Left-wing authoritarianism: Hiding in plain sight
In 1950 a book called "The authoritarian personality" appeared. It was under the lead authorship of Theodor Adorno, a prominent European Marxist theoretician. It was immediately popular among psychologists but also had to be one of the most wrong-headed books ever written.
The very title of the book was faulty. It claimed to be about personality but everything in the book was in fact about people's attitudes. Personality tells you about what people normally DO whereas attitudes tell you about what people THINK. The distinction is important. It is not at all uncommon for people to say one thing and do another. And that was particularly so in this case.
The basic thesis of the book was that authoritarianism is uniquely conservative. And that has been the prevailing view among psychologists ever since. The vast authoritarian structures of the Soviet Union and Mao's China seem to be invisible. In a world beset by vast authoritarian regimes of the Left, there was somehow no Leftist authoritarianism!
And Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian anyway. What is a Leftist if he/she is not someone who wants to impose change on the world, whether the world likes it or not? Despite all that, Leftist psychologists often still insist that there is no such thing as Leftist authoritarianism. Something foundational to Leftism is said not to exist. The whole thing is a vivid example of Leftist reality denial.
The way out of reality used by Leftist psychologists is to look at what people SAY rather than what they DO. And there is a great discordance there. It has been known for decades that attitudes do not always reflect behaviour. People often say one thing and do another. That would seem to me to indicate the relative unimportance of attitudes. What people DO is what matters.
But if we look at Leftists of all stripes, what they DO is to attempt to impose their idea of what is a good thing onto everybody else, whether by public shaming, legislation or revolution. So Leftist expositors of authoritarianism work almost entirely with attitude statements and largely overlook what is actually happening in the world. It is only by looking at words, not deeds that they can support their claim that authoritarianism is peculiarly conservative. The many Leftist criticisms of so much in the world about them are held to show Leftists as anti-authority, while conservative acceptance of existing arrangements is said to make them pro-authority or authoritarian.
This Leftist analysis of conservatives attitudes struck me as wrong-headed as soon as I heard of it so I spent the first 20 years of my academic career (1970-1990) questioning it and endeavouring to show by survey research that is was incoherent and wrong. See http://jonjayray.com/auth.html
My work did not budge the leviathan one bit. Leftist psychologists continued on their merry way of relying on a perverse analysis of attitudes to convict conservatives of authoritarianism and exonerate themselves from it. I was wasting my time.
20 years of banging my head against a brick wall was enough, however so I ceased my survey research and attitude studies and have focused my writing ever since on looking at what Leftists DO, largely using history as my data source. See http://jonjayray.com/leftism2.html
But my studies were still focused on WHY Leftists and conservatives do different things. The explanation for what they do does not rely on attitudes so what does it rely on? And I have concluded that it does after all rely on personality, even though attitudes tell us little about personality. I have concluded that the essence of conservatism is caution and the essence of Leftism is anger. Leftists and conservatives differ in those two fundamental ways. The stance that they take on the issues of the day will vary but underlying and influencing the stance will be one of those two personality types.
So I got a rather pleasant surprise recently when some mainly Norwegian psychologists published an article questioning the non-existence of Leftist authoritarianism (Lane et al., 2023) . And they did it by the old Leftist method of analysing what people say. And one of the things that they found was that Leftist attitudes were primarily influenced by anger! They too found that anger was fundamental to Leftist authoritarianism
So even using basically Leftist methods you can -- with a lot of work -- show that Leftists are the angry people. The study concerned is a very complex one and something of a brain-breaker if you want to follow it in detail but I reproduce the abstract from it below:
The Moral Foundations of Left-Wing Authoritarianism: On the Character, Cohesion, and Clout of Tribal Equalitarian Discourse**********************************************
Left-wing authoritarianism remains far less understood than right-wing authoritarianism. We contribute to literature on the former, which typically relies on surveys, using a new social media analytic approach. We use a list of 60 terms to provide an exploratory sketch of the outlines of a political ideology "tribal equalitarianism" with origins in 19th and 20th century social philosophy. We then use analyses of the English Corpus of Google Books (n > 8 million books) and scraped unique tweets from Twitter (n = 202,582) to conduct a series of investigations to discern the extent to which this ideology is cohesive amongst the public, reveals signatures of authoritarianism and has been growing in popularity. Though exploratory, our results provide some evidence of left-wing authoritarianism in two forms: (1) a uniquely conservative signature amongst ostensible liberals using measures derived from Moral Foundations Theory and (2) a substantial prevalence of anger, relative to anxiety or sadness, in tweets analyzed for sentiment. In general, results indicate that this worldview is growing in popularity, is increasingly cohesive, and shows signatures of authoritarianism.
