The Authoritarian Moment
Page 1
Dedication
To my children, who deserve to grow up in a country that values the freedoms promised by the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by our Constitution
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1: How to Silence a Majority
Chapter 2: How the Authoritarian Left Renormalized America
Chapter 3: The Creation of a New Ruling Class
Chapter 4: How Science™ Defeated Actual Science
Chapter 5: Your Authoritarian Boss
Chapter 6: The Radicalization of Entertainment
Chapter 7: The Fake News
Chapter 8: Unfriending Americans
The Choice Before Us
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Also by Ben Shapiro
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
According to the institutional powers that be, America is under authoritarian threat.
That authoritarian threat to America, according to the Democratic Party, establishment media, social media tech bros, Hollywood glitterati, corporate bosses, and university professors, is clear—and it comes directly from the political Right.
And that authoritarian threat, according to those who control vast swaths of American life, manifested itself most prominently on January 6, 2021.
On that day, hundreds if not thousands of rioters broke away from a far larger group of pro-Trump peaceful protesters and stormed the United States Capitol, many seeking to do violent harm to members of Congress and the vice president of the United States. Their goal: to overturn the legally constituted results of the 2020 election.
The images from January 6 were indeed dramatic—and the rioters of January 6 did indeed engage in acts of criminal evil. Pictures of barbarians dressed in buffalo horns and idiots carrying Trump flags and military gear–clad fools carrying zip cuffs made the front pages globally. Sitting congresspeople and the vice president of the United States were rushed to safety, shielding themselves from the droogs beyond.
All Americans of goodwill—on all political sides—decried the January 6 riots. Vice President Pence personally oversaw the counting of the electoral votes; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) condemned the rioters as vile cretins, then moved forward to the certification of the election.
But according to the Left, the January 6 riots weren’t merely an act of universally condemned criminality. They were the culmination of right-wing authoritarianism. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote, “We entrusted a sociopathic instinctive authoritarian with the most powerful office in the world. What did we think would happen?”1 Paul Krugman of The New York Times suggested, “one of our major political parties has become willing to tolerate and, indeed, feed right-wing political paranoia. . . . The GOP has reached the culmination of its long journey away from democracy, and it’s hard to see how it can ever be redeemed.”2 Greg Sargent of The Washington Post explained, “Trump’s GOP has an ugly authoritarian core.”3 Lisa McGirr wrote in The New York Times, “Republicans will certainly seek to pivot from the riot, but the nativism, extreme polarization, truth-bashing, white nationalism and anti-democratic policies that we tend to identify with President Trump are likely to remain a hallmark of the Republican playbook into the future.”4
“If you voted for Trump,” said Don Lemon of CNN, “you voted for the person who the Klan supported. You voted for the person who Nazis support. You voted for the person the alt-right supports. That’s the crowd that you are in. You voted for the person who incited a crowd to go into the Capitol and potentially take the lives of lawmakers.”5
Score settling would be necessary. Charles Blow of The New York Times asked, “What do we do now as a society and as a body politic? Do we simply turn the page and hope for a better day, let bygones be bygones? Or do we seek some form of justice, to hold people accountable for taking this country to the brink?”6 Joy Reid of MSNBC called for “de-Baathification,” à la the post–Iraq War purge of Saddam Hussein’s military.7
Indeed, the American Left argued, the greatest threat to America’s future came from right-wing authoritarianism—which, naturally, the Left conflated with white supremacy and conservative philosophy. To fail in the quest of ridding America of this threat would spell the end of the republic.
Authoritarianism had to be stopped.
But what if the most dangerous authoritarian threat to America wasn’t the several hundred evil conspiracists, fools, and criminals who breached the Capitol?
What if the most dangerous authoritarian threat to the country wasn’t a properly despised group of agitators making asses of themselves by charging into the Hall of Democracy, variously dressed in military gear, animal skins, and buffalo horns?
What if the primary threat to American liberty lies elsewhere?
What if, in fact, the most pressing authoritarian threat to the country lies precisely with the institutional powers that be: in the well-respected centers of journalism, in the gleaming towers of academia, in the glossy offices of the Hollywood glitterati, in the cubicles of Silicon Valley and the boardrooms of our corporate behemoths? What if the danger of authoritarianism, in reality, lies with those who are most powerful—with a ruling class that despises the values of half the country, and with the institutions they wield? What if the creeping authoritarianism of those who wield power has been slowly growing, unchecked, for years?
What if authoritarianism has many strains—and the most virulent strain isn’t the paranoia and fear that sometimes manifests on the Right, but the self-assured unearned moral virtue of the Left?
THE AUTHORITARIAN INSTINCT
Something there is in man that loves a dictator.
