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- [00:00]
Andrea Pitzer
On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I want to address a big and panoramic idea about democracy and its foes. One of the themes of this podcast is the degree to which propaganda has done so much to shape authoritarian regimes of the past century or so around the world, as well as the current crisis in the United States. The rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, and before them, grifter television evangelists, all turned out to be critical in halting the country's movement toward ideals of equality and true representation, instead bringing democracy to the brink of collapse. Yet the US disaster is mirrored around the world in parallel political disasters with rising authoritarian parties and movements.
- [00:52]
Samantha Niblett
Labour's Samantha Niblett, who represents South Derbyshire. One thing that's awful is in 2017 there were about three organisations that were anti trans campaigning for anti trans rights. There are now 51 in new newspapers. There are about 17 stories a day that are anti trans. And I'm sorry, but that is not proportionate for half a percent of the population to have so much light shine on them.
- [01:12]
Andrea Pitzer
Something larger than just the US is going on.
- [01:15]
Samantha Niblett
We've also seen devastation across the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Our understanding is that at least 13 people have been killed in that large
- [01:23]
Andrea Pitzer
scale Russian missile and drone strike on Kyiv. And as always, it's worth paying attention to the very particular history of the country, but also trends on the global stage.
- [01:34]
Samantha Niblett
Mother News to bring you in that Russian athletes could be allowed to compete for their country at the 2028 Olympic Games in LA.
- [01:41]
Andrea Pitzer
And it isn't always about propaganda from governments or from big companies.
- [01:46]
Walter Masterson
Let's see if they'll let me in. My name is Walter Masterson. Are you letting press cover this event?
- [01:52]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
No.
- [01:52]
Andrea Pitzer
Sometimes personal exchanges can drive the turn toward embracing policies of hate and exclusion.
- [01:59]
Walter Masterson
Why are you a Log Cabin Republican when Trump, the administration is trying to take away all of our. He's trying to take away all the LGBTQ rights. Mine, he's taking. He's like, oh, he's taking yours, not mine.
- [02:10]
Andrea Pitzer
Those can be a little harder to measure.
- [02:11]
Walter Masterson
It's actually an honest response was, he's taking away yours, not mine. I'm fine with you losing your rights. I'm going to keep mine.
- [02:18]
Andrea Pitzer
So for today's episode, I want to talk about a recent experiment described in a paper published not two weeks ago in the American Journal of Political Science. The study looked at how authoritarianism infected individuals through small communities and peer pressure, changing views and shifting community consensus. It's a window on how to Think about the corruption and violence in America today, why people are going along with it, and how to stop it.
- [02:45]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
Breaking news from the Magnolia park neighborhood. A man shot in the stomach. With ICE agents and federal investigators on scene within the last few moments, we've confirmed that man has died.
- [03:04]
Andrea Pitzer
The paper's title is Is support for authoritarian rule Contagious? Its authors, political scientist Sirian Dalum at Norway's University of Oslo and Tobjorn Hansen of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, along with several other people, set up field and survey experiments with incoming members of Norwegian armed forces. They surveyed the incoming groups before and after boot camp. On intake, they measured individual attitudes toward authoritarianism. With their subjects randomly assigned to different quarters, researchers could measure shifts in attitude after exposure to peers with similar or different ideas. After eight weeks of training, they returned to record changes. They made a striking discovery determining that in fact, not only were participants aware of the prevailing opinion about authoritarianism in their quarters, but a lot of individuals increased their level of support for authoritarianism to match their peers beliefs. Even recruits who initially possessed low or moderate levels of openness to authoritarian rule, they wrote, noticeably open up for strong leader governance when exposed to peers with preferences for authoritarian rule. One issue with this finding is that the authors couldn't be sure exactly what triggered the increased support for authoritarian rule.
- [04:36]
Dr. Russell Razak
Increasingly, it's Norway's women stepping up as the country's first line of defense because of the increased threats across northern Europe.
- [04:44]
Andrea Pitzer
Perhaps the incoming trainees had been convinced through personal persuasion.
