The Origins Of Totalitarianism (1951)

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Luke Ford

The only way I can understand this book being held in high regard is that it reads like a thriller for a certain type of intellect and it conveys exciting feelings that are easily mistaken for profundity.

A professor friend tells me: “Her thing was against the public private distinction, in favor of some sort of Greek model of public life. I’ve never seen the point of her stuff.”

Another prof says: “I’ve always felt she was an extremely over-rated thinker and writer. She seems like one of those people that pretentious journalists like to cite to back up their own half-baked ideas. Assertions supported by unsupported assertions. Like you I was curious to see what people said in book reviews. And it was just what you described: Stupid generalizations and speculations with no arguments, mixed with the odd truism, reported as breathtaking “insights”. Pretty pathetic that such a mediocrity is acclaimed as a deep thinker, but it’s not unusual.”

A bud says: “I think there was a market for a lady political theorist. And, to be fair, “the banality of evil” is a catchy phrase.”

Any coincidence between Hannah Arendt’s assertions in this book and reality are purely accidental. This is a work of theory for which little evidence is provided. I can assert to you that 17 angels can dance on the head of a pin, but so what? How is my assertion any less valuable than Arendt’s assertion that “The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class”?

People such as Donald Trump can assert all they want that voter fraud determined the 2020 election but without evidence, these assertions are just rants. The Origins Of Totalitarianism is similarly just a rant. I’m sure there has to be something accurate and profound in there, but why waste the time to dig for it amidst all the pointless opinions?

What do you do when you start reading a highly regarded book that you’re finding it tedious? I start looking for reviews of the book. I did so in this case and none of them matched my own thinking. Then I looked for a study guide to the book to get a handle on it. That was useful, but I still couldn’t find what was I looking for. So then I started emailing people I respected to get their perspective. When their experience matched mine, I felt at peace.

When Donald Trump took office in January of 2017, sales for Arendt’s book took off and there were all sorts of think pieces published that year about the relevance of Origins for our current situation. Karen Greenberg wrote April 14, 2017 for The New Republic: “Her concerns are clearly present before us, now, in the United States. Public displays of racism and xenophobia are on the rise. The White House has issued yet another Muslim ban alongside a refugee ban. Anti-Semitic incidents are skyrocketing around the country. Imperialism as well is an unmistakable part of the language of Trump and his administration: “America First,” has become the administration’s policy mantra, along with an escalation in drone strikes, a willingness to alienate long-standing allies including the UK, Germany, Australia and Sweden, and a drum roll to war with North Korea, and maybe Syria. The instability of the nation-state as we know it alongside the rise of transnational groups are eroding political institutions in America, much like the erosion Arendt saw in Germany.”

So how much totalitarianism did we experience during the Trump years?

Hakim Bashara writes Jan. 19, 2021 for Hyperallergic.com: “A Trump executive order that includes erecting a statue for Hannah Arendt, the political thinker who dedicated her scholarship to understanding the roots of totalitarianism, struck many as a new height of irony.”

Ironic how?

From Jewish Insider Jan. 18, 2021:

Of the many names included in President Donald Trump’s executive order on Monday expanding on a previous mandate to establish a statue park called the “National Garden of American Heroes,” one that stands out as particularly unexpected is Hannah Arendt, the German-born Jewish political philosopher who fled Nazi Germany and eventually settled in the United States, where she became an American citizen in 1951.

For those even passingly familiar with Arendt’s oeuvre, including her best-known work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Trump’s announcement no doubt came as a surprise — and a jarring one at that. Over the past four years, Arendt’s writings — including her famous coinage, “the banality of evil,” a phrase she invented after witnessing Nazi war-criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem — were repeatedly invoked as opinion columnists, professors and other pundits endeavored to make sense of the president’s apparent flirtation with autocracy, so often that it has become something of a journalistic cliché.

On social media, Arendt’s inclusion in Trump’s list was, predictably, singled out.

But what would Arendt have made of Trump’s executive order? It’s impossible to say, of course — she died in 1975 at the age of 69 — but those who are in a position to speculate offered varying takes.

“I think she would be appalled,” Roger Berkowitz, who directs the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College — on whose campus Arendt is buried and where she taught for many years — told Jewish Insider on Monday evening. “I think Arendt would find it ridiculous that Trump nominated her. I think she would find Trump ridiculous, and I think she’d find him dangerous insofar as he undermines the basic idea of truthfulness and truth in the country. His attack on the election she would have found abhorrent and dangerous.”

“Trump is everything she hated,” Berkowitz added. “That said, so is 90% of our politics, and she would have seen, for the most part, Trump as a symptom of what is wrong with our politics. What makes him exceptional is just his absolute lack of shame and his willingness to flout all common norms and standards.”

Who cares how this pointless pontificator would have reacted to getting a statute?

Thomas Edsall writes Jan. 6, 2021 in the New York Times:

As Congress is set to affirm the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, the words of Hannah Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany after being arrested in 1933, acquire new relevance.

In 1967, Arendt published “Truth and Politics” in The New Yorker:

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.”

The fragility of democracy had long been apparent. In 1951, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt wrote:

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”

Totalitarianism required first blurring and then erasing the line between falsehood and truth, as Arendt famously put it:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true ….”

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

And here’s Arendt in “Truth and Politics” again, sounding like she is talking about contemporary politics:

“Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.”

America in 2021 is a very different time and a very different place from the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century, but we should still listen to what Arendt is saying and heed her warning.

David Brooks wrote for the Times Mar. 22, 2018: “People like Hannah Arendt and Irving Howe believed that if you stood alone and researched carefully and hard, you could transcend your own background and render independent and objective judgments about society.”

Steve Sailer notes: “David’s background has nothing to do with his choice of Hannah Arendt and Irving Howe as examples…”

Anonymous posted to Steve Sailer in 2013: “What does Heidegger have to say about race that makes him worth listening to? Or Arendt? They aren’t Natural Scientists and even if they were, much water has flowed under the bridge since they lived and breathed. This is precisely why I didn’t go on to grad school in the humanities and decided to get another bachelors but this time in hard science.”

At the time of her 1951 publication or Origins, many men wanted to bang Hannah Arendt, so I get why they would want to praise her book, but why venerate it now? Does she deserve affirmative action pokeymon diversity points for being a lady philosopher who fucked Heidegger and fled Germany with an exotic look and an exuberant personality?

This book reads like a collection of Zman blog posts.

According to GradeSaver.com:

The People
The “People” are the citizens of a nation-state. They come from the Third Estate of the French Revolution—they are the people who work. They form the body politic and are the ultimate source of authority in the functioning nation-state. They are often mistaken for the Mob or the Masses, both of which are degenerations of the People. In the mid-19th century, the People get split into classes, allowing for the Mob and the Masses to make their appearance.

The Mob
The Mob consists of the refuse of all classes of society. According to Arendt, they search for a strong-man or great leader to follow. They always use extra-parliamentary (and often violent) means to accomplish political goals since they are not represented by parties that are based on the classes they have been ejected from. The Mob was harnessed by the elite in the Dreyfus Affair to further antisemitic goals. The Mob also plays a role in imperialism, allying with capital in the case of the pan-movements and the Boers in South Africa.

The Masses
The Masses refers to the mass of isolated, atomized individuals that is created by the destruction of the nation-state and the accumulation of capital during imperialism. The Masses are not the same as the Mob. While the Mob is the refuse of all classes, the Masses are created by the apparent liquidation of classes. The Masses are the basis of totalitarian movements, which rely on a mass of humans who have lost all relations to their fellow man.

…Arendt argues that by “pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them,” which proves to be much more than merely the abolition of essential freedoms, but rather amounts to the wholesale eradication of “the love for freedom from the hearts of man” (466).

How does Arendt know what is going on in the hearts of man?

Gradesaver: “For Arendt, the history of the 19th and 20th centuries is the history of the failure of the Rights of Man.”

How can something which does not exist, such as the Rights of Man, fail?

Gradesaver: “The failure began with the triumph of the bourgeois over the citoyen and the death of the nation-state, and culminated with the crisis of the 20th century. When the world wars created a mass of stateless people, the nations of the world—which supposedly exist to realize and defend the Rights of Man—were unable to incorporate these refugees. Thus, their “rights” as men went unrecognized.”

