The Demagogue's SHAM.

Authoritarianism follows a formula...

Authoritarian movements always start under the guise of populism, and they succeed by taking advantage of two of humans’ most problematic psychological imperfections: our desire for simple silver bullet solutions and our tendency to think in tribalistic (us vs them) terms.

Smart authoritarians know these features well and, moreover, know how to exploit them. They paint the world’s issues as fundamentally the fault of scapegoats and their movement as simply the force standing up for the little guy against the evildoers exploiting them.

To drive home their point, they seek to demonize whatever group they are targeting by attributing to them the most wicked of motives, doing whatever possible to make them seem alien, foreign, and “other,” and finding ways to paint them as ultimately culpable for all faults in society. The examples of this are endless. 

The most extreme of leftists will scarcely find a problem they do not believe is the result of the owning class. They attribute nearly every bad government policy to the owning class’s perverting influence. They attribute them the blame for low wages, lack of affordability, wars, the broken criminal justice system, and even the existence of social conservatism and fascism. 

Similarly, the right is addicted to the demonization of immigrants. They want you to believe that the deficit is an immigration problem. High housing prices are an immigration problem. Societal decline is an immigration problem. And on it goes. 

In the mind of an authoritarian, there is no issue that is not the fault of their enemy, and thus, there is no room for thoughts of positive-sum changes, such as those that improve efficiency or increase economic growth. It is no surprise that authoritarians have such an awful economic track record. 

However, cunning authoritarians do not stop at simply attempting to convince people that all their problems lay at the feet of one group. No, that would be insufficient. In their war to remake society in their own image, they need highly motivated soldiers, and more so, soldiers who are not at risk of defection.

They achieve this by maximizing the contrast between the status quo and their perfect future. Never will you find an authoritarian that says something positive about how things are. To do so would be to commit self-sabotage. Rather, like the false messiahs of religious cults, they paint the present with ultimate pessimism as a state of armageddon, collapse, and hell, and they present the new world they and only they offer as a paradise, infinitely better in all respects and nearly divine in its lack of fault or blemish. 

Unfortunately for authoritarians, their ridiculous and absurdly reductionist view of the world quickly collapses upon critical inspection. And this is where the most important element of a successful authoritarian movement comes in: the discrediting of their critics.

In any authoritarian worldview, there is no such thing as a critic who makes a good point. Critics can only be one of two things: victim to the propaganda of the elite or, more commonly, a knowing tool of the elite. To the authoritarian, discourse is a war of ideas, and the elites who have rigged the game have been strategically winning it through an elaborate network of propaganda for a long, long time. Under this view, the goal of authoritarian movements is not to engage productively with the arguments of their rivals—to do so would give them the legitimacy they do not deserve. Rather, it is to call them for what they are: the problem, the ones responsible for destroying society, the liars, the crooks, and the demons that have allowed this injustice to go on for so long. 

This view runs adjacent to the idea shared by almost all authoritarian movements that the people are fundamentally on their side. In their eyes, only by acts of deception or fraud could their authoritarian movement fail to be victorious, and that is why they will never, ever admit defeat in an election, no matter how overwhelming. 

The way to beat authoritarians is to call them out on their bullshit—to forcefully punch through the stream of lies they feed their victims with an even more powerful stream of inconvenient truths. The inconvenient truth that the world is not actually collapsing in on itself, but is, in many ways, getting better. The inconvenient truth that the scapegoat they attribute blame to for causing a problem is not, in fact, the cause of that problem.  And also, the inconvenient truth that the solutions that authoritarians offer to the issues of the status quo are as shallow as their tolerance for opposing views. In other words, nonexistent.