- [04:48]
Dr. Russell Razak
This is especially true in the north, where the country shares a 200 kilometer border with Russia.
- [04:53]
Andrea Pitzer
Or maybe someone shared information on the topic, or even propaganda.
- [04:58]
Dr. Russell Razak
Norway's army wants to lead the way in gender equality. At the same time, nearly every second female enlistee reports sexual harassment in the barracks.
- [05:08]
Andrea Pitzer
It might also have been possible that the subjects simply conform to the group identity of those they saw as their social peers.
- [05:15]
Dr. Russell Razak
Despite the army's progress recruiting women, there's only one woman in their five member executive leadership team so far.
- [05:22]
Andrea Pitzer
Researchers also wondered whether people at a young age and in the hierarchical setting of military training might be particularly susceptible to indoctrination.
- [05:31]
Dr. Russell Razak
My name is Dr. Russell Razak. I'm a psychiatrist.
- [05:34]
Andrea Pitzer
To address these issues, they plotted additional study, hoping to answer two questions.
- [05:40]
Dr. Russell Razak
Now, in very simple terms, an authoritarian personality is somebody who feels a deep need to follow authority, to follow strict rules and codes.
- [05:50]
Andrea Pitzer
1 what is the actual mechanism of how views on authoritarianism shift? And two, were the results they got from young recruits arriving from military training generalizable to broader groups of human beings. The authors conducted additional boot camp surveys informing the subjects accurately in advance about whether or not the other recruits in their group supported authoritarian rule. This knowledge had the effect of changing not just the recruit's perception of others support for authoritarianism, but in changing their own levels of support. Expanding the surveys to the broader Norwegian population, the authors found that the tendency held welcome back to the Oslo Freedom Forum. People who found themselves among groups with support for authoritarian rule changed their own opinions toward Greater support themselves.
- [06:49]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
3 and a half billion people are not living in freedom.
- [06:54]
Andrea Pitzer
Norway was a good setting for this experiment as a whole because it tends to rank high on global democracy indices.
- [07:00]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
That statistic demands a response, and that response, in our case the responsibility that we take at the Human Rights foundation and our associated partners here in Norway, that response is the Oslo Freedom Forum.
- [07:14]
Andrea Pitzer
Over time, Scandinavian nations have typically occupied the top five spots, with Norway in first or second place. Authoritarian power isn't just a ruler, it's a system.
- [07:26]
Ami Fields Meyer
It teaches fear.
- [07:27]
Andrea Pitzer
It corrupts truth. It captures institutions. It makes you believe that resistance is useless. The country has a strong social network of healthcare and education for all and would seem to have created institutional guardrails against typical resentments that have been thought of as seed corn for planting authoritarianism in a given society. So it's particularly troubling that support for authoritarianism would be so socially malleable in a truly entrenched democracy. But the researchers didn't stop there. They wound up surveying more than 25,000 participants from at least 29 countries and consistently found that preferences for authoritarian rule could be shifted by knowing what others thought. If the researchers still didn't know all the mechanisms that could trigger that shift, they appear to have determined that knowing a group of peers supported authoritarian rule was enough to shift individuals further toward doing the same. It's worth taking a minute to address authoritarianism itself. For nearly a century, practitioners in different fields, from historians and political scientists to psychologists and psychiatrists, have tried to address the rise of strongmen and how they come to appeal to populations around the world. In the wake of World War II, the main attempts were to analyze fascist movements.
- [08:53]
Dr. Russell Razak
Now, in 1950, a man called Theodore Adorno, a psychologist, started to think, what is it that led people to essentially bring in the kind of authoritarian leaders that led to the world war in the first place?
- [09:07]
Andrea Pitzer
And early models, sometimes understandably focused on right wing government policies and attributes.
- [09:13]
Samantha Niblett
Psychodynamic or Freudian theory of the development of authoritarianism explain what had happened as being due to two reasons.
