About the broad right, there are many straightforward points but also some odd bits about the psychology and behavior: dominating and being dominated, closed-mindedness and control, rejection and specialness, social isolation and group identity, stress and trauma, anxiety and fear, threat and danger, loss and struggle, victimhood and victimizing, boredom and melodrama.

I’ve been slowly making sense of it all over time, as I add new pieces to my previous understandings. But even going by the most basic level of research and theory, there are already more than enough pieces to form a clear picture.

As I often repeat, and it bears repeating, there are diverse theories, conditions, factors, traits, facets, patterns, and expressions that interlink and overlap or closely correspond:

Socio-political conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), fundamentalism, patriotism, honor culture/concern, need for certainty, need for closure, thick boundary type (Ernest Hartmann), terror management theory, behavioral immune system, parasite-stress theory, purity thinking, mortality salience, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, prejudice, xenophobia, mistrust, paranoia, aggression, punitiveness, etc.

This further  involves the reactionary mind, Burkean moral imagination, and anti-traditionalist nostalgia (invented traditions, revisionist history).

To be clear, as the above list suggests, there isn’t a single right-wing mentality. It’s a constellation of features that’s particularly seen across populations, but not in every individual.

Consider that RWA (low ‘openness to experience’) and SDO (low ‘honesty-humility’, high dark triad) measure independently, while diverging on many features. But all of it combines in right-wing identities, groups, parties, and movements. As such, the typical authoritarian leaders are SDOs and the typical authoritarian followers are RWAs, with the far right consisting of Double Highs (RWA+SDO). In practical terms, both RWA and SDO predict conservative politics.

Additionally, honor concern — defined by conservatism, conventionalism, conformity, religiosity, and fundamentalism; and group-based prejudice, xenophobia, aggression, unforgiveness, retaliation, violence, inequality, hierarchy, status, reputation, integrity, etc (e.g., patriotism) — is distinct, if also sharing major aspects with RWA and SDO.

“Results identified group honor concern as the most distinct, sharing only moderate overlap with RWA; masculine and feminine honor concern were strongly positively correlated with RWA. […]

“Honor concern shares several similarities with both RWA and SDO. Akin to higher RWA, honor concern encompasses values of upholding traditional norms and ingroup purity. Akin to higher SDO, honor concern encompasses beliefs that social groups are hierarchical and ordered by status. […]

“Domains of honor concern share theoretical similarities to RWA, including emphasis on following cultural honor norms and traditions (similar to feminine honor concern), and SDO, by emphasizing status-based differences between people or groups with higher versus lower honor concern (similar to group honor concern) and that dominance and aggression are relatively appropriate responses to status challenges (similar to masculine honor concern; Barnes et al., 2014; Uskul et al., 2022). Domains of honor concern also share empirical similarities to RWA and SDO by predicting greater political conservatism (see Barnes et al., 2016; Martens et al., 2018; Mirisola et al., 2007; Wilson and Sibley, 2013). Yet, one prediction based on generalized prejudice theory (Bergh and Brandt, 2023) is that honor concern may uniquely predict prejudice by emphasizing both values and status. […]

“By contrast, people’s masculine honor concern appears to be particularly strongly associated with greater SDO, consistent with their theoretical similarities that societally advantaged groups (e.g., men) are assertive, strong, and use their high-status position to protect their loved ones (Barnes et al., 2012). However, Barnes et al. (2014) also reported mixed evidence for the association between feminine honor concern and SDO, instead suggesting that feminine honor concern was strongly related to RWA due to their overlap of valuing traditional norms (e.g., familial loyalty).”

Olivia K. Nop & Matthew D. Hammond, A meta-analysis and test of the overlap between honor concern, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation

Though individuals may vary, it seems unlikely that most conservative populations wouldn’t contain all three.* So, in how they play out in the real world, it’s impossible to entirely separate them. Just understand that they involve distinct conditions and factors, causes and mechanisms. If with differing motivations, they’re complementary in being able to work together within the same social order and often toward the same ends.

