Authoritarians adopt whichever rights principle serves their side’s current advantage

Evidence

In other words, Highs often support majority rights when they compose the majority but support minority rights when in the minority. Obviously, they believe in neither. While High RWAs think of themselves as being driven by high principles, in reality they often snatch their “principles” off the shelf, after the fact, to justify getting what they want. Many Highs can speak out of both sides of their mouth on an issue, and perhaps never notice they are doing so. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1486

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates the vault’s claims about Christian-nationalist and authoritarian inconsistency between stated principle and strategic interest.
• QUESTION: This ‘post-hoc principle acquisition’ mechanism — is there a good empirical demonstration of it beyond self-report?