The Short Form
An old friend asked me recently what the conclusions of my book are, and I blurted out, “One third of all people, worldwide, in all eras, in all societies, are authoritarian. They just want to punch somebody in the head.” Authoritarianism is a truly ecumenical phenomenon.
That’s the short form. The long form is more complicated—300+ pages so far. I expand on the nuance and I relate details, but it is hard to deny the evidence collected across many fields. I quote from the research of Karen Stenner, who parses numbers from our massive global data bases to conclude that about a third of all people in all times and places—in Australia today, Germany back then, or San Francisco in 1948—are deeply authoritarian.
Authoritarians want privileges for themselves, and violent punishment for others. They demand clear lines between good and bad groups, and loyalty to the tribe against existential enemies. They aren’t a majority, but that’s how America is now, but also France, and also Nigeria. The historical evidence is limited, but results are so consistent across time and space that they imply a fundamental psychological condition rooted in human evolution and expressed at the level of personality, temperament, and social values.
I’ve got over three hundred pages unpacking this. But yet another old friend sent me this summary of the MAGA agenda in his state, which pretty much applies across America, and in similar forms for other authoritarian populations around the world:
Bring back privilege for white people. Normalize bullying black/brown/different people. Embarrass liberals, intellectuals and other smug elites. Enable and justify their self-absorbed, mean-spirited lifestyle. Enrich the US economy in the short-term with economic tricks. Put other countries in their place where they belong. These are people who only think in adversarial terms. Everything is a zero-sum game and if you lose that means that they win. They don't believe in country, community, or humanity.