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George Orwell, 1984

Authoritarianism is a very interesting phenomenon. Its adherents don't necessarily want to "tell you what to do"—as long as, if they disagree with you, someone else in power will tell you what to do. Political scientists define authoritarianism as, "not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear." [1]

Authoritarian intellectuals like Julius Evola, Elizabeth Dilling, and Jordan Peterson all behave much differently from authoritarian politicians such as Jair Bolsonaro, Alfredo Stroessner, and Sir Oswald Mosley. Since Evola, Dilling, and Peterson all push authoritarianism in democratic societies, they tend to compromise for a hierarchical society that honors traditional values.

It is this honoring of power over reason that makes an authoritarian. The authoritarian loves rules and loves to apply them. However, for a true authoritarian, power is more important than rules: the rules themselves aren't the source of power and they don't apply to the powerful. Oceania had no laws—it didn't need them. Crime was simply whatever the authorities said it was.

Usually the first step for any would-be authoritarian leader is to arrange blanket exemptions to civil and constitutional protections for broad groups of people (people accused of certain crimes, for example) and to give power to armed forces or to the police to act outside of the law. On a site such as this, which is run as a mobocracy, authoritarians find themselves lost, as we care more about the spirit of our "rules" than strict adherence to them.

People who are raised to strictly follow specific writings as unquestionable display a strong tendency towards authoritarianism. As such they are very dangerous to democracy and to the health of any society in which they live.

In government[edit]

Authoritarian governments seek to perpetuate the power of the rulers. They will often use the fear of disorder to justify their rule, as in Egypt, which was under a continuous state of emergency that started in 1981 and ended in 2011 when Hosni Mubarak was finally deposed from power.[2] Similarly, Syria imposed a State of Emergency in 1964 and lifted it in 2011. Full state control over the media is also a common component of authoritarian control, as it allows the government to effectively control the populace's views, particularly of foreign events. Religious policies vary, ranging from theocracy[3] to complete suppression;[4] the common thread is the suppression of the potential threat posed by independent religious leaders.[5] Heavy-handed policing and arbitrary detention suppress any dissent that survives the government's other methods of control by placing the regime's opponents in government custody. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro is making the army raid colleges and other institutions to persecute Marxists. In Hungary, authoritarian Viktor Orban recently banned gender studies.

Some, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, have tried to make a distinction between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes. The general idea is that authoritarian regimes still allowed for some (mostly economic) freedom and thus could be reformed, unlike the completely dominating totalitarian ones. Most see this as a desperate attempt to make it O.K. for Ronald Reagan to have supported authoritarian regimes[6], while he still blasted the Soviet Union on its human rights problems.[7]

The authoritarian mindset[edit]



Authoritarianism can also exist in a nominally left-wing situation—cults of personality such as Stalin's or the Kim family's are examples. Other such examples might include the French Reign of Terror, in which egalitarianism was twisted into a chaotic witch hunt that consumed its own leaders (including Maximilien Robespierre himself), left-wing purity trolls (including the centrist PUMA movement in American politics) and the Judean People's Front.


I can't stand this indecision, married with a lack of vision[edit]

Vladimir Putin on Trump.[10]
Noam Chomsky[11]

Trump is a new thing under the American sun, but anyone living in Europe had the same thought. Oh, America is getting its own oligarch now.[12] It's the same mentality that the people have about a lot of Russian oligarchs involved in politics: They can't be bribed, or bought off, and they already have so much that people think they won't try to steal more (Trump makes a lot of anti-corruption noises but doesn't make a case for it which extends beyond trust me). Of course it's ridiculous to elect billionaires to represent Middle America, but it shows just how out-of-touch part of the country is.


Another thing that many Europeans can find familiar: upon a terrorist attack, the right wing instantly calls for more invasive or downright oppressive measures, ostensibly to "protect" the people. Trump would fit right at home with many of them: he advocated for American citizens to report their suspicious neighbors to the authorities, a hallmark of several oppressive regimes in history. He goes even further and says if you don't report your suspicious neighbors, you'll be "brought to justice", which gives him carte blanche to arrest just about anyone.[13] A major hallmark of authoritarianism is when they employ divide and conquer tactics, both to prevent any rivals from undercutting him and to promote a "survival of the fittest" mindset among his lackeys. Hitler famously did this while he was in power, which destroyed the Nazis' chances from winning the war. Meanwhile, Trump did this for his own campaign staffers, who are split between those who think he should go with his gut and those who try to make him more "presidential".[14]

Like most authoritarians, you want to stack the government with your cronies and that's exactly what Trump wants. According to Governor Chris Christie, Trump wants to fire the entire civil service (which is supposed to be apolitical and non-ideological) so it can be replaced with a crop of patronage-driven opportunists or Tea Party style extremists at best. This purging of the civil service would allow, for instance, a Goldman Sachs banker to be Treasury Secretary, which heads the economy and its regulations, while keeping his job as a banker—it's a call back to the patronage years of the Gilded Age.[15][16][17][18]

Beyond just the terrorism, this time around, Americans had:

  • Very bad recession that still isn't totally over
  • Gen-X getting crushed by the housing crisis, millennials crushed under student loan debt and both suffering from a poor job market
  • Collapse of social conservatism and religious right[19]
  • Chinese stock bubble happening at the worst moment

Take all of that, add the United States' penchant for gun violence, and combine it with yet another trademark of strongmen: threatening political assassination of their opponents, courtesy of Trump yet again.[20] Trump's authoritarianism shouldn't even be controversial in the libertarian sphere, but it is. It's no secret how the libertarian movement is disproportionately filled with white nationalists, but it's still surprising how many immediately abandoned all of their principles to support the guy over Ron Paul's own son. If anything, they should be the ones who hate Trump the most, but their partisanship and tribalism is really showing this year.[21] Yet paleoconservatism has always been a populist movement and Trump knows exactly how to fire those people up, to get the Mussolini juices flowing (which some think the U.S. actually needs as an alternative to the cult of Putin).[22][23] If you listen to any employee of Trump being interviewed about the election it sounds like they are either a member of a Scientology-like cult or have guns pointed at their head.[24] Trump has built a cult of personality around himself, and this 'brand' has unfortunately grown much larger as a result of his candidacy.


Recovery from authoritarian rule can be exceedingly difficult because authoritarians attempt to subvert democratic institutions, even if they continue to hold less-than-fair elections.[25][26]

See also[edit]

External Links[edit]

  • , by Bob Altemeyer,
  • The Authoritarian Personality:
  • and the appropriately named


  1. , BBC News, 24 January 2012.
  2. Iran
  3. North Korea
  4. See China's official Catholic church.
  5. , p75; Dr. Bob Altemeyer, University of Manitoba
  6. Social conservatism, shocked?
  8. , Foreign Policy (2/2/16, 1:12 pm).
  9. Not a joke]
  10. , NYT 4.5.16.
  11. , Politico. Xenophobic, racist, anti-vaxxer, birther, makes up statistics, lies about everything, then denies those lies... Yup, sounds like a pretty standard libertarian candidate! But rest assured, they'll keep chanting about how they Logic? the most, and how they "hate both sides", etc.
  13. , Washington Post.
  14. , Daily Beast (12.14.15 3:00 PM ET).
  15. By Rachel Kleinfled & David Solimini (2018 October 31st) Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Democracy Fund.
  16. by Joshua Kurlantzick (November 16, 2018) The Washington Post.