March 2026 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Authoritarianism and self-control

people explain away good behavior on the part of the out-group and bad behavior on the part of the in-group

Here’s my crank theory. If you think about authoritarianism from a rhetorical/mobilizing passion perspective, rather than a political arrangement, policy agenda, or place on the fantastical left/right axis, then it’s most useful to define authoritarians as people who believe that the ideal world is one with a stable hierarchy of submission and domination. Authoritarians believe that the in-group is entitled to dominate others, and should not be held to the same standards as those “below” them on the hierarchy.

Authoritarian systems rationalize the hierarchy on the grounds that those toward the top have more self-control than the people/groups below them, and therefore have the “right” to demand submission. There’s more here. One of the characteristics of an abusive relationship is that the abuse is narrated so that the victim is the one responsible for the abuser’s behavior.

The victim is framed as responsible for having provoked the abuse on the grounds that, had they been more submissive, compliant, polite, accommodating, the abuser would not have been forced into abusing them. So, the behavior of the object of abuse forced the abuser to be abusive. If you think about this way of narrating the situation, the victim was the one in control of the situation, and could have chosen not to trigger the abuse, whereas the abuser had no choices.

This is a narrative about abuse, a way of assigning people roles of good or bad, victims or villains.

It’s the narrative used to defend police use of excessive force, parents who sent a kid to the ER, slavers’ mass killing of African-Americans in the middle of a fabricated panic about insurrection, mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans, lynchings, DV, and so much else.

That is authoritarianism.

There are three points I want to make about it. First, the people justifying the violence on the grounds of insubordination never imagine that it might have happened to them. Were they (or an in-group member) treated that way, their hair would catch fire because of outraged they would be.

The second is an inherent problem with authoritarianism and the fantasy of rationality. Authoritarianism is the belief that the ideal political/cultural/social situation is one in which an in-group leader (or group) who has universal genius is at the top, making the decisions, and power flows down. The people below them are supposed to enact those decisions, and they are also all in-group. So, it is a structure of a person with access to the truth dictating true policies to those below them. And everyone should kiss up and kick down.

Third, what’s so weird about this way of narrating the ideal relations (and I’m not the first or only person to point this out) is that the argument is that many people make the argument that (usually white) males need to be in charge of everything because women and non-whites aren’t in control of their emotions. But, when white male patriarchs respond with an out of control level of violence (e.g. slavers,, the police, or a parent who sends a wife or kid to the ER), it’s the fault of the victims for having provoked them. So, white males should be in charge because they are in control of their emotions, except they aren’t–the victims are.

They aren’t actually in control of their emotions because, as their defenders say, they have no choice as to how they respond to insubordination.

Sit with that.

The whole argument for “white men should be in control because no one else has control of their emotions” is in direct contradiction with the defense of white men who get out of control on the grounds that they couldn’t control their response to insubordination.

Pick a lane.

Authoritarianism is never actually about some group being more rational than others. It’s about a lot of things—deflecting uncertainty, in-group favoritism, confirmation bias, projection—but it’s never about doing unto others as we would have done unto us. And it’s interesting what happens if you point that out to people who claim to be Christian authoritarians. Suddenly, they know better than Jesus what it means to be Christian. Christian authoritarians who want to reject treating others as they would be treated cheerfully reject the authority of Jesus.

Lying about Talarico

showing full version of a Talarico quote

One of the ways it’s possible to know that a political group is frightened is when they start to lie about opponents.

As far as I can tell, a political group, media, pundit, or whatever lies about what the opponent has said when they’re very frightened that the opponent might win, and they think they will lose if they try to make their case via reasonable and ethical responses. In other words, they misrepresent (a polite word for “lie”) about the stances of their opponent because they don’t have a reasonable response. If they had a reasonable response, they wouldn’t have to lie.

I’ll say it again for the people in the back: Lying and misrepresenting is an admission that you don’t have a reasonable argument.

One way of admitting you don’t have a reasonable argument is this meme about Talarico. Much pro-GOP media misrepresented his argument. Either that media/pundit/political figure deliberately lied about what Talarico said, or they’re too stupid to understand how doors work.

