doing so even when he is leading them off a cliff. They are prone to suspicions and the Paranoid Style in American politics. Their understanding of the world is unfalsifiable and immune to counter-evidence. Witness the current troll. But less-extreme people with similar problems abound. We even know some of them in the real world.

The leaders are similar, but less docile. They are motivated by a drive for high social dominance, sometimes verging on sociopathy. They are even harder to get through to than their followers. I think some of the folks here are right that they will not back down or reveal their goals (or their goal-less opportunism).

So here we have a problem with Sara's call. The leaders will not and can not, by themselves, scale back their drive for control. To the degree that it is possible, the followers have to see their leaders as a problem and stop following their orders. It sometimes happens. They don't become saints, but they do stand aside, reducing the number of active footsoldiers. Mrs. R wrote about this in her "Cracks in the Wall" and "Tunnels and Bridges" posts, which are permanently linked in the left column on the main Orcinus page.

I'm assuming that Mrs. R's recent blog posting, asking conservatives if they really want another civil war, is directed to the Conservative Movement's base just as much as it is to the leadership. *Maybe* the lack of an answer from the talking heads, or a series of non-denial denials, will get the regular people wondering if they might want to slow down and look where they're headed. They might then decide to stop running toward that cliff.

So, Mrs. R: Are there ways we can bring up your challenge to our conservative family-members and neighbors, without making them become defensive? This would include conversations over dinner or during Fourth of July picnics. Do we put it in the context of what the bloviators seem to want, and avoid asking our friend directly if they want war? Or should we be more direct?

Thoughtful comments are appreciated.

Indeed they are. Trefayne is heading the conversation directly toward my next intended post, which wants to talk about why and what happens when lone wolf actions become the common cause of communities. But today's a study day, so that will have to wait.

In meantime, it's a gorgeous Saturday here at the old whale-watching shack. The water's beautiful, the orcas are hunting salmon on the cliffs below, and the sound is full of weekend boaters. Crack open a cold beer, plop down on the porch, and hold forth. I'm stuck inside with Excel and a 500-page statistics text, but I'll check in on the conversation every now and again, too.

Are They Crazy Dangerous, or Just Plain Crazy?

Welcome sign to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX

-- by Sara

One of the hard parts of dealing with the fringe elements of the extremist right is figuring out whether a given group is just harmless garden-variety crazy -- or harboring the special kind of insanity that will lead to acts of local violence or outright domestic terror.

I was noodling around the web doing some research on this recently, and came across a public document from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (that's the CIA with a maple leaf on its hat) that summarized some of the tell-tale signs they look for in discerning who's gone over the edge and around the bend, and might be regarded as a possible threat to domestic security. The signs are simple and elegant -- and, I thought, useful rules of thumb for anyone who's trying to decide if the local ruffians are just disaffected, or heading for serious trouble.

The article is aimed at "the challenge of contending with religious movements whose defining characteristic is an adherence to non-traditional spiritual belief systems;" but pretty much everything they say applies just as accurately to "non-traditional political belief systems" -- such as neo-Nazism and its fetid cousins -- as well. Here's a wrap-up of what CSIS' agents look for in assessing possible trouble ahead.

Marching Toward the Apocalypse
You can tell a lot about a group's danger quotient by taking a quick look at their preferred future. The CSIS document was written in 1999, so the authors had their eyes wide open looking for millennialist groups looking to bring on some variant of the Second Coming in 2000. That threat, of course, has passed; but the general rule still holds. Any group that's insisting that The End Is Near -- that the world is about to end in fire, ice, Rapture, or a Racial Holy War -- has already taken one giant step back from consensus reality. Interestingly: the report notes that "not all foresee a violent turning of the millennium; in fact, many see it as the catalyst for peaceful and harmonious change." Harmonic convergences and Jesus' Thousand-Year Kingdom also apply here. (Note, however: global warming, which is supported by thousands of studies, does not.)

The core point is: people who think this way have given up hope that they can create any kind of fulfilling future within this society, and have retreated to a fantasy future that they find more emotionally compelling. This is important: as I've discussed before, creating a common future is the fundamental goal that keeps societies together; and the shared vision and collective effort this goal inspires are critical to a functioning democracy. When people check out of the reality-based consensus vision entirely and cling beyond the reach of reason to future-based fairy tales -- especially if they start doing it in large numbers -- it's a serious symptom of a democratic society in trouble.

Authoritarian leaders, in particular, specialize in peddling these fantasies. As we'll see, they use them as an early lever that will pry open their followers' minds, allowing them to hijack their moral systems and ultimately control of their actions as well.

A Theology of Violence
The report lays out the small handful of epistemological beliefs that set the stage and provide justification for groups heading toward ideologically-based violence:

Dualism - The belief that the world is fractured into two opposing camps of Good and Evil, which confers a profound significance on small social and political conflicts as evidence of this great cosmic struggle, and which could precipitate a violent response.

