Please, please, please read this free Ebook:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
It was written during the Bush years but totally applies to the Obama years. It explains "all of it". It explains the Bushbots and the Obamabots equally well. He flat-out says "this is a personality type" just like you did, and it makes sense. It's backed by gobs of good scientific research he explains and that almost anyone can understand. I'm happy to note that rather a lot of his comments are Obama-defectors who see what's up.
I started off by reading the author's "Comment on the Tea Party Movement"
here, and I'm disappointed to see how thinly veiled his political bias is. He's spot on about authoritarian followers, but he tries too hard to inherently tie them to conservative ideology and downplay their prevalence among liberals, when it is really only the demographical and ideological homogeneity of authoritarian conservatives that makes them bolder and more visible. There are just as many authoritarian liberals, and they're just as bad, but the Democrats of today are essentially a coalition party opposing a largely uniform group of baby boomers who became the Republican base. Being more of a coalition, they simply don't have as many unanimous points of agreement to work each other into a fervor about much of anything except for wanting more economic regulations, controls, and progressive taxation...and hating Bush (and other Republicans). However, their contrasting diversity and tolerance for each other is incidental to the circumstances and demographics, and it is not indicative of Democrats being intrinsically more free-thinking or rational than Republicans as human beings, or as a result of their ideology. As you say, these insights apply just as well to the Obama-bots as the Bush-bots...and yet the author doesn't himself doesn't seem ready to acknowledge it.
(It's really just the nature of collective institutions to become monsters unto themselves and destroy the individuality of their "cells" though, and over time the reason for their existence shifts from accomplishing a specific purpose to simply promoting their own existence and accumulating power. Sociopaths inevitably rise to the top of all kinds of institutions, from governments to NGO's to corporations to political parties to nonprofits, and irrational, emotionally/socially driven personality types enable this through their desire for social acceptance overriding their individual consciences and rationality. Completely reshaping this reality isn't going to happen, and collective institutions will gradually trend toward evil for all eternity, but the worst abuses are only made possible by the centralization of coercive power, which has also led to the centralization of corporate power...and we're the only political movement that understands the problem or the solution. Mass psychology is an obstacle to change as well, but we can at least adapt to it by making it emotionally and socially rewarding to promote individual liberty, and by making it as unpopular and socially isolating as possible to support neoconservatism. A huge part of that is by making sure the neocons are perceived as "losers" on their way down. Sociopaths rule the world by social manipulation, and as much as we'd rather just argue our hearts out on principled and consequential grounds, we're going to have to learn how to influence people more efficiently on top of that to even the odds.)
Anyway, the imbalance in his analysis was a bit irritating and kept throwing up "caution" signs in my mind, but I could stomach it until he tried lumping libertarians in with authoritarians by portraying us as callous, uncaring "social dominators" who are driven largely by a resentment of equality. In fact, he seems to consider that our defining characteristic.
Bob Altemeyer said:
Libertarians vary in how much the government should do, but staunch libertarianism
apparently rejects the role that government can play in righting injustice and social wrong. It seems
to say, “If some people get screwed in life because of discrimination against their race or gender or
nationality or sexual orientation or whatever, that‟s their tough luck. The government exists to do
things like organize fire departments. It has no business interfering with the way society works.”
One can hold this view, but it does not overflow with sympathy, generosity, or a sense of
justice. When millions of Americans had no health insurance and other millions were being gouged
by the big insurance companies, when so many had been laid off because of a recession caused by
greedy, deceitful bankers, when the poor stayed poor while the rich got richer through tax cuts
enormously favoring them, the “leave things alone” attitude seems morally bankrupt and very
selfish. You often see the Gadsden flag at Tea Party rallies; it‟s the yellow one with the coiled snake
in the center. The inscription under the snake does not read, “Don‟t tread on us;” it goes, “Don‟t
tread on me.” It‟s an apt symbol for this kind of libertarianism.
If you read postings and comments that argue the Tea Party‟s case on various websites, you
will sometimes encounter sentiments like those expressed in the “Three Groups” quote above. Poor
people are poor, they say, simply because they are lazy. We should not extend unemployment
benefits to the people laid off now because it will just encourage them to watch TV instead of
looking for work. The poor people who accepted the banks‟ invitation to buy nice houses for their
families at low interest rates were “reaching beyond their class” and deserved to lose them. The rich
are rich simply because they worked harder than everybody else, and deserve their wealth. Obama
is taking money from those who work hard to buy votes from people demanding hand-outs.
These attitudes come right out of the catechism of the other authoritarian personality that
research has discovered, the social dominators. Their defining characteristic is opposition to
equality. They believe instead in dominance, both personal (if they can pull it off) and in their group
dominating other groups. They endorse using intimidation, threats, and power to enrich themselves
at the expense of others. This is the natural order of things, they believe. “It is a mistake to interfere
with the „law of the jungle,‟ they argue. Some people were meant to dominate others.” “It‟s a dog
eat dog world in which the superior people get to the top.”
Such people may want government to stick to running fire departments so they can rise/stay
above others unimpeded. Research shows that social dominators are power-hungry, mean, amoral,
and even more prejudiced than the authoritarian followers described earlier. They want unfairness
throughout society. Barack Obama, and the ludicrous perception that he is going to lead African-
Americans in “taking over America” would be their worst nightmare. So the hypothesis that the Tea
Party movement has more than its fair share of social dominators may have merit.
