Dominant authoritarians migrating through leftist movements skew revolutions toward dictatorship

Evidence

In closing this section, let me try to mine three nuggets of insight from the discovery of the Wild-Card Authoritarians. First, if we recall that Wild Cards almost always find the RWA Scale more to their liking than the LWA Scale, … I think we can understand better the perplexing careers of Benito Mussolini, Lyndon LaRouche, and others who started out on the political left, but ended up way over on the political right. Some High RWAs can turn up in leftist movements. Second, you can see why left-wing organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Students for a Democratic Society eventually split into nonviolent and violent factions. The Left-Wingers and the Wild Cards could not work together forever. Third, these results may help explain why leftist revolutions so often become dictatorships if they succeed. Wild Cards tend to control things at the end of the war. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2996 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Well then, what about all those earlier “sightings,” including Manitoba’s militant Maoists? I suspect that the hostile, dogmatic, authoritarian people who sometimes appeared in such movements were usually Wild-Card Authoritarians, not Left-Wingers. I have no proof of this, since the instruments needed to find these “combos” did not exist at the time. But I offer Table 9.1 as evidence. Maybe the future will bless us (?) with a resurgence of radical left-wing movements in North America, so we can test this prediction. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2993 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Left-originated syndicalism became a powerful organizing tool of the fascist right — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 262; Liberation movements inherit the deformity of what they oppose — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 196; Scholars on the left increasingly favor China-style authoritarianism over democracy — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1640 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Personality-driven authoritarians, not ideological leftists, drive leftist movements toward violence and dictatorship. #corroborates (0.92) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2996
• Apparent left-wing authoritarians were actually high-RWA wild cards who drifted into radical movements #complicates (0.88) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2993
• Supposed left-wing authoritarians in past movements were probably right-wing wild cards #complicates (0.85)
• Authoritarianism links to right-wing politics across hostile national groups #complicates (0.74) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 502
• People high in left-wing authoritarianism tended also to score high on right-wing authoritarianism #complicates (0.72) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2897