In the book of Samuel, the people of Israel, threatened from without by warring tribes and within by dissention, seek to end the age of judges: they want a king. They have been warned repeatedly about the disastrous consequences of such a choice. God tells Samuel that the people have “rejected Me”; Samuel excoriates the people, telling them that a king “will take your sons” and “take your daughters” and “take your fields and your vineyards” and “take the tenth of your flocks”—that, in the end, “you shall be his servants, and you shall cry out in that day because of the king you chose, and the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
And the people answer: “No, there shall be a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.”8
Human nature does not change.
This is the unfortunate truth of human history: because man is a threat to man, human beings seek safety and satisfaction in authority; because man is a threat to man, human beings seek the possibility of a remolding of man, a remolding to be achieved through the exercise of power. Human beings, all too often, trust not in the moral authority of a God above, looking down benevolently on humanity, providing ethical guidelines for building fulfilling lives and rich communities. Instead, they look to the earthly authority of a king, a leader, an institution. It took just a few weeks from the splitting of the Red Sea for the Jews to embrace the Golden Calf.
Human beings are ripe for authoritarianism.
For most of human history, authoritarianism manifested in centralized governmental systems: monarchies, oligarchies, aristocracies. The widespread democracy of the post–World War II period is extraordinary, and extraordinarily fragile: human beings may be granted freedom, but freedom has a short shelf life.
Democracy is threatened chiefly by ochlocracy: the rule of the mob. Mob rule transfo
rms freedom into authoritarianism in two ways: through reactionary brutality, in which citizens seek protection from the winds of change, without and within—a form of brutality largely associated with the political Right; and utopian brutality, in which citizens seek to escape present challenges through the transformation of mankind itself—a form of brutality largely associated with the political Left. Often, the two forms of brutality feed on each other, creating a downward spiral into tyranny. This is precisely what happened in Weimar Germany, where the utopian brutality of German communists came into conflict with the reactionary brutality of German Nazis. The winning side implemented the most vicious tyranny in the history of mankind; the losing side was an offshoot of one of the most vicious tyrannies in the history of mankind. Neither side sought the preservation of a democratic, rights-based system.
The Founding Fathers of the United States saw in mob rule the greatest danger to their nascent system—and they put in place governmental checks and balances in order to protect individual rights from the frenzied whims of the riotous mass. The Constitution was designed to check ambition against ambition, passion against passion. James Madison famously abhorred “faction”—by which he meant “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” He posited two possible ways of preventing faction: one, “by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” Both ways would end in authoritarianism.9 The solution, he suggested, lay in checks and balances, in creating such a diffusion of interests that combination would become nearly impossible.
For a while, it worked.
It worked for two reasons.
First, the checks and balances built by the founders were wondrous in their durability. The hopes of would-be authoritarians were routinely stymied by the balances of federalism, of separation of powers. Those checks and balances remain durable today: the constitutional system’s series of speed bumps certainly blunt momentum. Despite the best attempts of members of both parties to completely override the constitutional order, excesses are often mitigated, at least in small part.
Second, and more important, the American people broadly rejected the impulses of the mob—they rejected both the utopianism of left-wing authoritarianism and the reactionary nature of right-wing authoritarianism. Core American freedoms—freedoms of speech and of the press, freedoms of religion and association—were widely perceived to be beyond debate. If oppression deeply marred American history—and, of course, it did—it did so against a backdrop of American liberty, more and more broadly applied to more and more Americans. The Founding Fathers were united in their support for a culture of freedom—particularly freedom of thought and speech.10
THE AUTHORITARIAN MINDSET
But beneath the surface, the authoritarian mindset always looms.
In 1950, Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno, along with University of California, Berkeley, researchers Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, authored a book titled The Authoritarian Personality. The book, an attempt to explore the origins of anti-Semitism, posited that people could be classified via the use of a so-called F-scale—F meaning “pre-fascist personality.” Adorno et al. posited that such personalities were churned out by the American system. The authors suggested, “The modification of the potentially fascist structure cannot be achieved by psychological means alone. The task is comparable to that of eliminating neurosis, or delinquency, or nationalism from the world. These are the products of the total organization of society and are to be changed only as that society is changed.”11
Because Adorno was a leftist and a Freudian, the analysis was deeply flawed; the very possibility of a left-wing authoritarianism was ignored by Adorno. Still, right-wing authoritarianism is quite real. Following in Adorno’s footsteps, Harvard social scientist Robert Altemeyer utilized a “Right Wing Authoritarianism” (RWA) scale, attempting to detect three character traits:
“Authoritarian submission,” or willingness to submit to established and legitimate authorities;
“Authoritarian aggression,” or aggressiveness approved by the authorities against a particular “outgroup”;
“Conventionalism,” defined by adherence to approved social conventions.12 Altemeyer found that right-wing authoritarianism was unnervingly common.