How exactly did the bourgeois triumph over the citoyen? On what basis does she claim this? Nation-states did not die prior to WWII nor after WWII. Where does she get the idea that the purpose of nation-states is to realize and defend the Rights of Man? There are no such rights. The purpose of a state is to survive. Non-citizens have no rights. The only rights that exist are those that a nation-state chooses to extend to its citizens at a particular time and place.

Gradesaver: “For Arendt, the Rights of Man are untenable because they cannot be enforced by human political institutions, and Edmund Burke’s alternative of the “Rights of Englishmen” is preferable since the nation offers stable ground which can serve as the source of rights.”

Finally she makes some sense. John J. Mearsheimer noted in his book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities:

One can make the case that it is dangerous to think in terms of universal rights in a world of nation-states. Doing so risks giving people the impression that there is some higher authority—maybe some international institution—empowered to protect their rights. In fact, there is no such entity; states protect an individual’s rights, not some superior authority. Hannah Arendt saw the problem: “The Rights of Man . . . had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.” 98 She maintained that stateless people and unwanted minorities residing inside nation-states live in grave danger, because there is no enforcement mechanism to defend their rights, including the right to life, if they come under attack. “The abstract nakedness of being nothing but human,” she argued, “was their greatest danger.”

Arendt’s solution was to eschew talk of universal rights and instead emphasize “nationally guaranteed rights.” In this she aligned herself with Edmund Burke, who “opposed the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man” and instead made the case that rights “spring ‘from within the nation.’” For Arendt, as for Burke, “It was much wiser to rely on an ‘entailed inheritance’ of rights which one transmits to one’s children like life itself, and to claim one’s rights to be the ‘rights of an Englishman’ rather than the inalienable rights of man.” 100 Her opposition to this universalist strand of liberalism was driven in good part by concerns about survival.

Gradesaver: “Superfluousness is a recurring theme in Arendt’s work used to describe the status of men who have lost their relations to other men and have been rendered superfluous to society.”

Nations are extended families. Those who are outside the nation but still inside the state are generally considered superfluous unless they have special skills or assets. This is not a new fact of life. It has ever been such.

Gradesaver: “This touches on a problem that still plagues political theory today and is a common theme in Arendt’s work: the seeming opposition of liberalism and democracy. Phenomena such as the mob or the masses make it seem as though the democratic rule of the people will be antiliberal and that liberal rule is only possible if a few experts control the government. Ostensibly this antinomy was not a problem for the thinkers of the French Revolution, but it is a problem that, since the 19th century, has tasked the present.”

When nationalism and liberalism collide, nationalism always wins. Liberalism is an artificial construct based on a fantasy about people as primarily individuals with inalienable rights. Nationalism is natural based on the understanding that people are primarily members of a group, a tribe, a family, a nation. The world has steadily become less liberal and democratic since 2007 according to Freedom House since liberalism and democracy have not been found to be more useful on the margin for many states than the alternatives.

Arendt: “The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies—which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest—well-nigh impossible.” (137)

The human heart has always been such. Man has always sought unlimited money and power. This is not new to the 19th and 20th Centuries and there is nothing about this eternal human condition that makes new political bodies impossible.

* Gradesaver: “There are few limits on bureaucracy’s power to expand, and its decisions are kept completely secret from most people. As a result, most people only experience bureaucracy as a series of events happening in their lives, but these events are not at all explained by reason. This is different from the ideal of governance in a democratic republic, where citizens can comprehend the laws that govern them, and thus can judge and deliberate about them.”

What a shocking insight! The way governments work is different from the ideal. Who would have thought that? There has never been a modern democratic republic where citizens comprehend the laws that govern them and then judge and deliberate about them. Bureaucracies always develop a power of their own that is largely impervious to check in the courts, by the executive and by the legislature.

* Arendt: “Behind the curious uniformity of method used by the supporters of all the candidates [of the 1932 German election] lay the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened—afraid of the Communists, afraid of the Nazis, or afraid of the status quo. In this general fear all class divisions disappeared from the political scene.”

Class divisions did not disappear but they were superseded by more primal human instincts — the will to live. In 1932, Germany was headed for total government — the choice was only between total government of the right or of the left.

Gradesaver: “Arendt is arguing that the rejection of reality in a totalitarian era is a two-sided phenomenon. Not only do those within the totalitarian regime reject reality and live in a land of fiction cultivated by propaganda, but those outside the regime refuse to face the reality of the atrocities happening. By rejecting the normal world as irrational, the totalitarian regime begins through its actions to make the normal world irrational.”

What evidence does Arendt have that people in total regimes believe the propaganda? And why should outsiders “face the reality of the atrocities happening.” They can’t do anything about it. The reality of human nature is that people do not care about out-groups.

Gradesaver: “Here Arendt is arguing that the lawlessness of the totalitarian regime and their complete disregard for the consent of the governed follows logically from their raising of historical and natural law to an ideal. When man becomes identical with the movement of the laws of history, he is merely a means to its end and no longer acts according to will or spontaneity. Since the consent of the governed is only required because laws are made and fulfilled in practice by the free will and action of man, when these things are lacking, it becomes completely superfluous to the hyper-rationalized execution of natural and historical laws.”

I’ve got a simpler explanation — the strong take what they want and the weak endure what they must.

* Arendt: “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.” (478)

How does she know? By what measures are people headed for total government more objectively lonely than other people?

Hannah Arendt writes:

* Drunkenness and incompetence, which loom so large in any description of Russia in the twenties and thirties and are still widespread today, played no role whatsoever in the story of Nazi Germany, while the unspeakable gratuitous cruelty in the German concentration and extermination camps seems to have been largely absent from the Russian camps, where the prisoners died of neglect rather than of torture. Corruption, the curse of the Russian administration from the beginning, was also present during the last years of the Nazi regime but apparently has been entirely absent from China after the revolution… Absolute monarchy, no doubt, was a very different affair in Spain, in France, in England, in Prussia; still it was everywhere the same form of government. Decisive in our context is that totalitarian government is different from dictatorships and tyrannies; the ability to distinguish between them is by no means an academic issue which could be safely left to the “theoreticians,” for total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible. (1966 Introduction)

* …Hitler, who during his lifetime exercised a fascination to which allegedly no one was immune, 1 and who after his defeat and death is today so thoroughly forgotten…

* Hitler’s rise to power was legal in terms of majority rule 3 and neither he nor Stalin could have maintained the leadership of large populations, survived many interior and exterior crises, and braved the numerous dangers of relentless intra-party struggles if they had not had the confidence of the masses… Nor can their popularity be attributed to the victory of masterful and lying propaganda over ignorance and stupidity. For the propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones… Bolshevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propaganda…

* The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. It has always been true that the mob will greet “deeds of violence with the admiring remark: it may be mean but it is very clever.” 6 The disturbing factor in the success of totalitarianism is rather the true selflessness of its adherents…

[LF: This is bogus. There is no evidence that mobs are less moral than individuals. Also, the motives of those pushing totalitarianism tended to be mixed in the same way that those who oppose totalitarianism tend to have mixed motives. People are complicated. Sometimes a total government is a rational response to reality just as dictatorship is the most prudent form of government at times for a state to survive a crisis. It’s a lot easier to have human rights when you have no enemies on your doorstep. A weakness of Arendt’s analysis is a lack of awareness of things like cultural dimensions. Some cultures are individualistic and others put the group first. Totalitarianism is less likely to develop in an individualistic culture.]

* The Nazis, who had an unfailing instinct for such differences, used to comment contemptuously on the shortcomings of their Fascist allies while their genuine admiration for the Bolshevik regime in Russia (and the Communist Party in Germany) was matched and checked only by their contempt for Eastern European races.

* …Nazism, up to the outbreak of the war and its expansion over Europe, lagged so far behind its Russian counterpart in consistency and ruthlessness; even the German people were not numerous enough to allow for the full development of this newest form of government. Only if Germany had won the war would she have known a fully developed totalitarian rulership…

* Conversely, the chances for totalitarian rule are frighteningly good in the lands of traditional Oriental despotism, in India and China, where there is almost inexhaustible material to feed the power-accumulating and man-destroying machinery of total domination, and where, moreover, the mass man’s typical feeling of superfluousness—an entirely new phenomenon in Europe, the concomitant of mass unemployment and the population growth of the last 150 years—has been prevalent for centuries in the contempt for the value of human life…. Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible.

* Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization.

