Authoritarian Impulses Research Articles

U.S. against the world: Authoritarianism among American public servants

AbstractWhat is the prevalence of authoritarianism among public servants in the United States, and what are its resulting consequences? Several underlying psychological traits are associated with both authoritarianism and a desire to work in the public sector, such as an aversion to ambiguity and a preference for order and security. Scholarship also suggests that those with high authoritarian attributes may see the world through an ‘us versus them’ prism; in this case, the ‘them’ may be represented by other countries. Therefore, it is hypothesised that those with higher authoritarian attributes are more likely to work in the public sector and that public servants with higher authoritarian attributes are more likely to be sensitive to potential threats to the country. Using six surveys that cover a 20‐year period from the American National Elections Study, both hypotheses are supported. Authoritarian attributes are associated with an increased likelihood of government employment. Additionally, authoritarian public servants tend to support government wiretapping and express greater concern about terrorism. The presence of authoritarianism among public sector employees has implications for a range of governance issues, which makes it important to understand where and to what degree it is prevalent.Points for practitioners More attention should be devoted to the division and prevalence of authoritarian attributes within public servants . Checks and oversight mechanisms should be implemented for public sector employees in sensitive areas to help counterbalance potential authoritarian impulses. Organisational cultures that value openness, evidence‐based policymaking, and tolerance for dissenting viewpoints should be fostered as a counterweight to authoritarian preferences for conformity.

Democracy and Kinship in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

This article argues that Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind provides generative openings for young people to imagine egalitarian political relations with non-human animals. At the same time, the film also reproduces the all-too-common image of the young monarch who almost single-handedly saves their people from destruction: an autocratic and authoritarian impulse that runs contrary to what a truly ecological democracy might look like. Nevertheless, I propose that educators might still use Nausicaä to help young people think through the politics of climate-minded media.

Controlling the Past to Control the Future: Christian Nationalism and Mandatory Patriotic Education in Public Schools

AbstractRecent debates about whether educators should teach America's racist history have sparked activism and legislation to ensure students are taught American history in such a way that promotes “patriotism,” amplifying cherished national myths, emphasizing American exceptionalism, and erasing negative historical facts. Building on insights from both social dominance theory and Christian nationalism research, we propose Christian nationalism combines legitimizing myths that whitewash America's past with authoritarian impulses and thus seeks to enforce “patriotic” content in public school classrooms. We also theorize this connection varies across racial, partisan, and ideological identities. Data from a nationally‐representative survey of Americans affirm Christian nationalism is by far the leading predictor Americans believe “We should require public school teachers to teach history in a way that promotes patriotism.” This association is consistent across race (possibly due to divergent meanings of both “Christian nationalism” and “patriotism” across groups), but varies by partisanship and ideological identity for whites. Specifically, Christian nationalism brings whites who identify with the ideological and political left into complete alignment with their conservative counterparts who are already more likely to support mandatory patriotic education. Our findings provide critical context for ongoing battles over public‐school curricula and education's role in perpetuating social privilege.

The psychological causes and societal consequences of authoritarianism.

Over the past two decades, citizens' political rights and civil liberties have declined globally. Psychological science can play an instrumental role in both explaining and combating the authoritarian impulses that underlie these attacks on personal autonomy. In this Review, we describe the psychological processes and situational factors that foster authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population. First, we summarize the dual process motivational model of ideology and prejudice, which suggests that viewing the world as a dangerous, but not necessarily competitive, place plants the psychological seeds of authoritarianism. Next, we discuss the evolutionary, genetic, personality and developmental antecedents to authoritarianism and explain how contextual threats to safety and security activate authoritarian predispositions. After examining the harmful consequences of authoritarianism for intergroup relations and broader societal attitudes, we discuss the need to expand the ideological boundaries of authoritarianism and encourage future research to investigate both right-wing and left-wing variants of authoritarianism.

