Authoritarian psychology and the liberal democratic ethos

A clarifying observation from my secret cousin ^@Politigoth:

By their nature, authoritarians respect authoritarian action. Their worldview is shaped by fear of punishment. Therefore if no one will be punished for a thing, there is no reason not to do that thing. Without punishment, all actions are valid. This is true in both religious and secular contexts. In short, if there’s nothing to make you afraid of doing X, then you can do X.

People who are not authoritarians don’t work this way, don’t think this way and don’t operate on these principles. But because of this, they make the crucial error of thinking that letting actions perpetrated in bad faith slide in the name of “someone has to make the first move” will engender a good faith response. They are continually disappointed, because this is (here’s the punchline, folks) not the lesson authoritarians learn from this gesture. They learn that rules don’t apply to them, and that there is no authority that will call them to account.

This is important to understand, especially in this moment when we are experiencing breakdowns in liberalism as in liberal democracy.

Liberalism builds institutions like legislatures as a forum where constituencies with divergent interests hash out their differences in a human process of compromise and reciprocity. It mythologizes the virtues of giving up some things you want and accepting some things you do not want so that we can all get along. This is a good myth.

But one thing that the last decade plus has taught me is that authoritarians were always just playing along with this ethos, only pretending to believe in this ideal. This breakdown in authoritarian pretense makes libdem governance hard to maintain.

Defenders of the libdem order yearn to continue to act as if we have a healthy libdem order. We do not want to act harshly, because we want a society which is not harsh. We offer our open hand, to show what we want, because we would respond to that in kind. “When they go low, we go high.” But this reflects, in part, our difficulties understanding the thinking of reflexively-authoritarian people.

Authoritarians presume that the world is cruel, that authority & power are inherently cruel, and that obedience to right authority defines the good. This is why they accept political authority which harms them, so long as it harms others more; such is the nature of power. This is why religious authoritarians look to a God of harsh judgments; such is the nature of power. This is why religious authoritarians are baffled that people who do not dread divine retribution can live moral lives; how do we recognize the good?

As ^@Politigoth says, offering the open hand sends them a confusing signal. (If you want to understand authoritarian psychology and its consequences, I strongly recommend psychology prof Dr. Bob Altemeyer’s study The Authoritarians.)

This clarifies the importance of something that has been much on my mind. Defenders of the libdem order err in leaving out elements of our own ethos for how to act. As I summarize in a recurring refrain, the libdem ethos calls for:

1. Honesty — always speak in good faith, telling the truth as well as one knows it, especially about oneʼs own ideas and intentions
2. Generosity — start from a presumption that everyone speaks & acts in good faith
3. Vigilance — always watch carefully for bad actors
4. Skepticism — demand strong evidence before accepting that someone is a bad actor
5. Transparency — publicly document evidence of bad actors
6. Safety — ruthlessly exclude demonstrated bad actors

I often lament how liberals-as-in-Democrats have failed at the necessary ruthlessness, and how the press have failed at the vigilence and stringent documentation. (I also occasionally lament when social justice advocates have elided the stringent documentation, or the starting presumption of good faith.)

I tend to think of this in terms of creating good incentives for building and maintaining a libdem order, but ^@Politigoth reminded me of something at least as important. Libdem ruthlessness when necessary bridges the gap in psychology between egalitarians and authoritarians.

Update on moral debt

After watching ^@Politigoth in a lively discussion of this point, I realized something else about authoritarian psychology. She argues, correctly, that Biden’s plan to govern with gestures toward reconciliation with conservatives will backfire, and the lack of consequences for their bad faith actions in support of DJT will read to them as a demonstration that Democrats are chumps who deserve contempt … and also that their actions were not really wrong, because there were no consequences for them.

This make me register how, to the libdem sensibility, when someone offers clemency to bad faith actors, this incurs on them a debt. They have harmed the social and political order and need to make amends. They have been granted undeserved grace on a provisional basis, will be watched more carefully, and need to invest in demonstrating that they are commited to acting in good faith and to the health of the system.

This does not register at all with authoritarians. When they break faith — which they will — they will feel baffled by how we are even angrier the next time. It will feel disproportionate to them, because they will not see the history and larger failure.

