Authoritarianism, psychological contradictions, and states of exception

A follow-up to Saturday's post

Last Saturday, I wrote a piece marveling that the new Democratic vice presidential candidate is extolling the virtues of “minding your own business”, when the whole progressive plan for human life is to have the state micromanaging all of your affairs, which ain’t exactly coincident with minding your own business, and how in the world can anyone believe he means what he is saying? Just in case you thought it might be a one-off, he was still at it yesterday:

When they find a line people seem to like (or which they have decided people will be compelled to like), they are apt to repeat it 5000 times. And from the very top, and just a few hours ago, the party of vaccine mandates would like you to know that women should be trusted to make their own healthcare decisions.

Again, this stuff wouldn’t survive for five seconds under an intelligent and adversarial press.

With the leaders on top, I know you can easily just say, “they’re lying”. I’m less interested in the fact that politicians lie, and more interested in the fact than many of the common folk seem to believe their lies, and in fact actually believe “we stand for freedom!”, when every political action they cheer has as its goal the destruction of freedom. See, that would bother me.

As explanation for that, a couple articles and thoughts were passed my way, and I thought I would pass them on to you.

Left-authoritarians don’t know they’re authoritarians

The first is a nice piece by Grove City College professor of psychology Luke Conway, entitled “The Left Has an Authoritarian Problem (but Doesn’t Know It)”. If I may briefly summarize the argument:

1. First of all, let us not mistake obedience for authoritarianism. Although there are dangers of excess on every side, in general a populace that seeks to obey leadership is a good thing. Nations fall apart rather quickly when that goes away. True citizen-authoritarians don’t just want people to obey rules, they go further, they want a leader who will hurt the people they don’t like, and require submission to group norms. In fact they’d happily see laws broken to get those two things.

2. And, authoritarian leaders are everywhere, in every political movement, in just about every societal cause. It is not news to notice there are would-be authoritarian leaders about, they are always about. The question is, has a cultural position developed that will get people to promote and obey them. Without that, they are nothing. With that… well, you have authoritarianism.

3. And finally, on that note, there are people who desire authoritarian leadership on both the Right and the Left. But the authoritarians on the Right know they are authoritarians. And the authoritarians on the Left are in heavy denial about it. This has been tested by giving people surveys filled with questions like “should a society strongly punish those it disagrees with?”, and then asking them at the end of the survey if they think of themselves as an authoritarian. Well:

This isn’t mere speculation. Our scientific data demonstrate this very clearly. In a national survey of over five thousand Americans, we gave people a standard authoritarianism questionnaire and then afterwards asked them a simple question: “Do you view yourself as a dogmatic and authoritarian person?”

Conservative Americans who scored high on the authoritarianism questionnaire had no problem saying “Yes, I am authoritarian.” But liberals were a different thing entirely. Not only were liberal authoritarians less likely than conservatives to accurately identify themselves as authoritarians (when they were, in fact, authoritarian), but there was actually a negative correlation between left-wing authoritarianism (the reality) and liberals’ willingness to identify as authoritarian (their own perception). That means that the more authoritarian liberals are, the less they believe they are authoritarian!

As he says, this is dangerous, because if your movement recognizes that problem X is a temptation of the movement, you will be on guard against it. If you deny that it is a problem, it can reach its full flowering, and nobody will stop it.

Every party has potential authoritarians—but a party that denies the problem also won’t address the problem.

Right now that party is the Democratic Party. We’ve tacitly raised a generation of liberals who think that it’s normal for Disney to fire actress Gina Carano for having a political opinion that some people don’t like, and yet also think they aren’t authoritarian for doing so.

So that is interesting data, anyway, to say “no, it isn’t just your imagination, the Left really does have this blind spot”. Alas, there is not as much information as I’d like (you can go read the whole piece) on why this is a particular problem of the Left, except a brief argument that goes as follows:

1. This sort of psychological contradiction is actually not uncommon, on Left or Right. We seek to limit freedoms in the name of freedom, or exhibit collectivism in the name of individualism.

2. These contradictions arise when group norms go against individual motivational goals. The conservative group norm is to desire freedom, but we sometimes may have individual reasons for restricting freedom. If so, we will be tempted to recast those decisions as actually freedom-loving, to be more in line with the group. (Although frankly, seems to me we don’t do this nearly as often, you can tell me I’m blind if you’d like. The Roman Catholic integralists who want a new monarch to smite their enemies will happily tell you they want a new monarch to smite their enemies. But perhaps they have different group norms, now.)

3. Similarly, liberals have, believe they have anyway, a group norm that opposes authoritarianism. But, he says, “often their individual members have motives toward authoritarianism—and the net result is that liberals have a motivational blind spot for believing that their own authoritarian behaviors are authoritarian. They simply don’t want to believe it.” (Note: He calls them liberals, I otherwise would not, because there is very little that is liberal left about them. And perhaps that does express a weakness in his understanding of their motivations as well.)

There are some thoughts for you anyway.

The state of exception

On a related note… you remember during COVID there was a lot of talk about states of exception, thinkers like Giorgio Agamben would talk about how our nations now live in a permanent state of exception. Nominally, we are liberal democratic republics with constrained governments. In reality, we just declare an "emergency”, or some other proclamation of exception, and then we can ignore normal restraints and procedures do whatever we want. This was super prominent during COVID, but actually it happens all the time.

That same sort of thing seems to operate on an individual level. Conversing these last few days with a couple people who were defending Walz’s comments, seemed to me their position was essentially:

1. I believe in freedom for everyone, and in minding your own business!

2. Unless doing so would threaten the common good.

Now maybe, literally, all of us would actually affirm that… the problem is their list of “unless” is 78 million pages along, and has utterly obliterated any practical sense in which they actually believe in freedom. But (and we can point back to psychological contradictions here), they are totally clueless about it. It’s not their fault that in our complex societies their “except for” list is of necessity 78 million pages long. By golly they believe in freedom!

Many times I have remarked on the people who walk directly from the “my body my choice!” rally to the “vaccine mandates now!” rally. Well, I have had many conversations with these folks via social media, and they have told me many times now that they are passionate defenders of bodily autonomy… unless that bodily autonomy might threaten someone else. Abortion, fortunately, does not threaten anyone else (????). What does? Well, I mean… basically everything else you do in life. Even drinking that Dr. Pepper is bad for you, why it is going to raise healthcare costs for everyone when we have to care for you later, so of course we have to restrict the consumption of soda too, for the common good. Also that plastic straw you’re using is too dangerous. But I believe in freedom man. I believe it.

So we reach the point where they’re saying “we believe a woman has a right to make her own healthcare decisions!” and they’re talking about abortion. They are literally not talking about anything except abortion. But they actually believe within themselves that they are great defenders of individual choice.

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