Biden Admin Tries to Force Its Religion on Employers. Here’s How You Can Fight Back
In President Joe Biden’s America, if you disagree with transgender orthodoxy, you might not be able to run a business.
Federal law prohibits harassment on the basis of sex in the workplace, and under Biden, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission aims to weaponize that law against employers who believe that biological sex can’t be altered by mere identification.
The EEOC published its proposed rule for workplace harassment Monday.
The proposed rule cites the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), stating that “sex-based discrimination includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
“Accordingly, sex-based harassment includes harassment on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, including how that identity is expressed,” EEOC claims:
Examples include epithets regarding sexual orientation or gender identity; physical assault; harassment because an individual does not present in a manner that would stereotypically be associated with that person’s gender; intentional and repeated use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s gender identity (misgendering); or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity. (emphasis added)
To underline the point, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission provides an example of how this works in practice.
“Jennifer, a cashier at a fast food restaurant who identifies as female, alleges that supervisors, coworkers, and customers regularly and intentionally misgender her,” the EEOC narrates. “One of her supervisors, Allison, frequently uses Jennifer’s prior male name, male pronouns, and ‘dude’ when referring to Jennifer, despite Jennifer’s request for Allison to use her correct name and pronouns; other managers also intentionally refer to Jennifer as ‘he.'”
“Coworkers have asked Jennifer questions about her sexual orientation and anatomy and asserted that she was not female,” the EEOC adds. “Customers also have intentionally misgendered Jennifer and made threatening statements to her, but her supervisors did not address the harassment and instead reassigned her to duties outside of the view of customers. Based on these facts, Jennifer has alleged harassment based on her gender identity.”
In July 2022, a federal judge prevented the EEOC from applying a “guidance” document encouraging Americans to file complaints against employers who violate transgender orthodoxy, including by “misgendering.”
The EEOC—and the Department of Education—claimed that it did not need to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act in drafting such a document because it was not binding. The judge ruled otherwise, and this proposed rule seems to be EEOC’s belated response.
Federal courts repeatedly have ruled that employers cannot compel employees to endorse speech with which they disagree—including gender pronouns.
Shawnee State University attempted to force philosophy professor Nicholas Meriwether to use students’ preferred pronouns, even neologisms such as “xe” and “ze.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that Meriwether had alleged sufficiently that the university burdened his rights to free speech and religious expression by requiring him to refer to a male student using female pronouns.
The university settled with the professor, avoiding a ruling that it actually had violated Meriwether’s rights, but the case established a clear precedent on the matter.
Yet the Meriwether case doesn’t necessarily doom the EEOC rule.
In the Bostock case, the Supreme Court ruled that the discrimination “because of sex” prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
The EEOC’s proposed rule adds that an employer’s duty to protect workers from “religiously motivated” harassment overrides the Title IV requirement that employers “accommodate employees’ sincerely held religious beliefs, practices, and observances in the absence of undue hardship.”
“Employers are not required to accommodate religious expression that creates, or reasonably threatens to create, a hostile work environment,” the rule says. “As with other forms of harassment, an employer should take corrective action before the conduct becomes sufficiently severe or pervasive to create a hostile work environment.”