[*As a qualification, the only way to drive a wedge between RWA and SDO is to extremely and carefully suppress high inequality, power disparity, and dominance hierarchy. Only SDO is directly about anti-egalitarianism. Whereas RWAs, more than anything else, simply want to belong and conform, to be accepted and included. There are rare situations where RWA might coincide with a limited form of egalitarianism, specifically as small-scale communitarianism. Think of the collectivist Shakers, Pietists, Hutterites, etc.]

As linked to status-based honor types, SDOs want to dominate and RWAs want to be dominated, while both agree that dominance hierarchies are to be enforced on low status groups and outgroups, as well as enforced on those who don’t want to either dominate (egalitarian-minded) or be dominated (liberal-minded). But note that RWAs tend to be the most compliant with and submissive to SDO machinations when under stress (e.g., RWAs being more anti-immigrant when immigrants are portrayed as not assimilating).

Hence the reason SDOs go out of their way to stress RWAs so as to gain and maintain their dominance position. That is the only way for SDOs to enforce social control.

Stress likewise has a role to play in suppressing liberalism and controlling liberals, as will be discussed further on. Egalitarianism is also compromised under certain kinds of stressors, specifically high inequality that promotes power disparity and dominance hierarchy. Specifically, RWA is elicited by threat, risk, danger, and mortality (as well as certain forms of disease, nonzoonotic infections and parasitism); SDO by competition, rivalry, scarcity, and inequality.

This is why liberal and egalitarian mentalities can be like hothouse flowers. They require the most optimal conditions of flourishing that, if possibly having been more common in the Paleolithic era, are now rare in modern society, especially under late stage capitalism.

* * *

In addition, like sociopolitical conservatism, RWA specifically has correlations with lower levels of educational attainment, literacy, critical thinking, and IQ (Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain).

That relates to why Fox News viewers are more misinformed than those who don’t watch news at all. These are people who lack intellectual self-defense that requires knowledge of psychology, sociology, media studies, rhetoric, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies. They are easy marks for con men, demagogues, and propagandists.

That deficiency in turn corresponds to lower ‘openness to experience’ and ‘intellect’, and thus lower in everything related to it: need for cognition, intellectual curiosity, exploratory behavior, tolerance for cognitive dissonance (negative capability), cognitive flexibility, perspective shifting, fluid intelligence, original problem solving, pattern recognition, aesthetic appreciation, and much else.

With less cognitive load and cognitive complexity, such people tend to rely on simplifying heuristics like stereotypes and groupthink. Along with ingroup bias and group narcissism, this is also why they’re prone to prejudice and bigotry.

It’s the natural expression of compromised and/or stunted neurocognitive development. It’s related to: poverty, inequality, chronic stress, trauma and PTSD, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), childhood heavy metal toxicity, malnourishment, parasite load, infectious disease exposure, etc. You see this pattern of factors and conditions in conservative communities with the worst of it being in conservative states, always accompanied with the RWA-SDO dynamic and combined with honor culture.

Cognitive-impaired heuristics involve identifying oneself as part of a group and identifying others according to groups. These are built on stereotypical social roles, norms, and expectations. Everything is turned into a readymade package where one doesn’t have to go to the trouble of understanding unique individuals, specific contexts, etc. It’s all modeled, learned, and internalized from a young age; and so taken as ideological reality, the order of things, the way the world works.

A place for everything and everything in its place. Just determine your role and follow the script. All [fill in the blank] are [fill in the blank], look [fill in the blank], and act [fill in the blank]. Anyone who doesn’t comply will be forced to do so or else be punished, shunned, eliminated, at least when stress (threat or competition) is involved.

* * *

Part of my thought on the  matter is based on family members, along with some friends and coworkers. I don’t know that my personal sample is representative. But I frame and interpret what I’ve learned through experience according to the scholarship I’ve studied: history, political science, cultural studies, psychology, media studies, ecology, health studies, and anything else that seems insightful and useful.

Observations of people I personally know are my way of grounding otherwise abstract research and theory.

As an example, it’s one thing to intellectually read about cultivation theory and mean world syndrome, as developed by George Gerbner. Then it’s something else entirely to have firsthand watched the lived effects of right-wing media as a steady indoctrination and decline that occurred over decades; as I’ve seen among those I’m close to and as others have shown with their own loved ones (Jen Senko, The Brainwashing of My Dad).

