agnostics

"I never cared a bit for philology; my chief aim has been throughout to illustrate the social condition of the English people in the past."

"There is a twofold deception here: one side supports the Islamic veil or polygamy in the name of the struggle against racism and neocolonialism. The other side pretends to be attacking globalization in order to impose its version of religious faith."

"Every war, every crime against humanity among the damned of the Earth is supposed to be somewhat our fault and ought to lead us to confess our guilt, to pay endlessly for being a member of the bloc of wealthy nations."

"“We are not afraid of death,” the suicide bombers say to show their superiority to ordinary people. But they are afraid of life, constantly trampling on it, slandering it, destroying it, and training children still in their cradles for martyrdom. Observers have noted that the photos of terrorists taken a few hours before they made their attacks show people who are serene and at peace. They have eliminated doubt: they know. It is the paradox of open societies that they seem to be disordered, unjust, threatened by crime, loneliness, and drugs because they display their indignity before the whole world, never ceasing to admit their defects, whereas other, more oppressive societies seem harmonious because the press and the opposition are muzzled. “Where there are no visible conflicts, there is no freedom,” Montesquieu said."

"Naturally, we will continue to speak the double language of fidelity and rupture, to oscillate between being a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. That is our mental hygiene: we are forced to be both the knife and the wound, the blade that cuts and the hand that heals. The first duty of a democracy is not to ruminate on old evils, it is to relentlessly denounce its present crimes and failures. This requires reciprocity, with everyone applying the same rule. We must have done with the blackmail of culpability, cease to sacrifice ourselves to our persecutors. A policy of friendship cannot be founded on the false principle: we take the opprobrium, you take the forgiveness. Once we have recognized any faults we have, then the prosecution must turn against the accusers and subject them to constant criticism as well. Let us cease to confuse the necessary evaluation of ourselves with moralizing masochism. There comes a time when remorse becomes a second offence that adds to the first without cancelling it. Let us inject in others a poison that has long gnawed away at us: shame. A little guilty conscience in Tehran, Riyadh, Karachi, Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Caracas, Algiers, Damascus, Yangon, Harare, and Khartoum, to mention them alone, would do these governments, and especially their people, a lot of good. The fines gift Europe could give the world would be to offer it the spirit of critical examination that it has conceived and that has saved it from so many perils. It is a poisoned gift, but one that is indispensable for the survival of humanity."

"As good heirs of the Bible, we think that a great misfortune necessarily follows a great infraction. In this respect the intellectual caste, in our world, is the penitential class par excellence, continuing the role of the clergy under the Old Regime. We have to call its members what they are: officials of original sin."

"There is no solution for Europe other than deepening the democratic values it invented. It does not need a geographical extension, absurdly drawn out to the ends of the Earth; what it needs is an intensification of its soul, a condensation of its strengths. It is one of the rare places on this planet where something absolutely unprecedented is happening, without its people even knowing it, so much do they take miracles for granted. Beyond imprecation and apology, we have to express our delighted amazement that we live on this continent and not another. Europe, the planet's moral compass, has sobered up after the intoxication of conquest and has acquired a sense of the fragility of human affairs. It has to rediscover its civilizing capabilities, not recover its taste for blood and carnage, chiefly for spiritual advances. But the spirit of penitence must not smother the spirit of resistance. Europe must cherish freedom as its most precious possession and teach it to schoolchildren. It must also celebrate the beauty of discord and divest itself of its sick allergy to confrontation, not be afraid to point out the enemy, and combine firmness with regard to governments and generosity with regard to peoples. In short, it must simply reconnect with the subversive richness of its ideas and the vitality of its founding principles."

"Taking over from Arabs and Africans, it instituted the transatlantic slave trade, but it also engendered abolitionism and put an end to slavery before other nations did."

"Europe got over the loss of its colonies much more quickly than the colonies got over their loss of Europe."

