Even if Harris wins, the fact that Trump made notable gains in many districts compared to 2020 - especially after Jan 6 - is staggering, stunning, and depressing.
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Even if Harris wins, the fact that Trump made notable gains in many districts compared to 2020 - especially after Jan 6 - is staggering, stunning, and depressing.
WTF have we become?
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@rickf I'm originally from Germany and people my age there always said they never would've voted for Hitler, that they would have recognized the evil he represented – but this never sat right with me because there isn't a qualitative difference between people now and then.
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But when learning about the history of Nazi Germany one thing always stuck with me:
There was an allied psychiatrist or psychologist who interviewed the accused of the Nuremberg trials and the result was that even high-ranking perpetrators involved directly in the planning and implementation of the Holocaust showed no apparent aberrations from the norm.
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@rickf A country that let its tots grow up to be Taters.
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@phryk This is a true anecdote that often gets misinterpreted.
The aberrations were not detected because the systematic study of fascism as a psychological complex was only undertaken after that. Psychology at the time was still a dark magic laden with Freud's pipe^W cigar dreams. It has come a long way since 1945.
Look up right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and need for closure. These are things that can be measured (assuming the patient coöperates), and that correlate strongly with fascism.
But then, the next point is, RWA traits are kind of widespread. About a quarter of WEIRD populations ar high-RWA. In USA, only about half of the eligible population regularly votes, and this happens to include almost all of the authoritarian ones, which leads to the anomalous situation of roughly half of the active voters always being pro-fascism, provided fascism is available on the ballot.
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@riley This isn't exactly a counterpoint tho, because if these things are so widespread, they are arguably part of the norm – which was my point.
Also, are the emphasized bits paper titles?
I can find "Right-Wing Authoritarianism and
Social Dominance Orientation": https://sci-hub.st/10.1027/1864-9335.40.2.93But nothing on need for closure.
// @rickf
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@phryk No, my point is, there's not a single norm. There's clear behavioural traits that can be measured and, at population basis, reliably distinguish the fascism-prone phenotype from the one that is not quite so fond of fascism.
The distinction is harder at individual basis, because it's a sliding scale without an unequivocal cut-off point. But this is often the case in biology. Some people fall clearly on one side, some clearly on the other, and some are in the sort of grey area inbetween. But the measurable quality underlying fascist feelings is a real thing, not a part of some single universally applicable "norm".
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to phryk 🏴 last edited by [email protected]
@phryk No, not titles of papers, but psychometric scales. https://lexikon.stangl.eu/21727/need-for-closure offers a brief description of the Need for Closure and a couple of citations. It can also be discussed as just 'Closure' (which is, alas, harder to google for, but adding in 'psychology' or 'psychometry' should help), or the 'NFC scale'.
Professor Bob Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians is a great entry-level introduction to the RWA and SDO scales and how they interact. It's available on his website, https://theauthoritarians.org/, together with commentaries of some changes in the American politics since. (The book is so old that he had to write a special annex on the Tea Party after the original book was nominally ready. And then, as the Russians say, things got worse.) Alas, Altemeyer died of old age a couple of months ago. IIRC, the question of how NFC relates to the other two was still a hot research topic in 2006, so he doesn't talk about it very much, but there's a number of papers from the 2010s discussing it and its interactions with political outlooks.