Feminists Against Authoritarianism

Feminists Against Authoritarianism Meaghan Winter (bio) Last summer, soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Kansans turned out in record numbers to reject a ballot amendment that would have stripped the right to abortion from the state's constitution. The overwhelming "no" vote—59 to 41 percent—was followed by similarly promising results in the midterm elections. In November, voters in Michigan, California, and Vermont affirmed the right to legal abortion, and Kentuckians and Montanans rejected anti-abortion amendments. Support for abortion rights helped Democrats win up and down the ballot. Across the country, Americans asserted what advocates have known for years: if voters could decide, abortion would be legal. These victories have been much celebrated—and for good reason. The amendments that enshrined legal abortion are helping women and pregnant people access lifesaving healthcare. They also demonstrate that Democrats can loudly endorse abortion rights and win. The unequivocal results from Kansas, Michigan, and Kentucky should theoretically offer cautionary tales for anti-abortion politicians: you'd think it would be difficult for an elected official to criminalize abortion and keep his seat. But the way we lost Roe illustrates the limits of such wins. Back in 2011, Mississippi voters resoundingly—58 to 42 percent—rejected a state-wide ballot amendment that would have defined personhood from the moment of conception. But the Republican legislature kept discussing bills designed to ban abortion and passing laws that made it more difficult for physicians to perform the procedure. In 2018, the state legislature passed a law banning abortion after fifteen weeks. Even though lower courts uniformly decided that the ban was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court took the case, and in June last year, the new conservative majority upheld the Mississippi law and overturned Roe. Three days later, the Mississippi attorney general certified the state's trigger law, banning abortion in the state. The implications are clear: minority rule is a major obstacle to ensuring abortion rights. [End Page 49] As Lisa Corrigan, an expert on social movements and Professor of Communication and Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Arkansas, said last year, "There are no minority rights when the minority rules. Restrictions on voting rights and erosion of freedom of speech are essential to state rule. . . . The political minority is where the authoritarian impulses find expression." In other words, when officials can act without public approval, they can further disenfranchise people who already have less power, including women and Black voters. Many Republican state lawmakers across the country are embracing openly undemocratic rhetoric and policy, including endorsing voter suppression laws. And since the 1990s, Republican operatives have become more strategic about gerrymandering political maps. These strategies, which they accelerated in 2010 and 2020 (pivotal redistricting years), have given white, rural voters and their chosen lawmakers disproportionate power in Congress and state legislatures, incentivizing Republican leadership in states like Mississippi to favor fringe partisans when they set their agendas. In states such as Florida and Ohio, it is now functionally impossible for voters to swing control of the state legislature from Republicans, at least in the near future. Meanwhile, in November, Democrats lost control of the House—and any possibility of codifying Roe in Congress—by seven seats, after Florida drew maps that enabled Republicans to pick up four new congressional seats and the Supreme Court blocked orders from lower courts to force Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana to draw new majority-Black districts to satisfy the Voting Rights Act. At the same time, the Republican Party (with the assistance of the Federalist Society) has filled the federal judiciary and Supreme Court with unelected ideologues who hold lifetime appointments. Unless national Democratic leaders make dramatic changes to the Court and its authority, including expanding the number of justices, those judges are poised to spend decades setting national precedents by upholding laws enacted by semi-autocratic state governments. With these problems in mind, I want to highlight another ballot amendment as a cause for hope. In 2018, Michigan voters approved an initiative that reformed the redistricting process so that citizens—not political officials and their operatives—controlled the map-drawing process. Previously, Michigan was one of the most gerrymandered states...