"[I]t is not hard to predict which one will crush the other once its objectives have been achieved. The Leftist intransigence that refuses any compromise with bourgeois society and cannot castigate too severely “little white men” actively collaborates with the most reactionary elements in the Muslim religion. But if the far Left courts this totalitarian theocracy so assiduously, it is perhaps less a matter of opportunism than of a real affinity. The far Left has never gotten over communism and once again demonstrates that its true passion is not freedom, but slavery in the name of justice."

"The average European, whether male or female, is extremely sensitive, always ready to shoulder the blame for the poverty of Africa or Asia, to sorrow over the world’s problems, to assume responsibility for them, always ready to ask what Europeans can do for the South rather than asking what the South could do for itself."

"The critical spirit rises up against itself and consumes its form. But instead of coming out of this process greater and purified, it devours itself in a kind of self-cannibalism and takes a morose pleasure in annihilating itself. Hyper-criticism eventuates in self-hatred, leaving behind only ruins. A new dogma of demolition is born out of the rejection of dogmas. Thus we euro-americans are supposed to have only one obligation: endlessly atoning for what we have inflicted on other parts of humanity. How can we fail to see that this leads us to live off self-denunciation while taking a strange pride in being the worst? Self-denigration is all too clearly a form of indirect self-glorification. ...This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history."

"We are not going to confine women to the home, cover their heads, lengthen their skirts, or beat up gay people, prohibit alcohol, censure film, theater, and literature, and codify tolerance in order to respect the overly sensitive whims of a few sanctimonious persons."

"I recall a phrase of that incorrigible cynic Labouchere, alluding to Mr. Gladstone's frequent appeals to a higher power, that he did not object to the old man always having a card up his sleeve, but he did object to his insinuating that the Almighty had placed it there."

"Labouchere was the incurable cynic who mocked, at everybody, including himself."

"Democrats are told that they are dreamers, and why? Because they assert that, if power be placed in the hands of the many, the many will exercise it for their own benefit Is it not a still wilder dream to suppose that the many will in future possess power, and use it not to secure what they consider to be their interests, but to serve those of others? Is it imagined that artisans in our great manufacturing towns are so satisfied with their present position that they will hurry to the polls to register their votes in favor of a system which divides us socially, politically, and economically, to classes, and places them at the bottom with hardly a possibility of using? Is the lot (of the agricultural labourer) so happy a one that he will humbly and cheerfully affix his cross to the name of the man who tells him that it can never be changed for the better? We know that artisans and agricultural labourers will approach the consideration of political and social problems with fresh and vigorous minds For the moment, we demand the equahsation of the franchise Our next demands will be electoral districts, cheap elections, payment of members, and abolition of hereditary legislators When our demands are complied with, we shall be thankful, but we shall not rest On the contrary, having forged an instrument for democratic legislation, we shall use it."

"Dying was by far the most astute and successful thing King John did in his entire reign."

"The world has never been fair, and cannot be made fair, and claims that it can are foolish or dishonest. It can be made fairer and attempts to make it less fair can be resisted. Optimistic realists seek improvement, not perfection."

"The fine constitutional principles we have inherited from Magna Carta and parliament started off as the mere rhetorical perfume the barons doused themselves in to cover the stench of their own treachery. ... Fondness may be a more appropriate thing to feel about them than pride."

"Their certainty that they were right is worth remembering because it means there's probably stuff we're certain is right that future ages will correctly judge to be monstrous. The fact that everybody is convinced of something is no guarantee that it isn't evil horseshit."

"Once a line of succession becomes open to different interpretations, it has ceased to function."

"Trusting the state doesn't make it more trustworthy."

"I doubt religion is responsible for as much death as is claimed. Some people love to fight and steal and dominate – that's the key. There are arseholes among us and, given half a chance, they're going to start some sort of trouble out of ruthless self-interest or bloodlust or both. The prevailing ethos of any surrounding society is almost always that you're not supposed to kill people without a good reason, or at least some sort of reason. But the arseholes are clever, so they come up with reasons. To deeply religious societies, religious differences sound like a very convincing reason to kill people. But that doesn't mean the killing wouldn't have been happening anyway."

