Focused Read in 3 minutes
"The political center is
fighting back
(Opinion, by Max Boot)
This can be a dispiriting
time to follow U.S. politics — especially for someone of my
classical liberal (a.k.a. conservative) views.
President Trump is the
most unethical, unhinged and openly racist president in modern
history, and yet he still maintains the support of roughly 40
percent of voters and 85 percent of Republicans.
GOP leaders
know how awful he is but are too cowardly to speak out.
Congressional
candidates are actually echoing many of Trump’s most
offensive and authoritarian statements, from his calls to lock up
Hillary Clinton to his attacks on special counsel Robert S. Mueller
III.
It’s hard to know who is worse — Trump himself or his many
enablers.
If there is any silver
lining to this dark cloud hanging over our democracy, it is that
Trump’s outrageous behavior is provoking opposition from a growing
number of good-government groups.
Both the center-left
and center-right are mobilizing and
— best of all —
they are cooperating, because they realize that their policy
differences fade into insignificance at a time when our core
institutions and norms are under assault.
It’s hard to keep up
with all of the groups that are protesting Trump and championing
democracy. ...
Most of these
organizations were represented at the National Summit for
Democracy, held in Washington in February.
It was an invigorating
event, bringing together civil society activists to figure out how to
protect our institutions from the threat of Trumpism.
For someone
such as me, who feels aghast at the direction of the Trumpified
Republican Party, it was reassuring to meet so many on the left and
right who share my horror at what the president is doing to the
country we love.
The newest group to join
the fight, and the one I’ve been most closely involved in starting,
is called the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI).
Its chairman is
Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion turned democracy activist...But this is not just a conservative undertaking...the
signatories to RDI’s manifesto include liberal luminaries...There is also a transatlantic cast to the signatories,
including former prime minister José María Aznar of Spain, the
British architect Lord Norman Foster, the Israeli human rights
activist Natan Sharansky and Nobel Prize-winning writer Mario Vargas
Llosa of Peru.
As this eclectic and
impressive group of signatories would suggest, RDI’s manifesto
isn’t limited to the problem confronting the United States.
In
fact, the manifesto never mentions Trump, because the U.S. president
is just part of a worldwide phenomenon — the rise of authoritarian
populists...
As the manifesto notes,
“The economic and political stability we have taken for granted for
decades is eroding rapidly. The core principles of liberal democracy
that once defined a centrist political majority across the free world
are being pulled apart as once fringe views from the left and right
gain public acceptance.”
In the face of this
assault, RDI’s manifesto issues a call to mobilize the forces of
moderation:
“There is still a center in Western politics, and it
needs to be revitalized — intellectually, culturally, and
politically.
The center right and center left are still joined by a
broad set of common values...and an understanding that free societies
require protection from authoritarians promising easy fixes to
complex problems.”
Trying to defend these
ideas may sound like a mission impossible when extremism appears
ascendant, but Emmanuel Macron showed last year in France
that it’s still possible for a centrist to prevail against the far
left and far right.
Obviously, signing petitions and issuing
manifestos won’t by themselves transform U.S. politics.
But the
intellectual labor now going on to revitalize the center is necessary
if we are to prevent our democracy from eroding even further as is
now happening in Hungary and Poland.
You
can read more here
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(L) John Dean, courtesy of the Richard
Nixon Presidential Library (R) John
Dean, approximately 2016
"Understanding the
Contemporary Republican Party: Authoritarians Have Taken Control -- Part
One in a Three-Part Series
(By John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist and a former counsel to the president. -- Wed., Sep. 05, 2007)
Last year, I
published Conservatives Without Conscience ...The core of the book examines a half-century of empirical studies
that had never been explained for the general reader.
At this point, I feel that
this material is simply too crucial to understanding current politics
and government for me to continue to ignore it in my columns for
FindLaw. ...
Conservatives Without
Conscience ("CWC") sought to understand the modern
conservative movement, and in particular it's hard turn to the right
during the past two-and-a-half decades. ...
Who are these people? Of
course, we know their names: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Newt
Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush - to
mention a few of the obvious.
More importantly, what drives them?
And, why do their compliant followers seem to never question or
criticism them?
Here, I am thinking of people like Rush Limbaugh,
Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter - to mention a few more of the
conspicuous.