In my case, this has mainly involved my parents who I personally know in detail like no one else. Not only did they raise me but I’ve spent much of my adulthood around them, often on a daily basis, as they returned to town in the early Obama administration. Later during the COVID-19 shutdown, I moved in with them and have remained since. I see the media they consume, listen to what they talk about, and observe how they act. I’ve noted the results of changes over time.

My mother most closely fits the standard demographic profile and psychological pattern of the average Fox News viewer: US-born, older, white, middle class, non-urban, fundamentalist, conservative, and Republican; although she is college-educated and had a professional career, if not high status (speech pathologist in public schools).

She falls into the predictable mean world syndrome. Having been tolerant and positive-thinking when younger, with increased exposure to Fox News propaganda and fear-mongering, she has been drawn into a dark worldview and has made some horrendous statements.

For instance, in believing right-wing narratives that are repeated ad nauseum until they feel like reality itself, she has on a few occasions said that leftist protesters should be shot or hung from trees, of course always while Fox News was on. That is stereotypical mean world syndrome: authoritarianism, fear and anxiety, exaggerated threat perception, and punitiveness.

Keep in mind that she is now in her 80s and has been showing neurocognitive decline for a long time, if it’s been gradual over decades. So, as her mind is no longer entirely there, she doesn’t necessarily know what she is saying and its significance, much less how she is being manipulated. It’s simply her reacting to the fear and hatred instilled in her.

That is basic level right-wing mentality. Those victimized by Machiavellians are manipulated into victimizing others or into supporting those who are doing the victimization (police, ICE, etc).

* * *

My father is of similar demographics as my mother, of course, but with the higher education of a PhD. He prefers other kinds of right-wing media: Hoover Institution, Heritage Foundation, Imprimis, Hillsdale College, National Association of Scholars, Epoch Times, etc. He draws some of his propaganda from closer to the source of the propaganda mills, such as think tanks.

In many ways, he interests me more, partly because he has been in positions to influence others. He fits the main target of propaganda operations, as explained well by C. J. Hopkins:

“The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an ‘official narrative’ that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them. This official narrative does not have to make sense, or to stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny. Its factualness is not the point. The point is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between ‘the truth’ as defined by the ruling classes and any other ‘truth’ that contradicts their narrative.”
~ Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works (quoted in Hillsdale’s Imprimis: Neocon Propaganda)

As a retired professor, he has a moderate intellectual bent, if not particularly well-informed or curious to remedy that lack; and he still reads books, if mostly Christian apologetics and inspirational texts.

In spite of having spent his career split between factory management and university professor, he surprisingly doesn’t demonstrate much independent thought of questioning and skepticism. I suppose a critical intellect is neither required nor desired in functioning within the corporate structures of neoliberalism and in teaching students, as the new aspiring business class, to do the same.

In the end, though more intelligent, he isn’t particularly more intellectually driven than my mother. It’s not only disengagement from thinking carefully and learning new info. Simultaneously, it’s a general disengagement from the world and others, an all-purpose incuriosity. Yet he used to be highly engaged, in a basic manner. He often belonged to organizations and held leadership roles. He was respected and, most of all, he loved to obtain praise.

He was all about status (i.e., high SDO) and, to a large degree, adheres to gendered honor norms. He sort of likes being a patriarch and a leader in his community.

From a young age, he internalized a need to be perceived as an important person. I don’t know that this was a natural tendency or a product of his early life experience. But in either case, it became core to his psychology and identity.

His father was a minister in a small town, which meant he was part of the local elite, as a big fish in a small pond. Their family had automatic membership at the country club. They were always kept in a nice house and always ensured to have a nice car, gifted by a local car dealer.

As the son of a minister, my father was expected to play the role of a Christian leader, groomed to be a patriarch one day. If his father or older brother wasn’t around when adults were meeting, it fell to my father as a child to lead group prayers. One could imagine that, eventually, such expectations would either go to one’s head or else radicalize one in opposition to it.

Obviously, my father wasn’t radicalized. He accepted it all, without question. It seems to have shaped everything he did as an adult.

Straight out of college with ROTC training, he became an army officer and instantly held authority over people with years of actual army experience. And immediately after that he got his first of many jobs as a factory manager, followed by being a professor in mid-life. That is to say he was always an authority figure in dominance hierarchies and has never known anything else.

