This was in infamous concept that supposedly characterized the right. But Jordan Moss and Peter J. O’Connor write,
Individuals high in authoritarianism – regardless of whether the hold politically correct or rightwing views – tend to score highly on DT and entitlement. Such individuals therefore are statistically more likely than average to be higher in psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism and entitlement. We found both moderate bivariate effects and unique effects (regression coefficients) and conclude that the DT and entitlement have important shared and unique effects in predicting our attitudinal outcomes.
Pointer from Zaid Jilani.
In other words, somebody who likes to act out extreme political views is likely to have the “dark triad” (DT) personality characteristics. But we are in an environment of “the other side does it,” so people are willing to excuse the nuts on their own side, which encourages them.
By the way, I have not seen one defense of President Trump’s executive orders bypassing Congress on the next round of “stimulus” that isn’t of the form “the other side does it.” That means it is not an acceptable defense, in my view.
Ok; here it is. Both sides want to do the stimulus. One side is blocking it for reasons even it would acknowledge as fundamentally illegitimate were it not for some moral obligation to use any tool available against Trump. So Trump is simply doing what can be done of what they would both do otherwise. That doesn’t make it the right policy, but it is the policy all the politicians would have supported.
Well, yeah. The house passed a stimulus plan weeks ago. McConnell wont bring it to the floor of the Senate. Is that the one side you are referencing?
“By the way, I have not seen one defense of President Trump’s executive orders bypassing Congress on the next round of “stimulus” that isn’t of the form “the other side does it.” That means it is not an acceptable defense, in my view.”
Well maybe you have not been paying attention and maybe no defense is needed but people may be attempting to place a marker on the grotesque hypocrisy at play.
From Josh Blackman at the purportedly libertarian Reason:
“On Friday, President Trump issued a memorandum that provided financial assistance to people affected by COVID-10. He issued another memorandum that deferred payroll taxes till the end of the year. Once again, the professoriate charged that President Trump was flouting the law. (How many of these professors actually checked the statutory framework before making these arguments?) Again, a law professor on a list-serve argued that these actions violated the Anti-Deficiency Act and–you guessed it–contended that administration officials should be thrown in jail. Once again, none of these claims are true. The disaster relief memorandum is on solid legal footing. And I am confident the payroll tax memorandum memorandum is based on at least a plausible legal argument–though I am more confident about it today after some further research than I was yesterday. No one is going to jail.”
https://reason.com/2020/08/09/lock-them-up/
And see Blackman’s detailed analysis: https://reason.com/2020/08/09/the-statutory-authorization-for-president-trumps-disaster-relief-memorandum/#comments
And there is also the legal strategy created by the courts to consider. If legal opinions are not to be equally applicable to all, then there is no rule of law. I am not really sure anymore if the rule of law means anything to people using the libertarian label or if it’s only applicable when convenient.
More Blackman:
“The Trump Administration is carrying into execution what I’ve dubbed the Regents strategy. First, confer benefits through the under-enforcement of the law. Second, hope that the Supreme Court allows the executive action to go into effect. Third, allow people to rely on those policies. Fourth, there are now reliance interests. Therefore, pursuant to Regents, it will be tougher for the court to unwind the policy in the future.”
https://reason.com/2020/08/08/tentative-thoughts-on-trumps-four-executive-actions/
Extremism on both sides leads to violent authoritarianism. But that does not mean that violent authoritarianism is equal on both sides in America.
Leftists often imagine that blacks or Muslims are the most frequent victims of attacks by political extremists but in fact Jews are the most frequent victims. For this reason the Anti-defamation League has tracked murders by political extremists for decades. Year after year it has found that extremism on both sides has led to murder, but not in anything like equal numbers. I 2019, 90% of the murders in America committed by political extremists were done by right wing extremists according to the ADL Report on Murder and Extremism in the U.S. in 2019.
In 2018 there were 50 murders committed in the U.S. by political extremists as tracked by the ADL report. ALL 50 had ties to at least one right wing organization.
Over the last decade 73% of the murders in America committed by political extremists were committed by right wing extremists. 23% by Islamist extremists and 3% by left wing extremists. The next murder by someone tied to Antifa will be the first. Even the murders of policers have been much likely to be motivated by right wing rather than left wing extremism.
To read this comment section you would think these numbers had been reversed.