[LF: Total movements are possible when total movements bring an adaptive advantage to a challenging reality.]

* The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of European nation-states and their party system in particular. The first was that the people in its majority had taken an active part in government and that each individual was in sympathy with one’s own or somebody else’s party. On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized by only a minority. The second democratic illusion exploded by the totalitarian movements was that these politically indifferent masses did not matter, that they were truly neutral and constituted no more than the inarticulate backward setting for the political life of the nation. Now they made apparent what no other organ of public opinion had ever been able to show, namely, that democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country. Thus when the totalitarian movements invaded Parliament with their contempt for parliamentary government, they merely appeared inconsistent: actually, they succeeded in convincing the people at large that parliamentary majorities were spurious and did not necessarily correspond to the realities of the country, thereby undermining the self-respect and the confidence of governments which also believed in majority rule rather than in their constitutions.

[LF: Most people have no rational reason to care about politics. Despite this, people are not naive. So Hannah Arendt is stupid to think that new forms of propaganda caused people to support things against their own interest. Democracy is a tricky thing. It has come to mean rule by discussion of elected representatives but a dictator may well better represent majority sentiment than the legislations of parliaments.]

* It has frequently been pointed out that totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them. This is not just devilish cleverness on the part of the leaders or childish stupidity on the part of the masses. Democratic freedoms may be based on the equality of all citizens before the law; yet they acquire their meaning and function organically only where the citizens belong to and are represented by groups or form a social and political hierarchy. The breakdown of the class system, the only social and political stratification of the European nation-states, certainly was “one of the most dramatic events in recent German history” 18 and as favorable to the rise of Nazism as the absence of social stratification in Russia’s immense rural population (this “great flaccid body destitute of political education, almost inaccessible to ideas capable of ennobling action” 19 ) was to the Bolshevik overthrow of the democratic Kerensky government. Conditions in pre-Hitler Germany are indicative of the dangers implicit in the development of the Western part of the world since, with the end of the second World War, the same dramatic event of a breakdown of the class system repeated itself in almost all European countries, while events in Russia clearly indicate the direction which the inevitable revolutionary changes in Asia may take. Practically speaking, it will make little difference whether totalitarian movements adopt the pattern of Nazism or Bolshevism, organize the masses in the name of race or class, pretend to follow the laws of life and nature or of dialectics and economics.

[LF: So to preserve democracy, our ruling elites have decided since WWII to restrict the realm of the political. The working class is no longer to be trusted, neither is free speech. Tracy B. Strong noted in his Introduction to Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political: “An intellectual consequence of the experience with Nazism was to effectively shrink, perhaps one might say homogenize, the language and terms of political debate in the subsequent period. As the Nazi experience fades from consciousness (at just over sixty years of age, I am among the last to have been born during the war and to have been taught by those with adult consciousness during the war), so also possibilities excluded by the specter of Auschwitz have returned. The revival of interest in Schmitt is consequent, I believe, to this increasing distance from the 1930s.”]

* Indifference to public affairs, neutrality on political issues, are in themselves no sufficient cause for the rise of totalitarian movements. The competitive and acquisitive society of the bourgeoisie had produced apathy and even hostility toward public life…Both the early apathy and the later demand for monopolistic dictatorial direction of the nation’s foreign affairs had their roots in a way and philosophy of life so insistently and exclusively centered on the individual’s success or failure in ruthless competition that a citizen’s duties and responsibilities could only be felt to be a needless drain on his limited time and energy. These bourgeois attitudes are very useful for those forms of dictatorship in which a “strong man” takes upon himself the troublesome responsibility for the conduct of public affairs; they are a positive hindrance to totalitarian movements which can tolerate bourgeois individualism no more than any other kind of individualism.

[LF: Indifference to public affairs is rational as there is nothing the individual can do about them. It is not peculiar to the bourgeoisie state.]

* The masses share with the mob only one characteristic, namely, that both stand outside all social ramifications and normal political representation.

[LF: What does that mean and how is it possibly true?]

* membership in a class, its limited group obligations and traditional attitudes toward government, prevented the growth of a citizenry that felt individually and personally responsible for the rule of the country. This apolitical character of the nation-state’s populations came to light only when the class system broke down and carried with it the whole fabric of visible and invisible threads which bound the people to the body politic.

[LF: This book reads like a series of assertions for which the author feels no compulsion to provide any evidence.]

* The parties, consequently, became more and more psychological and ideological in their propaganda, more and more apologetic and nostalgic in their political approach.

[LF: And where is the evidence for this?]

* The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent.

[LF: Ties of blood and soil and religion tend to tie people together, not political ideology. Absent ties of blood, soil and religion, people may abstain from slitting each other’s throats in response to incentives, but they feel little in common with each other. Citizenship is a poor substitute for nationalism.]

* The gigantic massing of individuals produced a mentality which, like Cecil Rhodes some forty years before, thought in continents and felt in centuries.

[LF: These are stirring words, but where’s the evidence?]

* The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.

{LF: How does she know?]

* Neither tribal nationalism nor rebellious nihilism is characteristic of or ideologically appropriate to the masses as they were to the mob.

[LF: Which masses exactly were indifferent to nationalism? Not the masses of Germany and Russia. Arendt is apparently speaking of masses who exist only in her imagination. No wonder she did want to provide any evidence for her assertions.]

* But the most gifted mass leaders of our time have still risen from the mob rather than from the masses. 23 Hitler’s biography reads like a textbook example in this respect, and the point about Stalin is that he comes from the conspiratory apparatus of the Bolshevik party with its specific mixture of outcasts and revolutionaries. Hitler’s early party, almost exclusively composed of misfits, failures, and adventurers, indeed represented the “armed bohemians” 24 who were only the reverse side of bourgeois society and whom, consequently, the German bourgeoisie should have been able to use successfully for its own purposes. Actually, the bourgeoisie was as much taken in by the Nazis as was the Röhm-Schleicher faction in the Reichswehr, which also thought that Hitler, whom they had used as a stool-pigeon, or the SA, which they had used for militaristic propaganda and paramilitary training, would act as their agents and help in the establishment of a military dictatorship.

[LF: The people who supported the Nazis did so out of their perception of their self-interest. By and large, people were not “taken in” by the Nazis. Those Germans whose views generally aligned with the Nazis supported them and those whose views did not align opposed the Nazis. People did not evolve to be gullible. Hannah Arendt apparently views the great masses of people who went along with total approaches to governance as stupid when there is more evidence that they were self-interested and rational. I tend to discount intellectuals who fall back on the lazy argument that the reason the great mass of people do as they do is because they’re stupid.]

* That totalitarian movements depended less on the structurelessness of a mass society than on the specific conditions of an atomized and individualized mass, can best be seen in a comparison of Nazism and Bolshevism which began in their respective countries under very different circumstances. To change Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship into full totalitarian rule, Stalin had first to create artificially that atomized society which had been prepared for the Nazis in Germany by historical circumstances.

[LF: I think you would find a lot of countries far more atomized than 1930s/1940s Germany and Russia, such as the United States and England at the same time, and yet these more individualistic countries did not become totalitarian.]

* All these new classes and nationalities were in Stalin’s way when he began to prepare the country for totalitarian government.

[LF: So it was not totalitarian under Lenin? The affirmative action empire of the Soviet Union under Lenin continued with its affirmative action after Stalin took power. This is a very German book with tons of theories and a complete lack of interest in providing empirical evidence for these lofty ideas.]

Posted in Totalitarianism | Comments Off on The Origins Of Totalitarianism (1951)

Trolling Journalists and the Risks of Digital Publicity

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Luke Ford

Professor Silvio Waisboard writes in 2020:

* Fresno Bee educational reporter Mackenzie Mays became the target of online trolling after she published stories on sex education and teen pregnancy in local schools in early 2018. In one story, she reported that Brooke Ashjian, board president of the Fresno School District, made derogatory comments about LGBT “lifestyle,” and that he had settled a defamation suit prompted by his remarks. The story sparked much criticism and demands for Ashijan to resign. In response, Ashijan insulted Mays on Twitter and local radio, and doxed her on social media. Immediately after, Mays and her family were the targets of trolling filled with lies and threats. She feared for her physical safety and her family’s. Concerned about threats, she became wary when covering events and opening emails. Eventually, managing editor Joe Kieta took her off the education beat and assigned her to do investigative stories. Mays was the subject of fresh attacks after she reported
about drug use and prostitution in a boat cruise sponsored by a winery partly owned by Republican Representative Devin Nunes. Nunes disparaged Mays in his 38-page diatribe against The Fresno Bee, a mailer sent to his constituents (Nunes also filed a defamation suit against the newspaper). Trolls targeted Mays online and by voicemails (Baron 2018). In January 2019, Mays quitted the Bee to join Politico’s California bureau, and received an award from the National Press Club for her work.