In that manner, he once had been highly engaged. But that has changed over time. Maybe it’s because dominance hierarchy itself has changed, no longer being as respectable. Or at least, not as straightforward as it once was now that anyone, even blacks and women, can climb the ladder and join the elite.

The Kiwanis group, for example, originally was a civic organization solely consisting of businessmen who were community leaders, and all white men in most early chapters. Now Kiwanis includes women, minorities, and the working class. It no longer is a group identity that exudes elite status, as it once did.

These kinds of civic organizations are in decline with aging membership far past their prime. Belonging to them no longer inspires hope for the future of a community ruling elite. And in my father’s local chapter of Kiwanis, the members as a group have become less interested in community projects, in spite of dedication to community service having been the stated purpose around which such groups formed earlier last century.

It’s left my father not only disengaged but also demoralized. He’s also unhappy that it’s no longer an old boys’ network where men can tell crude jokes without judgment and censure. The female members, in his mind, have ruined it for those like him. And it makes him feel worse that others would see this as misogyny.

* * *

But to be honest, my father’s misogyny really has increased over time or else become more apparent. And my mother too has become more right-wing.

From the 1970s to 1990s, my parents belonged to organizations where women were often the leaders. Our family’s church, Unity, when I was growing up had mostly women as ministers, as well as having been openly ‘woke’ (e.g., doing same sex marriage ceremonies). Obviously, this kind of thing didn’t bother them as much in the past. Or if it bothered them, it wasn’t enough that they openly complained about it.

Did society leave behind those like my parents? Or was it that many such people, as they’ve aged and cognitively declined, simply alienated themselves from their fellow humans by having become ultra-conservative, even authoritarian and domineering?

* * *

There is another particular aspect that interests me. It relates to disengagement.

Right-wing mentality operates by isolating people. In perusing books, I came across a summary of Rebecca Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End:

“While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.”

That’s the whole point of belonging to an exclusive and exclusionary group that only allows certain people to join. But the further one falls into that constraining ideological worldview the smaller becomes one’s group identity and social circle. It harms even the right-winger, which sadly drives them further into the ideology harming them.

That is what I’ve observed with both of my parents. It’s a shrinking down of their social world over time, as they increasingly turn inward.

When younger, they were somewhat socially liberal and they socialized with diverse people. But importantly, they were generally open to all kinds of experience and ideas. Their lives were relatively expansive and flexible, more friendly and welcoming. They weren’t yet stuck in their ways. They hadn’t yet retreated into fear and anxiety, safety and security.

The change happened gradually, only reaching an extreme in recent years. It’s not only how they’ve withdrawn into a reactionary worldview, as reinforced by a right-wing echo chamber. Simultaneously, they’ve pushed away many who don’t fit into that increasingly insular reality tunnel.

If they remain caring people on a personal level toward those they know and identify  with (as is common among many authoritarians and social dominators*), my parents’ social and political views have become more fearful, prejudiced, judgmental, and sometimes callous or mean-spirited. This occurs with perceived outgroups (poor blacks, LGBTQIA+ individuals, leftist protesters, etc), especially foreigners (Palestinians, Iranians, Latino immigrants, etc).

[*My cousin has said the same of my uncle and aunt who are ‘liberal’ Democrats. My cousin explained that her parents have often expressed prejudice, but will make excuses for those they personally know. The black person or poor white who is their friend, neighbor, or fellow congregant is good people; unlike most others of their kind.

I’d note they’ve spent their whole lives in a conservative community. The town they live in is small, rural, and working class. Following neoliberal union-busting and offshoring, there was a vast rise of unemployment and poverty. The county shifted from a Democratic and union stronghold to hardcore MAGA Republicanism.]

That’s the reason my brothers rarely visit or call my parents. They just don’t want to be around that hateful ugliness, don’t want to hear it. That avoidance saddens my parents, of course, and further contributes to their negative mentality.

Even I’ve been wondering where my breaking point might be.*

How long will I rationalize away my parents’ support of political evil? I’m talking Zionist genocide, wars of aggression, ICE brutality, police abuse, and on and on. Do I wait until there are millions perishing in death camps, assuming we’ll eventually get to that point, to see if my parents are still on board with neo-Nazism?