Surprisingly, Altemeyer found that left-wingers were not at all susceptible to authoritarianism. Altemeyer concluded that left-wing authoritarianism was “like the Loch Ness Monster: an occasional shadow, but no monster.”13 Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that the “Left Wing Authoritarianism,” or LWA, scale-loaded the questions.14 In fact, when University of Montana social psychologist Lucian Conway simply rewrote Altemeyer’s exact questions, replacing only the right-wing premises with left-wing premises, he found that “the highest score for authoritarianism was for liberals on LWA.” Conway explained, “Our data suggest that average Americans on the political left are just as likely to be dogmatic authoritarians as those on the political right. And those left-wing authoritarians can be just as prejudiced, dogmatic, and extremist as right-wing authoritarians.”15
The content of the dogma is merely different: as sociologist Thomas Costello of Emory University et al. writes, left-wing authoritarianism is characterized by three traits that look quite similar to those of right-wing authoritarianism:
“Revolutionary aggression,” designed to “forcefully overthrow the established hierarchy and punish those in power”;
“Top-down censorship,” directed at wielding “group authority . . . as a means of regulating characteristically right-wing beliefs and behaviors”;
“Anti-conventionalism,” reflecting a “moral absolutism concerning progressive values and concomitant dismissal of conservatives as inherently immoral, an intolerant desire for coercively imposing left-wing beliefs and values on others, and a need for social and ideological homogeneity in one’s environment.”16
In reality, there are authoritarians on all sides. Even Adorno came to take this view: during the student protests of the 1960s, Adorno, who taught at the Free University of Berlin, was confronted by student radicals. He wrote a plaintive letter to fellow Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse complaining about the left-wing authoritarianism he saw in the student protesters who occupied his room and refused to leave: “We had to call the police, who then arrested all those they found in the room . . . they treated the students far more leniently than the students treated me.” Adorno wrote that the students had “display[ed] something of that thoughtless violence that once belonged to fascism.” Marcuse, a strident left-wing authoritarian himself—he infamously proposed that “repressive tolerance” required that dissenting right-wing views be censored17—then chided Adorno, stating that “our cause . . . is better taken up by the rebellious students than by the police,” and argued that violence by the Left was merely “fresh air.”18
Authoritarians rarely recognize their own authoritarianism. To them, authoritarianism looks like simple virtue.
THE AUTHORITARIAN QUESTION
So, if there are authoritarians on the Right and on the Left—and if the two feed on one another, driving America ever deeper into a moral morass—where does the true risk lie?
To answer that question requires us to evaluate two more questions. First, which form of authoritarianism is more common in the halls of power?
Second, which form of authoritarianism is more likely to be checked?
Let’s revisit January 6 and its aftermath with these questions in mind.
There is little doubt that the rioters of January 6 were right-wing authoritarians. They invaded the Capitol building in order to stop the workings of democracy, overthrow the constitutional process, and harm those seeking
to do their legal duty. They participated in authoritarian submission—they believed they were doing the work of President Donald Trump against a corrupt and effete establishment. They participated in authoritarian aggression—they believed they were empowered to do harm in order to defend Trump and take on the legislative branch. And they were engaged in conventionalism—they felt they were defending established values (the flag, the vote, democracy itself) against a revolution from within.
On January 6, these right-wing authoritarians invaded the Capitol.
And, contrary to popular opinion, the system held.
As it turns out, authoritarianism on the right was checked, in large measure, by members of the right. It was Vice President Mike Pence who sent a letter to President Trump explaining that he would do his duty “to see to it that we open the certificates of the Electors of the several states, we hear objections raised by Senators and Representatives, and we count the votes of the Electoral College for President and Vice President in a manner consistent with our Constitution, laws, and history. So Help Me God.”19 It was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who congratulated Joe Biden on his victory immediately after the Electoral College vote. It was Republicans in the Senate who abandoned their electoral challenges immediately upon the reconvening of the electoral counting, after the Capitol building was cleared out. It was Republican governors and secretaries of state who certified their state votes.
The institutions held.
Many in the media termed January 6 a “coup,” but it was never a coup in any proper sense: a coup requires institutional support. Certainly the rioters had no institutional support. In fact, Trump himself never explicitly called for the Capitol riot, stated in his speech that morning that he wanted the protests to be “peaceful,” tweeted that he wanted everyone to go home in the midst of the riot (the vast majority of his supporters at the rally already had), and eventually—far too late, of course—put out a statement in which he acknowledged his defeat and told his supporters to remain peaceful. Trump might have authoritarian tendencies, but he did not wield authoritarian power. And beyond Trump himself, not a single major institution in American society supported the Capitol riots. Few even supported the president’s efforts to challenge the election beyond the Electoral College vote.