Is Authoritarianism Growing Everywhere?

For the second consecutive week, the review portion of this blog will take on a non-Christian article. Why? It is because of the subject. We have seen a worldwide growth in authoritarianism in what are considered to be democratic nations. A partial list of those nations was provided by the article reviewed in last Friday's blogpost. This week, the article reviewed will try to provide some reasons for the current growth in authoritarianism, in particular authoritarian populism.

Lydialyle Gibson (click here for a bio) has recently written an article for the Harvard Magazine which reviews some of the work by Pippa Norris (click here for a bio) on authoritarian populism. Since I have spent some time writing on authoritarianism for this blog, while including my own views I will hopefully not mix my own ideas in with the views expressed by Gibson and Norris so what they are saying is fairly represented. But I can't promise much here.

In the article by Gibson (click here for the article), Norris has been studying authoritarian populism as it has been emerging in quite a few nations in the West. In addition, she has studied quite a few other nations around the world as well.

Gibson reports Norris's observation that authoritarianism is making a comeback after decades of social changes. Only they are not referring to the authoritarianism exercised by rulers; they are talking about the authoritarianism in populist movements such as the one that carried Trump to his election as President. Because those social changes have been occurring for decades, possibly with no end in sight, some nations like the US have reached a 'tipping point' in which too much change has occurred for, in particular, older people but it includes others. Because of decades of continual change with no end in sight, the old status quo has all but lost its power and this frightens many who prefer the good old days.

So now we have this conservative populism that is resisting the continued changes and the question arises on whether the continued change is being threatened. And here we should see the perceived need for power to stop things before it is too late. And that is partial reason why we see authoritarian populism.

Gibson notes that Norris distinguishes between populism and authoritarianism since the two do not necessarily go together. According to Norris, populism consists of the speech of an 'anti-establishment impulse' that believes that it is the people who should have power, not the elites. I question this definition because we need to ask why, on a case by case basis, must their be a head-butting against certain elites like scientists, with the public? Why can't the populous demand that power be shared while sometimes agreeing with elites? In essence, conservative populism now has developed a mentality of us-against-the establishment-world. So they only trust themselves and those who feed their fears.

What should we say to this article by Gibson? The first thing that should be said is that this blogpost could never do full justice to the article. Thus, I highly recommend that people who seek to understand why we have the divisions that we have to read and reread this article.

Second, what is missing in the review of Norris's works on this subject is a clear description of what authoritarianism is. We can think of authoritarianism in two ways: authoritarianism as a personality type of the individual and a collective authoritarianism that we can observe in tribalism.

To understand the authoritarian personality type, I suggest that people start with reading an article on it by Eric Fromm (click here for the article) and an article that partially describes the authoritarian personality type posted in the Psychologist World website (click here for the article).

From those two articles, we get a glimpse at part of the personalities of 'passive' authoritarians, as From called it. That glimpse tells us that such authoritarianism is the opposite of maturity. Thus, with passive authoritarianism a person needs to 'cling,' perhaps like a child because they feel too inadequate to rely on themselves. What is observed in those with an authoritarian personality type is a fear response to those who disagree and challenge the views of their accepted authority figures. As we have learned from intergalactic history: 'fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.' Thus that fear response results in 'hostility' and 'aggression' toward those who challenge accepted beliefs and authority figures.

Something else we can surmise from the descriptions of authoritarianism provided by the references previously cited, truth for authoritarians is more often than not determined by the credentials of a given source rather than giving a fair hearing to the claims and logic employed by that source when making their case. 

The problem here when listening to a dissenting voice is that for each particle of agreement one recognizes from a dissident source, some credentials are then rewarded to that source. And the more credentials that source has, the more authority they are recognized as having. Thus an authoritarian, especially a passive one, is more vulnerable to an all-or-nothing way of listening to others. If the person being listened to is not a recognized authority and they challenge what has been accepted as being authoritative, then a strong tendency exists to reject everything that source says. Likewise, there is a tendency to accept everything a recognized authority says because errors and faults takes away that person's credentials as being an authority figure.

And here we should note that what is involved with the authoritarianism of the individual because of their personality type must be multiplied by two because we now must include tribalism. Tribalism includes the recognition of the authority of the group. It is group authoritarianism because with tribalism there is such a high degree of loyalty to the group. That degree of loyalty can become so high so that moral relativity is embraced shown in the belief that right and wrong depends on who does what to whom.
 
We should also understand about the nature of how social changes often occur. More often than not, social changes that address social injustices become overreactions in the attempt to not only eliminate the injustice, but to prevent it from occurring again. Thus such changes to injustice can somewhat become like a phobic reaction. But the same can be said of conservative populism's reactionary response to decades of liberal social change. And thus we have another source of all-or-nothing thinking that can permeate not just conservative populism, but the forces calling for social change as well. Likewise, just as we can have conservative authoritarian populism, we can have authoritarianism in the continued call for our society to change.

In short, what often goes unrecognized and thus ignored in how we approach people on either side is that emotional/personal bond followers have to their views and groups. How we include that awareness in effectually talking to those with whom we disagree has always escaped my capacity to do. And yet, we must recognize it as existing and needing to be utilized in order to communicate with each other.