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The Left Has an Authoritarian Problem
American Thinker ^ | 24 Jun, 2025 | M. Walter

Posted on 06/24/2025 4:01:00 AM PDT by MtnClimber

It’s not just your imagination. Lefties really are completely un-self-aware about what tyrants they are, and one professor with five thousand study participants proved it.

October 2024’s article, The Left Has an Authoritarian Problem (but Doesn’t Know It), was written by social psychologist Luke Conway who “has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and others, as well as on the BBC and NPR” and draws from three “decades of authoritarianism research.” The article appears in an online publication called “Presser” which, according to their “What is Presser?” page, launched in 2024 and is “politically nonpartisan” but has “a clear bias toward liberalism, secularism, and humanism.”

Interestingly, Professor Conway’s research focuses on the followers of authoritarian leaders, not the authoritarian leaders themselves, and he argues, quite convincingly, that, in short, the people get what they want good and hard: were there not a crowd of people with an authoritarian ethos within themselves, an authoritarian leader would be all but powerless over them. One must precede the other. A leader of this sort must have the mob.

Indeed, leaders are irrelevant if no one will obey them. [snip] It doesn’t matter if Congresswoman Maxine Waters tells protestors to ‘get more confrontational' if they don’t like a trial verdict; it only matters if everyone thinks that kind of authoritarian fear-mongering is okay.

He gives an excellent example of what the absence of the authoritarian follower ethos would look like were it not there to precede the tyrant leader:

Imagine an authoritarian Donald Trump supporter walking down the street and subsequently being commanded by Joe Biden to support climate change research. Do you see? It matters very much to an authoritarian [follower] who is giving the command and what the command is about.

(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: authoritarian; marxism; r; research; totalitarian; tyranny

1 posted on 06/24/2025 4:01:00 AM PDT by MtnClimber
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To: MtnClimber

I am not surprised that they don’t see the authoritarianism in themselves. Everything they seem to believe is false.


2 posted on 06/24/2025 4:01:16 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber

I believe it was Aristotle who observed that most men were content to be slaves.


3 posted on 06/24/2025 4:04:22 AM PDT by sphinx
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To: MtnClimber

It’s not that the left has an authoritarian problem. It’s that our dog$hit RINOs [why am I maligning dogs?] are useless spineless self-serving anti-American pathetic excuses for human garbage. I could find better representatives from the first 200 street denizens of Boston than from this useless filth that call themselves GOP public servants.


4 posted on 06/24/2025 4:06:19 AM PDT by AndyJackson
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To: MtnClimber
“Everything they seem to believe is false.”

”The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we're afraid.”
~ Richard Bach

5 posted on 06/24/2025 4:13:15 AM PDT by Sicon ("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - G. Orwell)
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To: MtnClimber
Facebook-Event-Cover777
6 posted on 06/24/2025 4:18:13 AM PDT by timestax
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To: MtnClimber
"Lefties really are completely un-self-aware about what tyrants they are

Ohhh no they're not. I don't think for a second that their comradery is "completely" unwitting or coincidental. If it is, then there wouldn't be the simultaneous concerted efforts of the media to repeat, verbatim, the bits of micro-propaganda they're trying to put over.
7 posted on 06/24/2025 4:33:51 AM PDT by equaviator (Nobody's perfect. That's why they put pencils on erasers!)
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To: AndyJackson

Well, somebody seems to keep electing the clowns. Or the local constituients are failing to keep the elections (primary as well as general) fairly honest.


8 posted on 06/24/2025 4:36:49 AM PDT by curious7
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To: MtnClimber

They project constantly. Everything they accuse the right of doing is what they themselves do or are.


9 posted on 06/24/2025 4:39:32 AM PDT by metmom (He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus)
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To: curious7

It’s not an exclusive “Or.” Actually its a both and. We would still get a lot of feckless bastards. Just maybe not quite so many. Get rid of cross-over primaries, get rid of ranked choice and go to paper ballots, in person with ID against vetted voter rolls and it might help. Of course a lot of dead and illegal voters would be denied their constitutional rights.


10 posted on 06/24/2025 4:40:13 AM PDT by AndyJackson
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To: MtnClimber

The whole raison d’etre for the Left is to enlist useful idiots in reestablishing authoritarian economic and political control.


11 posted on 06/24/2025 4:42:00 AM PDT by 9YearLurker
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To: MtnClimber

This is a good article. There are authoritarians on both the right and left, but I do think it is far more prevalent on the left in this country.