In other words, if a female employee asks for a religious exemption to use male pronouns when referring to male employees, regardless of their stated gender identity, her boss should dismiss her request because she’s attempting to engage in harassment.
This rule imposes the Biden administration’s view that stated gender identity overrides biological sex, a highly dubious contention that Americans reject in many arenas.
The two sexes are a biological reality, constituting two basic body structures and corresponding gametes—sperm for males and eggs for females. Each person is either male or female. Biological sex impacts how a baby develops in the womb, how an adolescent goes through puberty, how certain drugs affect a person’s body, how an adult reproduces, and even how anthropologists analyze the skeletons of human beings long dead.
Disorders of sex development may lead to ambiguous genitalia and sterility, and they can make it harder to determine visually whether an individual is male or female, but even “intersex” people are still either male or female.
Gender ideology attempts to muddle the clear differences between men and women, and in doing so, it creates a host of harms. Although most people who suffer from a gender dysphoria (the persistent and painful identification with the gender opposite one’s biological sex) may not represent a threat, nefarious opportunists can use a gender identity as a weapon.
Males can claim to identify as women to gain admittance to women’s private spaces, such as locker rooms and restrooms. They can claim a female identity in order to compete in women’s sports, where their male physiology gives them a distinct advantage. In some horrifying situations, men convicted of rape have convinced authorities to move them to women’s prisons.
Gender ideology arguably constitutes a religion at odds with scientific fact. It propagates a narrative of oppression—society inherently hates transgender people. It promotes a pseudo-gospel of personal transformation—from “living the lie” of one’s biological sex to adopting a transgender “true self.”
From social media influencers to schools to the Biden White House, many on the Left praise as “brave” those who “come out” and embrace a transgender identity. Some dismiss those who identify with their biological sex as “cisgender” or even “cissies.”
This ideology presents an entirely different notion of reality—one grounded in an individual’s feelings rather than plain biological fact.
Sensing the wide-ranging impacts of this ideology, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a dire warning about the high court’s Bostock decision.
The ruling “may even affect the way employers address their employees and the way teachers and school officials address students,” Alito warned. “Under established English usage, two sets of sex-specific singular personal pronouns are used to refer to someone in the third person (he, him, and his for males; she, her, and hers for females). But several different sets of gender-neutral pronouns have now been created and are preferred by some individuals who do not identify as falling into either of the two traditional categories.”
“Some jurisdictions, such as New York City, have ordinances making the failure to use an individual’s preferred pronoun a punishable offense, and some colleges have similar rules,” the justice warned. “After today’s decision, plaintiffs may claim that the failure to use their preferred pronoun violates one of the federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination.”
Alito warned that the court majority’s ruling in Bostock could lead to the kind of forced orthodoxy that the Biden administration now has officially supported.
This Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s proposed rule may drive tens of thousands of small business owners out of business because they refuse to kowtow to the administration’s new speech codes.
On the other hand, if the rule faces opposition in the courts, it may force the Supreme Court to reconsider the Bostock ruling.
In either case, Americans can make their voices heard by commenting on the EEOC’s proposed rule. Federal law requires the agency to read every comment you send before the deadline of Nov. 1. You may comment on the rule at this link.
*****************************************************
Smithsonian’s Planned Latino Museum Is Woke Move Intended to Radicalize US Hispanics
The growing controversy over the Smithsonian Institution’s planned National Museum of the American Latino is making one thing perfectly clear: The once-august organization cannot now be trusted to refrain from “decolonizing” history.
The recent revelation that it hired two radical professors to create a second forerunner to the museum, an exhibit aimed at making Hispanics question capitalism, makes its proclivities clear. The Smithsonian only got cold feet and suspended the second exhibit to the museum late last year after critics complained that the first precursor exhibit was absurdly Marxist.
As two of the three critics who raised the alarm, in a column for The Hill newspaper in August last year, we are happy to have contributed to making the Smithsonian hit the pause button on yet another project to radicalize Hispanics by telling them they are victims in America.