At some point, even with neurocognitive decline and being out of touch, it’s no longer as compelling of an excuse to argue that they’re victims of a highly advanced system of spin and disinfo, indoctrination and propaganda. As MAGA fascism becomes more blatant and devastating, it’s getting harder to believe that my parents don’t understand what they’re supporting, that the sadistic cruelty and violent oppression isn’t exactly what they want.

[*4/14/26: My father recently crossed into overt fascist territory. About the Iran War, he admitted to all the facts. Iran poses no direct and immediate threat to the US, has no nuclear weapons, has no program for producing them, and has officially stated an intention not to have such a program. In fact, they have a fatwah (religious decree) against nuclear weapons, which is no small thing in a theocracy. Though they have every right and good reason to defend themselves against aggressors.

Yet merely because Iran has nuclear power plants, my father states that it’s inevitable they’ll develop nuclear weapons. So, in pre-empting an imagined threat of Iranians possibly entertaining a thought crime, he supports the mass killing of innocent people and destruction of another society through authoritarian violence, militarized imperialism, war of aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and political evil. That is the exact same logic of Nazi Germany in justifying every country it attacked and invaded, that Germans were merely protecting themselves from threats.]

* * *

My parents understandably feel rejected by others. It is an accurate perception, to a significant degree. Many of their fellow Americans, including their own family, really have rejected their values, woldview, and identity.

But I’ve been wondering if the right-wing mentality achieves this end intentionally, if not with full consciousness. Through their behavior and words, my parents in rejecting ever more people (gays, trans, feminists, minorities, immigrants, foreigners, etc) likely find themselves, in turn, rejected by ever more people. This particularly includes their two oldest sons.

Even when it’s not outright rejection, I do know they simply feel out of sync with the society around them. As the general public has gone further left, my parents have marched rightward. But in their mind, they’ve simply remained who they always were, stood still as the world moved around them.

In rewriting their personal history and in remaking their identity, they don’t recognize how extreme has been the transformation in themselves. They genuinely don’t remember how liberal-minded they once were.

My mother used to be pro-choice, my father used to have a Playboy subscription, etc. It was the Seventies, to be fair. Everyone was a bit crazy back then. Even President Richard Nixon was pushing hard left domestic policies: increased funding for social programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, family support, etc), and advocated universal healthcare reform and a universal basic income.

With the liberal consensus in the air, most of the population was on board with the liberalism. Everyone was doing it. And it was a time of expanding civil rights. Liberation was in the air. How times have changed!

My parents spent the first half of their life becoming more liberal and, in the second half, they reversed course. It hasn’t been a happy fate that they’ve embraced, albeit unconsciously.

If your chosen group only allows people who are exactly like you, and if being like you means judging and hating upon anyone not like you, then it’s more probable than not that your group will end up small and will, over time, become ever smaller. That is what illiberalism means, unless you successfully plan an authoritarian takeover and force your illiberalism over the entire society — the preference of the far right my parents have become aligned with.

That sense of isolation and alienation, in being politicized and weaponized by right-wing media, becomes an all-encompassing and totalizing identity.

As Corey Robin argues in The Reactionary Mind, the ideological mindset and its attendant politics is built on a sense of loss, typically portrayed as something have been unjustly stolen or destroyed, and so requiring to be regained by any and all means, any and all costs:

“Failure is its most potent source of inspiration. Loss – real social loss, of power and position, privilege and prestige – is the mustard seed of conservative innovation.”

And:

“But as that sense of conflict diminishes on the left, it has fallen to the right to remind voters that there really are losers in politics and that it is they – and only they -who speak for them. ‘All conservatism begins with loss,” Andrew Sullivan rightly notes, which makes conservatism not the Party of Order, as Mill and others have claimed, but the party of the loser.