12 posted on 06/24/2025 4:51:03 AM PDT by Bruce Campbells Chin ( )
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To: MtnClimber
an authoritarian leader would be all but powerless over them

(a pet peeve of mine - use FEWER words)

13 posted on 06/24/2025 7:10:08 AM PDT by spankalib
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To: Bruce Campbells Chin

A major litmus test is censorship.

Almost no folks on the right side of the spectrum want to censor those who disagree with us.

The majority of leftists favor censorship.


14 posted on 06/24/2025 7:14:45 AM PDT by cgbg (It was not us. It was them--all along.)
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To: MtnClimber

Aaaan, water is wet. The left is founded on the beliefs of the commie trash that murdered >100M people. That started way back with Roosevelt2.0.


15 posted on 06/24/2025 10:08:12 AM PDT by bobbo666
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To: MtnClimber
And the first thing to get straight is that, to a psychologist, “authoritarian” doesn’t just mean “obeying authority” or “ordering someone to do something.” Parents who punish their kids for being mean to their siblings aren’t authoritarian leaders. People who obey the speed limits aren’t authoritarian followers. Authoritarianism means something specifically nastier. Authoritarians don’t merely enforce reasonable rules or obey those rules—they want a strong leader to crush and silence their opponents. They want that leader to hurt people for the benefit of their group.

Summary of every leftist I know

16 posted on 06/24/2025 10:15:03 AM PDT by Fzob (“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential)
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To: MtnClimber

Children rarely do. It is why adults just teach them to be fair.


17 posted on 06/24/2025 10:17:23 AM PDT by CodeToad
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To: cgbg
A major litmus test is censorship. Almost no folks on the right side of the spectrum want to censor those who disagree with us. The majority of leftists favor censorship.

I generally agree, although that sentiment unfortunately is becoming more common on the right now than in the past. Just ran into a Freeper a couple of weeks ago who said this:

"I’d like to see “aiding and abetting” viewed broadly enough so that anyone who speaks out and disagrees with the deportation policy can be found guilty and punished. Politicians, Media, people marching in the street — you oppose mass deportation? That’s 30 days in jail for you and a big fine.

That's not rioting - it's enough if you just "speak out and disagree".

Rather depressing to read that on here.

18 posted on 06/24/2025 5:57:17 PM PDT by Bruce Campbells Chin ( )
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To: Bruce Campbells Chin

Agreed.

It is kinda hard to have an “information age” with censorship by anybody.


19 posted on 06/24/2025 7:31:22 PM PDT by cgbg (It was not us. It was them--all along.)
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To: MtnClimber; Fred Nerks

“Lefties really are completely un-self-aware about what tyrants they are.................”>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

What a load of bull crap.

They are unaware not for reasons of innocent psychosis.

They are unaware simply because they associate with only their own kind. Birds of a feather flock together.Their tyranny is a standard of community mores and values. Like a herd of penguins they uniformly make the same noise, walk the same walk,exercise only the latest memes and tropes via the web, and seek a lack of any individuality that would make them stand out, comfortably smug and ignorant.

These lefties were welded together via the socialization scheme of the Obama movement, essentially a movement of emotion over logic, anger over peace, false moral superiority, and a false redefinition of history.

Below is a link to an article article reveals why the lefties are “unaware” of their own tyranny. To a man ( or woman) they think they have a superior morality to those who do not share their politics or social values. This replaces logic, or any desire to accept a variety of views. Even our universities now indoctrinate rather than educate, unceremoniously eject conservative speakers, for example, unaware that they are violating universal inquiry as tyrants.They are just so full of themselves, egos out of control. They are the cannon fodder of a new age of fascism.

This thread article seeks to use psycholgy to allow them to dodge their responsibility for their destruction of our civil society , now supplanted by violence in rhetoric and action.(F**K THEM!)

Good read :

“Barrack Obama The Quintessential Liberal Fascist” by Kyle- Anne Schiver

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2009/05/barack_obama_the_quintessentia_1.html

As the lefties now led us towards civil war in sanctuary cities and states, they use violence to achieve their solidarity, and exercise the forces of nullification of federal law.

If we have to, we will cut them all down at the ankles.


20 posted on 06/26/2025 7:30:39 PM PDT by Candor7 (Ask not for whom the Trump Trolls,He trolls for thee!<img src="" width=500</img><a href="">tag</a>) )
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