"Fundamentalist parents could talk to their children about being Christians before talking about being Baptists. They could talk about being God’s children before talking about being Christians. They could talk about all being brothers and sisters before that. They could."

"Our studies have focused upon the religious decisions made by college freshmen both because they are a convenient group for psychology professors to examine and because they have just emerged from an often turbulent time when they scrutinized the family religion. But will the decisions reached by eighteen-year-olds hold for the rest of their lives? If they have decided to stay in the fold, will they still be found there decades later? If they have decided to chuck the family religion, will they come back to it when they have children of their own? Speaking as middle-aged adults who once thought that "Fifty is really old," but who now consider fifty "much younger than sixty," we can testify that one's views can change as the growth rings accumulate. So maybe youthful decisions to keep or abandon the family religion will be reversed later."

"High RWAs tend to feel more endangered in a potentially threatening situation than most people do, and often respond aggressively. In 1987 my colleague Gerry Sande and I had five-man teams of male introductory psychology students role-play NATO in an “international simulation” involving (they thought) another team of students playing as the Warsaw Pact. Some of the NATO teams were composed entirely of low RWA students, and other NATO teams were stocked entirely with highs. (We experimenters secretly played the Warsaw Pact.) The simulation began with a couple of ambiguous moves by the Warsaw Pact, such as holding military exercises earlier than anticipated, and withdrawing divisions to rear areas (possibly for rest, or --as Dr. Strangelove might argue--possibly for redeployment for an attack). The NATO teams could respond with nonthreatening or threatening moves of varying magnitudes. But if they made threats, the Warsaw pact responded with twice as much threat in return, and the NATO team would reap what it had sown as an escalation of aggressive moves would likely result. The low RWA teams did not interpret the ambiguous moves at the beginning of the game as serious threats and thus seldom made threatening moves. The high RWAs on the other hand usually reacted to the opening Warsaw Pact moves aggressively, and sowed a whirlwind. Over the course of the simulation, the high RWA teams made ten times as much threat as the low teams did, and usually brought the world to the brink of nuclear war."

"I similarly think you’ll likely be wasting your time trying to convince authoritarian followers that they are being systematically misinformed and played for dopes by their leaders. It’s too important to them to believe otherwise, and just your raising the question will likely put you into their huge out-group and make them suspicious of you."

"It probably takes considerable courage to turn your back on your background, your family, and your friends and join another faith. In a way, the Amazing Apostates show the same courage. But "deep converts," like AAs, and BBs, are rare. Most of the believers in Table 1, most of the way through their lives, still accepted the religion in whcih they group up. Which leads to our concluding point. If there is one ultimate, simple, definite, fundamental lesson to be drawn from the studies we have considered in this book, it is this: Do not underestimate the power of socialization when it comes to religion. Even in the cases where it seems socialization has been overthrown, it has just worked in "mysterious ways.""

"So (to foreshadow later chapters a little) suppose you are a completely unethical, dishonest, power-hungry, dirt-bag, scum-bucket politician who will say whatever he has to say to get elected. (I apologize for putting you in this role, but it will only last for one more sentence.) Whom are you going to try to lead, high RWAs or low RWAs? Isn’t it obvious? The easy-sell high RWAs will open up their arms and wallets to you if you just sing their song, however poor your credibility. Those crabby low RWAs, on the other hand, will eye you warily when your credibility is suspect because you sing their song. So the scum-bucket politicians will usually head for the right-wing authoritarians, because the RWAs hunger for social endorsement of their beliefs so much they’re apt to trust anyone who tells them they’re right. Heck, Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany running on a law-and-order platform just a few years after he tried to overthrow the government through an armed insurrection."