“The chief aim of the loser is not – and indeed cannot be – preservation or protection. It is recovery and restoration. That is one of the secrets of conservatism’s success. For all of its demotic frisson and ideological grandiosity, for all of its insistence upon triumph and will, movement and mobilization, conservatism can be an ultimately pedestrian affair. Because his losses are recent – the right agitates against reform in real time, not millennia after the fact – the conservative can credibly claim to his constituency, indeed to the polity at large, that his goals are practical and achievable. He merely seeks to regain what is his…”

But in creating a narratized identity of loss, that sense of loss becomes manifested as reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The right-winger loses themselves in their own dark fantasies. The abstract rhetoric of loss becomes reified as a totalitarian ideology that consumes people like a boa constrictor swallowing its prey whole.

* * *

To demonstrate this in another area, my parents left the large mainline Methodist church they had been attending for about a decade.

As well-established and well-known members of that congregation, they had been part of an extensive social circle that was enmeshed in the larger local community. But it was also a congregation with lots of activities and opportunities for involvement. My father had taken on important roles, such as having been on the board that made important decisions. He genuinely felt like he was contributing and so was of value.

But that church was liberal and ecumenical. In rejecting the liberal preference for non-rejection (tolerance, acceptance, & inclusion), my parents ended up self-rejecting themselves from that broad inclusivity. They were being influenced by right-wing rhetoric that told them such social liberalism was wrong and unChristian. So, instead, they joined a small fundamentalist church with a congregation that is tribalistic and parochial, with a theological bunker mentality and persecution complex.

I’m starting to think this isn’t an unintended side effect but the very core of the reactionary right, precisely how it’s mentality operates and how its identity is maintained.

It’s similar to why cults must separate individuals from their former social networks of family and friends. In its place, a new identity is created. It tells them that they are special, privileged, and superior; that they have the truth and all others are lost in dangerous lies; that outsiders don’t understand, can’t understand.

Then the more cut off, isolated, and lonely that individuals are made to feel — dejected, demoralized, or even desperate — the more they’ll cling to the authoritarian ingroup identify offered to them as a lifesaver, a refuge.

* * *

There is some strange compulsion in this. In all cases of people I know, there is no self-awareness of what it’s doing to them. Once inside that mentality, it’s hard to ever get out again or even to find the motivation to try. The trap is triggered and the trapdoor closes behind.

After some time, being so tightly enclosed feels like safety, security, and certainty. It’s known and everything outside of it becomes threatening, as it reminds the individual there is something else that exists beyond.

Right-wingers often complain about liberals and leftists. They can’t understand why those with principles of tolerance won’t tolerate their intolerance. They try to spin this as hypocrisy, as if liberals are required by definition to tolerate everything without moral discernment, critical thinking, and ethical concern for its affect on others.

If optimally including as many as possible, those on the left reject those who would, as is happening as we speak with the Trump regime, actively target the broad left, everything it stands for, and all those who find protection under it. That this attack would be rejected and why it would be rejected is self-explanatory, for those who want to understand.

I’m seriously starting to think right-wingers want to be rejected so as to feel embittered about having been rejected and to further rationalize their behavior that caused it all in the first place. It’s precisely the mechanism as a vicious cycle that makes it so potent and effective. They need that sense of loss, that sense of being on the defense to maintain their core identity.

The purpose of the Burkean moral imagination is to obscure, enclose, and isolate (Corey Robin).

As already noted, this relates to the need for conflict. As reactionary right-wingers want to be rejected, they likewise seek to elicit reaction from others and so to bring their perceived adversaries into their worldview of animosity, struggle, and competition (Reactionaries Seeking Reaction). They need to recruit people to play a role in their socially constructed and politically enforced melodrama, if and when others will respond to their ‘hail’ and become interpellated.

They are trying to trap others as they have been trapped. Oddly, pulling others into their worldview, even as narratized enemies, might make them feel less lonely. The point is to create a shared worldview, if done through fear and hate.

That is why stress, specifically threat, is so important. But stress as trauma, competition, etc also works, as do disease and mortality salience. In the broad sense, ‘threat’ can be almost anything.

As research shows, stress will make right-wingers even more right-wing, while also drawing liberals and left-wingers into the reactionary mind (Paul R. Nail, et al, Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives). In the end, even merely reacting to the reactionary turns one’s mind toward the reactionary. It’s like wrestling with the allegorical pig that gets you muddy but only leaves the pig happy.

