What those who have studied authoritarianism since Adorno and his colleagues published The Authoritarian Personality, Hofstadter wrote
The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Hannah Arendt was penning some of her classic work, up to more present-day theorists and researchers like Bob Altemeyer and John Duckitt have warned us about is increasingly becoming reality. David Neiwert’s latest tweet thread is well worth reading.
Herr Combover barks about a particular group he doesn’t like, and lo and behold, his authoritarian base give in to their base instincts – submission to Dear Leader and meting out violence against those Dear Leader targets.
Neiwert makes another pertinent observation: there is nothing even remotely like this on what we might think of as an actual left: communist, anarchists,antifa (sorry liberals – these folks don’t think of us as left by their standards). There is one side that is hell-bent on trashing democratic norms and institutions, and spill a bit of blood along the way. Those folks are right-wing authoritarians and the GOP is for all intents and purposes their home. Herr Combover has his stormtroopers. No one else does. The aftermath of the 2016 election unleashed the id of this bunch to a degree unseen in a long time. Even Obama’s impending 2008 victory produced less violence and eliminationistic rhetoric than the current era – and that election and the months afterward were ones of genuine economic insecurity (to put it mildly).
You can like it or hate it all you want, but there is one viable political party in the US that actually produces sane leaders and potential leaders, and has a base (and a much larger potential base) of sane people. It ain’t the GOP folks. It’s the Democratic Party. At this point, if anything even remotely resembling the progressive dreams that many of you once espoused still mean anything, you’ll be voting, canvassing, and donating like your life depends on it.