In this column, and those
that follow, I hope to explain the rather remarkably information I
have uncovered. It explained what for me what I had previously
thought inexplicable...So let me see if I can
extract a few key points that may help to understand what happened,
and why it happened.
In the first two columns
of this three-part series, I will offer some basics to provide
context, and some of the relevant data. In the last of the three, I
will drive home the points I believe are most relevant.
How Conservatives Think
(Or Fail To Do So)
Most conservatives today
do not believe that conservatism can or should be defined. They claim
that it not an ideology, but rather merely an attitude. (I don't buy
that, but that point is not relevant here.)
Conservatives once looked
to the past for what it could teach about the present and the future.
Early conservatives were traditionalists or libertarians, or a bit of
both. Today, however, there are religious conservatives, economic
conservatives, social conservatives, cultural conservatives,
neoconservatives, traditional conservatives, and a number of other
factions.
Within these factions,
there is a good amount of inconsistency and variety, but the movement
has long been held together through the power of negative thinking.
The glue of the movement is in its perceived enemies.
Conservatives
once found a common concern with respect to their excessive concern
about communism (not that liberals and progressive were not concerned
as well, but they were neither paranoid nor willing to mount witch
hunts).
When communism was no longer a threat, the dysfunctional
conservative movement rallied around its members' common opposition
to anything they perceived as liberal. (This was, in effect, any
point of view that differed from their own, whether it was liberal or
not.)
To understand conservatives thinking, it is important to examine not merely what
conservatives believe, but also why they believe it. I found the
answers to these two key questions in the remarkable body of
empirical research work, almost a half-century in the making,
undertaken by political and social psychologists who study
authoritarian personalities.
Authoritarian Republicans:
Understanding the Personality Type
While not all
conservatives are authoritarians, all highly authoritarian
personalities are political conservatives.
(Emphasis is mine.)
To make the results of my
rather lengthy inquiry very short, I found that it was the
authoritarians who took control of the conservative movement in the
1980s, and then the Republican Party in the 1990s.
Strikingly, these
conservative Republicans - though hardly known for their timidity --
have not attempted to refute my report, because that is not possible.
It is based on hard historical facts, which I set forth in
considerable detail.
Authoritarian control
continues to this day, so it is important to understand these people.
There are two types of authoritarians: leaders (the few) and
followers (the many).
Study of these personalities began following
World War II, when social psychologists asked how so many people
could compliantly follow an authoritarian leader like Adolf Hitler
and tolerate the Holocaust.
Early research was based at the
University of California, Berkeley, and it focused primarily on
followers, culminating in the publication of a The Authoritarian
Personality (1950) - a work that broadly described authoritarian
personalities. The book was quite popular for decades, but as the
Cold War ended, it had been on the shelf and ignored for a good
while.
Given the strikingly
conspicuous authoritarian nature of the contemporary conservative
movement, and in turn, of the Republican Party, those familiar with
the work of the Berkeley group thought it time to take another look
at this work.
For example, Alan Wolfe, a political science professor
at Boston College, observed that the fact that "the radical
right has transformed itself from a marginal movement to an
influential sector of the contemporary Republican Party" called
for a reexamination of this work.
That is exactly what I did,
although I did not discover Dr. Wolfe's call for it until well into
my project.
The Authoritarian
Personality relied heavily on Freudian psychology, which was not
without critics, although neither Dr. Freud's work nor that of the
Berkeley scientists has been proven incorrect.
The weakness of this
early work was the lack of empirical data backing up its conclusions.
But in the half-century since its publication, that weakness has been
removed, based on others' empirical work.
A number of researchers
have examined and reexamined the Berkeley Group's conclusions, and no
one more thoroughly than Bob Altemeyer, a Yale and
Carnegie-Mellon-trained social psychologist based at the University
of Manitoba.
Professor Altemeyer's
Findings
Altemeyer's study
addressed flaws in the methodology and findings of The
Authoritarian Personality,
and he then proceeded to set this field of
study on new footings by clarifying the study of authoritarian
followers, people he calls "right-wing authoritarians."
The
provocative titles of his books (see below) indicate the
tenor of his research and the range of his interests.