They don’t only want to dominate people but also their minds and imaginations. At the same time, what gets them excited is the perceived threat that their enemies might win, that the inferior are conniving and sneaky (Schizoid Reaction: Enemies are Weak and Strong). A threat has to feel compelling in order to be motivating.

This is part of why every right-wing accusation is an admission of guilt or a statement of intent. They claim to be threatened while threatening others, so as to create a totalizing situation of threat. And in forcing their victims to defend themselves, they of course interpret that as further stress.

At one point, while enforcing violent oppression, an official of the Trump administration said that state violence and terrorism against the left wouldn’t be necessary, as long as the left just rolls over and plays dead. But any action taken to defend democracy and civil rights from right-wing attacks would be considered justification for further right-wing attacks.

Basically, they’ll attack the left if they do nothing and they’ll attack the left if they try to defend themselves. But in either case, it’s the fault of the leftist victims who were asking for it.

The real ‘threat’ posed by liberalism, in its fullest form and expression (under optimal conditions), is that it represents a mentality without threat. There is nothing more fearful, in the reactionary mind, as all that is not reactionary, from non-threat (i.e., safety) to non-rejection (i.e., inclusion), because it demonstrates and proves the reactionary isn’t inevitable, isn’t reality itself. All possibility of alternatives, or even the mere imagining of them, must be shut down.

* * *

That is the purpose of censorship and such. Ideological realism can only manifest through the enforced silence and invisibility of all else. It’s like the 19th century scientists who cut the vocal cords of living animals before dissecting them so that they wouldn’t have to hear them scream and be bothered by the potential for empathy.

It’s part of an entire culture of silence, a culture of trauma (Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words, & The Culture of Make Believe). It’s a deafening silence. So much of right-wing ideology and the reactionary mind, specifically in its modern American form, is simply about mass, transgenerational trauma as part of a self-perpetuated victimization cycle.

That is what underlies the desire to be special, to be among the lucky and privileged few. The right-wing is about a dangerous world and the need for group dominance and status, for group power, protection, and privilege.

Though liberalism accepts and even celebrates difference, the twin force of egalitarianism tells us that no one is inherently and ultimately more worthy than anyone else. Rather than to become a victimizer among victims, rather than to be on the winning team of social Darwinism or religious salvation, it’s the anti-authoritarian and anti-dominance aspiration to end the victimization cycle entirely.

To desperately cling to specialness out of fear is no great victory, no worthy prize. It provides us nothing we need and nothing that can help us, even as it creates a mirage of safety and strength, my group against the world.

This can be brought back around to the need for melodrama of conflict and competition. The reactionary mind and Burkean moral imagination requires a ritualistic creation of enemies to be fought, usurpers to be overthrown, and threats to be scapegoated. In being cut off not only from others but also from their own vitality as part of an expansive self in a living world, right-wingers feel compelled to artificially pump up the grandiosity of their small-minded identity.

In the end, right-wing ideology is boring.

It closes down curiosity, fascination, and wonder; all things liberal-minded that drive people to play and create, to explore and experiment, to invent and innovate, to question and learn. It sacrifices the very heart of what it means to be human, the simple enjoyment of being alive in a shared world.

Ironically, right-wingers hate this self-caused boredom most of all. Of such soul-sucking ennui and soul-deadening alienation, no one would choose this sorry fate accept as a threat response, a trauma response. It’s mere survival, at all costs. Fear can motivate you to react against something, but it can lead to nothing greater, not even fear writ large as Cosmic War or Clash of Civilizations.

* * *

Those are empty fictions, illusions of meaning that slips through their fingers as they try to grasp hold of them. That is why right-wingers, even when they win, feel like they’ve lost.

And so they constantly look for the next division, conflict, and battle. If none is available, they’ll invent one. That is why, when right-wingers do gain power, they so often turn on one another in a bloodbath (e.g., Nazi leaders who, once Nazis seized control, immediately killed competing Nazi leaders). If external enemies are defeated, the next step is to look for internal enemies. In the right-wing world, there has to be someone to oppose and attack, scapegoat and eliminate.

Having had taken up this attitude was the later regret of the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller.

He was a German patriot, fervent nationalist, World War I veteran, social conservative, anti-communist, opponent to Weimar democracy, right-wing authoritarian, xenophobe, anti-Semite, and fundamentalist leader. He supported and voted for the Nazi Party, the defenders of everything he believed in, or so he thought.

