Fine Tuning Authoritarianism

Originally Published on OpEdNews

Trump is fine-tuning 21st century authoritarianism.

Conservatives love authoritarian voters. Authoritarians come in two varieties-- people who are dominators, who love to tell people what to do and how to think and people who love to and need to be dominated and told what to do. Authoritarians of both varieties are brutally cruel.

Robert Altemeyer, a world renowned expert on Authoritarians explains, "the hostility you find so often in authoritarian followers is based upon more than anything else they are just being very frightened; and feeling that they are the good guys, they are god's designated hitters, and so they can go and attack whom they want because it's all in a good cause." Altemeyer describes authoritarian followers as being self-righteous.

This authoritarianism plays beautifully into the hands of anti-regulation, anti-government types, like the Koch brothers.

The problem is that certain authoritarian, top-down institutions are inconvenient for corporate authoritarians, like big government and even some iterations of religions. Now, corporate authoritarians do not have natural followers, outside their employee based. So they parasitize by tapping the authoritarianism of evangelicals and white supremacists.

Trump is playing right into this fine-tuning by attacking big government-- one of the authoritarian forms anti-regulation corporatists oppose. And Trump attacks the media and law enforcement agencies, also authoritarian powers that are inconvenient to corporatists.

So Trump is engaging in a culling of authoritarian forces. By intensifying the enmity towards government, towards media, even towards the Pope, Trump is strengthening the bond between right wing conservatism and evangelicals and white supremacists. The face of this ugly concoction is a mix of billionaires and evangelical leaders, like Franklin Graham.

What will the future look like with this corporate-evangelical authoritarianism?

Government of and by the people is a relatively new idea, a result of the idea of democracy. Democracy has no place in the world of billionaires, the ultra wealthy and Evangelicals.

The problem is, the current leadership of the Democratic party also embraces wealth and corporate influence as their means for holding on to their deck chairs on the titanic.

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