- [09:21]
Andrea Pitzer
But there's also been an attempt to understand how it is that people become susceptible to supporting such dangerous forms of government, which led to more psychological analysis. What kind of person was vulnerable to being drawn to authoritarian leaders?
- [09:38]
Samantha Niblett
Firstly, harsh punitive parenting and rigid parental values cause a tension between anxiety or fear of disapproval and punishment and hostility or anger towards parents.
- [09:49]
Andrea Pitzer
The psychological approach tried to identify people who wanted to submit to an authority figure or who wanted to be subordinate to someone who would do harm on their behalf.
- [09:59]
Samantha Niblett
And secondly, suppression of impulses leads to displacement of aggression towards safer or weaker targets, such as ethnic minorities.
- [10:07]
Andrea Pitzer
But one issue is that policies like mistreatment of women, immigrants and people of color don't only draw people who already support those viewpoints.
- [10:18]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
There is no problem of racist speech on campus. There is no problem with racism. There is no problem with sexism. These, or to the extent there is a problem, it is not very big.
- [10:27]
Andrea Pitzer
They draw people in who had not held those ideas before or who had held them latently rather than taking, taking action on them.
- [10:34]
Peter Thiel
That was then 28 year old Peter Thiel promoting his book at an event hosted by the Heritage foundation in 1996. The book was titled the Diversity Myth, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford.
- [10:48]
Andrea Pitzer
It turned out that a tremendously broad range of people in extreme situations can wind up supporting authoritarianism.
- [10:55]
Peter Thiel
George Packer, thank you for coming back. Good morning, Joe.
- [10:58]
Andrea Pitzer
So the authors of this study looked more specifically at one concrete aspect. Individual support for a strong leader with overwhelming power in a political system structured to maximize the leader's ability to act.
- [11:13]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
They've now come around, having been hardcore libertarians all their lives, to a view that government can actually be useful to their financial interests, their business interests, and their sense that really the world should be ruled by a small number of very smart, very wealthy men.
- [11:35]
Andrea Pitzer
This is less a theory of every psychological nook and cranny of authoritarianism than an attempt to understand how support for authoritarian government is expanding so rapidly as it is right now. I think George has hit on something here that I think we don't underline enough. These guys are bending the knee because of opportunity. I've been thinking recently about the book Cultural Backlash, written by Pippa Norris and Ronald Englehart.
- [12:02]
Samantha Niblett
Today we are joined by Pippa Norris.
- [12:04]
Andrea Pitzer
It came out in 2018, a year after my Concentration Camp History was published.
- [12:08]
Pippa Norris
This isn't just something which is about the communication format, nor is it just something about the leadership. It's actually rooted in society.
- [12:15]
Andrea Pitzer
Norris and Engelhardt consider the Rise of authoritarian leaders who had begun to expand their support in several European countries to double digits at the time their book was written.
- [12:27]
Pippa Norris
You can look at Germany and you look at the alternative for Germany, a radical right party. You can look at Norway, some of the most progressive countries in the world, Sweden, and they have radical right parties or authoritarian populist parties.
- [12:39]
Andrea Pitzer
And in the years since it came out, those numbers have continued to grow into the present, with few exceptions, one of them being Hungary, where the public definitively rejected the authoritarian model run by Orban.
- [12:52]
Pippa Norris
What's happened over time, and it started in the 80s and has continued ever since, is that cultural issues have increasingly become important. And the trouble with cultural issues is you can't divide them up very easily.
- [13:03]
Andrea Pitzer
For their book, Norris and Engelhardt defined authoritarianism as prioritizing collective security for the tribe at the expense of individual autonomy.
- [13:12]
Pippa Norris
These are issues which people feel passionately about. They're people's identities and they feel. But basically they're zero sum. If one side wins, the other side loses.
- [13:21]
Andrea Pitzer
They identified three components of authoritarianism. First, security over any risk of instability and disorder. They give examples such as the rhetoric of foreigners stealing jobs, immigrants assaulting women, or terrorists threatening the country.
- [13:39]
Peter Thiel
They're scum. You know what scum is? They're scum. They're sick people. They're led by sick people, and they're vicious, violent people.