No mention of the execution of Cannon Hinnant on the ADL website. https://www.adl.org/search?keys=Cannon+Hinnant
One wonders if they concur with those who claim the 5 year old deserved to die for his white privilege. Judging from the blatant politics of their decidedly non-nonpartisan twitter feed, I am not quite willing to acknowledge them as the definitive authority on hate crime score keeping.
The ADL has allowed itself to become another shameless disgrace like the SPLC. For example they routinely smear opponents of generically leftist movements or groups like antifa as “white supremacist”, which is nonsense. Anyone who takes their “reports” seriously these days is a naive chump.
>—” Anyone who takes their “reports” seriously these days is a naive chump.”
Counting murders and documented political connections is neither that hard nor that subjective. They don’t just put up the numbers. They cite all the specific cases they count. So far the number you have shown they have gotten wrong is zero.
These reports and trends trends go back decades and long precede current political fashions.
>—“No mention of the execution of Cannon Hinnant on the ADL website. https://www.adl.org/search?keys=Cannon+Hinnant
One wonders if they concur with those who claim the 5 year old deserved to die for his white privilege.”
There is no evidence yet that Cannon’s murder was a political extremist. Nor is there any evidence of your delusional fantasy that the ADL (or anyone else) thought the 5 year old “deserved to be murdered.”
This is exactly the kid of nonsense I was referring to being so common in this comment section.
Well here is a source that disagrees and cites specific examples: https://summit.news/2020/08/13/leftist-5-year-old-boy-deserved-to-be-shot-in-the-head-for-his-white-privilege/
The ADL has no shortage of items on its site that state that the police murdered George Floyd even though all available evidence indicates that Floyd died of a drug induced heart attack.
We are living in a Hannah Arendt moment. The lies of the media have people like Dr Kling believing that there is no statutory basis for the Trump EOs when in fact there are, yet no one raises an eyebrow at Joe Biden launching a campaign on mandatory mask wearing that is based on no constitutional authority whatsoever.
Ok edgar, then a grand total of two moronic unverified nobodies on social media making these comments equals for you a reason to think that this is something the ADL would “concur with.”
And Summit News as a reliable source? [arguments welcome. personal insults not welcome.–ed.]
I do not base my view that Trump’s orders exceed his authority based on any media commentary. My reaction is that they violate the principle of separation of powers, even if they hold up in court.
>—“[arguments welcome. personal insults not welcome.–ed.]
Ok no problem. It’s your blog and you are free to maintain any standard you want. In general I think you do a good job of keeping the tone around here pretty civil regarding fellow commenters although it seems anything goes when discussing parties not present.
Am I really to believe though that if I had said that anyone doing what he was doing was a “naive chump” as was said of me a few inches above here that that would have been viewed as OK and not a personal insult?
There inevitably is some subjectivity in how one classifies acts of political violence, specifically in how one assigns the murderers into binary categories. For example (I don’t know whether/how the ADL classifies these cases, I don’t know if they detail each case, so this isn’t a rhetorical question) are the various murders of police officers by people with political social media activity (e.g. BLM support) in the last few years counted as left wing violence? Do they classify the guy who was active in pick up artist forums who killed six people as right wing (on the premise that misogyny is intrinsically right wing)? How do they classify the guy who shot Gabrielle Giffords, whose opinions were extreme but heterodox (I believe he was a fan of both Marx and Rand)? There is enough ambiguity such that it is perfectly fair to question whether an organization with known political leanings reaching a conclusion supporting its political leanings can be accepted as merely an unbiased record-keeper.
You mention that Jews are the most common target of political violence, but according the the FBI if I recall correctly, white people are underrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes, while black people are over-represented, with popular targets being Jews, gay people, and Muslims. This not only belies the conventional narrative on hate crimes but also invites questions of categorization. I could imagine that a white person who commits anti-Semitic hate crime would be classified as right wing, but what about a black anti-Semitic attack? So yeah, categorization isn’t as objective as you’re suggesting. Lastly, I don’t think the main worry (can’t speak for anyone else here) is being murdered, as the probability of that happening for political reasons is negligible whatever your views, but fired or ostracized.
Yes, Mark I’m sure there is indeed “some subjectivity” involved for anyone categorizing these murders. The ADL report has the very great virtue of explaining their methodology in extraordinary detail. They name each murderer they count and explain why they categorized the case the way they did. They have been doing this for decades.