As the famous quote of his words describes, Niemöller didn’t speak out in defense of the innocent when he had the opportunity. He silently and complicitly did nothing when Nazis put left-wingers, minorities, etc in death camps. It was only after he criticized Nazi religious policy that, like other religious dissidents and heretics (Jews, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists), he suddenly found himself on the wrong side of persecution and oppression. After some time in prisons, he too ended up in a concentration camp.

Once the Nazis had taken care of all the enemies that he too wanted destroyed, the Nazis needed new enemies and then even mild critics like him were offered up as sacrifices. As he explained, in having stood up for no one else, there was no one left to stand up for him. As victims can become victimizers, sometimes victimizers become victims of their own desire to victimize others. (Israeli Zionists and MAGA evangelicals might eventually learn this lesson.)

It never ends.

Ever smaller differences are deemed a mark of sin and guilt, until the entire population is terrified into submission in knowing that any of them might be next. But at least, the right-winger isn’t bored. That’s what really matters, right? It’s why god-emperor Donald Trump is constantly ginning up violent conflict and, if he doesn’t perfectly succeed in getting the desired reaction, Fox News, Newsmax, and other right-wing media will spin it that way for the entertainment of MAGA followers.

It’s all about the entertainment, the excitement, about not being bored.* It’s almost like having a sense of meaning and purpose.

[*See: Boredom in the Mind: Liberals and Reactionaries, Violent Fantasy of Reactionary Intellectuals, The Fantasy of Creative Destruction, Reactionary Mind in Reactionary Times, & Erotic Fantasies of Moral Imagination.]

* * *

To the right-wing mind, anything along the lines of liberal democracy is simultaneously boring, weak, and dangerous. What is desired is to have the right kind of people to rule, with all others kept out. The struggle for power is exciting, whereas democratic process — especially as egalitarian mutualism — is the opposite. That’s why right-wingers prefer war. It’s the ultimate expression of their political vision.

But conflict and threat is also a political tactic.

Stress induces and strengthens the right-wing, reactionary mind. In general, the right-wing seeks agitation and anxiety, often combined with group narcissism and egoic inflation. The imagined greatness of threats and enemies is used to boost the narratized greatness of collective identity (Schizoid Reaction: Enemies are Weak and Strong).

It’s why they use moral panic, scapegoating, folk devils, witch-hunts, political religion, aestheticization of politics, society of spectacle (Guy Debord),  shock doctrine (Naomi Klein), flood the zone, the big lie, and fearmongering (e.g., cultivation theory and mean world syndrome).

It’s all about ginning up emotions. This is why the right-wing has come to dominate social media that operates through eliciting emotional responses to get clicks, views, and engagement. Anger, outrage, vengeance, lust, envy, schadenfreude, etc. It doesn’t matter, whichever emotional reaction is most intense and engaging.

The right-winger, though, is particularly an addict of fear; or at least that is so for RWAs, if SDOs (and honor types) likely would also be drawn to status-related emotions like pride and shame. As their tolerance builds, they need an increasingly bigger hit of their favored drug. This is the reason why right-wing power tends to be self-destructive. It constantly pushes toward greater extremes and atrocities, until it overdoses on its own terror, chokes and suffocates on it’s own ‘greatness’ (What does stress do to the mind? And why?).

Adolf Hitler in a bunker as Germany was being pulverized and invaded is the fullest culmination and final endpoint of the right-wing vision of totalizing violent conflict. Even Hitler found it a fitting ending of sorts. As he argued, the German people must prove their superiority by defeating all enemies and conquering the world or else, if proven inferior in battle, to be wiped from the face of the earth.

It was a Manichaean vision of absolutes. There can be tolerated the domination and rule of only one ideology, one group, one race, one religion, one party, one leader — one ring to rule them all. Any number of things can play this role. But whatever it it is, it must be absolute and totalizing. Even complete defeat and decimation would be preferable to being bored.

I’m not sure what conclusion to make and what lesson to take away. Maybe this: Don’t be a right-winger. Just don’t. It will end in a vale of tears, if you ever do gain power.