This example is just one among scores of recent cases of trolling against journalists in the United States and around the world. Globally, reporters continue to face a constant barrage of online attacks (Costa-Kostritsky 2019). Trolls generally abuse journalists through email and social media messaging. It disproportionately targets female (Koirala 2020; Martin 2018; Mong 2019; Rego 2018; Westcott 2019), non-white reporters (Gardiner 2018), as well as journalists identified with religious minorities (Crary 2018). According to a study by the International Women’s Media Foundation, online harassment has become the main safety concern for female journalists (Ferrier 2018). Anecdotal evidence and personal testimonies describe a host of negative consequences of online intimidation (Elks 2018; Reporters without Borders 2018; Thielman 2020; Wolfe 2019). Journalists fear that covering certain people and subjects might attract trolls, and they report cases of self-censorship and personal trauma. They are generally reluctant to disclose and cover attacks out of fear of enraging trolls as well as the potential “Streisand effect” of amplifying incidents.

The consequences of online harassment have been particularly damaging in cases of doxing (the malicious publication of private information) and swatting (coordinated prank calls to emergency services to deploy the police to a certain address). Washington Post columnist Vargas’s (2018) observation that trolling has become “one of the worst parts of the job” captures a widespread sentiment in contemporary newsrooms (Miller and Lewis 2020).

While I recognize that trolling is an ambiguous, fuzzy concept, here I understand it as a range of malicious behaviors that aim to cause trouble, fear, and concern through aggressive and threatening language (Coles and West 2016; Phillips and Milner 2018). Trolls taunt, demean, scare, intimidate, and harm others. Trolling represents a range of disturbing trends in the digital society, such as intolerant speech, hate, and the erosion of personal privacy. Forty percent of the United States population has experienced online harassment (Pew Center 2017), especially young adults and women, through social
media, online games, comments section and email. Trolling has become a global threat to human rights (Amnesty International 2018).

* The twofold push to make newsrooms more accessible to the public through various forms of “audience engagement” (Steensen, Ferrer-Conill, and Peters 2020) and to raise the visibility of journalists and their work in social media and legacy platforms has made journalists frequent targets of trolling.

* Frequent exposure on social media and legacy media turns journalists into salient examples of contemporary “known citizens” (Igo 2018), whose thoughts and lives can be tracked with relative ease by many actors – governments, corporations, and citizens. With more publicity comes higher risk of surveillance, invasion of privacy, and defamation. Like other public people, journalists are more prone to be targets of vicious attacks simply because they are prominent and easy to identify and contact. Personal and professional reputation is constantly on display and at risk for people like journalists for whom visibility is intrinsic to their jobs. In the porous, dynamic structured of mediated visibility in digital societies, reputation is a fluid, volatile good (Rosamond 2019). Just as they can display their work and ideas publicly, journalists are also more likely to be scrutinized by publics motivated by various reasons – accountability, curiosity, or spectacle. Furthermore, heightened visibility also facilitates digital vigilantism (Trottier 2017). Digital vigilantism refers to toxic actions such as harassment, naming and shaming, and doxing by citizens who want to retaliate against others.

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on Trolling Journalists and the Risks of Digital Publicity

Resilience to Online Censorship

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Luke Ford

Political Science professor Margaret E. Roberts writes in 2020:

* While the Internet has long been touted as a technology that is difficult to censor, regimes around the world have adopted a wide variety of censorship technologies and online propaganda strategies to try to control it. As a result, a rich debate has emerged as to whether the Internet solidifies or undermines autocratic rule. Some scholars have called attempts to control the Internet futile because the controls can often be easily circumvented (Diamond 2010). Others have a much more dire view of the ability of governments and powerful interests to manipulate the information environment and limit their own accountability…

* Internet activist John Gilmore once posited that the Internet was impervious to censorship because “[t]he Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”…a

* For those who are unaware that censorship exists and do not know what information might be censored, compensating for information manipulation is very difficult, particularly in online contexts, where censorship is masked by algorithms and the complexity of user interfaces.

* While many pundits predicted that the Internet would be difficult to censor, a wide variety of research has shown that government censorship efforts can have a huge impact on information access and—at times—political belief and action.

* These findings, combined with online experiments in democracies that show huge impacts of friction on the Internet, suggest that the costs of access to information can have large effects on consumption of information and belief about politics. Epstein & Robertson (2015) use lab and online experiments to show that small changes in the order of results presented by a search engine have a large influence on the voting intentions of participants. While the experimental setting makes it difficult to know the external validity of this experiment, this “search engine manipulation effect” (Epstein & Robertson 2015) suggests that government manipulation of search engine algorithms could have large effects on political behavior. King et al. (2017b) show that the coordinated coverage in national newspapers has large impacts on the distribution of information that is discussed in social media. Participation experiments in democracies, such as Facebook experiments (Bond et al. 2012, Jones et al. 2017), have shown that an online nudge to go out and vote can significantly increase the likelihood of participation. These studies suggest that actors with power over what information reaches Internet users, and how quickly, can potentially have a large impact on what users see, what they believe, and when they decide to participate.

* While fear-based censorship—meant to intimidate and deter—must be visible in order to be effective, more sophisticated forms of censorship that work through friction and flooding such as blocking of websites, reordering of search results, and covert information campaigns can exert their effects without users’ awareness (Roberts 2018). For this reason, information manipulation can easily go undetected, and users may not notice government influence on their information environment.

* Given that awareness of censorship can create more interest in censored material and can lead to backlash, governments have adapted their censorship strategies by only exerting partial control of the Internet through friction and flooding in an effort to hide their manipulation.

* It is well established in the political science literature that demand for political information is typically quite low. Downs (1957) calls citizens’ general lack of interest in politics “rational ignorance,” meaning that for the most part, people rationally should be ignorant of political issues because they are unlikely to be pivotal in those issues. Surveys have documented a very low level of political knowledge among average citizens in democracies (Converse 1964, Popkin 1994). Rational ignorance in politics may be even more likely in authoritarian contexts, where citizens have less control of the political environment than in democracies.

Even for politically interested citizens who are aware of censorship, the inability to know what is missing might make demand for circumvention low.

* Given low demand for political information, resilience to censorship may be stronger when censorship is applied not just to political information but also to entertainment. Zuckerman’s (2015) “cute cat theory of censorship” posits that while demand for political information is often low, Internet platforms that combine entertainment (like photos of cute cats) and politics may be more immune to censorship. This theory would predict general websites (such as YouTube, Facebook, and WhatsApp) that contain both entertainment and political information to be more resilient to censorship than specific websites that mostly offer political information. This argument is consistent with scholarship that shows that consumption of political information increases when it is paired with entertainment. For example, Baum (2002) shows that Americans are more likely to consume news about international politics when the news is paired with human interest stories. Pan & Roberts (2020) show that before the block of Wikipedia, mainland Chinese users largely sought out entertainment content on Wikipedia, but they ended up consuming political content because they were directed to it through the Wikipedia homepage.