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Between a rock and a hard place: academic freedom in globalising Chinese universities

ABSTRACT This article examines academic freedom in China amid the tensions within a marketised global political economy of knowledge production. Joining the global competition for hegemony in the ‘knowledge economy’, the Chinese authorities signalled an acceptance of the ‘rules of the game’, even though these have the potential to undermine domestic political control. Global (as opposed to national) rankings of universities were actually initiated in China, and Chinese universities are competing for status. Likewise, China has created space for marketised higher education institutions and increasingly collaborates with global commercial publishing platforms, while academics there are under growing pressure to publish in globally ranked journals. The dynamic authoritarianism pursued under Xi Jinping has exacerbated the tensions inherent in these differing imperatives. The Xi era has witnessed declines in university autonomy; growing content-related restrictions in teaching, research and publishing including extending these to global firms; and increased distrust of research collaborations with ‘foreigners’. We focus here on a central support for academic freedom: institutional and individual autonomy, showing how threats to autonomy in Chinese universities are related to two different types of authoritarianism: party control and managerialism. We also point to areas of tension between internationalisation of Chinese higher education and authoritarian impulses.

“To Believe in an Image (Again)”

Abstract In screen studies and photography studies, the name of the acclaimed film theorist and critic André Bazin is frequently invoked by scholars seeking to defend the import of analogue media on ontological grounds by citing photography's privileged connection to the real. This article seeks to unsettle Bazin's reputation as the patron saint of analogue recording by exploring the ontological implications of the concept of sense in Bazin's writings on neorealism. Placing Bazin's writings into dialogue with a selection of critiques that find the digital image to be lacking in historicity, negativity, and presence, and flag its potentially authoritarian impulses, this essay seeks to reframe Bazin's ontological project as a question of cinema's sense (rather than its essence) to mobilize a different set of conclusions that may in fact prove to restore faith in the digital image and its rapport with the real. By maintaining that what is often treated as a purely technological problem also harbors aesthetics implications, this article confronts the manifest skepticism that has pervaded the discourse around the digital since the 1990s, seeking an alternative outlook in Jean-Luc Nancy's work on sense, an ontological concept that evidences the political potentials (or potential politics) of Bazin's predilection for images, which are said to ameliorate our love for reality by transmitting the excessive sense of the world in its ambiguity, creativity, and unpredictability.

Evading Secret Police: Counterintelligence Vulnerabilities in Authoritarian States

The authoritarian impulse has characterized human governance through most of recorded history, and popular resistance to the same has waxed and waned with the intellectual currents and conditions of the day. There is little in the open literature, however, that considers the common counterintelligence vulnerabilities of contemporary authoritarian states. Growing out of the traditional authoritarianisms, our century is seeing the emergence of a modern authoritarianism characterized by technology-infused surveillance states whose new vulnerabilities are now emerging.

‘Unlocking Us’: Analyzing the US election and its aftermath

The American presidential election of 2020 ended in the early hours of Thursday 7 January 2021, when the US Congress counted and certified the ballots of the Electoral College in the aftermath of a violent, Trump-supporting mob breaching the US Capitol. The spectacle of this assault may be analyzed for years to come, yet it is immediately clear that it was the result of authoritarian impulses on the part of the defeated president. Critical Leadership Studies has concerned itself with the ‘problematization’ of leadership theory, often examining distributions of power both within society and within the discipline itself. This article takes its title from Brené Brown’s podcast, ‘Unlocking Us’, torqueing it in an effort to understand these events and their causes as a group dynamic that manifested between Trump and his supporters. I also make the argument that the anxiety fomented and falsely contained by Trump has its deeper origins in what Kuhn labeled ‘paradigm shifts’. To deconstruct the kind of leadership that took place in the run-up to and the aftermath of the 2020 election—darkly charismatic, authoritarian, and cultish—I employ three lenses of analysis: paradigm shifts as progenitors of crisis; ‘basic assumption’ patterns of work avoidance in groups; and ‘holding environments’ as the imposition of salutary boundaries that foster growth. In combination, these three lenses offer an interpretation of recent events in America that enhances the dialectical approach proposed by Critical Leadership Theory.

