Extremist parties need diverse personality types, not uniform authoritarians.

Evidence

The idea that all persons affiliated with an extremist political party should have the same personality characteristics is much too simple-minded. It is some improvement to recognize the kinds of personality differences among people adhering to a common ideology that are suggested by a dynamic conception of authoritarianism. But there are other differences that must exist. As Lasswell (1954) has argued an organization as complex as a political party must have a great variety of differentiated roles. The Nazi Party had use for a great many rigid, sadomasochistic, anti-intraceptive, anti-Semites of the kind described in the Berkeley study. But it also had need of clever propagandists, clear-thinking ministers, sensitive diplomats, and courageous military men. There may be some essential quality that occupants of all of these roles had to have in order to be Nazis but, in addition, they had to have distinctive characteristics. An institutionalized political movement could not have operated with personalities of a completely uniform type. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 682

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the ‘banality of evil’ and role-differentiation literature; also undermines one-dimensional typologies of movement members. — connects to: Most left-wing party supporters lacked a matching radical personality type. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 707; US domestic extremists divide into far-right, Islamist, and far-left groups of very unequal size. — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 165
• SEED: Essay angle: the administrative and diplomatic personnel who make totalitarian movements function are not the sadistic stereotype, and that has implications for how we recognize complicity.