The persecuted chosen - Movements view themselves as prophetic vanguards belonging to a chosen elite but feel persecuted by wicked and tyrannical forces, which push the group to make concrete preparations to defend their sacred status.

Imminence - Because movements believe the apocalypse is unfolding before their very eyes, the "last days" are experienced as psychologically imminent and pressure them to take immediate action to ensure their salvation.

Determinism - Since a group devoutly believes it will be the ultimate winner of the final battle, if it believes a catastrophic scenario is being actualized, the group may feel it has no choice but to try to trigger the apocalypse through violence.

Salvation through conflict/enemy eradication - As salvation depends entirely upon direct participation in the apocalyptic struggle, a group is always on the verge of anticipating confrontation, which justifies action to eliminate evil and eradicate enemies.

Authoritarian groups like to set up strong black-and-white boundaries between "us" and "them'" -- and then enforce those boundaries with stringent behavior codes, persecution myths, demonization of outsiders, and stories about the future that promise them ultimate victory. Note that all tribes do this to some degree -- you can see all of this going on at some level in both Republican and Democratic party politics, for example -- because it's an instinctive part of how humans bond. But when a group embraces in-group/out-group thinking to the point of paranoia -- and to where where it's actively anticipating, preparing for, and perhaps even making plans to precipitate the coming end -- you can safely say it's veered into dangerous territory.

The Chosen One
Sociologists have devised dozens of different scales by which one can assess the relative "cultish" nature of a group. One of the recurring traits that's noted on every such scale I've ever seen is that cults always have a charismatic, messianic leader around whom everything else revolves. In fact, these leaders are so central to the whole enterprise that the group will almost always fold after its leader dies or (as frequently happens) is sentenced to a long jail term.

Whether they're on the left (Jim Jones) or the right (Rev. Moon), these leaders all operate in exactly the same way -- a way that is strikingly familiar to those of us already acquainted with Altemeyer's description of high-SDO leaders. They step into the center of their followers' lives, dictating every detail of their existence and co-opting their moral centers. When the followers become convinced that society's rules no longer apply to them because they follow a "higher code" laid down by their leader, the door to antisocial and perhaps even violent action swings wide open. And the leaders themselves, unanswerable to any other authority, often set the prime example for violence by heaping unchecked and escalating abuse on their own followers over time.

Goin' Up To The Country
Of course, you can only live by your own rules for so long before you start drawing unwanted attention to yourself. So, in trying to stay under the radar, these groups often decide to move out of town to some remote corner of the world, buying up large tracts of country property where they can build a compound and be left to "live in peace" -- though, too often, peace is about the last thing that results from this.

According to CSIS, "goin' up to the country" is a watershed moment in the development of a dangerous group. The decision to withdraw from society is often the first overt act of paranoia -- a clear statement that the group believes that mainstream authority is "out to get us," and is strongly asserting the right to live outside the law. Furthermore, in the isolation of the compound, leaders are free to consolidate their arbitrary control over the group's members, without any social counterbalance at all -- "a situation that facilitates violence," as the report observes.

In this hothouse environment, suspicion and dependency flourish; and the unquestioned conviction that the outside world means them harm -- and they must organize and arm themselves for the coming showdown -- takes deep root. The persistence of this pattern is borne out by the huge numbers of rural cult compounds that turned into armed camps in recent American history. Jonestown. Waco. The Aryan Nations' Hayden Lake camp in Idaho. Elizabeth Clare Prophet's attempt to arm her retreat in Montana. The Hare Krishna compound in West Virginia. Rajneeshpuram in Oregon. (The biggest example of all may be the Mormon exodus to Utah, where Brigham Young's growing paranoia led him to order the Mountain Meadows Massacre.) When a charismatic leader moves his or her group en masse from the city to the country, that group has crossed a Rubicon beyond which the likelihood of violence increases dramatically.

When all four of these factors are in play -- emotional investment in a fantasy future, adoption of an apocalyptic belief system, total dominance by a charismatic leader, and withdrawal and isolation from the world -- the CSIS report indicates that you're looking at group that is actively assembling the means, the motive, and the intent required to commit violent acts against the outside world. From this point, we're not unreasonable to ask: Where is this going? What could set them off? How and when might the shooting begin?

The pattern of proximate events that propel these groups toward actual acts of violence will be the subject of the next post.

Fake News and 'Glorious Leader' Trump: The Key to His Authoritarian Following

Trump's authoritarian followers remain voluntarily within his alternative universe with the help of his press-baiting "fake news" claims, which drive a wedge between his True Believers and the reality the rest of us inhabit.