So, those of you with anti-Talarico people in your world who shared that lie, here’s how I think they will respond when told, very clearly, that they believe and share information from sources that lie.

Reasonable people stop getting their information from that media/pundit. (Why I stopped getting information, or passing along links, from Mother Jones, the Heritage Foundation, or Occupy Democrats without vetting them carefully first).

If you had an uncle who lied to you about things, if you’re a reasonable person, you would stop believing him. If, on the other hand, you had some notion of fanatical loyalty to family, you might choose to keep believing him no matter how many times he lies to you. That would not be reasonable. You might choose to do so because of values like family loyalty, or he’s got a lot of money that you’re hoping to inherit. I think one of the most powerful motivations for continuing to believe your lying uncle is that you’ve repeated his stories in public, and so you’d be publicly admitting you were duped. If other people told you he was lying, and you refused to believe then, then (especially if you’re the kind of person who thinks of interpersonal interactions as domination and submission), you’d be particularly motivated to refuse to admit what you now know to be true. It might feel like submitting to the others.

We all get duped at times. A reasonable person responds to being told they’re repeating information from a lying source by saying, “Whoops!” And then they’re more careful about what they repeat from that that source.

Here’s how unreasonable people reply to having it pointed out to them that they’re sharing information from a media source that is lying/deliberately misrepresenting. (I learned this by arguing with Stalinists many years ago): “So, what, Dems do that too.” Even if every Dem source also lied and misrepresented, it still means you’re getting your information from a source that lies. Or is stupid. You don’t have to abandon that source—just keep those grains of salt nearby.

-“Well, even if this quote is misleading, he’s still a bad person.” He might still be someone for whom you don’t want to vote, but you’re still getting your information from media/pundits that lie to you.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at various definitions of a “reasonable” argument, and I’ve ended up deciding that Jesus said it best. “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” So, instead of trying to justify believing sources that consistently lie and misrepresent, ask yourself? Are you okay when other people lie about or misrepresent what you’ve said? Is that how you want to be treated?

The issue is that you are getting your information from a source that will lie and try to fool you, and the various ways of swatting away that issue are unreasonable. But they’re more than that. Being okay with treating Talarico in a way you wouldn’t want you or your political figures treated means being okay with telling Jesus he got it wrong.

If Talarico is that bad, there’s no need to lie about him or deliberately misrepresent what he said. Lying and misrepresenting is a pragmatic admission that he’s pretty good.

What do we do now?

2009 Irish tug of war team — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tug_of_war#/media/File:Irish_600kg_euro_chap_2009_(cropped).JPG

I’ve spent thirty years worried that our media environment would either create a civil war or a fascist overthrow of democracy. In the midst of the pro-Iraq invasion demagoguery I was researching pro-slavery demagoguery, and I realized in both cases, the problem wasn’t demagogues. The problem was a culture of demagoguery.

In both cases, complicated policy options were reduced to a single-axis binary or continuum of identity (a person is pro- or anti-slavery, or pro- or anti-invasion). So, the frame for politics was identitarian.

In both cases, that was a completely false way of representing the policy options. In both cases, it was a way of framing the conflict that benefitted the authoritarians. The very complicated set of policy options that the United States had in regard to slavery were reduced to a binary of identity: pro- or anti-slavery. That helped slavers (there is no distinction between slaveholders and slavers—the institution of slavery was profitable because “slaveholders” bought and sold slaves; they were all slavers). It helped slavers because the “anti-slavery” position could be fallaciously equated with advocating slave rebellion.

It’s the genus-species fallacy. Since some people who are anti-slavery advocate slave resistance (e.g., David Walker), and slave resistance is the same as slave rebellion (as a famous court decision concluded), then anyone who criticizes slavery is advocating slave rebellion. (That’s the summary of actual arguments made by people who were taken seriously.)

It was the same fallacy that showed up in regard to Iraq—terrorists oppose the war (actually, they didn’t), therefore people who oppose the war are terrorists. The genus-species fallacy is repeated thrice over in the claim that “anyone who says racism is systemic is advocating CRT because that’s what CRT says and CRT is Marxist, so they’re Marxist.”