Save the Economy, Liberty, and Yourself: Christian Nationalism and Americans’ Views on Government COVID-19 Restrictions

During the COVID-19 pandemic, state and local governments implemented lockdown restrictions that were tremendously polarizing. Those on the cultural and political left supported restrictions hoping to protect the vulnerable, while those on the cultural and political right challenged restrictions citing threats to the economy and liberty. We theorize that libertarian and authoritarian impulses within Christian nationalism undergirded much of the resistance to government restrictions. Analyzing national panel data collected before and during the pandemic, we find Christian nationalism is either the first or second strongest predictor that Americans prioritize the economy and liberty and deprioritize the vulnerable when asked about government restrictions. Religiosity works in the opposite direction, however. Findings underscore the centrality of Christian nationalism as an ideological driver of far-right discourse shaping COVID-19 responses.

Subtle Connections: Pandemic and the Authoritarian Impulse

The current crisis is setting ominous precedents for would-be authoritarians, but it does not appear to be a game changer in the tussle between democratic and authoritarian regimes.

The First Amendment in the Trump Era

This book examines challenges to the First Amendment during the Trump Era. The Trump Era is characterized first and foremost by a president who has publicly challenged First Amendment free speech and press principles, norms, and rights. Candidate and now President Trump has declared “war” on the institutional press, publicly condemned individual protesters, blocked Twitter critics, made derogatory comments about race and gender, and exhibited a general intolerance of criticism and dissent. These events have transpired in an era also characterized by a diminished institutional press, mass digitization of speech, generational uncertainty about the benefits of freedom of speech, deepening social and cultural cleavages, the rise of intense and negative partisanship, and the proliferation of hateful expression. Together, these conditions pose serious threats to our First Amendment traditions concerning freedom of press and speech. In particular, they pose a distinctive threat to the creation and preservation of a culture of dissent, without which democracy itself is imperiled. Although some of the era’s conditions and challenges are new, many of the First Amendment concerns they raise are not. The book thus looks to historical events to highlight both what is unique about the Trump Era and what is historically familiar. In terms of rebuffing authoritarian impulses and resisting pressures to conform, the lessons of the past point the way forward.

“The Period After 1989”

This guest column amounts to a conversation between two of the most crucial Soviet bloc dissidents about developments since the 1989 overthrow of communismin their part of the world. They agree that a “creeping coup d’état” is underway in which not only the government administrations of their countries have changed but also their systems of governance—and changed for the worse. “It is not,” they agree, “what the democratic opposition spent twenty-five years fighting for.” Their apprehension is that, under new forms, the old authoritarian impulses are returning to East-Central Europe as well as to Russia.

Guest Editor's Introduction: Toward an Archaeogenealogy of Post-truth

Guest Editor's Introduction: Toward an Archaeogenealogy of Post-truth

Justice Ngcobo’s Rich Legacy at the Intersection of Federalism and Democracy

 This article aims to make a connection between the Tongoane judgment, which deals with ‘tagging’ legislation, and Justice Ngcobo’s innovative thinking in the Matatiele Municipality cases, which are about the demarcation of provincial boundaries. These cases are bound together by Justice Ngcobo’s powerful commitment to democracy at the sub-national level. The judgments build accountability at grassroots level and constrain authoritarian impulses. This article examines the political issues behind provincial demarcation disputes, including ethnic impulses. It argues that current democratic concepts in South African Constitutional law can never meet the popular sovereignty, self-determinative type of claim of communities who wish to determine their own futures in boundary disputes. These disputes raise specific democratic problems that need to be named, seen for what they are and theorised on their own terms.Â

Swift and History: Politics and the English Past. Ashley Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. x+282.

Marshall is equally attentive to other Swift scholars. One instance of this is when she reappraises Swift’s abandoned historical project, “Reigns” (written ca. 1700; published 1768), which was spurred by Sir William Temple’s An Introduction to the History of England (1694), but which “reflect[s] an authoritarian impulse too easily obscured by defining Swift’s work as a continuation of Temple’s Introduction” (71). Here she revises influential versions of the Temple-Swift relationship, taking A. C. Elias and Irvin Ehrenpreis to task for their “partly imaginary” versions of it: Swift “made relatively few remarks on his erstwhile patron in later years, which taken together suggest neither bitter traumatization nor veneration” (54). Convincingly dissolving “largely chimerical” biographical assumptions, and finding the idea of Sir William’s influence “at best a distraction” (from her own topic, at least), Marshall models probing, thorough, confident scholarship (55).

