Left-Wing Authoritarianism Real and Needs Taken Seriously Political Psychology | Hacker News Reader

Left-Wing Authoritarianism Real and Needs Taken Seriously Political Psychology

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38 pointsmrfusion9 comments

> Antihierarchical Aggression – the belief that those currently in power should be punished, the established order should be overthrown, and that extreme actions, such as political violence, are justifiable to achieve these aims.

> Top-Down Censorship – preferences for the use of governmental and institutional authority to quash opposition and bar offensive and intolerant speech.

Those two are kind of at war with each other, aren't they? But I guess psychological syndromes don't have to be self-consistent.

The "top-down censorship" shows their authoritarianism quite well, I think.

> The very idea of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) has received not only little academic attention, but a lot of scepticism from psychologists. “I think I have not found any authoritarians on the left because if there ever were any, most of them have dried up and blown away….”

WTAF? How old are these people? Don't they remember the seventies?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGLGzRXY5Bw

I'm struggling to see how wanting the authorities that brought us massive inequality, unjust wars, global surveillance and the destruction of countless species and habitats, etc, is considered authoritarian.

That's just self-defense at this point.

Imagine you live in a liberal democracy which has decent economic equality and social opportunity, has not been to war recently, has privacy laws, and is taking aggressive action on climate change. Yes, there are a few of those! But even in those countries, it's not that hard to find some people who are in favour of the violent overthrow of liberalism.

That's a fair point, though those countries and the people in them are still very much affected by global climate change, global surveillance, refugees from wars and proxy wars, etc, with their causative origin in other countries.

And, I doubt that the respondents in this study were from those countries. It seems that, at least in the researchers second round, participants were selected to represent the US (I don't have access to the full study so can't say more).

I also doubt that the researcher took any, much less all, of the valid reasons for desiring dismantlement of neo-liberal power structures into account when building up these "iterative" profiles.

I do think LWA is worth researching, but without being able to see how they're defining "political violence", or "left wing", or how these aspects are weighted, it's hard to judge the value of their data.

I think their conclusion sounds about right, for many on the so-called left in America these days - “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behaviour, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy and moral absolutism.”

However, in most other Western countries Democrats are considered quite right-wing, for the exact above reasons.

Well, I think the argument goes that these liberal countries are a vital part of a broader international system, that has no privacy laws, is not doing anything about climate change, and is at war all the time: in fact, a system that's basically a combination death pact / torture machine.

Living in a gated community gives you less personal motivation to radicalism, but the broader, more general grounds are still there.

So which people are going to fix global warming and save the whales? The ones smashing windows, the ones burning tires, or the ones who use profits from lectures on BLM to buy up a ton of real estate?

Of course it's real. There is just far more right-wing authoritarianism right now, so that's what most people focus on.

I believe the opposite. Pretty much the entirety of the push towards authoritarianism I see in my life today comes from the left

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