- [13:48]
Andrea Pitzer
The second component is an emphasis. Emphasis on conformity to preserve some conventional way of life.
- [13:55]
Peter Thiel
And if you were here 15, 20 years ago, and if somebody made a speech about transgender for everyone, I always say transgender because for everyone, transgender.
- [14:07]
Andrea Pitzer
And the third is the expectation of loyalty and obedience towards strong champions.
- [14:12]
Peter Thiel
People like Comey have created tremendous danger, I think, for politicians and others. You know, Comey is a dirty cop. He's a very dirty cop.
- [14:23]
Andrea Pitzer
They laid out how populist rhetoric can combine with authoritarian values to create a cult of fear. Populism takes aim at elites who can be egregious in how they behave or in their corruption. But when populism targets indiscriminately, it can also disrupt faith in elected government or public institutions more broadly. How does that happen, you might ask? Let me just mention briefly one threat in particular that should concern all Americans. Democrats, Republicans and independents alike, especially those who serve in our Congress. Populist rhetoric that takes aim upward can be deflected outward to whole parties and institutions by authoritarian leaders. The epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year. Successful strategic deflection corrodes social trust as a whole, confidence in all institutions, and faith in democracy altogether. It's now clear that so called fake news can have real world consequences. So if you adopt populist rhetoric or tactics, be attentive to what you're taking aim at and how your attacks might be used by unscrupulous actors.
- [15:50]
Peter Thiel
Don't be rude. I'm not going to give you a question. Can you stay? Cat, you are fake news.
- [16:01]
Andrea Pitzer
Of course, authoritarian leaders around the globe would like nothing more than for us to throw up our hands and declare the current wreckage of government as hopeless and assume that people like them are simply inevitable.
- [16:12]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
Law firms and universities cutting deals with the Trump administration, hoping acquiescence by safety, donors going quiet, institutions falling in line. That is all of this how modern authoritarianism works.
- [16:26]
Andrea Pitzer
But if we decide not to do that, how can we respond to these tsunamis of authoritarianism?
- [16:31]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
This book, it's called On Courage by Julia Anguin and Ami Fields Meyer.
- [16:37]
Andrea Pitzer
On Courage, the answer is a global one, a national one and a local one.
- [16:42]
Ami Fields Meyer
All Ami and I did was call up dissidents around the world and ask them what they did, how they did it, and it turns out it was much more doable than I thought.
- [16:52]
Andrea Pitzer
In the big picture, we need to maintain international coalitions on specific issues and on democracy itself. Even where governments like that of the United States have rejected collaboration on key issues such as climate, renewable energy and
- [17:06]
Ami Fields Meyer
other topics, it's about them taking your rights and taking your money for themselves. The only way they can do that is if you don't pay attention, if you don't care. And so caring is the courageous thing
- [17:15]
Andrea Pitzer
here in the US experts in everything from children's health to immigration and education can work to reestablish sites of public exchange and information such as those previously hosted at the cdc.
- [17:28]
Ami Fields Meyer
And so you have to care about people who you may not know. They're not necessarily part of your community, but if you start to care about what's happening to them, that actually prevents the regime from demonizing them and focusing everyone's attention on that instead of on what they are doing.
- [17:43]
Andrea Pitzer
As we work to retake the reins of government itself in this country, we can begin to protect these fonts of information more fully, both by custom and by statute.
- [17:56]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
What we've seen all over the world is that the civil resistance movements that are the most effective are not the ones that only rely on the normative democratic processes, like voting, although that's important while we still can, but also the ones that try to inflict the most, the highest cost and the most pain and just make it inconvenient to continue.
- [18:18]
Andrea Pitzer
When we're able to attain a congress without trumpist control of it, political leaders need to make propaganda more difficult to disseminate with consequences for corporations and institutions spreading conspiracy theories.
- [18:31]
Ami Fields Meyer
Orban was incredibly clever, right? He did not use violence to enact his authoritarian rule. He very carefully made it all look legal. He changed the constitution, he took control of the press. And controlling the media, by the way, is 90% of the game for authoritarians.