Update on Not Moving On

A comment by pacerme on a post at Emptywheel:

I truly fear the codependent belief that Dems have acted out for years, that taking the moral high ground is the moral equivalent of letting bygones be bygones. This would be what happens in domestic violence when he / she or they forget about the beating last night and move on hoping it will never happen again.

Ignoring the broken laws of the Republican Party. From Iran contra, to Plame, to Iraq war, to Russian interference in our elections, to literally torturing children on the border in a way that will alter their brains for life. Dems behave with this moral superiority that is really just codependency. Instead of living in the truth and allowing the natural consequences, as provided by our laws, the Dems intervene like the father who calls in legal favors for their drug addicted child to save the family name. Never realizing that by interfering with the natural consequences, the perception of truth is altered for the addict and that this interference may well only bolster the disease and hasten the fatal illness of addiction. (If left untreated). This doesn’t require chastisement or anger, but love and the discipline to refuse to protect that addicted child from the consequences of the disease, or the violent partner from the consequence of violent behavior.

If you love your country, you let the truth and its consequences reign. And if you are behaving outside of dysfunction you allow the consequences to speak truth to the nation. No matter how unpopular or risky that is. To refuse to do so under some self righteous belief of superiority, some hope that if we ignore it it will go away will continue to chip at our democracy. Dysfunction is contagious. Taking the moral high ground means applying the legal process for truth’s sake despite the consequences.

Fascism is speaking in bad faith

It is important to understand that fascism is not a political ideology in the same way that communism is. Communists have a detailed policy program which they espouse and pursue. Fascists do not; their policy prescriptions are often outright incoherent.

Fascism is better understood as a political method. And a key part of that method is speaking in bad faith: falsely describing what they want and care about, as a way of disrupting the process of political discussion itself. The vigor with which fascists do this is difficult to understand unless one has encountered it.

I have talked about this before, when talking about Milo Yiannopoulos, the Alt Right, and free speech:

We should not defend that as free speech; we need to recognize it as an attack on free speech.
[⋯]

This is a method and it has a purpose.

If we look at the history of far right movements, we can recognize the basic pattern. These movements are not simply opposed to liberalism-as-in-the-Democratic-Party; they are opposed to liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy. They oppose universal human rights and equality. They aim to discredit liberalism by turning its systems against itself, making them impracticable, perverting the meaning of words like “free speech”.

In this we see a continuity between the fascists of the early 20^th century and the fascists and para-fascists of today. Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive describes this pattern in a troublingly familiar way.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play.

They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

This is not restricted to the specifics of antisemitism. It is a general rhetorical style. Here is Harry Frankfurt, the author of the wonderful short book On Bullshit summing up the method.

The distinction between lying and bullshitting is fairly clear. The liar asserts something which he himself believes to be false. He deliberately misrepresents what he takes to be the truth. The bullshitter, on the other hand, is not constrained by any consideration of what may or may not be true. In making his assertion, he is indifferent to whether what he is says is true or false. His goal is not to report facts. It is, rather, to shape the beliefs and attitudes of his listeners in a certain way.

I bet you can guess who Frankfurt was talking about in the essay where he said that.

To get a feel for how this works in governance, I vigorously recommend the (exceedingly fun) party game Secret Hitler, in which players pretend to be a parliament where fascists are trying to pass legislation and get their leader elected Chancellor. In the game, the fascists know who each other are but the liberals don't; this makes the gameplay include the fascists lying about their intentions and pretending to be liberals. The player who is their secret leader tries the hardest to appear to be a liberal.

The game is structured such that the fascists are always outnumbered. But they usually win.

Update

A telling example from 2025 from Brian Beutler:

⋯ Hasan asked Estelle: if you hate democracy so much, why are you engaged in public debate, a cornerstone of the democratic process?

“It is the means to support an end,” Estelle responded. “The reason we have free speech now is because we want to be openly talking about our opinions so we can get the state that we want. But it doesn't mean free speech after we win.”

Thanks to Estelle for his honesty. His means-to-an-end-style of bad faith in discourse is endemic on the right—not just among ascendant fascists—and has been for a long time. It’s just that most of them will never break character, and take false umbrage if you question their sincerity. But here Estelle lays out the method plainly: Rightists appeal to whomever they can with whatever false commitments they intend to break, knowing that, once delivered to power, they will pull the rug.