The genus-species fallacy is built in to any identitarian model of politics. Identitarian models of politics say that the world of policy disagreements isn’t actually about individual (or small group) concerns, needs, problems, goals and therefore different policy commitments (e.g., an anti-choice soybean farmer) . It says that our policy world is really a zero-sum tug-of war of people along a single axis, or even a binary (that soybean farmer is far right).

Just to be clear: we all are members of many social groups, some of which are important to our sense of identity. Chester might be a Lutheran, 49ers fan, parrot owner, parcheesi fanatic. Those are Chester’s “in-groups” if they are how he defines himself. We also all have a lot of groups we are in that aren’t important to our sense of identity—the way you can tell whether your group identification is in-group is if you get defensive if someone criticizes that group. So, if someone said parcheesi sucks, and they prefer chess, Chester would only care if his sense of himself as a parcheesi player was important to him.

In-groups always have out-groups. In fact, in-groups are generally defined by their not being out-group. Unhappily, self-worth tends to be comparative. We can think of ourselves as good, or justified, or successful, or whatever, if we can compare ourselves to others around us and say we’re better. (“Maybe parcheesi players do yell at kittens, but that’s nowhere as bad as what chess players do, so I’m not going to feel bad about it.”) So, out-groups help us feel good about ourselves because they’re so much worse than we are.

Because people have a lot of in-groups, there are a lot of ways that we can be called on to identify ourselves, and a lot of policy commitments we might have. Media that promote the identitarian model evade discussions of the various policy options, instead narrating the zero-sum conflict along that continuum of identity (this is also called the “horse race” frame).

In all my research of train wrecks in public deliberation—from the Sicilian Expedition to Bush’s failure to plan for an occupation—a major factor is identitarian politics. Identitarian politics makes disagreement about policies seem pointless, trivial, or even distracting. It thereby fosters authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is a model of society, culture, and government that assumes that politics is a question of identity, with one identity entitled to dominate the others.

All authoritarian politics are identitarian. All ethnic cleansings are identitarian. All train wrecks in public deliberation are identitarian.

We are in what might be end times for democracy. The way we should respond to this crisis is NOT to engage in purity wars, although that’s the impulse. We don’t stop authoritarianism by being more authoritarian about our allies (i.e., condemning people who haven’t take a strong enough stance), or purifying the in-group and insisted that everyone “get on the same page;” we stop it by forming alliances. There has never been a time when opponents of authoritarianism successfully prevented an authoritarian takeover by fighting among ourselves.

We shouldn’t spend our time (and social media) mobilizing resentment about potential allies. If your impulse is to respond to what I’m saying is that I’m telling you that you can’t criticize Dems, then you’re completely misunderstanding. Absolutely criticize the Dems. But do so in a way that is likely to have impact without mobilizing resentment. Email the DNC. Email the Dem politicians who are taking stands you think are wrong.

The DNC and Dem politicians care about what email they get. They don’t know, and therefore don’t care, about what you or I post on FB. But posting about how the Dems suck (especially when it’s reposting something that is just wrong about how Congressional practices work) helps authoritarians.

Keep in mind that it’s documented that Russian trolls spent much of their effort, not promoting Trump, but mobilizing resentment about “liberals” and the Dems. So, just to be clear: criticize the Dems, but do so in ways that are likely to get the Dems to change, and not in ways that help authoritarians.

My final point is: don’t try to create alliances of identity, but of policy.

I often attend the Texas TribFest, and it’s where policy wonks wonk together. They make an effort to bring in people with different points of view. And one of the most moving panels I saw was two Texas state legislators who both self-identify as Christian, and one is a Dem and the other GOP. And they talked about their going together to Death Row, and praying with the people there, their working together on abolishing the Death Penalty, and their failure to get any pro-Death Penalty legislators to come with them. They said they disagree vehemently with one another about all sorts of issues, but they agree on this. Alliances can be policy specific, and yet effective and important.

[A friend sent along this vid, which makes a similar argument.]