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Re:Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab by TheOtherHobbes on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @09:35AM (#25928716)
I don't think the horseshoe theory works. The critical factor is authoritarianism. Which is a grown-up word for bullying and narcissism.

Authoritarians are invariably toxic damaged people who are full of rage and are looking for a target to make themselves feel better.

Sometimes they end up on the left. Sometimes they end up on the right. Sometimes they end up in management or venture capital.

Same issues, same dynamic, different context.

The difference is authoritarians on the right are more likely to use physical violence. "Cultural" authoritarians are more likely to use social exclusion - brigading on social media, getting people fired, and so on.

The key point is that the presenting issue is irrelevant. The social dynamic and mode of relationship - angry tribalism used to justify violence without any sense of context - is the real tell.

Re:Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab by cercatrova on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @10:25AM (#25929303)
You're just redescribing the horseshoe theory. The X axis is political leaning, the Y axis is level of authoritarianism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

Re:Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab by yellowapple on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @02:02PM (#25932328)
Horseshoe theory implies (if not explies, if that's a word) that going far left or far right automatically entails becoming authoritarian, and that they converge as you go farther "left" or "right". That's pretty demonstrably false, and even a two-dimensional political compass (let alone one with more axes) does a much better job of describing actual political stances than a horseshoe can. Authoritarianism v. libertarianism and socialism v. capitalism are separate and independent axes, and societies have existed across the whole gamut, corner-to-corner-to-corner-to-corner and everything in between.
Re:Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab by cercatrova on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @02:08PM (#25932434)
I always viewed it as descriptive and not prescriptive, so I wouldn't say it implies movement across the authoritarian axis just by moving more right or left.
Re:Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab by yellowapple on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @05:13PM (#25934795)
I feel like even as a descriptive theory it doesn't really map all that well to reality, though.
Re:Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab by brodouevencode on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @10:32AM (#25929399)
Pretty sure leftist authoritarianism exists and is violent. i.e.: Communist Russia, Maoist China, Cuba.
Re:Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab by aleister_777 on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @11:46AM (#25930393)
Portland.
Re:Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab by bitwize on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @01:30PM (#25931896)
Bob Altemeyer would disagree. He formulated the idea of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) as a psychological condition. His research discovered that there is no corresponding left-wing authoritarianism -- that even the authoritarianism exhibited by followers of Stalin or Mao was right-wing.

Kinda hard to be authoritarian if one of your central beliefs is in the fraternity and equality of all. It's more useful to describe Stalinist USSR or Maoist China as right-wing regimes cloaked in leftist rhetoric.

Re:Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab by brodouevencode on Thursday January 28, 2021 @03:29PM (#25948624)
Thomas Costello has found countering data: https://psyarxiv.com/3nprq, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00926...

This sums it up pretty well: "Left-wing authoritarians, in Costello's research, typically strongly agree with the following statements: the rich should be stripped of their belongs and status; deep-down just about all conservatives are racist, sexist and homophobic; classrooms can be safe spaces that protect students from the discussion of harmful ideas." (https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/05/there-suc...)

All of which lines up with the rhetoric from the Bolsheviks and the Maoists and a lot of the modern day critical race theorists.

Re:Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab by Zuider on Saturday February 06, 2021 @09:18AM (#26046627)
Have to agree. If Mao and Stalin can be disqualified as being left-wing due to the contradiction between their actions and the leftist values of equality and universal solidarity, then, by the same token, Hitler and Mussolini must be disqualified as being right-wing because of the contradiction between their actions and the values of limited government and rule of law.

Critical race theory has more in common with National Socialism than with the leftist values of equality and solidarity, because when you get past the verbal subterfuge which ostensibly denies that race exists, you find a deeply racist ideology of racial collectives locked in a struggle for supremacy, with one particular collective singled out as evil beyond redemption and in need of destruction. We have seen that before, and it is undeniable where it must lead. Critical Race Theory is Nazism barely disguised by a light sprinkling of leftist pixie-dust.

The common factor between the extremes of left and right is collectivism. Totalitarian demagogues, left or right, favor collectivism as a tool of control because it detaches people from their moral obligations to other individual human beings and transfers their loyalties wholly to an abstraction controlled by that demagogue.