Academics Discover Left-wing Authoritarianism

Academics have just discovered left-wing authoritarians! Up to now, they were thought not to exist.

I have posted here on how left-wing authoritarianism differs from right-wing authoritarianism, such as this 2014 post.

The authoritarians today are those who (1) want to censor medical opinions that differ from official covid recommendations; (2) cancel people for politically incorrect speech; (3) imprison activists for participating in a political protest; (4) send missiles to Ukraine in order to support NATO expansion there; and (5) blocking opposition politicians from social media.

These authoritarians are mostly on the Left.

The great authoritarians of the past -- Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc. -- were all leftists. Hitler is often considered a right-winger, but he was a national socialist. Most Jews today are left-wing authoritarians.

Psychiatrist Sally Satel writes in a Sept. 2021 The Atlantic article:

Published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Costello team’s paper is persuasive, to the point that you have to wonder: How could past researchers have overlooked left-wing authoritarianism for so long? “For 70 years, the lore in the social sciences has been that authoritarianism was to be found exclusively on the political right,” the Rutgers University social psychologist Lee Jussim, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told me in an email. In the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, an inquiry into the psychological makeup of people strongly drawn to autocratic rule and repressive politics, the German-born scholar Theodor W. Adorno and three other psychologists measured people along dimensions such as conformity to societal norms, rigid thinking, and sexual repression. And they concluded that “the authoritarian type of human”— the kind of person whose enthusiastic support allows someone like Hitler to exercise power—was found only among conservatives. In the mid-1990s, the influential Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer described left-wing authoritarianism as “the Loch Ness Monster of political psychology—an occasional shadow, but no monster. ” Subsequently, other psychologists reached the same conclusion.

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The Trump era likely deepened psychology’s conventional wisdom that authoritarians are almost always conservatives; the insurrection at the Capitol earlier this year showed the urgency of understanding the phenomenon. And yet calls to de-platform controversial speakers and online campaigns to get people fired for heterodox views suggest that a commitment to open democratic norms is eroding, at least in some quarters, on the left. Much further along the authoritarian continuum, people purporting to be antiracist or antifascist protesters have set fires and committed other acts of violence since the summer of 2020.

This is so bizarre. My guess is that the academics who dominated the fields were Jews who like to accuse others of authoritarianism in order to conceal their own authoritarianism.

Here is Jordan Peterson talking about the issue.

Also Rod Dreher.

Here is what was found:

In six studies, which included 7,258 individuals in total, the researchers validated their measure of left-wing authoritarianism, which they called the Left-Wing Authoritarianism Index. The results indicated that left-wing authoritarianism was comprised of three primary dimensions.

The first is anti-hierarchical aggression. People who score high on this dimension agree with statements such as “The rich should be stripped of their belongings and status” and “We need to replace the established order by any means necessary.”

The second is top-down censorship. People who score high on this dimension agree with statements such as “I should have the right not to be exposed to offensive views” and “Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called ‘right’ to free speech.”

The third is anti-conventionalism. People who score high on this dimension agree with statements such as “All political conservatives are fools” and “The ‘old-fashioned ways’ and ‘old-fashioned values’ need to be abolished.”

Costello and his colleagues also found a large overlap in personality traits, cognitive styles, and beliefs among those who scored high on left-wing authoritarianism and those who scored high on right-wing authoritarianism. Both groups had heightened levels of psychopathic meanness and boldness, dogmatism, disinhibition, conscientiousness, need for closure, fatalistic determinism beliefs, belief in conspiracy theories, and belief in a dangerous world.

The left-wing authoritarians are agressively censoring social media, forcing compliance with covid recommendations, restricting fossil fuels, and possibly starting wars in Ukraine. NATO aggression is led by authoritarians, but I am not sure if they are left-wing or right-wing. Certainly the left-wing news media has fallen into line with pro-war policies.