"The need for social reinforcement runs so deeply in authoritarians, they will believe someone who says what they want to hear even if you tell them they should not. I have several times asked students or parents to judge the sincerity of a university student who wrote arguments either condemning, or supporting, homosexuals. But some subjects were told the student had been assigned to condemn (or support) homosexuals as part of a philosophy test to see how well the student could make up arguments for anything, on the spot. Other subjects were told the student could choose to write on either side of the issue, and had chosen to make the case she did. Obviously, you can’t tell anything about the real opinions of someone who was assigned the point of view of her essay. But high RWAs believed that the antihomosexual essay that a student was forced to write reflected that student’s personal views almost as much as when a student had chosen this point of view. In other words, as in the previous experiments, the authoritarians ignored the circumstances and believed the student really meant what she had been assigned to say--when they liked what she said."

"Eleanor now considers herself an agnostic, having stopped thinking of herself as a Lutheran in a religious sense whens he was about seventeen. However, "I'm still a member of the Lutheran church. I still go on Christmas Eve and all that," and "if I get married, I'm going to get married in a Lutheran church." She is now at peace with her agnosticism and no longer feels any guilt or fear because of her beliefs. "Just because I don't believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, I'm not going to be damned to some eternal hell, if there is such a thing. It just does not make any sense to me." If she could find some way to reconcile religious teachings with her current belief, Eleanor could conceivably go back to being an active Lutheran. But it isn't likely because "I just don't believe that, really, any religion has the absolute answer." In response to the "Back to the Future" scenario, Eleanor said that she would tell her younger self about the intolerance, contradictions, closed-mindedness, and so on that she saw in religion. Her fourteen-year-old self would have been surprised at all this, and "a bit stubborn," but she "would have gone home and thought about it and started looking at things on her own." Why is Eleanor different from most people her age, who question but then accept religious teachings? "I have always considered myself to be really analytical about things. I can't knowingly have two beliefs that contradict each other." Also, it would be hypocritical to pretend to believe in something that she cannot accept, something she believes many "religious" people do."

"Eleanor's questions caused some anxiety, since "you are taught that you have to go this way or you'll go to hell." Near the end of her confirmation classes she gave a speech "intended to really question a lot of the beliefs." However, "it was so subtle that I guess nobody really caught on to it and they were all saying it was such a great speech." This made Eleanor feel guilty, since she appeared to be supporting religion when she had meant to question it. She did have some discussions with her minister about her questions, but found the answers to be unsatisfying. Sessions with a devoted Christian friend were much more influential. The two friends would often debate Christian teachings, with Eleanor taking the questioning position, and her friend defending religious beliefs. Similar discussions occurred in a high school English class. Eleanor's purpose in these debates was to make religion work for her. "I was trying at that point to tie everything to a religious framework that would allow me to believe in Christianity." But she couldn't find the answers she was looking for, and became less religious. She also hunted for answers in the Bible, which she read every evening before she went to bed. Eleanor misses those readings even today, "because it gives you a focus and if you believe in it, you have all the answers you're looking for right there in the Bible." But they were answers she could not accept."

"Could it be that the more parents and clergy stress religion to a child, the more likely the child will feel guilt or fear when questions arise later? If so, the emphasis becomes self-defeating at this critical time, because parents and clergy want children to bring these questions to them, not hide the seeds of doubt. But the more times a child has heard that her religion has a hold on the absolute truth, the harder it may be for her to ask for help in reconciling cracks that appear in the absolute."

"I am now writing the last page in my last book about authoritarianism. So, for the last time, I do not think a fascist dictatorship lies just over our horizon. But I do not think we are well protected against one. And I think our recent history shows the threat is growing... We cannot secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves, and our posterity, if we sit with our oars out of the water. If we drift mindlessly, circumstances can sweep us to disaster. Our societies presently produce millions of highly authoritarian personalities as a matter of course, enough to stage the Nuremberg Rallies over and over and over again. Turning a blind eye to this could someday point guns at all our heads, and the fingers on the triggers will belong to right-wing authoritarians. We ignore this at our peril."