But we also take no pleasure in being proven right, again, that the coming National Museum of the American Latino has been set up to promote a leftist take on the experience of Hispanics in the United States, and Congress must scrap the project altogether.
One need only consider that the museum’s 18-member Scholarly Advisory Committee, which is responsible for reviewing all exhibits, is dominated almost completely by woke professors, researchers, and activists whose work focuses on advancing culturally Marxist concepts such as critical race theory and gender and queer theory. Many teach the academically questionable subject of “Latinx” studies.
What can one expect from this museum?
The first exhibit, “Presente! A Latino History of the United States,” made clear to us after it opened its doors in June 2022 at the National History Museum that the upcoming museum—created by Congress in the giant omnibus COVID-19 bill in the waning days of 2020, and yet to be built—will be used to curate neither art nor history, but grievances and resentments against the United States.
That the second exhibit—ostensibly devoted to “civil rights”—was going to be more of the same, or worse, should now prove this to everyone else.
A Time magazine article this month revealed that two scholars—Felipe Hinojosa of Baylor University and Johanna Fernandez of Baruch College—had been working for two years on the second exhibit. It also revealed that the Smithsonian told them to cease and desist in an email last Nov. 28. In a subsequent phone conversation, the Latino Museum’s director, Jorge Zamanillo, told them their exhibit would interfere with funding.
Hinojosa and Fernandez were not told why, but Time additionally reports that “they believe it was because they planned to feature a variety of countercultural organizations of the 1960s that questioned how well American democracy was meeting the needs of its citizens under a capitalist system.”
Time reported that the Smithsonian confirmed halting the exhibit, and added that new one on salsa and Latin music “is being developed in its place.”
The article quotes Hinojosa as saying, “The tragedy and really the story here is around who controls the future of Latino history.”
Hinojosa is not wrong. We think it would be dangerous for professors like him and Fernandez, or the members of the museum’s Scholarly Advisory Committee, to control how the history of these immigrant groups is told. Taxpayers should definitely not fund an effort to divide America.
Quick research reveals that Fernandez is a socialist who also lobbies for the release of cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. She edited a prison book by Mumia, and, in a 2021 Workers’ World Party webinar, Fernandez said that Mumia “has a critique of the state and of capitalism. This means that he represents a continuity in the black radical tradition, a continuity in black radical descent from the 1960s to the present.”
Hinojosa, for his part, sympathizes with Latin America’s liberation theology, which proposes that the church should be an instrument of mobilization and even revolution to overturn the traditional structures of society. Hinojosa militates for the preservation of Hispanics as a separate group inside the U.S., rejecting assimilation, and no doubt would have used the exhibit now suspended to promote this separatism.
“What the 1960s and 1970s did for Latinos, especially the rise of liberation theology, was to be able to see themselves in a brand new way, to be able to rearticulate their identity, to reject this notion that they were to just assimilate and become white Americans, to take on a brown identity, a sense of difference and a connection with indigenous roots … . That was a beautiful moment,” Hinojosa told a podcaster in 2021.
These are the people the Smithsonian hires to shape the identity of Hispanics.
It was perhaps inevitable that Hispanics would find themselves smack in the middle of the culture wars. The group now comprises almost one-fifth of the U.S. population. At 60 million strong, they have begun to drift rightward, and progressives are getting desperate.
Congress appeared to get what was happening, and the House Appropriations Committee in July passed a funding bill that cut the museum’s funding. But Republican members of Congress then met later that month with Smithsonian leaders who made reassurances that they had learned their lesson. Sources tell us that the Smithsonian leaders told members that they had “fired” people, presumably a reference to Fernandez and Hinojosa.
But members of the House of Representatives need to understand that they were apparently lied to. Despite the assurances of bipartisanship by Smithsonian leadership, the museum is controlled by woke academic elites who only want to recruit Hispanics into the victimhood Olympics.
*************************************************
Hillary Clinton Calls for 'Formal Deprogramming' of Trump Supporters
This sounds more like North Korean brainwashing than any kind of democracy
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for the reeducation of supporters of former President Donald Trump during a CNN interview on Thursday.
