Prejudice provides authoritarians a sanctioned outlet for aggression

Evidence

Why should people whose parents were anxious about status have an idealized image of themselves and of their parents and a very bad opinion of minorities and foreigners? It is because status anxiety produces authoritarian discipline which produces repression of faults and shortcomings and of aggression against authority. It is the fate of repressed faults and shortcomings to be projected to minorities and outsiders. It is the fate of the repressed aggression to be displaced from authority and directed against minorities and outsiders. Finally the projected faults and shortcomings rationalize the aggression. Prejudice plays an integral role in the total ideology but the role is psychological rather than logical. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 563

Categorization

• XREF: The displacement/projection chain from Adorno anticipates the ‘counter-identity’ logic the reader is tracing — where psychological defensiveness, not belief content, drives out-group construction. — connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: Ours, True, and the Identity That Defends Both”
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 563