[Note: I originally wrote this essay three weeks ago as an op-ed for potential use by newspapers. We approached several to see if we could raise interest in the issue. No one responded, so I am publishing it here.]

There’s a reason Donald Trump bandies the term “fake news” about so readily and gleefully. It’s more than just a tic or a theme. It’s actually a tool he uses to drive a wedge between his followers and reality.

This week he even seemed to lay ownership to the phrase. “The media is really, the word, one of the greatest of all terms I've come up with, is ‘fake’,” Trump told Mike Huckabee in an interview. “I guess other people have used it perhaps over the years but I've never noticed it. And it's a shame. And they really hurt the country. Because they take away the spirit of the country.”

Fact-checkers such as PolitiFact have observed that, beyond the extremely dubious notion he actually “came up with” the phrase, Trump’s use of it actually turns its original meaning on its head in a peculiarly self-serving way. Instead of describing fabricated content with no basis in fact, he uses it to mean any news that criticizes him – that is, any news he chooses not to believe because he does not like it.

Any person using normative rules of factuality, evidence, and reason would defer to the original meaning of “fake news.” However, Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters, and many more similarly inclined, instead agree with him. Their version of reality, as such, becomes very different from the rest of us.

It works, too: Recent polling found that 46 percent of all voters believe the media make up stories about Trump. Even 20 percent of Democrats believed this.

This is what authoritarians throughout history have done: Set themselves up not only as the arbiters of right and wrong and other mainstream values, but of reality itself. They keep their followers close under their banner by creating a separate lived universe for them, an epistemological bubble that inevitably becomes a cult of personality and fanaticism. In the Trump era, I have dubbed this alternative universe “Alt-America.”

Most Americans have a healthy skepticism about American news outlets, as our mainstream media landscape becomes increasingly littered with charlatans and corporate interests out to make a buck. But some Americans have elevated that skepticism to another and frankly unhealthy level, leading them to view anything produced by the mainstream media or official government or academic sources with an extreme form of “selective skepticism” – that is, they refuse to believe any kind of “official” explanation for events, actions, or policies, but instead go seeking any kind of alternative explanation for these.

When this happens, their extreme skepticism is reversed into an extreme gullibility, so that they become vulnerable suckers for just about any kind of conspiracy theory or fantastic fabrication, so long as it confirms the narrative they want to believe. In this environment, conspiracists like Alex Jones of Infowars and a coalition of like minds calling themselves the alt-right have thrived, both politically and financially, peddling their own set of “alternative facts.”

This gullibility shapes – or rather, distorts – people’s relationship to authority. Any kind of authority that exists outside of that person’s universe -- in the current Trump era particularly, anything with the taint of liberalism -- is innately viewed as illegitimate and untrustworthy and is to be vehemently rejected and ardently opposed. In the meanwhile, any authority within the “Alt-America” universe, especially political figures, conspiracist pundits, and Patriot movement leaders, are revered as absolute, and become objects of abject devotion. There is a reason that some of Donald Trump’s followers refer to him as “Glorious Leader,” or “G.L.”

Translated from individual psychology to mass politics, these traits, and in particular the conspiracism, become the manifestation of right-wing authoritarianism. It becomes manifest in polls that reveal profoundly disturbing attitudes rampant among Trump’s supporters.

One poll found that half of Republican voters were OK with Trump postponing the 2020 election if he decided that “voter fraud” was too massive a problem. Another poll found that 61 percent of his current supporters say they can think of no circumstances under which they would ever stop approving of what he does, regardless.

When most people think of authoritarianism, they think of the strongman dictators who have led such rule in various nations around the world throughout history, and they commonly view it as a political phenomenon in which whole nations are subsumed by dictatorial rule imposed from above. The reality, however, is that authoritarians usually are swept to power and maintained in it by an army of followers, people who desire precisely that kind of governance, by a singular figure whose charisma and instincts can chart a nation’s course.

It’s also a phenomenon studied in depth by psychologists, whose focus is less on those figures atop the pack, and more on the hordes they control – the ordinary people who willingly sacrifice their personal freedoms in the name of an orderly society shaped that imposes their personal beliefs and prejudices.

How could supposedly freedom-loving Americans (or Germans, or anyone else, for that matter) subscribe to an authoritarian worldview? As psychologists have explored, most people have some level of authoritarian tendencies, but these are often leveled out by such factors as personal empathy and critical thinking skills. In some personalities, however, a combination of factors ranging from strict upbringing, personal traumas, harsh rearing environments, or any number of other similar issues, can produce people who are inclined to insist on a world in which strong authorities produce order and peace, often through iron imposition of “law and order.”

