Big RR wrote:Well maybe if you slept though the history of the future class in high school.
Personally, I had read all of
Robert A. Heinlein's Future History stories and novels by the time I finished high school.
Seriously, though...to get back to the topic of this thread...
It seems the principal objection Jim (and others) have to this field of study is that the researchers are using a definition for the terms "authoritarian" and "authoritarianism" which does not jibe with how most of the world defines those terms.
Which is a valid criticism.
In
my first comment in this thread I said
Econoline wrote:I
do wish they--someone, anyone--could come up with a better term than "authoritarian"...one with less implied value-judgement and negative connotations. Because Republicans especially need to understand what has happened to their party, without feeling that the researchers' agenda is to put them down. The article
does note that
"[...] this early research seemed to assume that a certain subset of people were inherently evil or dangerous — an idea that Hetherington and Weiler say is simplistic and wrong, and that they resist in their work. (They acknowledge the label "authoritarians" doesn't do much to dispel this, but their efforts to replace it with a less pejorative-sounding term were unsuccessful.)
The researchers studying this have clearly identified a real phenomenon, regardless of what anyone chooses to call it. (I'm curious what "less pejorative-sounding term" they tried--and failed--to replace it with? They probably just should've invented a new word, rather than use one which already existed . How about
"lawnorderist" and
"lawnordertude"? Nah, I guess that doesn't quite cut it, either...shall we go with "
**authoritarian** ") But whatever it is, it's apparently an identifiable, studiable (is that a word?)
thing that was *
NOT* invented by Vox.com (according to the article the seminal work in this "niche subfield of political science" is
The Authoritarian Dynamic by Karen Stenner). And if it seems to be able to predict certain things about certain people's political behavior--and it does seem to do that--that might make it useful, no?
And Meade seems to get it--that in those studies, people who did
not choose "respect for elders" over "independence", who did
not choose "obedience" over "self-reliance", who did
not choose "well-behaved" over "considerate", who did
not choose "good manners" over "curiosity"--these people (which apparently would include you, Jim) were
nott classified as "authoritarians" (or "lawnorderists" or "
**authoritarians** " or whatever you want to call them).