Posted in Censorship | Comments Off on Resilience to Online Censorship

What is the future of free speech? Are there any positive trends? (1-15-21)

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Luke Ford

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-foreign-bitcoin-trader-capitol-rioters-20210115-7fml7ojgx5gdxaqvfblxdd4gn4-story.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jack-dorsey-has-second-thoughts-11610667168?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-common-carrier-solution-to-social-media-censorship-11610732343
https://nypost.com/2021/01/15/mexicos-president-vows-to-fight-social-media-censorship/
Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder, https://www.amazon.com/Life-After-Google-Blockchain-Economy-ebook/dp/B072NYKG2G/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1610744349&sr=1-1

Posted in America | Comments Off on What is the future of free speech? Are there any positive trends? (1-15-21)

Were The Capitol Hill Riots Charlottesville II? A Jason Kessler Interview (1-14-21)

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Luke interviews Jason Kessler about the Capitol Hill riots
1:30:00 Mike Enoch
1:35:00 Greg Johnson
1:47:00 Tim Pool: Facebook Has RESTRICTED My Page Effectively Shutting it Down, The Purge Is Real And Will Get WORSE, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_diG_7jQPMU
1:49:00 Amazon Empire STRIKES BACK! Lawyer Explains Response to Parler’s Lawsuit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB06JtDbtvU

Posted in America | Comments Off on Were The Capitol Hill Riots Charlottesville II? A Jason Kessler Interview (1-14-21)

David Friedrich Strauss – Father Of Unbelief (1-14-21)

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 RS not a fan of Gab
02:00 RS & Mike Pompeo on the threat of anti-semitism
04:00 Ali Alexander, Rep. Paul Gosar and the MAGA riot on Capitol Hill
26:40 Mark Brahmin, https://pages.vassar.edu/pharos/2019/02/22/an-anti-semitic-interpretation-of-the-saturnalia/
32:00 Red Elephants banned from Dlive
38:00 Sargon calls Nick Fuentes a White Supremacist
45:00 Sea of Faith 3 – Don Cuppit – Documentary : (David Friedrich Strauss, Albert Schweitzer), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWmGaV0g188
1:13:00 The sermons of Greg Johnson, https://chechar.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/greg-johnson/
1:24:00 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthold_Ephraim_Lessing
1:30:00 Trump Reconciles With Ex-Strategist Steve Bannon in Talks on Election, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-14/trump-reconciles-with-ex-strategist-bannon-in-talks-on-election
1:34:45 Large bitcoin payments to right-wing activists a month before Capitol riot linked to foreign account, https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-large-bitcoin-payments-to-rightwing-activists-a-month-before-capitol-riot-linked-to-foreign-account-181954668.html
1:46:10 Scholarly Skepticism: Strauss’s Life of Jesus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr7Ww_1Qlvs
2:09:00 Twitter Insider Records CEO Jack Dorsey Laying Out Roadmap for Future Political Censorship, https://www.projectveritas.com/news/exclusive-twitter-insider-records-ceo-jack-dorsey-laying-out-roadmap-for/
2:11:45 Scottsdale prosecutor says far-right streamer Tim ‘Baked Alaska’ Gionet violated release conditions by traveling to Capitol riot, https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/scottsdale/2021/01/13/scottsdale-prosecutor-says-far-right-streamer-tim-baked-alaska-gionet-violated-release-conditions/4150529001/
2:29:00 BLM activist arrested in connection to Capitol riots, https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-blm-activist-arrested-in-connection-to-capitol-riots
2:45:00 The Truth about Dr. Desmond Ford and Glacier View, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMjymQJazh4
Jacob Burckhardt, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Burckhardt
Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Martin_Leberecht_de_Wette
David Friedrich Strass, Father of Unbelief: An Intellectual Biography, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08GCW4HVZ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Strauss

Posted in America | Comments Off on David Friedrich Strauss – Father Of Unbelief (1-14-21)

The Capitol Hill Riots & Power In America (1-13-21)

Posted on January 13, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 House votes to impeach Trump
13:00 Babylonian Hebrew joins
35:20 Invoking Motive, Means & Opportunity Is Not A Strong Argument For The Presence Of Widespread Voter Fraud, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=135279
58:00 Theories of Power: Perceived Strategies for Gaining and Maintaining Power, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=136399
1:10:00 Elite parties
1:30:30 Dooovid joins to discuss Capitol Hill riot, https://twitter.com/RebDoooovid
1:32:00 Dooov says Charles Moscowitz is huge on Tiktok
2:14:00 Jack from Twitter on why he banned Donald Trump, https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690

Posted in America | Comments Off on The Capitol Hill Riots & Power In America (1-13-21)

Ann Coulter Was Right?

Posted on January 13, 2021 by Luke Ford

A friend says: Politics can only be interesting if there is a win here and there for both teams. Trump might have appeared to be a big win, but increasingly just look like a meaningless anomaly. Culturally the left is in turbo charged domination. It’s a blowout game, and I’m turning the channel. It’s over. To live in reality means accepting as normative whatever is offered. You can crack jokes or snark on twitter for a year or so but reality sets in.

Trump was delighted by the mob he’d unleashed on the Capitol, but according to sources, appalled by how badly dressed they were. He “expressed disgust on aesthetic grounds over how ‘low class’ his supporters looked,” one Trump adviser told New York magazine, adding, “He doesn’t like low-class things.”

Ann Coulter is spot on, and should not hold back in the slightest. She is still somewhat in the Overton window and disavowed his hucksterism long ago. He was as lazy and disingenuous as she claimed. Drudge looks like a big winner too, sized up Trump and ran away. Ann’s column is so biting, so accurate in my view. ‘The Dems despise the working class and Trump uses them.’ Luke a good question is, is better to be despised or used?

She seem inordinately fixated on Israel though. Seems like a non sequitur. Evangelicals wanted it, and Trump delivered for those voters.

Ann doesn’t like working class people either, or lower class people, no one who has money wants to hang out with them. I have the good sense to be a nihilist in that I don’t assume anyone is truly authentic, myself included.

Posted in Ann Coulter | Comments Off on Ann Coulter Was Right?

NYT: White Riot – How racism, grievance, resentment and the fear of diminished status came together to fuel violence and mayhem on Jan. 6.

Posted on January 13, 2021 by Luke Ford

Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times:

There is evidence that many non-college white Americans who have been undergoing what psychiatrists call “involuntary subordination” or “involuntary defeat” both resent and mourn their loss of centrality and what they perceive as their growing invisibility.

Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote by email:

They fear a loss of attention. A loss of validation. These are people who have always had racial privilege but have never had much else. Many feel passed over, ignored. Trump listened to them and spoke their language when few other politicians did. He felt their pain and was diabolical enough to encourage their tendency to racialize that pain. They fear becoming faceless again if a Democrat, or even a conventional Republican, were to take office.

Cherlin pointed to the assertion of a 67-year-old retired landscaper from North Carolina who joined the Trump loyalists on Jan. 6 on the steps of the Capitol: “We are here. See us! Notice us! Pay attention!”

White supremacy and frank racism are prime motivators, and they combined with other elements to fuel the insurrection: a groundswell of anger directed specifically at elites and an addictive lust for revenge against those they see as the agents of their disempowerment.

It is this admixture of factors that makes the insurgency that wrested control of the House and Senate so dangerous — and is likely to spark new forms of violence in the future. Each of the forces at work has helped drive millions of white voters to the right: working in tandem, they collectively provide the tinder for the destructive behavior we saw last week in the chambers of the United States Congress.

“It is very, very difficult for individuals and groups to come to terms with losing status and power,” Cameron Anderson, a professor at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, wrote by email. While most acute among those possessing high status and power, Anderson said,

People in general are sensitive to status threats and to any potential losses of social standing, and they respond to those threats with stress, anxiety, anger, and sometimes even violence.

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, agrees in large part with Anderson, describing the fury and disappointment contributing to the takeover of Congress as concentrated among whites who see their position in the social order on a downward path. In an email, Keltner wrote:

The population of U.S. Citizens who’ve lost the most power in the past 40 years, who aren’t competing well to get into college or get high paying jobs, whose marital prospects have dimmed, and who are outraged, are those I believe were most likely to be in on the attack.

When pressed to give up power, he added, “these types of individuals will resort to violence, and to refashioning history to suggest they did not lose.”

In a September 2020 paper, “Theories of power: Perceived strategies for gaining and maintaining power,” Keltner and Leanne ten Brinke, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that “lower class individuals experience greater vigilance to threat, relative to high status individuals, leading them to perceive greater hostility in their environment.”

This increased vigilance, Brinke and Keltner continue, creates

a bias such that relatively low socio-economic status individuals perceive the powerful as dominant and threatening — endorsing a coercive theory of power. Indeed, there is evidence that individuals of lower social class are more cynical than those occupying higher classes, and that this cynicism is directed toward out-group members — that is, those that occupy higher classes.

In other words, resentment toward successful white elites is in play here, as evidenced by the attack on Congress, an overwhelmingly white seat of power.

Before Trump, many of those who became his supporters suffered from what Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, describes as pervasive “unhappiness, stress and lack of hope” without a narrative to legitimate their condition:

When the jobs went away, families fell apart. There was no narrative other than the classic American dream that everyone who works hard can get ahead, and the implicit correlate was that those who fall behind and are on welfare are losers, lazy, and often minorities.