"Sometimes, when I tell people that I study authoritarian personalities, they say things like, "Oh, you mean neo-Nazis and the Klan." When these people are psychologists at conventions or the president of my university, I say "Right," because I know they will probably instantly forget whatever I reply. But I am more forthcoming with others. Most people seem surprised when I say, "No, I study normal folks, not Nazis." Few people, unless they are familiar with the history of fascism, understand that people as ordinary as you and I, and our friends and neighbors, might bring down democracy if the going got tough enough. But we are the people who, driven by fear and cuddling in our own self-righteousness, could create the wave that would lift the monsters among us to power. And once the monsters acquire the powers of the state, their evil explodes. Can one credibly talk about fascism in the North American context as we approach the year 2000? Is it even remotely possible that the horrors of Nazi Germany could someday occur in Canada or the United States? When I talk about prefascist personalities, do I seriously propose that many North Americans could act like Hitler, Himmler, Hoess, and so on? [...] although the Nazis did monsterous things, it is a mistake to thing that only ardent fascists and psychopathic killers became Nazis. Adolf Eichmann struck some as a bland person, not particularly anti-Semitic, who basically wanted to advance his career and so worked hard to impress his superiors. His evil was "banal." I can also imagine that many of those who made the arrests and transported the victims to the death camps would have been described as "good, decent people" by their families and neighbors. So would many of those who ran the slave labor camps in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners perished and maybe even the SS soldiers who massacred whole villages. You can be an ordinary Joe, or Lieutenant Calley, and still do terrible things. One of the first things Americans learned about the militias, in an Associated Press story dated April 27, 1995, is that they were "ordinary people who feel pushed.""

"But the original question as, "Why is there still religion?" and the data above show that religion satisfies some important human needs about knowing who we are; why we are here; what will happen to us after we die; how to feel safety, love, and fellowship, and so on. These things logic and science do not do, at least not nearly as well. We would, as scientists, actually find some joy, happiness, and comfort in science's "poor showing." Science is not supposed to be emotional but objective, dispassionate, and even-handed. (We hope that the reader who has gotten to the end of this book is not surprised to hear us say this.) If some scientific theories or discoveries are "beautiful" (such as relativity); or "thrilling" (such as the genetic code), that is pure gravy. The endeavor is based in the cerebral cortex, not the adrenal glands. But as "Star Trek"'s Dr. McCoy kept telling Mr. Spock, human emotions undeniably enrich our lives and often govern us. They make us irrational at times, they may cause much of our worst as well as our best behavior. But to ignore them and their role in human enterprise- "That would be illogical.""

"Often one person can steel another, and another and another, until many are working together. You don’t have to form a majority to have an effect. Two or three people speaking out can sometimes get a school board, a church board, a board of aldermen to reconsider authoritarian actions. Lack of any opposition teaches bullies simply to go for more. But it takes one person, an individual, to start the opposition."

"Despite all the factors handicapping the Republicans from the start, and the painfully inept, lurching, hypocritical, unfocused campaign they ran, some 60 million Americans voted for McCain/Palin. That’s a pretty sobering realization. I think it shows Barack Obama was working against a significantly stronger headwind than John McCain was, yet he prevailed."

"These dangers can be parried. The United States has far more authoritarian followers in its midst than democracies usually do, but even so they do not comprise a majority of the nation’s population. If they did, Donald Trump would now be enjoying his second term—likely for the rest of his life. High RWAs can be defeated where it counts, at the ballot box, but it will take a lot of work because authoritarians vote more often than Moderates and Lows. Furthermore, various Republican state legislators are doing all they can to keep their opponents from being able to vote at all. Democracy will probably only survive in America if the non-authoritarians there plow through all the barriers and resolutely cast ballots in elections for the next decade or so. It will take yet more monumental energy and effort like that which carried the day in 2020. But the Americans who rise to defend their country in its hour of need will not only be saving themselves, they will be protecting the blessings of liberty for everyone’s posterity around the planet. We are at a crossroad in history, but take heart: You can do something about it. Involve others who do not appreciate the situation. Determine the outcome."

