The Reasons Authoritarianism Is Growing – and How to Reverse It

What authoritarians want is a limited number of well-defined roles and scripts for the way thing are to be done. They don't want to have to deal with figuring out every situation anew. In fact that seems to terrify them. But it's OK if there's not just one role, so long as it's clear where everybody stands.

In fact, they usually seem to prefer there to be a strong leader role that's obviously way different from everybody else... either because they see themselves as being that person, or probably more frequently because they want that person to come in and make everything all right for them.

Authoritarians also really seem to want the just world fallacy to not be a fallacy, and seem very willing to accept inequality if they can convince themselves that the people who are getting the better deal "deserve" it.

That's what's disappeared - a strong middle class. Not what the WSJ calls the middle class - they mean people with enough money to invest - but what was called the middle class through the 1970s. People who had a secure job, and could afford a house, a car, a family, and a retirement. Those people had a stake in maintaining the status quo.

What we have now is called "the precariat", from "precarious" and "proletariat". There's a job, but you could lose it at any time. You can't afford a house. You can't afford to save for retirement. Just paying the bills is tough. This is the new American normal.

A friend in banking who has access to retail numbers points out that, for most customers, the account balance after they pay rent is at most a few hundred dollars.

These are people flying commercial from another continent, and coming from a country, China, that is not only a geopolitical adversary of ours, but is projected to economically overtake us, and are coming here only because their economy has seen some recent slowdown. Purely economic migrants taking advantage of us.

Therefore it's enough to analyze the disagreement from a psychological or emotional level and the solution is to simply frame the existing agenda in some way that it is more psychologically palatable for the target demographic.

This misses that there may be a lot of completely rational, fact-based reasons to reject incumbent policy: If your statistics tell you that the economy is fine, but a significant part of the population doesn't know how to pay the bills, then this isn't some psychological error of that population group, it means your statistics suck.

From the perspective of one of the affected, the statement "the economy is fine" will also be understood quite differently: It means that whoever said it obviously doesn't include you in their definition of "the economy" and so is unlikely to alleviate your situation. Of course you then won't vote for them.

As a leftist, I also find the "diversity vs sameness" divide quite superficial. A lot of progressives and left-wing types are promoting cultural diversity while demanding strong economic regulations, while conservatives advocate deregulation and laissez-fair economics but have no problem directly interfering with people's private lives. The ultra-libertarians and ancaps who are so in love with freedom that they would like to abolish the state completely nevertheless have no problem with all-encompassing dystopian megacorps, as long as those megacorps are private enterprises.

Who exactly is the authoritarian and who is the libertarian here?

  Before we get into the politics of this argument, let's first go back in time, way back before agriculture, and think about a small band of humans that includes you and me. 

The rest is spot on and well written, but I was confused about the tone until the end: this was written before the election, assuming that Trump would lose. It’s all moot now. UBI? Hah, no. RFK Jr is now in charge of “foreign and domestic policy”, even just keeping a few of the consumer protections we have would be a huge surprise; building ones is a fantasy.

There’s only two proven strategies for defeating large authoritarian nations in the modern era, IMO: Cold War and hot war. I recommend anyone who’s read history act accordingly, and choose a place to live unlikely to be targeted by nuclear weapons.