In a December 2020 Brookings Paper, Graham and Sergio Pinto, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, wrote that

Despair — and the associated mortality trends — is concentrated among the less-than-college educated and is much higher among whites than minorities. The trends are also geographically dispersed, with populations in racially and economically diverse urban and coastal places more optimistic and with lower premature mortality.

What, however, could prompt a mob — including not only members of the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Bois but also many seemingly ordinary Americans drawn to Trump — to break into the Capitol?

One possible answer: a mutated form of moral certitude based on the belief that one’s decline in social and economic status is the result of unfair, if not corrupt, decisions by others, especially by so-called elites.

In “The Social and Political Implications of Moral Conviction,” Linda J. Skitka and G. Scott Morgan, psychology professors at University of Illinois-Chicago and Drew University, wrote that “although moral conviction motivates any number of normatively positive behaviors (e.g., voting, political engagement), moral conviction appears to also have a potential dark side.”

Skitka and Morgan argued that:

The terrorist attacks on 9/11, the Weatherman bombings in protest of the Vietnam War, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, or the assassination of abortion providers, may be motivated by different ideological beliefs but nonetheless share a common theme: The people who did these things appear to be motivated by strong moral conviction. Although some argue that engaging in behaviors like these requires moral disengagement, we find instead that they require maximum moral engagement and justification.

Alan Page Fiske, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A., and Tage Shakti Rai, a research associate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, make a parallel argument in their book “Virtuous Violence,” in which they write that violence is:

considered to be the essence of evil. It is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do it because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.

“Most violence,” Fiske and Rai contend, “is morally motivated.”

A key factor working in concert to aggravate the anomie and disgruntlement in many members of Trump’s white working-class base is their inability to obtain a college education, a limitation that blocks access to higher paying jobs and lowers their supposed “value” in marriage markets.

In their paper “Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage From 1940 to 2003,” Christine R. Schwartz and Robert D. Mare, professors of sociology at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote that the “most striking” data in their research, “is the decline in odds that those with very low levels of education marry up.”

In the bottom ranks of educational achievement, they continued, trends in inequality are

consistent with the decline in the odds of marriage between high school dropouts and those with more education since the 1970s, a period over which the real wages of men in this education group declined.

Christopher Federico, a professor of political science and psychology at the University of Minnesota, described the key roles of education and employment opportunity in the right-wing mobilization of less-educated white men:

A major development since the end of the “Great Compression” of the 30 years or so after World War II, when there was less inequality and relatively greater job security, at least for white male workers, is that the differential rate of return on education and training is now much higher.

In this new world, Federico argues, “promises of broad-based economic security” were replaced by a job market where you can have dignity, but it must be earned through market or entrepreneurial success (as the Reagan/Thatcher center-right would have it) or the meritocratic attainment of professional status (as the center-left would have it). But obviously, these are not avenues available to all, simply because society has only so many positions for captains of industry and educated professionals.

The result, Federico notes, is that “group consciousness is likely to emerge on the basis of education and training” and when “those with less education see themselves as being culturally very different from an educated stratum of the population that is more socially liberal and cosmopolitan, then the sense of group conflict is deepened.”

…Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, put it this way in an email:

We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.

President Obama, Grofman wrote,

responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork.

The result, according to Grofman, was that “white less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”

At the same time, though, and here I will quote Grofman at length:

More religious and less well-educated whites see Donald Trump as one of their own despite his being so obviously a child of privilege. He defends America as a Christian nation. He defends English as our national language. He is unashamed in stating that the loyalty of any government should be to its own citizens — both in terms of how we should deal with noncitizens here and how our foreign policy should be based on the doctrine of “America First.”

He speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president. What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.

In the end, Grofman said,

Trying to explain the violence on the Hill by only talking about what the demonstrators believe is to miss the point. They are guilty, but they wouldn’t be there were it not for the Republican politicians and the Republican attorneys general, and most of all the president, who cynically exaggerate and lie and create fake conspiracy theories and demonize the opposition. It is the enablers of the mob who truly deserve the blame and the shame.

Posted in America | Comments Off on NYT: White Riot – How racism, grievance, resentment and the fear of diminished status came together to fuel violence and mayhem on Jan. 6.

Theories of Power: Perceived Strategies for Gaining and Maintaining Power

Posted on January 13, 2021 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights of a recent study noted in the New York Times today:

* What does it take to gain and maintain power? Aristotle believed that power was afforded to individuals that acted in virtuous ways that promote the greater good. Machiavelli, nearly 2,000 years later, argued to great effect that power could be taken through the use of manipulation, coercion, and strategic violence. With these historical perspectives as a conceptual foundation, we validate a 2-factor measure of theories of power (TOPS; Study 1), which captures lay theories of how power is gained and maintained among family members, at work, and in international politics (Study 2). We differentiate TOPS from other established measures of power, highlighting that these beliefs about power are conceptually distinct
from widely used measures of dominance and prestige, and uniquely predict social outcomes. Turning to social class, we find that participants who make upward social comparisons perceive themselves to be of lower class and endorse less collaborative and more coercive theories of power, relative to those who make downward comparisons and report themselves to be higher in the class hierarchy (Studies 3a and 3b). Building upon these findings, we identify theory of power endorsement as a correlate of interpersonal trust, and a mediator of how lower class individuals, who endorse less collaborative views of power, report less trust of institutions and individuals (Study 4). Theories of power provide a novel construct for understanding power dynamics at multiple levels of analysis.

* Influencing others is the crux of power. People rise to power to the extent that they influence others’ thoughts, emotions, actions, and well-being. The powerful—in interpersonal, organizational, and political arenas—regularly make decisions that impact the lives of others. How, then, do people gain and maintain power through influence?

As social theorists have grappled with the nature of power over the millennia, two contrasting theories have emerged. A first finds its origins in Aristotle, who defined the qualities of an ideal political leader in 350 B.C., emphasizing virtues such as courage, justice, and temperance. A second found its chief voice some 2,000 years later in Machiavelli, who countered in his influential book, The Prince, that power is found in force, fraud, manipulation, and strategic violence. Recent research and theorizing provide support for both perspectives. Acts of social coordination and collaboration in pursuit of the greater good do lead to increased social influence via freely conferred deference. However, dominance, force, threat, and manipulation can also lead to rises in power within groups of different kinds.

We define power as the capacity to influence other individuals’ states…

While power is commonly defined as influence rooted in the control over valuable resources, there is considerable evidence to suggest that influence can spring from many sources. Studies have highlighted identity-based sources of power, including wealth, knowledge, title, education, physical attributes, and social skills, to name a few. For example, power is distinct
from prestige—the esteem an individual receives from others, which is sometimes based on one’s occupation. However, prestige affords the opportunity to influence others by sharing thoughts, opinions, and advice. In a similar vein, power is differentiated from social class, the mixture of prestige of work, family wealth, and education, which combines into the objective and subjective sense of one’s status in society. Yet, the wealthy are often afforded social influence, either freely by others wishing to copy their path to success or more forcefully, via resource control. In short, gaining power—that is, social influence— can derive from a variety of facets of social identity.

… power is distinct from dominance, a set of interpersonal strategies by which the individual exerts coercive control over others. However, physically formidable men are often afforded power in cooperative groups. Divergent strategies to achieving power lie at the heart of writings by Aristotle and Machiavelli, who famously wrote of their theories about how power is gained and maintained.

…people’s theories about academic achievement—as essentialist or incremental—predict responses to failure and students’ grades in challenging courses (Dweck, 2006). Similarly, lay beliefs about emotions as changeable (or not) predict the use of different emotion regulation strategies…

Collaborative theory of power. Aristotle reasoned that, above all, virtuous actions are the surest pathway to power (Aristotle, 350 B.C./1962). The virtuous leader was likely to gain and maintain social influence through acts of temperance, courage, humility, and magnanimity. Once occupying a position of power, he believed that a person of virtue would bear in mind the interests of all, rather than resorting to the gratification of narrow self interest or catering to a privileged minority. This early reasoning has found support in social scientific studies, guided by the central claim that groups, acting in their own collective self-interest, grant power to individuals who act in ways that advance collective interests. In a review of who rises to power in schools, organizations, and military units, it proved to be the individual with a more collaborative mixture of traits; the individual who is enthusiastic toward others, focused on goals and tasks, and open to new ideas. That groups give power to individuals who advance the greater good through collaborative action is a social regularity in hunter gatherer societies.