No doubt you could quibble with a few of their choices. But the differences in totals are differences in several orders of magnitude, not some artifact of a few questionable choices.
Furthermore, the ADL has also attracted criticism from the left. In an article there by Emmaia Gelman titled ” The Anti-Defamation League is Not What It Seems” she accuses the ADL of using its moral authority “to attack Arabs, blacks and queers.”
Political extremists of all stripes today usually share one common characteristic: They won’t shut up about their political views and plaster them all over social media. It’s usually not at all hard to figure out what they are when someone is being investigated and tried for murder.
I’m sure it is true that you are in more danger of being fired or ostracized for extremist political views than of being murdered for them. That should be the more likely risk shouldn’t it? Normally in this comment section it is more common to see the right of individuals to ostracize anyone they want, or for employers to fire anyone they want viewed as something closer to a sacred right.
Murders are also a good indicator of the level of non- lethal violence since they tend to be much better investigated and publicized than non-lethal violence.
This very short paper is getting a lot of buzz, but I don’t buy it.
Maybe we should apply some skeptical scrutiny to it. When results are based on surveys of questions, I always want to look at the questions, which depressingly often give the game away. If I can’t find the questions, that’s a red flag.
For “PC Liberal” vs “PC Authoritarian”, the source is an unpublished master’s thesis from five years ago. It’s actually not bad and kind of amusing. Table 5 has the factor analysis loading, and if one picks the highest numbers is allows one to do the Jeff Foxworthy thing, and say, “If you believe X, you might be a Wokenik.” Examples:
If you find “coconut” an offensive term for an hispanic who has embraced white American values.
If you are not offended by Susan Sontag’s line, “The white race is the cancer of human history.”
If you find the word “flip-chart” to be offensive (to people from the Philippines, Jordan Peterson did not make this up)
The good thing about that thesis is that it has an extensive and complete list of the questions asked of North American Mechanical Turks in 2015. And while one might quibble where the line between ‘liberal’ and ‘authoritarian’ versions of PC should be drawn, the emphasis on censorship and punishment passes the smell test and fits with the idea of “The RIPH”. However, that does raise the question, does it make sense to talk about immutable ‘authoritarian personality types’ when the proportion of people eager to identify and persecute heretics is growing fast?
What about the measures for the other extremists as measured by the “White Identitarianism (WI) Scale”?
For this, the young authors who have just one paper cite … only themselves, presenting a preliminary version of the same results at the 2018 Australian Conference on Personality and Individual Differences. Maybe you will have better luck searching than I did, but I couldn’t find the list of questions, only this description of it from their own paper:
Which figureheads? What websites? What statements? What are the questions? How can I tell if there was actually just one clear factor? What would the analysis on the non-Caucasian sample look like? Was there an appendix or supplement where all that way spelled out? If not, why not?
Ruy Teixeira is Caucasian and with John Judis wrote a whole book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority” and spent decades talking up the fact that “whites are being displaced in the U.S. “, so should answer 5. Does he count as “Alt Right”?
The trouble is, how can I tell?
We should not presume the validity of scholarship which doesn’t open itself up to basic standards of scrutiny and accountability.
The “other side does it” seems pretty straight forward in regards to the executive orders. Probably so much so that its not worth mentioning. The tax cuts were very famously pronounced by the Obama administration connected to the ACA by decree. At the time many acknowledged that this set a precedent for a president set tax cuts by decree.
As far as the direct payments, the precedent is DACA directly extending federal benefits, even those forbidden by law, by executive order. In fact when the Supreme Court upheld DACA (kind of) the Trump administration made a remark about this greatly expanding what a president can decree.
This is a non lawyer (so worthless) perspective. Again from a moral point of view I thought the “other side does it” argument was pretty obvious. That is aside from the fact that recently executives have been placing there jurisdictions under house arrest and so on by decree as well. Again, not an endorsement but to me these decrees are pretty small potatoes at the moment.
I see that you said “that ISN’T of the form” so I will accept that I should lose my privilege to comment. I will just make one last remark that touches on an earlier post you made. Very few believe that one side’s ability to use executive action will ever be meaningfully reigned in (which is a view on very solid ground.)