Now, yes, there are a lot of fiscal conservatives who ARE like this, and who believe some of the right things for the wrong reasons...but how many real libertarians actually fit the bill? It's much more representative of mainstream Republicans than libertarians or even Objectivists. There will always be a few in any camp, but to apply the caricature so broadly as to attempt to define libertarianism in these terms is simply outrageous...especially the parts of the "social dominator" outlook that "endorse using intimidation, threats, and power to enrich themselves at the expense of others," which are wholly incompatible with libertarianism. What malicious, blatantly disengenuous slander! He included enough "some people" references that he could backpedal on this generalization of libertarians if someone called him on this directly in conversation, but the aim of the piece and emotionally manipulative tone is pretty transparent. This is going to get very off-topic, but I take that mischaracterization personally, so I have to rant about its injustice a bit:
The author may have a good understanding of authoritarian followers, but once he started in trying to make the shoe look like it fit on our feet too, his essay revealed itself as little more than an intellectually dishonest political hit piece against the Tea Party in particular and fiscal conservatives in general, masquerading as psychological insight from a serious academic. (Some of his charges are also quite hypocritical, considering his own worldview implicitly endorses state coercion to enforce his arbitrary utilitarian judgments; the hypocrisy is doubled by his earlier criticism of right-wing hypocrisy. He also likes calling Tea Partiers "Tea Baggers" in the same essay where he laments their own labeling...he's unreal.). I've been all over the political spectrum except for Communism and hard fascism: I was "born and raised" neoconservative and remained so (occasionally wondering about the disconnect between military spending and fiscal conservatism) until I became disillusioned with the wealth gap and the Bush administration's corporatism, militarism, and disregard for the Bill of Rights. I entertained libertarianism before rejecting it for "progressive"/social democratic views out of concern for the poor, then spent a lot of my free time working out universal healthcare and education systems on paper. Gradually, my curse of economic sense forced me to keep revising those ideas until they became so convoluted I was no longer convinced they were workable. Still, what alternative was there to the misery of American corporatism? I plodded on, remaining the only liberal on both sides of my entire family...not exactly a walk in the park, but I wasn't going to back down, because I CARE about people and justice more than fitting in. I became disillusioned with the Democrats after they won Congress in 2006 and kept punting on the war/police state issues, and by the time I heard of Ron Paul in May 2007, I was firmly in the Kucinich/Gravel camp. I initially dismissed Paul as well-intentioned and honest but wacky, but he came back to mind six months later, and I decided that as an honest man, it was worth trying to convince him he was wrong about economic issues. (...lol.) I started writing an essay about problems with the gold standard and such, backing it up with my understanding of Keynesian and otherwise mainstream economics and continually reading about them to be sure, but I forced myself to think everything through to its logical conclusion, and after days of effort and revision, I kept having to address contradictions in my arguments until I finally realized that I was the one who was mistaken. Over the next month or two, I reexamined my beliefs with the understanding that if I was wrong about one issue, I could be wrong about several, and during this time I learned thought enough about economics to totally change my worldview again.
I naturally lean toward the libertarian "I think people have a right to be left alone" viewpoint anyway, and my own life experiences gave me the disposition to eventually come around to hardcore libertarian positions, but nothing ever changed regarding my desire to see people's living standards improve. I'm STILL a "bleeding heart" libertarian, and I believe the current wealth gap is unnatural and harmful, but I do not see economic equality as a supergoal. Instead, I see widespread prosperity as a much higher goal and the free market as the only rational means. I would rather let some people be so rich they owned moon bases than cripple economic production in the name of enforcing equality, so no, I'm not particularly obsessed with equality...but that doesn't mean opposing it defines me, or that I wouldn't be thrilled for free market policies to result in increased production, a middle class that isn't gutted by inflation and capital misappropriation, and the closing of the wealth gap. (Really though, the equality I care most about is equality of rights, and only libertarian/Lockean rights are truly reciprocal and consistently respect each individual's dignity, self-ownership, and free will.)
What's the point of all this obnoxious and off-topic talk about myself? When it comes down to it, I take it quite personally that Bob Altemeyer has the gall to make a carelessly defamatory accusation that libertarian ideology is driven by a callous fundamental resentment of human equality and a "me, me, me" attitude. I expect those kind of accusations from leftist trolls on the Internet who transparently make no genuine attempt to understand us, but when this guy claims to know libertarian motivations and paints them as negatively as possible immediately after writing convincingly and correctly about authoritarians (despite nagging bias throughout), that kind of demagoguery is totally beyond the pale.
Ultimately, the author reminds me a bit of Noam Chomsky, even if he's not quite as outwardly hostile to anything remotely resembling the "right wing:" He's intelligent enough to make startingly accurate pinpoint criticisms of political opponents when they exist, but he's not open-minded enough to take a step back when they don't. When he's right, he's
really right, but he's still ultimately guided by a "partisan" (in the loose sense of the word) ideology in a closed feedback loop, so when he's wrong, he has to force the square peg into the round hole and build sophisticated arguments on a foundation of quickstand to bury the elephant in the room and his cognitive dissonance along with it. (That's a lot of mixed analogies...) I have no problem reading something from someone coming from another viewpoint, and I can understand someone disagreeing on economic policy, but if he's the type of hack who goes around insulting libertarian motivations instead of at least acknowledging that we DO care, then I don't think I'm going to get much out of his book that I don't already know. Even if the subject were totally new to me, it's probably not a good idea to view someone as an authority on this topic when he's already shown himself to deliver "honey, honey, poison."
Speaking of poison:
Bob Altemeyer said:
When the American Enterprise Institute recently fired David Frum for saying the GOP was contributing to its own Waterloo by listening to the most radical voices in the party, it was just the latest loss of a principled, intelligent conservative that began some time ago.
Wait...libertarians are social dominator authoritarians, but David Frum is a principled, intelligent conservative? FOR REAL?
...rant over. Anyway, sorry, but I'm afraid I can't put that guy on my "must read" list.