"But the core connection between himself and his followers was their great fear of the future. As Ann Coulter, his strong promoter during the campaign and reputed source of his anti-immigration rhetoric, said “He had me with ‘Mexican rapists.’” Trump’s MAGA slogan resonated with masses of “forgotten Americans” who indeed felt America wasn’t great anymore. Everything was changing. All the old standards were being trashed. The things that gave them whatever precarious advantage they had in life, being white (and for most of them) being male counted for less and less. Instead the United States was filling up with bad people who would blow up your church, steal your jobs and get your kids hooked on drugs."

"There’s a hidden danger to authoritarian leaders in all this. When they discover their followers will believe anything they say, even things that contradict something they said earlier, they get sloppy with their lies. Maybe Donald Trump always was careless with the truth. But it seems that over the past two years he has become downright reckless. His base will swallow anything, he has learned, so he just says the first thing that comes to mind. The trouble is, for him and the future of his presidency, Truth happens. Constantly. It may be seen differently by various folks, but things did happen as they happened, not something else. You can only ignore the truth so long, and then reality will inevitably catch up with you. It will destroy you if you have been massively denying it."

"The long run prospects encourage one. Trump has solid support among my generation of Americans, for example, especially men, but we are not going to last forever. Some suppose that people become more authoritarian as they age, and so one batch of old white men will just be replaced by another. But studies show that political opinions tend to be set in early adulthood and endure. Today’s youth, better educated and wonderfully less ethnocentric than their predecessors, give one great hope for the future of American democracy in the long run. But this is like climate change. We were warned plenty that we were creating a disaster in the only atmosphere we’ve got, and we kept on doing it. Now we are facing the consequences. Whether American democracy endures could well depend on what happens at the polls in 2018 and 2020. Authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers have no great love of freedom and equality. Those who do had better organize and get out the vote, or they will make Donald Trump look like the super-genius he believes he is."

"Eternal vigilance. Remember, no one said democracy would be easy."

"One consequence of the followers’ strong need for consensual validation, experiments have found, is that they will trust someone who says things they believe, even if there is a lot of evidence that the person does not really believe what he says. They’re just so glad to hear their views coming back to them, they ignore solid reasons why the person might be insincere or outright lying. Relatively UNauthoritarian people, on the other hand, are downright suspicious of someone who might have ulterior motives for reinforcing their beliefs. It is therefore much easier to “con” authoritarian followers, as many a TV evangelist, radio shock-jockey and flag-waving politician knows. It’s no accident that Donald Trump, who had only loosely organized and not particularly right-wing political beliefs, became a Republican politician when he decided to declare war on both the Democrats and Republicans. That’s where the “suckers” are most concentrated, the people you can fool all of the time. (It’s another story, but the GOP largely brought this on itself by deliberately courting these folks.)"

"Republicans fear the wrath of Trump so much because he owns the GOP base. Always ready to emphasize the obvious, I have said many times that without a crowd of ardent supporters, a wannabe dictator in a democracy is just a clown on a soap box. The crowd is now well-assembled in America. Indeed it was brought together by Republican strategists for their own ends, with only a few like Barry Goldwater anticipating the newcomers would turn the “big tent” into a tabernacle and drive out all the non-believers. Having sown the seeds of its own destruction, the GOP is now reaping the whirlwind. We understand quite well who Trump’s followers are. The October 2019 Monmouth Poll reported in Authoritarian Nightmare found they are the most prejudiced people in America. Their prejudices and many other shortcomings are rooted in authoritarianism, and studies show that authoritarian followers have many emotional and cognitive weaknesses which explain why they are longing for a strong leader who will take their side against the “others” they find threatening. They are highly fearful, ethnocentric, and have uncritically copied the ideas of the authorities in their lives. Their beliefs are highly compartmentalized, even contradictory; they use many double-standards in their judgments; they have lots of trouble distinguishing good from bad evidence; they are highly defensive and dogmatic; they have little self-insight, and a host of other imperfections. Demographically, the two pillars of Trump’s base are white Christian evangelicals and white male blue-collar workers. Both groups score highly on a measure of submission to authority named the RWA Scale."