Best not to look at it in terms of “defense”. Better to stipulate that it is indefensible, but then the right question is the correct allocation of culpability among multiple responsible parties. A lot of the commentary on these moves wants to make Trump 100% or 0% culpable, but it is more like 20% culpable. Does that mean the argument is a “80% defense”?
What Trump has done with those orders and many other actions is most likely ‘legal’, and arguably ‘necessary’ to avoid a crisis, but only in terms of the sorry state of affairs created by the courts and Congress, in which many permanent and significant deviations from the Constitutional vision and scheme are now the new normal without the benefit of anyone having ever passed – or even proposed – any Amendments. Is something a “Constitutional Crisis” if everyone just agrees to live with it because any possible resolution is bad and they do not want to rock the boat?
Let me give you a recent example. Just yesterday, GAO issued a decision regarding the legality of certain appointments to senior positions in the executive branch.
They are probably right on regarding the Vacancies Act, though it’s not clear whether that act was Constitutional to begin with. The Appointments Clause tells us the one proper way people are supposed to become principal officers, similar to the one proper way people are supposed to become federal judges, and doesn’t provide for other ways. So why can a mere statute authorize alternatives?
Why does this matter? Because the Constitutional scheme imagines the President as running his administration by means of a hierarchy of politically appointed deputies who are loyal to him and, one hopes, to the agenda he promised his voters he would pursue. They are the personal extension of his election, which is what is said to make their exercise of the authority of those positions ‘legitimate’.
But, what if the Senate just … doesn’t confirm anyone? Or even hold votes for nominations? Then what? This is something the founders did not provide for (except for recess appointments, but recess was a bigger deal back then) because they did not think it would actually happen given the traditions and norms of what they understood a confirmation process to be. But it is now typical.
One possibility is to fill all those positions not with “The President’s Men”, but with career civil servants, who have different interests and loyalties and incentives, which the Senate might prefer to the results of the last election. Is that Constitutional, given that all the Executive Power is supposed to be vested in the President? If he doesn’t like what one of these bureaucrats is doing, can the President just fire him, but … then only be able to get the next bureaucrat in line?
Another possibility is “partial government shutdown”. If you don’t have a confirmed Secretary of Nannying, then the Department of Nannying ceases to operate. If there are no judges for the District of Such-and-Such, then no federal cases can be heard there. (Is this Constitutional? How does one defend one’s federal rights without a federal court? Does it go straight to SCOTUS? What if there are no judges at all? This is technically possible, but if it’s not Constitutional, then how do the slots get filled, and by whom?)
The point is, there *is* no good answer to what happens when the norms of personnel appointment confirmation completely break down for reasons of hard-ball partisanship. And when things break down, the courts are supposed to give us clear (and hopefully Constitutional) answers. But there is no answer.
If the Senate can’t block all appointments, it can’t block any appointments, which gives the President a completely free hand, which turns “advice and consent” into a Borkian ink blot. But if the President doesn’t have a free hand, he could have all his appointments blocked. And if the only alternative is provoking a government shutdown as when there is no budget because the Constitution doesn’t allow any flexibility, then by historical track record we know that tends to disadvantage certain parties and branches, which pressures also deviate from the Constitutional scheme.
If the President believes that without a Secretary of Nannying, the Department of Nannying must cease to operate, can he say that he is obeying his Constitutional Duty by unilaterally (that is, with no court order and no act of Congress) cutting off all funds from the Treasury, furloughing all employees without back-pay, stopping distribution of Nanny benefits, and barring access to all Nanny facilities? Is that better or worse than unilateral executive orders and quasi-legal appointments?
What would do you if you were President and faced this kind of question?
It might just be something that was 20% indefensible because 80% forced into it.
Pepsi can put out an ad saying Coke is mostly water. And yet Pepsi is mostly water too.
It’s not a selling point for Pepsi. It’s not even a real criticism of Coke. If it’s outrageous that Coke is mostly water, Pepsi doesn’t believe that line.
Pepsi can put it in a billboard a hundred feet high, but they’re not going to make any changes to their own product based on this line that they use.
So Pepsi has no standing. Pepsi isn’t distinguishing itself as an alternative to Coke. What’s notable or interesting is just that Pepsi expects us to play along like we don’t know there’s water in Pepsi. And if Coke had said it about Pepsi before Pepsi thought of it? The attack doesn’t mean something coming from them.