Before we go sprawling out in all directions pursuing the idea now that the logjam is broken, I'd like to consolidate the gains and summarize.

There's power in trying to separate ideology from psychology in analyzing politics. The first psychological dimension we've isolated has been called historically "authoritarian conservatism", stipulated that the term has some problems. Whatever it's called, it's the phenomenon whereby people are both more or less obedient to authority and more or less dogmatic about an ideology associated with authority.

It's probably worthwhile to continue decomposing in the psychological dimension. "AC" seems to entangle two individual vectors: Degree of submission to authority, and degree of dogmatism. Separating the two dimensions results in a notional plane surface representation.

It's interesting that where "AC" seemed to me to be unipolar, its two individual components can be treated as bipolar.

Along the authoritarian-submissive axis, zero might be considered "indifference" to authority, between extremes of total submission and total rebellion. This to me looks like the place of maximum independence, since a rebel is just as dominated by authority as a follower. At the center is a minimum of concern for and interaction with authority.

The "dogmatism" axis might be thought of as the degree of curvature of a mental topology. At one extreme is total gullibility and lack of critical thinking. At the other extreme is pathological skepticism, and a rejection of any new input. The center is, again, the place of balance and maximum independence of thought, accepting or rejecting ideas only after thoughtful judgment. It might help to use notions borrowed from physics, and talk about the "mass" of dogma warping "mental space", sometimes to an extreme that forms an "event horizon" through which nothing further can pass. The oppposite extreme is a completely flat and infinite plane, equally as useless for its lack of landmarks and definition; a place to get lost amid maximum uncertainty.

At the all-important origin is an idealized "centered" individual, somebody maximally independent in thought and action.

The high submissiveness/high dogmatism corner characterizes fanatics who follow an authority anywhere and completely adopt authority's accepted dogma as their own belief. HS/HD types defend the dogma as passionately as they defend the authority, and probably collapse the two into a single focus of loyalty.

High submissiveness/low dogmatism might describe purely personal loyalty, where a person subsumes their own misgivings about ideology or belief out of devotion to the person of power, or the devotion renders ideology moot. To my mind this is an unstable corner, because the habit of obedience can wear down the mind and eventually lead to acceptance of the dogma as well.

Low submissiveness/high dogma...that's a tougher one. A hermitic guru, perhaps? Somebody whose beliefs are adamantine, but disdains followers, or submerges ego in service, such as a religious leader. Ted Kaczinski comes to mind, too, somebody made insane by dogma but who couldn't stand the company of other humans. You can't be an authoritarian without being a "people person" to some twisted degree.

Low submissiveness/low dogma...another tough one. Best examples I can think of are people I've known who are bitter and cynical, and hate people while rejecting belief in anything.

Looking at it laid out that way, I think that the submission-to-authority axis is the dominant one. High submissives might switch sides to become just as fanatic a supporter of the new boss or idea, but their essential mode of thought remains unchanged. Another thing that stands out, I think, is that degree of submissiveness/participation in the group tends to lead to a greater perception of success and effectiveness--in other words, as a member of the dominant group, by definition you're on the winning side, and even as a worker ant you share in the group's success. The loners never experience that feeling of social success, never get validation from other people, and whatever sustains them has to come from within, possibly through redirection to abstract symbols of success such as money as a substitute for the emotional comfort of social interactions.

Pure primatology--the path of least resistance and general feelings of wellbeing is through going along with the tribe. Try to be a loner and you're cast out without the leverage of other people helping you. Good or bad, people gain both emotional and practical benefits from going along, and pay a price for independence along the Primate Way.

This has become more than a summary and risks being part of the sprawl, but I think it's an illuminating line of inquiry. Taking one careful step into the minefield, I'd observe that immediately after 9/11, the American people in general rated high in the desire to submit to an authority who promised to protect us. Bush was the automatic focus of that impulse as President, and was handed control of the most powerful force of human nature: A pissed-off and frightened populace. Ideology was nowhere in evidence on 9/11.

Where things started to go bad, IMHO, was when ideology got its nose into the tent. Bush and his colleagues recognized the opportunity to boost their ideology at the same time by riding the coattails of authoritarian submission. It seemed to take only a few milliseconds for the message to be formulated: "I and my colleagues can protect you because we are Republicans and our ideology is a mighty one". Wicked entanglement of authority and ideology--the canonical example of what once was known as "authoritarian conservatism".

If ideology is all that important to national security, then please explain how privatizing Social Security and outlawing gay marriage and posting the Ten Commandments in courthouses will win the war in Iraq. I'm not saying that to be snide, but to highlight the way that the Republican pitch has been all about the psychology of authoritarianism, under a rather thin shell of ideology. Tough leadership, willingness to do what's necessary, personal authority to command obedience from the troops and cooperation from foreigners; and on the other side, a terrible and deadly threat. Nothing says personal power more than the ability to "stay the course" and disregard events and indeed bend events to one's will.

Nothing there about ideology, that I can see. It's all about the assertion that only a Republican Authority is strong enough to save us. The arguments over the last five years have almost always been about psychology and rarely about ideology.

I'd better stop waving the red flag lest I distract you from what I said earlier. If my final paragraphs seem to call for a strong partisan reaction, best to ignore them. It's the earlier part that's important to me, and I wouldn't want to get hung up on a test case drawn from current events.