In an article titled “Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness, But an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies,” Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt make an interesting argument. (The article is part of a book edited by Cass Sunstein, Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America, which I will review in an upcoming issue of Regulation.)
Stenner and Haidt define the authoritarian personality in terms of
an enduring predisposition to favor obedience, conformity, oneness, and sameness over freedom and difference. … In the absence of a common identity rooted in race or ethnicity (the usual case in our large, diverse, and complex modern societies), the things that make “us” an “us”—that make us one and the same—are common authority (oneness) and shared values (sameness).
Authoritarians, which in the authors’ opinion make about one-third of society, vote for right-wing populist politicians (Trump in the United States or Marine LePen in France) or causes (such as Brexit) when their longing for oneness and sameness is threatened and they feel a strong leader is required to reestablish unity.
It is difficult not to recall a remarkable 2016 campaign advertisement, well worth listening to at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE3TzFVB_c. It shows Donald Trump saying:
I will unify and bring our country back together. … We will be unified, we will be one, we will be happy again.
This does not mean that the preceding political rulers were not also authoritarians, but they were, along most dimensions, a few notches lower on the authoritarian scale. They were also less brazen. I am not saying that Trump is not, on a small number of issues, less authoritarian: a blind man throwing darts can randomly hit a target that he does not see and does not actually want to hit.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas
Oct 3 2018 at 11:11am
True authoritarians — persons who wish to control the lives of others — seem to vote for taxing, regulating Democrats.
Weir
Oct 3 2018 at 6:21pm
Obedience, conformity, oneness, and sameness? Sounds like campus. Sounds like a newsroom. Sounds like a writers festival, or Google, or the firing of Ian Buruma from the NYRB.
The staff at the Atlantic said they would have felt un-safe if Kevin Williamson had been allowed to write for their magazine. The staff at the New Yorker objected to a journalist, David Remnick, interviewing Steve Bannon. No platform for Germaine Greer. No invitation for Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Robert Zoellick or Christine Lagarde.
Remember the shrieking student at Yale? Her home is not an intellectual space? Or the video from the University of Missouri: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”
A certain lack of self-awareness is pretty much inevitable when everyone says exactly the same thing over and over again.
SaveyourSelf
Oct 4 2018 at 10:38am
Something about this argument doesn’t ring true. Authoritarian leaning does not predispose someone to be “right-wing populist”. Authoritarian is a willingness to make decisions for others and back up that willingness with force. That describes socialism in general and both republican and democratic parties in the US are unquestionably socialist in practice. Stenner and Haidt’s definition of authoritarian lacks any mention of force. That’s a radical oversight.
Furthermore, the things that make “us” and “us” is citizenship. It’s contractual.
Their model lacks many important elements necessary to give it explanatory power, much less predictive power.
J
Oct 4 2018 at 12:01pm
Something being contractual implies that there is a voluntary agreement between two or more parties. Citizenship is the government declaring that a person has certain “rights” and “obligations”, usually without any input from that person. Most people did not choose to become citizens and can not choose to stop being a citizen.
I can imagine a meaningful definition for contractual that applies to citizenship but not slavery.
Hazel Meade
Oct 4 2018 at 1:33pm
Exactly. The recent rise of alt-right style “citizenism” is just as much a manifestation of authoritarianism as socialism. “Citizenism” is really just a way of rationalizing having the government make decisions for others. Different decisions than socialists would make, but still making decisions for others. After all, all immigration and trade restrictions are necessarily an application of the use of force against both parties in a transaction – employer to employee, or importer to foreign supplier. The specifics may differ (slightly), but they both involve making decisions for others and controlling what they may do.
And while we’re on the subject, Isn’t “citizen” how people referred to each other in the novel 1984? Maybe it was some other dystopian sci-fi.
SaveyourSelf
Oct 4 2018 at 3:22pm
Precisely.
This is technically false. Rights and obligations are contractual terms. If you have contractual rights and obligations without any input—ie. consent—that’s not citizenship. It’s slavery. Which is I think what Hazel Meade is getting at. If you prefer to think of Citizenship as a type of slavery, then we can abandon its use and instead use a term like, social contract. I personally like the word Citizenship, but it means a voluntary contract when I am using it. Actual practice of Citizenship often—but not always—favors the use you and Hazel have described, that of socialism and slavery.
Joe
Oct 4 2018 at 6:13pm
I have never seen anyone use the word in that way before. You are certainly not using it in the same way as any state that I’m aware of. I’m curious: What are the terms of this voluntary contract? Who are its other signatories?
SaveyourSelf
Oct 5 2018 at 11:28am
Citizenship in a nutshell:
Avoid actions that harm other citizens.
Aid other citizens who are being harmed or threatened with harm.
That’s it. Two clauses. It is literally a definition of justice, an agreement to abide by it, and an additional unified response plan. It’s real, even though, apparently, few people are aware of it. The details of this contract are present in the Citizenship declaration of the US. I checked. Though it is buried under a lot of other addons that are not citizenship. It is the justification for the draft. It is even the justification for all of government. It is the foundation stone of Adam Smith’s duties the Sovereign. And it forms the backbone architecture of the US constitution.
I’m trying to get the word out about it. Thanks for asking.
Hazel Meade
Oct 5 2018 at 4:10pm
Well, I see where you are going with this. That is “citizenship” as in “the act of being a good member of the community” versus “citizenship” as in “the state of belonging to a particular state”. The latter is slavery.
However, I don’t see how the former kind of “citizenship” is what “makes us an us”. It seems to me that onces you say you have any obligation to be a “good citizen” then you are veering directly into the latter definition – you’ve put an obligation on someone without their consent. As soon as you declare that there is any “us” which people automatically belong to, you have imposed an obligation on them without their input.
SaveyourSelf
Oct 7 2018 at 11:47am
Hazel Meade,
Sorry it took me a while to reply. I had to fly yesterday.
In response to your post: Citizenship is not “the act of being a good member of the community.” The social contract does not define what is good. It defines what is absolutely unacceptable. In other words, it defines what is bad. A Citizen fully adhering to the social contract is not necessarily admirable. He is only, by definition, not violently bad. This distinction is important on many many levels. Not the least of which is everyone has different values. What is good to one person (cow) can be abhorrent to another (Hindu). How then, could we possibly come up with a contract that defined what is good that everyone could agree on? Not possible. But everyone can agree that anyone else stabbing them is a bad thing and put that in writing.
Secondly, I’m also going to double down on my statement that citizenship is what makes “us an us”. You wrote,
Again, citizenship is not an obligation to be good. It truly does not make sense to use “good” as an adjective before “citizen”. Citizenship defines a duty not to be harmful and to gang up on any people who are being harmful. Furthermore, true citizenship is a voluntary contract. No one is obligated to enter into it and, in theory, anyone party to the contract can leave at any time. Except no sane person would want to do that, because the benefits citizenship provides to personal security are enormous and the costs, when spread out over a large group, are exceedingly small. [That last sentence assumes the terms of citizenship are restricted to the two clauses I have defined above. Add even one additional clause, and you effectively have defined socialism.]
Gottfried Leibniz
Oct 4 2018 at 2:41pm
On Liberty
Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.
(It appears to me that JSM would agree that sameness/”us” and authoritarianism go hand in hand)
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