March 01, 2016 By: Juanita Jean Herownself Category: Uncategorized
Welcome to The World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.
My name is Susan DuQuesnay Bankston. I live in Richmond, Texas, in the heart of Tom DeLay's old district. It's nuttier than squirrel poop here.
I am honored and privileged to know Miss Juanita Jean Herownself, hairdresser extraordinary and political maven. Since she does not have time to fiddle with this internet stuff, I type her website for her and you can read it if you want to. If you don't, she truly does not give a big bear's butt.
A lot of what I post here has to do with local politics, but you probably have the same folks in your local government.
This ain't a blog. Blogs are way too trendy for me. This is a professional political organization.
I know, I posted that upstream, it’s crazy.
1Honestly all elective organizations eventually select a leader that is the distilled version of themselves. Travis County snacilbupeR have selected Robert Morrow.
If you are a snacilbupeR, then like Pogo’s aha experience, Robert Morrow is your “We have met the enemy and he is us.” moment.
2Dr. Altemeyer requests that this be passed on, free of charge.
Donald Trump and Authoritarian Followers
Bob Altemeyer*
In 1998 I tried to explain why social scientists who are worried about our freedoms have focused on the crowd that would lift a dictator aloft rather than the autocrat himself.
Wanna-be tyrants in a democracy are just comical figures on soapboxes when they have no following. So the realthreat lay coiled in parts of the population itself, it was thought, ready someday to catapult the next Hitler to power with their votes.
That apprehension was well-founded, it turns out. Research suggests that 20-25% of the adults in North America are highly vulnerable to a demagogue who would incite hatred of various minorities to gain power. These people are waiting for a tough man on horseback who will supposedly solve all our problems through the ruthless application of force. When such a man gains prominence, you can expect the authoritarian followers to mate devotedly with the authoritarian leader, because each gives the other something they desperately want: the feeling of safety for the followers, and the tremendous power of the modern state for the leader.
I would not say that all of the people trying to carry Donald Trump to the presidency are authoritarian followers. But they likely compose his hard core base. Furthermore, many authoritarian followers presently support Senator Ted Cruz for religious reasons. You can expect most of them to slide into the Trump ranks once Cruz drops out of the race. By summer, the vast majority of authoritarian followers in the United States will likely be for Trump. And so will many others for various reasons.
We know a lot about authoritarian followers, but unfortunately most of what we know indicates it will be almost impossible to change their minds, especially in a few months. Here are a dozen things established by research.
1) They are highly ethnocentric, highly inclined to see the world as their in-group versus everyone else. Because they are so committed to their in-group, they are very zealous in its cause.
2) They are highly fearful of a dangerous world. Their parents taught them, more than parents usually do, that the world is dangerous. They may also be genetically predisposed to experiencing stronger fear than most people do.
3) They are highly self-righteous. They believe they are the good people and this unlocks a lot of hostile impulses against those they consider bad.
4) They are aggressive. Given the chance to attack someone with the approval of an authority, they will lower the boom.
5) They are highly prejudiced against racial and ethnic majorities, non-heterosexuals, and women in general.
6) Their beliefs are a mass of contradictions. They have highly compartmentalized minds, in which opposite beliefs exist side-by-side in adjacent boxes. As a result, their thinking is full of double-standards.
7) They reason poorly. If they like the conclusion of an argument, they dont pay much attention to whether the evidence is valid or the argument is consistent.
8) They are highly dogmatic. Because they have gotten their beliefs mainly from the authorities in their lives, rather than think things out for themselves, they have no real defense when facts or events indicate they are wrong. So they just dig in their heels and refuse to change.
9) They are very dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs. They think they are right because almost everyone they know, almost every news broadcast they see, almost every radio commentator they listen to, tells them they are. That is, they screen out the sources that will suggest that they are wrong.
10) Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and ideas, they vastly overestimate the extent to which other people agree with them. And thinking they are the moral majority supports their attacks on the evil minorities they see in the country.
11) They are easily duped by manipulators who pretend to espouse their causes when all the con-artists really want is personal gain.
12) They are largely blind to themselves. They have little self-understanding and insight into why they think and do what they do.
I hasten to add that almost anyone would become more ethnocentric, frightened, self-righteous, and so on if their situations, or our countrys situation, changed enough. And studies find examples of these twelve things in lots of others, not just authoritarian followers. But not as consistently, and not nearly as much.
If, as you went down this list of things experiments have discovered about authoritarian followers, you found yourself saying, Yeah, you can sure see that in the Trump supporters, and if you believe that a President Trump would be a very stiff test of democracy the United States, then what can you dowithout becoming a highly ethnocentric person yourself?
Well, its not going to be easy changing highly aggressive, dogmatic, insular people who will dismiss you out of hand as the enemy? They have been that way for most of their lives, and they have built a lot of supports, including straight-out denial, to keep their views intact.
Authoritarian followers in America today are tremendously energized by fear and anger. Theyre scared, and they want someone really strong and confident to protect them. Its a very natural, understandable reaction. As well theyre intensely angry about the way their country is changing, and most pointedly furious with the Republican Party which has won many elections because of their support, and then utterly failed to get things right again. So they feel betrayed, and that is a very powerful motivator.
One suspects they will feel even more betrayed if Trump becomes president and turns out to have been conning them all along too. But he is going to keep telling them hes one of them, and keep them scared and angry while selling himself as the Toughest Guy They Ever Met. Authoritarian followers are always waiting for The Leader, and now they firmly believe theyve found him.
But let me not stoke your fears too high, for we do have to fear fear itself. There is a simple way out of this situation: Others can outvote them. But even though most of the American electorate says now that they would never vote for Trump, hell become the next President if those folks stay home on election day. If Trumps opponents do not get as energized as Trumps very loyal followers are, his supporters will carry him on their shoulders to the highest office in the land.
*Bob Altemeyer is a retired professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba in Canada. He studied authoritarianism for over forty years during his academic career. His research on authoritarian aggression won the Prize for Behavioral Science Research awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. An accessible, non-technical presentation of his findings on authoritarian followers and leaders is available in The Authoritarians, a free online book available at home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
3What attracts voters, what motivates them to come out on election day…and what annoys voters and makes them grumpy and less willing to make the effort…are important things for any party to know.
Neither party pays attention to what annoys voters (I should know; I’ve been trying to get the various elements in the Democratic Party who annoy me the most to quit doing it for years now and they don’t.)
What attracts voters to a candidate is what attracts people to other people generally: upbeat, showing confidence, offering solutions to problems they care about, demonstrating not “cold” poise but “warm” ability to handle situations. A candidate that feels exciting, that arouses feelings of confidence *in the voter* which then is reflected onto the candidate. Even though Trump spouts negative messages, he spouts them in a confident “We can beat this!” way (I don’t like it, but it works with those voters), and his “Make America Great Again” both reinforces the fear (that it’s not) while giving the hope (it will be again IF he’s elected.)
Sanders is an effective candidate because he can arouse the same kind of enthusiasm, the voter’s feeling of confidence when hearing the candidate, and that ability to spend energy-enthusiasm to get enthusiasm back is invaluable.
The “scare the donor” approach both parties use in fundraising dilutes and negates the enthusiasm, and actually makes donors think further donation is no use, since every donation is followed by more demands, accompanied by more doom and gloom. I respond much better to “We’re almost there” than to “We might as well quit and go home” (the actual email subject line from one group of Dems seeking my money.) I don’t support defeatists.
4