The former Democratic presidential nominee who lost to President Trump in 2016 told Christiane Amanpour that though there have always been “bitter battles over all kinds of things” between Republicans and Democrats, there wasn’t “this little tale of extremism wagging the dog of the Republican party as it is today.”
“And, sadly, so many of those extremists—those MAGA extremists—take their marching orders from Donald Trump who has no credibility left by any measure,” she said.
Referring to his legal issues, Ms. Clinton said he’s “only in it for himself.”
“He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions, and when do they break with him?” she asked. “Because at some point—you know—maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. Something needs to happen.”
When Ms. Amanpour asked Ms. Clinton how this could be done given that he could be the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election, she replied, “At this point, I think sadly he will still be the nominee, and we have to defeat him, and we have to defeat those who are the election deniers as we did in 2020 and 2022, and we have to be smarter about how we are trying to empower the right people inside the Republican party.”
'Basket of Deplorables'
Ms. Clinton has criticized President Trump's stance on the 2020 election being stolen—a stance for which he is facing federal charges—while she herself has stated multiple times that the 2016 election was stolen, yet she faces no charges.
“I believe he knows he’s an illegitimate president,” she told Jane Pauley on CBS Sunday Morning in 2019. “He knows. He knows there were a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out the way it did, and I take responsibility for those parts of it that I should, but Jane, it was like applying for a job and getting 66 million letters of recommendation and losing to a corrupt human tornado.”
Despite special counsel John Durham's May report not only debunking Ms. Clinton’s allegation that President Trump conspired with Russians to steal the election but also pointing to her documented intent to “vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin,” she continues to blame the Russian president for her election loss and claims Russians are determined to infiltrate U.S. elections.
“I don’t think despite all of the deniers there’s any doubt that he interfered in our election or that he has interfered in many ways in the internal affairs of other countries," Mrs. Clinton said. “He hates democracy, and he especially hates the West, and he especially hates us. I fear that the Russians have proved themselves to be quite adept at interfering, and if he has a chance, he’ll do it again.”
Her call for deprogramming echoed her 2016 sentiment when she expressed disdain for Trump supporters who are largely in the middle class.
“You can put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call a basket of deplorables,” she said at a campaign event. “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it. And, unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up.”
To critics, her views are representative of the Democratic Party’s disconnect and disdain for many everyday Americans in its entanglement with elite and corporate self-interests.
Most recently in Mississippi, current Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commented on Mrs. Clinton's characterization of Trump supporters as "deplorables," and the Democratic party’s willingness to suspend constitutional rights to serve its own interests.
“It has an antipathy toward the American middle class,” he said. “I don’t think it was an accident when Hillary Clinton referred to people as deplorable. I see that sentiment a lot. It’s become a party that is opposed to freedom of speech, and that is tolerant of government-enforced censorship.”
In the CNN Primetime interview, Ms. Clinton told Ms. Amanpour that there are some “sane” Republicans in the House, but that they are afraid of other members.
"You saw the number of Republicans who voted along with Democrats to keep the government open, so there’s clearly a commonsense, sane part of the Republican caucus in the House,” she said. “But I think they are intimidated. They oftentimes, you know, say and do things which they know better than to say or do, and it will require us defeating those most extreme measures and the people who promote them in order to try to get to some common ground where people can again work together.”
MAGA Responds
Though President Trump himself has not yet commented on Ms. Clinton’s statement on deprogramming MAGA Republicans as of this writing, the Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC issued this statement:
“President Trump has said countless times that they are only coming after him because he stands in their way from coming after you—and Hillary Clinton just confirmed that to be true. Tens of millions of Americans will reject the Democrat Party’s re-education camp agenda in November 2024 when we make Donald Trump the 47th president of the United States.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/hillary-clinton-calls-for-formal-deprogramming-of-trump-supporters-5505316 ?
****************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
/>
Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
No comments:
Post a Comment