New book out on Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics, been reading about it in a couple places, including FiveThirtyEight:
Hetherington and Weiler expand and update the authoritarian literature by applying it to contemporary controversies. For example, what they measure and define as “maximum authoritarian” types show much lower support for gay marriage and gay adoption […]

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Funny how conservatives are suddenly worried about too much government power once it looks like someone else might have control of that government.

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Glenn Greenwald notes the debate going on now in Great Britain, where a plan to expand the government’s authority to detain terrorist suspects for 42 days without bothering to charge them with any crime had run into stiff opposition - from conservatives:
The official position of the British Conservative Party is to oppose the legislation, and […]

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So the FISA extension expires Saturday and House Democrats are about to let it, because they’re still fighting over whether the telecoms should get retroactive immunity for, you know, breaking the law when the government told them to. But as usual, we’re getting the usual hysterical mendacity from our friends on the right - such […]

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Story running in the NYT tomorrow about how J. Edgar Hoover, on the eve of the Korean War, wanted Truman to suspend Habeus Corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty:
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I […]

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The New Era’s letter to the editor page, always sort of a sewer of authoritarian thinking, seems to have really taken a plunge off the deep end of late. There’s a real hum-dinger today, written by an East Lampeter woman who’s somehow under the impression, after essentially seven years of Republican rule, that America is […]

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Some folks over at Slashdot are calling this the best post all year.

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