The Establishment's Crutch

I've been politically depressed since Super Tuesday. On the morning of Super Tuesday, this blog was blindly correct in mildly predicting the supremacy of Democratic Party establishment candidate. The voters, except those minority voters  in Texas who had to wait in long lines to vote if they got to vote at all, chose Biden, the oldest and most authoritarian Democratic candidate, in terms of personality, candidate.

Though a Biden nomination is bad enough, that is not what depresses me even though I am not voting for the Democratic nominee regardless of who they are. What saddens me is that this choice of Biden tells us some sad news about the voters. That it isn't just the Democratic party leadership that is authoritarian, so are too many of its rank and file members.

Biden and Trump are mirror images of each other. Both are authoritarian in personality. Both give evidence of being in the process of losing their mental capacities. And both have antiquated views of how the world should work. It is just one of those candidates is a little less conservative than the other.

But back to the voters, their choice of a safer candidate to beat Trump rather than wanting significant change is the result of listening to the Democratic establishment--an establishment that is run by wealth. That veering away from needed change in order to stay with what appears to be as sure a thing as possible is good indicator that authoritarianism, something Hillary warned us against a few years back, rules too many of the rank and file members of the Party.

By authoritarianism, I will refer back to Eric Fromm's (click here for a bio ) description of it. Authoritarianism has two forms: the active form of the ruler and the passive form of the ruled. According to Fromm, the authoritarian, regardless of the form, is an immature person who is afraid of living by one's abilities to use reason to make decisions. Passive authoritarian, therefore, gives allegiance, sometimes at significant sacrifice, to be ruled by the active authoritarian. Passive authoritarians cling to active authoritarians or others who are deemed to be superior. They are afraid of the loss of control by those those people or ideologies they submit to (click here for the article). Their fear often causes them to lash out. at those who challenge their authority figures.

Fromm described active authoritarians as those who rule over others regardless of their  lack of competence. They too are live in fear. They live in fear of losing control over those they rule. We could add that just as conservatives call a government that takes care of its people from cradle to grave a 'nanny state,' active authoritarians become Nanny-thinkers to those passive authoritarians who submit to them. For they allow these Nanny-thinkers to do most of the thinking for them without examining the competency or the cases made by those in charge.

Passive and Active authoritarians involve themselves in a fear-based co-dependent relationship with each other. And that fear drives all of their responses just as fear is driving a consumer run on certain health care products in the light of the Corona Virus.

In contrast to the authoritarian is the adult who relies on their ability to think on their own to make decisions. It isn't that the non-authoritarian doesn't have their authority figures on which they rely on for information. It is that what they have accepted from those authority figures is because they see the competence of those authority figures and the logic of their arguments. This stands in contrast to passive authoritarians who rely more on the credentials of the source to determine what is true rather than relying on one's own ability to think and examine what is being said.

And so as it now stands, we will see a Presidential race between two authoritarian personalities  in the persons of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That means that both sides of the 2 Party political system have more than their fair share of passive authoritarians willing to enable their authoritarian leaders. And if that is the case, then not only will voters reject any necessary changes for now, the future be bleakened by candidates who are even more authoritarian than what we have in Trump and Biden.