- [18:52]
Andrea Pitzer
But in the immediate timeframe and on the everyday scale, we can begin to secure our safety and shift awareness in our own communities at the state level and below.
- [19:02]
Ami Fields Meyer
What also was interesting to me is that it was the existence of these independent media that were hanging in for dear life that also helped turn the tide, right? They were just relentless with their $4, putting out YouTube videos and printing on websites and doing the best they could to get the message out about the corruption.
- [19:24]
Andrea Pitzer
Protecting local educational institutions, our schools and libraries remains critical.
- [19:29]
Ami Fields Meyer
And it really was the story of corruption that sold the people on throwing out Orban. Right, because the truth is authoritarianism is always about corruption.
- [19:38]
Andrea Pitzer
We can push for transparency in local government on everything from data centers to sanitation contracts, demanding regulations and ordinances that limit corruption and cronyism.
- [19:48]
Ami Fields Meyer
The vast majority of the people are kind of in the middle and kind of like, I don't know which side should I go on? Or I'm confused and they need to be persuaded.
- [19:56]
Andrea Pitzer
But perhaps most critical is to speak up. You might remember that I've referenced the study that found that Black Lives matter protests in 2020 actually shifted the political landscape in measurable ways and made a difference in the 2020 presidential election. Its influence was seen as particularly strong in smaller, whiter and less educated populations. That study mentioned the work of Zachary Steinert Thrukilda who noted that protest participation can create a ripple effect whereby one protester potentially influences multiple non participants. Showing up can make a difference.
- [20:35]
Ami Fields Meyer
The entire point of resistance is that there are more of us.
- [20:39]
Andrea Pitzer
And my thought is that it was due especially to the exposure these communities had to ideas that countered the dominant ones. Where they lived, they might have all
- [20:50]
Ami Fields Meyer
the guns, but they're more of us. Literally just numbers wise. And so to build those communities, you actually have to build those human bonds.
- [20:57]
Andrea Pitzer
In places where authoritarian views are perceived as normal and legitimate, people saw their neighbors stand up for something else. The results make me wonder if those protests acted as a reverse of the authoritarian social contagion that's been underway for many years now, showing people that their neighbors were willing to publicly identify against authoritarianism.
- [21:23]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
Instead, most of the dissidents whose stories these heroic stories it gets told in the book, they found themselves becoming dissidents not because they were destined for it from birth, but simply because they were stubborn.
- [21:37]
Andrea Pitzer
If we know that support for authoritarian rule can be influenced by something as simple as knowing that others support authoritarian rule, then it's incumbent on all of us who can to speak up.
- [21:49]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
And because they insisted on paying attention to their own quiet internal moral compass that told them that what was going on around them was wrong and that they shouldn't acquiesce to it, this study
- [22:01]
Andrea Pitzer
out of Norway shows that in communities with a free flow of information, as should be the case, the malleability of public opinion is a serious risk. And this kind of peer influence on people supporting strongmen when they realize others do, means that norms can shift radically in a short period, just as we've seen here in the US in the
- [22:25]
Human Rights Foundation Representative
last decade, quote a conflict often faced by people in authoritarian societies, a collision between the head and the heart, between values deeply held and an outside world unfolding in dramatic divergence. It can happen over decades or in an instant. It comes of morality, or it arises out of necessity.
- [22:46]
Andrea Pitzer
This runs deeper than trumpism, and one way that each of us can push back is to let our peers know, through word and deed, that the current situation is against our values, that the authoritarian response is a shameful one based in fear and weakness. There are a million ways you can take on that challenge. Through art, through writing, through community cleanups, through calls for accountability, through social get togethers. The main thing is to do something to stake your claim to a broader and more inclusive world and make those who support authoritarian rule into the decided minority where you live and around the world. Thanks for listening to Next comes what? Please share this with one person who's looking for ways to survive this mess. So to support this podcast, please become a paid subscriber@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts and that's it.