There you again with the reframing trick, lecturing on me on what I think and what are my influences, and as always, missing by several parsecs. You don't know what "set me off" or all of the sources that have fed into my thinking about politics.

Besides, it's been fun to step back and watch how this thread unfolded. It's as if I sent out a ping asking all authoritarian conservatives to please raise their hands, and sure enough the top three contenders for the label authoritarian conservative have obligingly posted furious rants in denial of a charge that I've made only to you. I wonder if Mae and SDAI-Tech1 remember the Stooges line "I resemble that remark!". I didn't twist their arms.

I enjoyed your response arguing from and about authority, as if who originated some of these concepts and who's applying them today is sufficient to disrcredit them. Nice irony. If the red haze didn't shut down your reading ability, you might have noted where I disagree with some of the ideological imbalance of those sources, and in fact I believe I've made my own original contributionl in resolving seeming paradoxes such as the lack of a balancing "authoritarian liberalism", by separating the problem into its ideological and psychological components.

Adorno and Altenmeyer were handicapped, I think, by trying to analyze the conjoined components of politic as one atomic Gordian knot. Of course you perceive ideological bias, because it's there, tainting the source data. Ideology obfuscated the psychological component in what was supposed to be a psychological study; that's where their work is most seriously flawed. I think that that makes it easier for bias to creep in through difficulty distinguishing between the resulting phenomenon and its ideological half.

I think I've sufficiently addressed that blind spot by repeatedly pointing out that there have been authoritarian conservative societies of all surface ideologies, exemplified of course by the Soviet Union. Quit with the reframing that I deny that there's such a thing as "authoritarian liberalism". I've explained why I think the question becomes moot if you separately analyze AC as a psychological factor. If you really need AL to exist, then go ahead and define it as a quantity of zero on the authoritarian conservative scale. Or we could shift the axis -50% to center it. Those are just notional games, but if it helps the idea get past your partisan defenses, go ahead.

I'm not arguing that authoritarian conservatism is strictly a Republican phenomenon (though I must say, the phrase "methinks TB doth protest too much" comes inevitably to mind as I see how furiously you deny a charge I've never made). I'm building on the ideas of people who to some degree have done that, but that's them, not me. You're trying to argue with Adorno, Altenmeyer, and Dean through me, but I'm not here to defend them. These are my own ideas.

I'm making a sincere effort to gain an objective understanding of politics. What are you up to? If you think the methodology of separating politics into ideological and psychology components is invalid, what alternative method do you think brings clarity to politics? If that separation works for you, what metric would you substitute along the psychological dimension instead of authoritarian conservativism?

(BTW, I realized I'm conveying a false sense of simplicity to talk about "the" psychological dimension. There are many more dimensions to the human mind; it's just that AC is proving to be one of the more distinctive and measurable of its axes, in large part because of the distinctive fingerprints it's left behind on history. We can study actual authoritarian conservative societies, like, you know, the Soviet Union.)

Seriously Tom, instead of just laying down a barrage of chaff to try to suppress discussion of the question, how about trying to contribute to it for a change? Aren't you the least bit curious about why politics is politics and why politics makes people do such whacky things? I'm not content to live in the demon-haunted world of partisanship. I want to understand. I challenge you to aspire to the same understanding.

The stick: The side with a better grasp of how politics really works is in the better position to play the game. Can you afford to let Liberals get ahead in the intellectual arms race?