Taking a frightening tour of the Right Wing mindset.

I'm right because I say I'm right!

I received an interesting link the other day which led me to this rather disquieting article at Truthout:

 Robert Altemeyer, a Canadian psychologist, has done extensive testing to isolate and describe the traits of the authoritarian personality. His results are distilled in his book "The Authoritarians." He describes religious fundamentalists, the core of the right-wing Republican base, as follows: 

"They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times and are often hypocrites." 

There are tens of millions of Americans who, although personally lacking the self-confidence, ambition and leadership qualities of authoritarian dominators like Gingrich or Sarah Palin, nevertheless empower the latter to achieve their goals while finding psychological fulfillment in subordination to a cause. Altemeyer describes these persons as authoritarian followers. They are socially rigid, highly conventional and strongly intolerant personalities, who, absent any self-directed goals, seek achievement and satisfaction by losing themselves in a movement greater than themselves. One finds them overrepresented in reactionary political movements, fundamentalist sects and leader cults like scientology. They are the people who responded on cue when Bush's press secretary said after the 9/11 attacks that people had better "watch what they say;" or who approved of illegal surveillance because "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear;" or who, after months of news stories saying that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, nevertheless believed the weapons were found.

If you are anything like me you have probably spent many hours trying to understand just how ANYBODY gets sucked into trusting these obvious charlatans, and how seemingly lucid people allow themselves to be convinced to vote against  their self interests time and time again.

Apparently they are raised to put their faith in those who talk with a voice of authority, despite their obvious shortcoming, or who appear to have some access to information not readily available to the masses, despite no evidence to support their claims.

So what are the circumstances in place which create these "authoritarian personalities?"



According to Reich (Author William Reich who wrote "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" in 1933.) , a patriarchal, sexually repressive family life, reinforced by strict and punitive religious dogma, is the "factory" of a reactionary political order. Hence, the right wing's ongoing attempts to erase the separation of church and state, its crusade against Planned Parenthood, its strange obsession with gays. Consider the following political platform, which sounds almost as if it were taken from a speech by Rick Santorum: 

"The preservation of the family with many children is a matter of biological concept and national feeling. The family with many children must be preserved ... because it is a highly valuable, indispensable part of the ... nation. Valuable and indispensable not only because it alone guarantees the maintenance of the population in the future but because it is the strongest basis of national morality and national culture ... The preservation of this family form is a necessity of national and cultural politics ... This concept is strictly at variance with the demands for an abolition of paragraph 218; it considers unborn life as sacrosanct. For the legalization of abortion is at variance with the function of the family, which is to produce children and would lead to the definite destruction of the family with many children." 

So wrote the Völkischer Beobachter of October 14, 1931.

Now I am not one to refer to those I don't agree with as Nazis, but  it IS fascinating how closely the values of many on the  Right Wing coincide with those of a certain movement in Germany.

It also goes a long way toward explaining the Right's never ending attacks on the public school system. As is so often articulated by Rick Santorum:

“Never before and never again after their years of mass education will any person live and work in such a radically narrow, age-segregated environment,” Santorum wrote. “It’s amazing that so many kids turn out to be fairly normal, considering the weird socialization they get in public schools.” 

He went on: “In a home school, by contrast, children interact in a rich and complex way with adults and children of other ages all the time. In general, they are better-adjusted, more at ease with adults, more capable of conversation, more able to notice when a younger child needs help or comfort, and in general a lot better socialized than their mass-schooled peers.”

But of course these are ridiculous arguments to hide the TRUE reason that people like Rick Santorum, and his ilk, despise and fear the public school system.

And that is because it attempts to level the playing field between the haves and the not yet haves, while encouraging the students to ask questions and, even worse, to think for themselves.

That is in direct conflict with what the Right Wing desires from the American public, which is to believe rather than think, and to trust rather than question.

And that is certainly NOT something that an authoritarian parent would want for their child, or that an authoritarian politician would want from any potential voter who might refuse to put their intellect on hold, and to simply vote while clinging to their fear of "the other" and holding onto their faith in those who look like they do, think like they do, and worship like they do.

P.S. By the way did you know that ALL Creationism bills introduced since 2004 are based on an amendment introduced in 2001 by Rick Santorum? Which, by the way, kind of tells you everything you need to know about Mr. Frothy Mixture.

Don'tcha think?