Talking with and about monsters

Since well before the current crisis I have been worried that too many people don’t know the difference between No Platform and Not My Megaphone, and are not careful enough in thinking about when they are appropriate.

And now we are in a moment when we need to re-think these fundamentals.

Not My Megaphone is a refusal to engage with a person or organization or idea. They don’t get the use of your megaphone: you will not put their quotes in your article, or let them speak on your stage, or debate them in some third party’s venue. You do this in order to prevent them from getting attention, and to identify the range of legitimate discussion which you recognize. So a newspaper may refuse to cover a publicity stunt, an astronomer may refuse to debate a would-be “scientist” offering proof that the Earth is flat, and so forth. This isn’t a form of censorship, since the folks you refuse to favor with your megaphone have other ways to speak. Indeed, there is no way not to make choices about what you allow on your own platform, since the platform is finite. And any platform must exercise some form of editorial judgment: a newspaper that will print any story becomes a joke. There are hard tactical questions — when is addressing a point implicitly helping it? when is ignoring a point leaving it dangerously unchallenged? — but they are tactical questions about what is effective in the moment for your mission.

No Platform is a stronger and more profound move: not just refusing to engage on your platform but fighting to prevent a person, organization, or idea from appearing on any other platform. It is a form of censorship. I say that not to dismiss it as always wrong; No Platforming is an essential part of the immune system of liberal democracies, preventing attacks on the foundations. It is paradoxically a defense of free speech if it is used exclusively to block those who would destroy free speech. In order for that to be true it must be used very, very sparingly, reserved for cutting out sources speaking deceitfully, in bad faith (like fascists) … and cutting out positions which have been already thoroughly and publicly discredited as illegitimate because they attack free speech and other deep liberal democratic principles. There aren’t many of those people, but when you find them you hound them to the point that they can only share their poison on the shitty parts of the internet because if you don’t, they a cancer on a free society which will break free speech and everything else.

We have seen several miscalculations in recent years which have weakened our ability to use these tools effectively.

It must be said that we have had a few leftists who have been too eager to reject ordinary conservative ideas … and even some liberal ideas … as not merely wrong, not merely unworthy of their debate and response, but illegitimate, worthy of No Platforming and comparable tactics. A noisy few among them reject the principle of free speech root-and-branch: “your freeze peach is not more important than the harm your speaking does”. This gives trolls of various stripes an opening to claim that they are defenders of free speech when they are only opportunists who want to abuse the principle of free speech to claim the right to speak on any platform without criticism.

More importantly, we have failed at discrediting the authoritarian-fascist axis. These folks are the classic examples of the speech that should be No Platform’d because it is a cancer on the discourse. Authoritarians want to end free speech. Part of what makes fascists fascists is their embrace of speaking in bad faith as a method. Were our public discourse’s immune system healthy, people would be able to recognize them when they show up so that when we No Platform them, and everyone would understand why. But we have enough Americans unable to recognize them that they just won a huge electoral victory.

And so the cancer has metastasized. The Overton window has come to include authoritarian and fascist ideas. Like it or not, they have a megaphone and cannot be No Platform’d. It is time for chemotherapy on the discourse: doing some stuff that is normally poisonous but necessary now in hopes that it kills the cancer before it kills us. So we need to re-think when and where and how we make Not My Megaphone and No Platform moves. There are things we need to address directly in this environment.

This post was proximately inspired by my frustration at seeing people on my social media feed saying that it was wrong for Trevor Noah to interview Tomi Lahren on The Daily Show because it only legitimizes Lahren and helps her spread her poison. And were Lahren a figure scrambling to be heard, I would agree. Two years ago I would have said without hesitation that someone like her was a good example of a voice that a major media platform like The Daily Show should respond to with Not My Megaphone, and would have been willing to entertain arguments that she should be No Platform’d. But it is not two years ago. Her movement has platforms so effective that they just won a huge political victory. So while I think the jury is still out on whether Noah’s interview was a good move and a tactic worth imitating, it was an interesting experiment in revealing the monster for what it is and so legitimate for Noah to try. We need more experiments like that in fighting this thing that has come upon us.

I do not think that means that in our current world Not My Megaphone and No Platform are dead as tactics. But I do think we need to revisit how and when and why we use them. The time has come for chemotherapy.