Cultural Rhetoric and Social Practice in the Search for Social Justice in Thailand

A Bangkok community that has successfully warded off the threat of collective eviction for over 20 years, Pom Mahakan – located in the symbolically dense historic old dynastic city, next to the wall associated with the latter's foundation – has aimed at a plan of accommodation between housing rights and historic conservation that deserves serious consideration as a model for emulation. Yet the community still struggles to stay on-site; its currently dubious legal status, resulting from an ill-advised acceptance of an eminent domain order on which the community subsequently reneged on the grounds of inadequate compensation, may typify other such cases, and this suggests an urgent need for legal reform so that the authorities can ratify the community's plan and enable other communities to follow its lead. This article thus explores the wider implications of the Pom Mahakan case for social justice as well as heritage conservation in and beyond the Thai polity, taking particular account of the tension between egalitarian and authoritarian impulses that continues to characterize this nation-state and especially its political and bureaucratic life.

Eroticism and Justice: Harold Pinter’s Screenplay of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers

A careful analysis of Harold Pinter’s screenplays, notably those written in the 1980s and early 1990s, renders an illustration of how the artist’s cinematic projects supplemented, and often heightened, the focus of his dramatic output, his resolute exploration of the workings of power, love and destruction at various levels of social interaction and bold revision of received values. It seems, however, that few of the scripts did so in such a subtle yet effective manner as Pinter’s intriguing fusion of the erotic, violence and ethical concerns in the film The Comfort of Strangers (1990), directed by Paul Schrader and based on Ian McEwan’s 1981 novel of the same name. The article centres upon Pinter’s creative adaptation of McEwan’s deeply allusive and disquieting text probing, amongst others, the intricacies and tensions of gender relations and sexual intimacy. It examines the screenplay—regarded by many critics as not merely an adaptation of the novel but another, very powerful work of art—addressing Pinter’s method as an adapter and highlighting the artist’s imaginative attempts at fostering a better appreciation of the connections between authoritarian impulses, love and justice. Similarly to a number of other Pinter filmscripts and plays of the 1980s and 1990s, the erotic and the lethal alarmingly intersect in this screenplay where the ostensibly innocent—an unmarried English couple on a holiday in Venice, who are manipulated, victimized and, ultimately, destroyed—are subtly depicted as partly complicit in their own fates.

Lu Xun's revolution: writing in a time of violence

Widely recognized as modern China's preeminent man of letters, Lu Xun (1881--1936) is revered as voice of a nation's conscience, a writer comparable to Shakespeare and Tolstoy in stature and influence. Gloria Davies's portrait now gives readers a better sense of this influential author by situating man Mao Zedong hailed as the sage of modern in his turbulent time and place. In Davies's vivid rendering, we encounter a writer passionately engaged with heady arguments and intrigues of a country on eve of revolution. She traces political tensions in Lu Xun's works which reflect larger conflict in modern Chinese thought between egalitarian and authoritarian impulses. During last phase of Lu Xun's career, so-called years on left, we see how fiercely he defended a literature in which people would speak for themselves, and we come to understand why Lu Xun continues to inspire debates shaping China today. Although Lu Xun was never a Communist, his legacy was fully enlisted to support Party in decades following his death. Far from apologist of political violence portrayed by Maoist interpreters, however, Lu Xun emerges here as an energetic opponent of despotism, a humanist for whom empathy, not ideological zeal, was key to achieving revolutionary ends. Limned with precision and insight, Lu Xun's Revolution is a major contribution to ongoing reappraisal of this foundational figure.