Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to I give up.

That's the problem right there
Robert — (archived)

You think you can refute the concept of authoritarian conservatism by attacking Dean personally, but there's little power in that. "Conservatives without Conscience" is hardly the only input to my thinking--"Book of the Month" my ass--as you well know, since I've been looking for the underpinnings of Conservative thought for a long time now. I've shared my thinking in realtime, from partisan tracts by Hewitt versus Carville and Begala, Lakoff's anthropological studies, history, etc. Dean didn't come up with the concept of AC himself, only relates it, and its value to me is that it provides a unifying framework which resolves a lot of contradictions and explains a lot.

In other words, you have to refute me, not Dean, because I say that there most certainly is such a thing as authoritarian conservatism, based on a lifetime of experience with and observation of Conservatives. Dean didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, he just pointed me toward a coherent explanation and a language with which to describe what I observe.

You're an authoritarian conservative, Tom, in spades. It's painfully obvious that you're struggling with denial, but ya know, that's an overreaction. I'll say again that AC is a facet of human nature that's present in all of us, and it only becomes pathological when demagogues tease it out and exploit it. It doesn't make you a freak, nor even unusual. It just makes you a victim.

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