As a psychological phenomenon, authoritarianism arises around three clusters of behavior and attitudes:

n  Authoritarian submission: The eager submission to edicts, rulings, and opinions of the authorities and leaders who are deemed legitimate.

n  Authoritarian aggression: The physical, verbal, and social aggression displayed toward anyone or any trend that runs counter to those authorities, or in the case of leadership, is deemed illegitimate.

n  Conventionalism: The adamant embrace of what is perceived as the social norm and the “real” national identity, and the belief that oneself reflects that “real” identity.

Psychologist Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, one of the world’s leading experts in this research, describes how this authoritarianism is manifest in Donald Trump supporters. They are highly ethnocentric, inclined to see the world as their in-group versus everyone else. They are highly fearful of a dangerous world. They are highly self-righteous. They are aggressive. They are highly prejudiced against racial and ethnic majorities, non-heterosexuals, and women in general. Their beliefs are a mass of contradictions. They reason poorly. They are highly dogmatic. They are very dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs. Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and ideas, they vastly overestimate the extent to which other people agree with them.

Most of all, Altemeyer says, they are easily duped by manipulators who pretend to espouse their causes when all the con-artists really want is personal gain. And they are largely blind to themselves, and almost inevitably will blame others when their own gullibility as marks for con men is exposed.

Their demand for leadership by powerful authority figures also helps explain their vehement rejection of the presidencies of such liberal politicians as Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton in every jot and tittle. An authoritarian by nature wishes to follow the orders of the president, but can never do so when an illegitimate usurper holds the position. Proving the fundamental illegitimacy of these presidencies – as the regimes of a sexual pervert, a Muslim foreigner, and a lying crook, respectively – has thus formed the overwhelming preoccupations of their various campaigns to attack them politically.

Authoritarianism as a worldview always creates a certain kind of cognitive dissonance, a feeling of unreality, because it runs smack into the complex nature of the modern world and attempts to impose its simplified, black-and-white explanation of reality onto a factual reality that contradicts and undermines it every turn. People with authoritarian personalities willingly slip into the alternative universe of Alt-America because it helps soothe this dissonance, allowing its occupants to glide over inconvenient facts because they participate in a larger “truth.”

So conspiracism is especially appealing to people with these personality traits – the people who tell pollsters they “don’t recognize their country anymore” and are discomfited and bewildered by the brown faces and strange languages that have been filling up their cultural landscapes in places where they never used to be. One study found that conspiracy theories seem to be more compelling to “those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large.” They often long for a 1950s-style America with lawns and cul-de-sacs, and are angry that the world no longer works that way.

While the mainstream media simply present the world as it is, conspiracy theories offer narratives that explain to them why the country is no longer what they wish it to be, why it has that alien shape. And so in their minds it comes to represent a deeper truth about their world, while repeatedly reinforcing their long-held prejudices, and enables them to ignore the real, factual (and often uncomfortable) nature of the changes the nation is undergoing. Simply put, it provides a clear, self-reinforcing answer to the source of their personal disempowerment.

The deep irony in all this is that the larger psychological and even political effect of conspiracy theories is that they are profoundly disempowering in and of themselves. They create a toxic mindset, a worldview in which the world is actually being run by secretive, powerful schemers intent on suppressing them, against whose immense power an ordinary individual is almost entirely powerless.

People who are “red-pilled,” as the conspiracy-loving alt-righters have dubbed themselves, see themselves as utterly disattached from their communities, fighting a desperate battle with only the help of their fellow conspiracists against truly dark and evil forces. Alex Jones constantly refers to his targets as “demonic.” It’s not just a bleak world, it’s one in which people can become overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness and anger.

That’s one of the primary reasons conspiracist beliefs are so often associated with horrific acts of terrorist violence. Think of Anders Breivik’s massacre of 69 schoolchildren in Norway in 2011, or Tim McVeigh’s destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 that killed 168, or Jared Loughner’s horrifying rampage in Tucson in 2011, or Dylann Roof’s rampage at the Charleston church in 2015. All of these people, and their many other domestic-terrorist cohorts, acted out of a desperation fueled by anger over their sense of deep disempowerment – all of it a product of a belief in conspiracy theories.

Beyond individuals, however, authoritarianism is also toxic for any kind of democratic society – which is unsurprising, given the alt-right’s express hostility to democracy and its institutions. And it is rising as a political phenomenon not just in the United States, but around the world, especially in Europe.

This is why a number of political scientists have recently begun speaking up about the trend. “If current trends continue for another 20 or 30 years, democracy will be toast,” recently warned Yascha Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard.

They warn that democracies die all the time, and there is no reason the United States would be immune, despite its longevity and comparative stability – until recently, at least. And the reasons have to do with people – both the leaders and the citizenry – taking its institutions for granted and permitting them to fall into decay.

These include the values of community and generosity that have previously guided the American spirit at crucial junctures, as well as the basic value of empathy as a personal characteristic. Defending them vigorously, and reviving them to full life, will be the key to defeating the authoritarian spirit unleashed in recent years.