Criminal and law-abiding authoritarianism arise from the same personality dynamics

Evidence

The criminal interviews were not coded or treated quantitatively but they are quoted at length in The Authoritarian Personality to establish the authors’ position that criminal authoritarianism had the same fundamental personality dynamics as did the authoritarianism that was within the law. Some of the quotations, especially those from the three prisoners who were labelled fascistic, are hair-raising. They suggest that we could find, in this country, willing recruits for a Gestapo. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 517

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a nation’s ordinary citizenry contains latent Gestapo recruits — that authoritarianism is personality-based and spans law-breaking and law-abiding forms — is a genuinely unsettling thesis worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre’s portrait of the anti-Semite independently matched the empirical authoritarian personality findings — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1787