In a review of studies of 48 such societies living in the conditions of our social evolution, Christopher Boehm (1993, p. 233) describes the individual who rises in power as follows: “generous, brave in combat, wise in making subsistence or military decisions, apt at resolving intragroup conflicts, a good speaker, fair, impartial, reliable, tactful, and morally upright,” and “strong and assertive” but “humble.”

We will call this the collaborative theory of power and note its resemblance to two recent theses about the acquisition of power. The first is prestige-based power. Rooted in evolutionary theorizing about social groups, Henrich and Gil-White (2001) proposed that power is based in social information transmission, such that prestige is freely given to individuals that possess superior knowledge or skill. Prestige-based power, like collaborative power, is freely conferred by subordinates. The original description of prestige-based power, as rooted in competence, does not emphasize social coordination, nor a concern for the welfare of subordinates and the greater good, which is central to the collaborative
theory of power. That said, the conceptualization of prestige-based power has evolved in recent years to include virtue as a component of this route to attaining social influence (e.g., Cheng & Tracy, 2014) and recent research suggests that virtue alone can provide a third pathway to social influence in social groups (Bai, Ho, & Yan, 2020).

We also note the similarity between a collaborative theory of power and the “guilt-prone leader.” The latter is based on the assumption that individuals with a strong sense of responsibility to others gain power These individuals do not grab power, but rather, are given power by others; they put the needs of others above their own and receive others’ respect in return… In this vein, a study of 161 employees in a large organization found that people rise in status to the extent that they are perceived as generous to others.

Thus, while contemporary conceptualizations of prestige-based power and guilt-prone leadership share virtuous characteristics with a collaborative theory of power, the former describe routes to achieving power. The collaborative theory of power, in contrast, refers to beliefs about power that favor social coordination and concern for the well-being of others, rather than one’s own pursuit, desire, or experience of power through these means.

Coercive theory of power. Machiavelli (1532/1961) was deeply hostile to Aristotle’s prescriptions for gaining power To Machiavelli, power was a resource to be grabbed—taken at will and ultimately without concern for others. He advised
aspiring rulers to feign convictions, often of a religious kind, that would appeal to the masses and to cripple rivals with strategic violence. His views are summarized in one well-known Machiavellianism; that it is better to be feared than loved. Although he conceded that it might be useful to appear virtuous, he believed that to be genuinely kind would be unwise. And to maintain power, he advocated the use of force, fraud, manipulation, and strategic violence (Machiavelli, 1532/1961). Gaining power, this theory holds, requires coercion.

This coercive theory of power overlaps in important ways with the dominance-based route to power put forward by Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Kingstone, and Henrich (2013) and others (Buss & Duntley, 2006). This route to power is based in evoking fear and the use or threat of force. Through intimidation and coercion, individuals gain influence over others. Building on the dominancebase route to power, the coercive theory of power emphasizes the amoral nature of Machiavelli’s strategy. Central to this theory of power is the utmost importance of gaining and maintaining the sole position of power in a group and the use of whatever tactics are necessary to do so.

In sum, while the dominance-based route to power overlaps conceptually with the coercive theory of power, the former describes actions that can be taken to achieve power. The coercive theory of power, in contrast, refers to beliefs about how power is gained and maintained. In short, while much empirical attention has been paid to studying power as a psychological state and to delineating the various actions that can cultivate power, theories of power are novel in that they pertain to cognitions about power that people develop and adhere to, perhaps at times independent of actions taken to gain power.

Moral foundations. Although Aristotle (350 B.C./1962) championed the idea that gaining and maintaining power is rooted in the pursuit of social good through moral action, Machiavelli (1532/1961) described power and morality as largely independent. Machiavelli advocated a pragmatic approach to moral behavior; that appearing virtuous can be valuable, but that deception, manipulation, and strategic violence should be deployed when necessary, as the context demands. Consistent with these early perspectives on power, the moral underpinnings of collaborative and coercive theories are likely to diverge significantly. Specifically, we expect that endorsing a collaborative theory of power will be positively associated with each of the five moral foundations: reducing harm, pursing fairness, in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity (Haidt & Graham, 2007). In light of Machiavelli’s pragmatic approach to morality, we did not expect coercive theories of power to covary with moral foundations, with the exception of authority, which concerns the maintenance of strict hierarchies.

Moral sentiments. Certain emotions such as compassion, awe, and gratitude are moral as they promote prosocial actions
including altruism, cooperation, the sharing of resources, and social coordination. These actions are critical components of collaborative power and, consistent with our predictions about moral foundation endorsement, we expect that the experience of moral emotions will be associated with collaborative, but not coercive theories of power. Relatedly, Melwani, Mueller, and Overbeck (2012) found that individuals who expressed compassion and contempt were both ascribed leadership
qualities. To the extent that compassionate individuals are enacting collaborative theories of power and contemptuous individuals are enacting coercive theories of power, the dispositional experience and expression of these sentiments may be part of dual routes to achieving social influence. Accordingly, we predicted that positive emotions would correlate positively with collaborative beliefs and negatively with coercive beliefs about power.

Personality. The Dark Triad of personality traits— comprised of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism—is often attributed to a compromised or dysfunctional sense of morality.. Specifically, Machiavellianism is characterized by manipulation and cynicism, psychopathy by callousness and aggression, and narcissism by vanity and grandiosity… Generally speaking, individuals with these traits tend to privilege their own interests strongly over others and act accordingly… These traits are also reflected in their moral cognitions and sentiments. For example, psychopathic personality traits are characterized by a diminished capacity to experience empathy (Hare, 2006), and are associated with decreased endorsement of all moral foundations, with the exception of authority (Glenn et al., 2009). Psychopathic individuals also cheat, lie, and
engage in instrumental aggression more than individuals without these traits… In management positions, individuals with Dark Triad traits tend to bully subordinates, create social divisions, and misbehave in the workplace. These dominance-based actions may be complimented by a coercive theory of power. Indeed, psychopathic personality traits are associated with a competitive worldview, including the overperception of conflict in negotiation scenarios and the biased attribution of negative personality traits to others. Consistent with these cognitions, we expect that psychopathy, and the related traits of Machiavellianism and narcissism (Paulhus & Williams, 2002), will be positively associated with coercive and negatively associated with collaborative theory of power endorsement.

* Across measures, it is clear that individuals of lower social class backgrounds enjoy less power in the world… A recent study Belmi and Laurin (2016) suggests that theories of power may in part be at play in this dynamic: Lower class individuals report being more reluctant to “play politics”— that is, enact Machiavelli’s theory of power. Building on the
findings of Belmi and Laurin (2016), we suggest that salient social experiences can predict theory of power endorsement. Social class, or socioeconomic status (SES), is a cultural lens through which people see and relate to their social world.

Lower class individuals experience greater vigilance to threat, relative to high status individuals, leading them to perceive greater hostility in their environment. Research…finds that low SES individuals experience more hostile emotional reactions to ambiguous social scenarios, and when being teased by a friend. This increased threat vigilance may create a bias such that relatively low SES individuals perceive the powerful as dominant and threatening— endorsing a coercive theory of power.1 Indeed, there is evidence that individuals of lower social class are more cynical than those
occupying higher classes…and that this cynicism is directed toward out-group members—that is, those that occupy higher classes…

The notion that powerful people are likely to engage in manipulation is central to the coercive theory of power, and accordingly, would suggest that lower class individuals would hold a more coercive and less collaborative theory of power.

This latter prediction also lies at the intersection of motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990), which suggests that people will engage in biased reasoning to maintain a positive self-image, and social dominance theories, which suggest that the powerful will harbor more hierarchy legitimizing beliefs while the powerless will harbor more delegitimizing beliefs (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Specifically, we predict that higher class individuals and those with a greater sense of power will be motivated to think positively of their position—as a station achieved by beneficent means, deserved, and legitimate. In contrast, lower class individuals and those who feel relatively powerless are likely to see the powerful and those occupying higher classes as having achieved their position illegitimately, through fear and manipulation. That is, higher class and powerful individuals are likely to hold Aristotelian beliefs about power, while lower class and powerless individuals will be more aligned with the views of Machiavelli. Indeed, it is among the lower class and relatively powerless that beliefs about how power is and ought to be achieved are likely to diverge, resulting in a loss of trust in the powerful.

