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Answering this question⤵️

It never resolves. The divide never fully goes away.
We push forward; reactionaries push back.

What I leaned from history and political psychologists is that the fight for democracy is a struggle that never really ends. . .

1/
Different political scientists describe the phenomena differently.

Some talk about the authoritarian personality (Adorno, etc.)

Some talk about reactionaries.

Hofstadter talks about the “paranoid style in American politics.”

2/
Hofstadter surveyed American history and concluded that a paranoid fringe has always existed on the far ends of the spectrum.

They often obtain power beyond their numbers.

Stenner and Haidt conclude that about a third of the population across cultures . . .

3/
. . . possesses a personality that can never feel comfortable in a liberal democracy. (See this reading list for some of these authors and works: terikanefield-blog.com/recommended-bo… )

As liberal democracy expands, they'll push back against it. They call it the authoritarian dynamic.

4/
When we get past the current crisis, we have to find a better way of dealing with the anti-democratic element.

For more, start reading here:


There are political psychologists with good ideas about how to better deal with those with an authoritarian disposition. When Trump is no longer president, I'll be tweeting about this more.

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