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When the young mother finally gets the screaming baby down for a nap, sometimes – rather than do a happy dance – she simply collapses herself.
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The Republicans don’t want a “grownup”; they want Trump. Biden isn’t nearly evil or stupid enough to make them happy, even if he wasn’t the wrong party.
F’ing solid post, no notes.
Here is a pre-print with more info:
They are mostly saying that in areas where authoritarian ideas are now most prevalent, COVID hit worse. One possibility – which would go against their thesis – is that the authoritarianism existed before COVID and impaired public health measures in those areas.
However – both could be true – preexisting authoritarianism made COVID worse, and then bad COVID made authoritarianism worse.
I actually consider this positive. The COVID effect should start wearing off.
Yesterday was one of the worst days in American history. Can I hope that was the nadir?.
This predates covid, and finds that higher rates of infectious diseases in the 1990s still causes higher rates of authoritarianism 20 years later.
We might just be beginning to see the rise of authoritarian politics due to this. Who knows how bad it’ll be. But since Covid, Trump has gotten re-elected and the far right are winning all over Europe. No idea if there is a connection though.
The US findings were replicated at an international level using survey data from over 51,000 people across 47 different countries, comparing responses with national-level disease rates.
The most authoritarian US states had rates of infectious diseases – from HIV to measles – around four times higher than the least authoritarian states, while for the most authoritarian nations it was three times higher than the least.
This was after scientists accounted for a range of other socioeconomic factors that influence ideology, including religious beliefs and inequalities in wealth and education. They also found that higher regional infection rates in the USA corresponded to more votes for Donald Trump in the 2016 US Presidential Election.
Moreover, in both nations and US states, higher rates of infectious disease correlated with more ‘vertical’ laws – those that disproportionately affect certain groups, such as abortion control or extreme penalties for certain crimes. This was not the case with ‘horizontal’ laws that affect everyone equally.
“We find a consistent relationship between prevalence of infectious diseases and a psychological preference for conformity and hierarchical power structures – pillars of authoritarian politics,” said study lead author Dr Leor Zmigrod, an expert in the psychology of ideology from the University of Cambridge.
“Higher rates of infectious diseases predicted political attitudes and outcomes such as conservative voting and authoritarian legal structures. Across multiple geographical and historical levels of analysis we see this relationship emerge again and again.”
“We found that pathogen rates from over 20 years ago were still relevant to political attitudes as recently as 2016. If COVID-19 increases the allure of authoritarian politics, the effects could be long-lasting,” said Zmigrod, from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.
That is an…optimistic…view.
Stranger
This just isn’t true, though. Young adults today are buying houses at about the same rate as the last several decades; sometimes it’s been a bit better, but sometimes it’s been worse. People think for some reason that millennials are worse off, but it isn’t so.
There are certainly problems I wish we would address with capitalism, especially in the U.S., but people are still generally better off than they have ever been.
Yes. This is the factor behind the rise of the far right in Europe. Mainstream parties refused to consider lowering immigration, or they promised to reduce it and failed. So the far right parties have gained more and more support.
1400s more like. There was a naive view that everyone is the same and immigrants would easily integrate and become part of their new societies, and as we are now seeing with the second generation, this is just not the case. Yet the enthusiasm of politicians to bring in more and more people continues, regardless of all the problems we’re seeing and regardless of the wishes of voters.
I think the Great Recession broke the trust of the people in neoliberalism, yet there is no mainstream alternative. Hence the turn to economic populism and willingness to try things like tariffs.
I’m going with this as well, in that people with memories of WWII are literally dying out; even those with experiences once removed are aging out of power. I have photos of my dad and his pilot buddies, all with sidearms, standing in front of ruins in Berlin. I have the few medals he picked up off the floor of some Berlin building, and I have a memo with Hitler’s signature on it.
My dad had a coworker in the federal govt who was an RCAF fighter pilot who managed to rip off a BF 109 to get back to the UK.
A lot of my (or our, Dopers’) generation have had experiences like that related to us. To the folks in power these days, I think that all of this is, almost-ancient, history such that the consequences of authoritarianism are simply things from overexaggerated dystopian fiction.
I remember when Bush the elder was running for presidency and I thought his military service was during Vietnam or Korea. It was a shock even then to discover a WWII vet was still active in politics. WWII was grandparents war in my mind.
I don’t know where that data come from (the plot says “Census Bureau” but no clue as to what data it is actually using) but the National Association of Realtors—who, you might say have a vested interest in knowing their market—show a quite definite trend of declining proportion and increasing age of first time buyers.
From the summary:
- First-time buyers decreased to 24% of the market share(32% last year). This year now marks the lowest share since NAR began collecting the data in 1981.
- The median first-time buyer age increased to 38 years old this year from 35 last year, while the typical repeat buyer age also increased to 61 years from 58 last year
The full report will cost you a nickel short of $200 but presumably goes into more detail.
Stranger
That’s projecting American politics onto Europe; there’s plenty of anti-immigrant hostility and general xenophobia in the European Left.
You can click through to the Dean Baker article with a link to the Census Bureau data. And I’ll take neutral data and analysis over a trade group’s doomsaying any day.