* Trust is defined as the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of others—romantic partners, political leaders, social institutions—with the expectation that the trusted party will act in ways that benefit the trustee… Human societies are built on cooperation (Ostrom, 2000), with trust being the social glue that keeps us embedded in a social network of people we depend on, seek counsel from, and trade value with (Kramer, 1999). Americans’ trust in powerful institutions, including the government, remain near record lows (Pew Research Center, 2019). Historical patterns of trust in institutions are linked to poverty rates (Twenge, Campbell, & Carter, 2012) and Elgar (2010) found that income inequality was negatively associated with interpersonal trust across 33 different countries. Similarly, a
large-scale study using the World Values Survey found that interpersonal trust was positively associated with income and education level (Alesina & La Ferrara, 2002). Lower class individuals, then, trust others less. What is less well understood are possible mediators of the relation between class and trust. We propose that one is theories of power. Indeed, one’s beliefs about power—as a collaborative or coercive endeavor—reflect perceptions about how powerful individuals and institutions are likely to act and whether those actions are guided by moral principles that favor collaboration or coercion in the pursuit of self-interest. Previously cited evidence that low SES individuals distrust politicians who present themselves as interpersonally warm is consistent with the notion that the relationship between social class and trust is mediated by the belief that power is attained through manipulation and deceit (Tan & Kraus, 2018). That is, we expect that lower class individuals will endorse more coercive and less collaborative theories of
power, leading to decreased trust.

* feeling powerful was associated with greater collaborative theory of power endorsement and less coercive theory of power endorsement. In other words, people who feel powerful tend to believe that power is achieved and maintained through collaborative tendencies, whereas the relatively powerless believe that power is gained and maintained by dominating, threatening, and coercing others (see Table 3). The same pattern of findings occurs with respect to one’s social class.
Subjective SES was positively associated with both dominance and prestige, yet we found that subjective SES was positively
correlated with collaborative, and negatively correlated with coercive, beliefs about power.

Although these findings suggest that one’s sense of power is associated with more collaborative and less coercive theories on power, findings also indicate that people generally endorse the beliefs about power that are consistent with their personal experience of dominance- or prestige-based power. That is, coercive beliefs about power were positively associated with feelings of dominance and negatively associated with feelings of prestige while collaborative beliefs about power were positively associated with feelings of prestige and negatively associated with feelings of dominance.

* Beliefs about how power is gained and maintained were also associated with dispositional emotional experience. Consistent
with the literature linking subjective well-being with concern for others, holding a collaborative theory of power was associated with the experience of all positive emotions measured by the DPES (dispositional positive emotions scale) (Shiota et al., 2006); coercive beliefs about power were related to the experience of fewer of these emotions…

* psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits were positively associated with coercive theories of power, and negatively associated with collaborative theories. Narcissism was also positively associated with coercive theories of power, but unrelated to collaborative theories (see Table 6). Coercive theories of power were also more strongly held by less agreeable, and less conscientious individuals, whereas collaborative theories of power were held by more agreeable, more conscientious, and more extraverted individuals.

* …people who feel powerful tend to believe that power is achieved and maintained through collaborative tendencies, whereas the relatively powerless believe that power is gained and maintained by dominating, threatening, and coercing others (see Table 3). The same pattern of findings occurs with respect to one’s social class. Subjective SES (socio-economic status) was positively associated with both dominance and prestige, yet we found that subjective SES was positively correlated with collaborative, and negatively correlated with coercive, beliefs about power. Although these findings suggest that one’s sense of power is associated with more collaborative and less coercive theories on power, findings also indicate that people generally endorse the beliefs about power that are consistent with their personal experience of dominance- or prestige-based power. That is, coercive beliefs about power were positively associated with feelings of dominance and negatively associated with feelings of prestige while collaborative beliefs about power were positively associated with feelings of prestige and negatively associated with feelings of dominance.

* people who held collaborative theories of power also reported a greater internal locus of control, a weaker social dominance orientation, and both dominance and respect/admiration related achievement motivations (Cassidy & Lynn, 1989). There was also a small, but significant, positive correlation between collaborative theories of power and right-wing authoritarianism beliefs (Aletmeyer, 1996). In the context of findings that relatively high SES and powerful individuals endorse collaborative theories of power, it may be these same individuals who endorse the hierarchy-legitimizing beliefs captured by the RWA scale. People who endorsed a more coercive theory of power also reported a greater external locus of control and were more likely to endorse a social dominance orientation and modern sexist beliefs…

* Consistent with Aristotle’s (350 B.C./1962) belief that gaining and maintaining power is rooted in the pursuit of social good through moral action, we found that collaborative theories of power were positively associated with the endorsement
of all five moral foundations, measured by the MFQ20: authority, fairness, harm, in-group, and purity.

* One’s sense of power was positively associated with feeling greater dominance and prestige. However, feeling powerful
was associated with greater collaborative theory of power endorsement, and less coercive theory of power endorsement…

* one’s subjective SES decreases when people compare themselves upward to higher status individuals, leading to perceptions of unfairness, hostility, and aggression. Similarly, social dominance theories would suggest that individuals occupying a lower class position will hold hierarchy delegitimizing beliefs while higher class individuals will perceive their position— and the means used to achieve it—in a positive, legitimizing light. Consistent with the correlations reported in Study 1, and H4, we expected that making upward (vs. downward) social comparisons would decrease participants’ subjective experience of social class, decrease collaborative, and increase coercive beliefs about power.

* collaborative theories of power were positively associated with interpersonal trust, while coercive theories of power were negatively associated with interpersonal trust (see Table 8). Interpersonal trust was also positively associated with
feelings of power and social class, but unrelated to feelings of dominance and prestige.

* For centuries, political scholars have theorized about how to gain and maintain power, with two opposing accounts first established in the writings of Aristotle (350 B.C./1962) and Machiavelli (1532/1961). The findings presented here suggest that these theories live, not only in historical texts, but in the minds of ordinary citizens. Consistent with Aristotle’s writing, the collaborative theory of power presupposes that rising in hierarchies is rooted in human virtues, social coordination, and concern for the greater good. In contrast, coercive theories of power hold that power is to be found in threat, force, and dominance over others.

* Given that lower social class leads to a more coercive and less collaborative view of power, it is perhaps unsurprising that lower social class is also associated with distrust of others. Specifically, individuals of a lower social class report less trust in powerful individuals and institutions (Alesina & La Ferrara, 2002; Twenge et al., 2014), and theories of power offer a novel account of this relationship. We find that coercive theory of power endorsement was associated with decreased trust in others, and collaborative theory of power endorsement trust—increased trust… Further, we find that individuals of lower social class hold less collaborative theories of power and this mediates their reduced trust. Alternatively stated, individuals of higher social class hold more collaborative theories of power and trust more.

* feeling dominance and prestige—while both positively associated with power— have divergent effects on trust, and that
theories of power that mediate these effects. Specifically, we find that feelings of prestige were positively associated with trust, via collaborative theories of power. However, feelings of dominance were negatively associated with trust, via coercive theories of power.

* time and context may play a role in theory of power endorsement; Machiavelli (1532/1961) proposed his formula for gaining and maintaining power in a particularly turbulent time, characterized by war and overthrown, short-lived governments. Conflict also appears to influence more modern preferences for leadership; participants preferred more masculine faces in leadership judgments during simulated wartime versus peacetime contexts (Re et al., 2013). As such, theories of power may become increasingly coercive when faced with real or perceived threats.

* This possibility, that lower status individuals assume power is to be attained through coercive strategies, is echoed also in the recent political past. Donald Trump’s coercive approach to gaining power in the 2016 Presidential Election was favored primarily by low SES voters, while high status individuals— even Republicans— denounced his tactics and candidacy (Graham, 2016; Silver, 2016). Moreover, Donald Trump often touted that he would “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC—presumably, playing on the perception of these same voters that powerful individuals in government were selfish, corrupt, and dishonest (Overby, 2017). Taken together, recent empirical findings and voting trends suggest that low (vs. high) status individuals will endorse a more coercive, and less collaborative, theory of power.

Posted in Power | Comments Off on Theories of Power: Perceived Strategies for Gaining and Maintaining Power