(Books: Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1981), Enemies of Freedom (1988), and The Authoritarian Specter (1996) / A few articles: "Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities" in the Journal of Social Psychology (2004) and "Why Do Religious Fundamentalists Tend to Be Prejudiced?" ...)
Working my way through
this material...I realized
that, since I do not have a degree in psychology, I should get
guidance to be certain I understood the material correctly ...
Altemeyer, who is the
preeminent researcher in the field, graciously agreed to tutor me in
his work. ...
At the outset
of Conservatives Without Conscience, I provided a quick and
highly incomplete summary of Altemeyer's findings, explaining that
his empirical testing revealed
"that authoritarians are
frequently enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, anti-equality, highly
prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian, and amoral."
To be clear, these are not assessments that Altemeyer makes himself
about these people; rather,
this is how those he has tested reveal
themselves to be, when being anonymously examined.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Altemeyer has tested
literally tens of thousands of first-year college students and their
parents, along with others, including some fifteen hundred American
state legislators, over the course of some three decades. He has
tested in the South and North of the United States.
There is no
database on authoritarians that even comes close in its scope to that
which he has created, and, more importantly, these studies are
empirical data, not partisan speculation.
... In the next two columns, I
will examine the implications of Altemeyer's findings, for they
explain a great deal about the operations of the Republican Party as
presently constituted.
You
can read more of part one here
( You can read part two here
And you can read part three here )
.
.
.
→ Direct sources for Democrats:
* ( Personal favored and most informative follows are shared here with the understanding that readers will always apply their own critical thinking to any information provided anywhere by anyone. #StrongerTogether does not share sources of information lightly but -- no one is perfect! -- so always #DistrustAndVerify I am using a star rating that is strictly based on my situational experience with the work of the media personality specifically in relation to issues of interest to me. )
The Democratic Party Website
Also
C-SPAN (a good place for speeches & hearings direct source (s))
→ Fact checking organizations courtesy of the Society of Professional Journalists
in alphabetical order...
→ Some of my favorite, most informative
follows on Twitter include:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ US Intelligence | Author | Navy Senior Chief | NBC/MSNBC
⭐⭐⭐ Federal Government Operations | Vanity Fair | Newsweek | MSNBC Contributor | Author
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Voting Rights/Voter Suppression | Author | Mother Jones
→ Some of the most credible media -- at the moment:
📰📰📰 Mother Jones
→ Some of the most credible Talking Heads -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
( 📎 Interesting to note: Wallace, a former Republican (or an inactive Republican I believe she calls herself) is new to the job but for right now she has clearly put country over party and her work on Trump GOP has been credible, IMO... )
...for Networking for Democrats today!
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
📎 Note: I rarely get involved in primary races -- outside of those in my own area. And, unless there is a glaring reason that can not be ignored, I support Democratic Party nominees winning in general elections.
.
.
.
(Linked) "...is our 2016 platform...a declaration of how we plan to move America forward. Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls.
It’s a simple but powerful idea: We are stronger together."
Eleanor Roosevelt with female reporters
at her first White House press conference
on March 6, 1933.
“ … At first Eleanor Roosevelt adhered to her own...political topics. She told about her daily schedules, discussed the prints on the White House Walls, and shared low-cost menus for Depression-era households. But reporters pressed the First Lady for more news on public policy, and the press conference sessions soon broadened their scope. As early as April 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt provided a political scoop; she announced that beer would be served in the White House once Prohibition ended. By the end of 1933, according to UP reporter Ruby Black, the First Lady had defended low cost housing, the subsistence homestead program, equal pay for equal work, old age pensions, and the minimum wage. “Tea Pouring Items Give Way to Big News,” Black declared. “No newspaperwoman could have asked for better luck,” reporter Bess Furman recalled. The First Lady, she wrote, “conducts classes on scores of subjects, always seeing beyond her immediate hearers to ‘the women of the country.’” … “ ( You can read more here )
( #its2018now )
*
Curated by Gail Mountain, with occasional personal commentary, Network For #StrongerTogether ! is not affiliated with The Democratic Party in any capacity. This is an independent blog and the hope is you will, at a glance, learn more about the Party and you will, with a click or two, also take action on its behalf as it is provided!
( You can also find me on Twitter
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See the League of Women Voters website:
Vote411 here
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Thank you for Focusing!
g., aka Focused Democrat
✊ Resisting "Fake News"
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