Infighting

In the face of the forthcoming Trump administration, there is a lot of work to be done. Protecting people and necessary institutions who are vulnerable. Preparing to win Congressional and statehouse elections in 2018. Preparing to handle the worst if it comes. Watchdogging what is happening in our government.

But there is, unhappily, very little we can do about what the Federal government actually does until 2018 elections come around. Republicans hold both houses of Congress and have a grip on the Federal judiciary; Democratic Party leaders, activist organizations, and ordinary citizens will therefore have very little power to shape the course of the Executive Branch's actions.

This is terrifying because I see Trump leading a para-fascist movement which is sure to severely damage the Republic. There is a real chance that it will take us to an authoritarian dystopia. Watching helplessly for the next two years is a nightmare.

But. These next two years will not be a simple death spiral into an authoritarian takeover. The internal dynamics of what the Federal government will actually do are complex and impossible to predict. I see four key actors on stage who do not have a shared agenda.

1. The Deep State
2. Republicans in Congress
3. Team Trump
4. Trump himself

The Deep State

The Deep State is the network of Federal government functionaries (and connected powerful citizens) who run the country and give us the seemingly unshakable continuity between Presidential administrations which one might naïvely expect to differ more. It's the military brass and foreign policy advisors who maintain American global hegemony though military and trade power, the economists and bankers and regulators and titans of industry who shape economic policy, and so forth. It's easy to go Alex Jones Paranoid talking about the Deep State, but you don't have to. I am not talking about a tight-knit small cabal of sinister secret princes with a shared agenda. The Deep State is more a large collection of smart, motivated, sincere, and not-entirely-wrong people with shared inclinations but plenty of internal friction. They are very smart and powerful and very accustomed to bending new Presidential administrations to their will ... but this is not a normal administration. There's going to be a huge battle between the Trump administration and the Deep State, it's going to mostly happen invisibly under the waterline, and it's very hard to imagine how it's going to go.

Republicans in Congress

Powerful Republicans in Congress think it's Christmas, and they are largely right. Initially, Trump is going to be happy to rubber-stamp almost anything they send him ... so long as they commit themselves to loyalty to him. A lot of them are going to fall for the okeydoke; they're either too dumb to see what they're doing or too scared of losing Trump's base as voters to do otherwise. But Team Trump's agenda is not their agenda. It won't be long before we see friction between Trump's erratic and eccentric policy versus the ideological movement conservatism of most Republican politicians, who will face some hard decisions. Do they betray the big donors to whom they have become beholden? Or Trump's base of voters? Do they push back against a White House gathering power at the expense of Congress? Or do they align with an administration that rewards loyalists and punishes individuals who show any signs of disloyalty?

Team Trump

The Trump administration is not just the man himself, it's the collection of Cabinet members, White House staffers, and other advisors (including Trump's family), many of whom are yet to be named. The crew we have seen so far are turning out to be an army of evil clowns. There are a lot of different flavors of crackpottery in there, and a lot of ambition. Vice President Pence wants to build the Christian Republic of Gilead. Chief Strategist Bannon wants to realize his vision of Twue Capitalism. National Security Advisor Michael Flynn wants a Forever War of the US military against Islam. Ivanka Trump wants to build the Trump corporate empire and her own brand. And so on. We can expect wild irresponsibility and crazy talk and crazier action on the regular from these guys. Will they turn into a circular firing squad of incompetence, or a powerful crackpot alliance? (Being a geek of a certain age, I cannot help but think of how the Legion Of Doom were never a threat to the Superfriends because they just couldn't get their acts together.) Will their squabbling for power in the administration undercut their effectiveness or produce weird fiefdoms in different domains? How will that interact with the Deep State? And what will hold them together? Usually in authoritarianism, there is either a tight-knit ruling junta or a dictator at the heart of it all, but instead here we have ....

Trump himself

Every evidence is that the Maximum Leader wants to reign rather than rule. This is one way in which Trump doesn't fit the usual authoritarian mold. Like Hitler or Franco or Stalin or Peron or Saddam Hussein, he cunningly gathers power and builds a personality cult ... but unlike those guys and others like them, he doesn't appear to be terribly interested in actually running the country. Given his narcissism, he's likely to intervene vigorously, erratically, and capriciously in policy, which is going to make a hash of how these other players try to interact with him.

It's going to be a strange, surprising, rocky ride.