"Demographically, the odds line up against Trump’s reelection. He draws much more support from older voters than he does from younger ones. But really old voters (and this is being written by someone in his 80s) kick the bucket a lot more than fuzzy-cheeked youths. And it turns out people do not inevitably get appreciably more conservative as they get older, but instead seem to carry forward the beliefs they formed in their younger years. Republicans have known for a long time—and that’s why they started recruiting politically inactive white evangelicals en masse—that the up-and-coming generations will be clenched-teeth liberal on balance. Generation Z could give an authoritarian leader nightmares. Add to this the fact that Trump supporters are dying faster than necessary from a disease their leader encourages them to catch, and you can see the climb is getting steeper and steeper for Republicans in 2022 and 2024. But Trump’s loyalist candidates can still win control of Congress in 2022, and he can still become president again in 2024, if enough persons who oppose him do not vote. You can’t possibly think that people who are ready to die for him won’t bother to show up at the polls, and they’ll proselytize like crazy to bring in converts the way they did in 2020. The question is, will his opponents show up too, especially given all the roadblocks Republican legislatures have thrown up to prevent them from voting? The GOP knows this is game-set-match for them personally. They are considerably outnumbered, but by no means defeated. Authoritarians commonly think they will prevail by steely force of will, and sometimes they do. You have to meet their attack with resolve and commitment, or they will win."

"Authoritarians did not disappear after George W. Bush left office and the United States avoided financial collapse. Instead they flocked to the Tea Party Movement, which the Republican Party cleverly (it thought) helped create and gathered unto itself. But the movement drove moderates from the GOP and sent radical conservatives to Congress. The “Tea Party Party” produced eight years of non-compromising stalemate in Washington as they imposed their own agenda on the Republican leadership. Now American authoritarians have united behind a presidential candidate who unabashedly says he wants to destroy the traditional Republican Party and deal a devastating blow to the Democrats as well. Is that anything to worry about?"

"Think back on your own past. What did you do when questions arose about religion? Some questions probably came up. "Is there a God?" "Is there really a heaven?" "Why do tornados sometimes destroy churches and miss saloons?" Whom did you go to with these questions? Parents? Priests? Peers? You might naturally have gone to the people who had taught you the beliefs in the first place. You might also have prayed to God for help, and read scripture or some other book of religious guidance a minister might have recommended. Maybe you talked things over with friends sharing the same religious background. You do not have to be a psychological genius to know that all of these reactions would probably have confirmed the original religious beliefs. The people who taught you your faith, or who share it with you, are not likely to answer your questions with "Hey, I never thought of that. Our religion must be wrong!" If you want to take a wider, more "two-sided" approach to the questions, you would have to search farther afield."

"If you think our countries could never elect an Adolf Hitler to power, note that David Duke would have become governor of Louisiana if it had just been up to the white voters in the state. Many people vote for extraordinarily High RWA candidates today. Many more would want one during a crisis. About a quarter of American state legislators are already poised to "stomp out the rot." And if you think a North American dictator could not find the people he needed to kill Jews, or professors, or Communists, or trade union leaders, or defiant clergy, or religious minorities, or the mentally "unsuitable," whomever he wanted to eliminate, then you might want to look at what Milgram found."

"It will seem strange that persons protesting against the government would be labeled “authoritarian followers.” But the concept of authoritarianism centers on submission to those whom one views as the legitimate, established authorities. And the whole point of the “birther” campaign against Obama is that he is an illegitimate president. As well, many Republican rank-and-file members believe the Democrats were unfairly favored by the media in 2008, and stole the election through massive voter fraud engineered by ACORN."