If you haven’t checked out my post about why I left the conservative party, I invite you to do so before reading further.
Like many of you, I have been perplexed by the grossly negligent, almost hypnotic loyalty to the MAGA agenda. Nonetheless, I’ve watched friends and colleagues grow eerily silent, clearly realizing that things have gotten entirely ass-backwards, yet too paralyzed to speak out. I applaud those who have finally ripped off the Trump stickers and abandoned this dying political ideology. Good on you for having a backbone!
But while this movement is still thrashing around, I want to take an introspective look at how we got here. Why did the movement I was formerly a part of—one that used to never shut up about “individual liberty”—become so deeply, weirdly obsessed with submission?
To understand why the Right traded “Don’t Tread on Me” for “Just Comply,” we have to look at the F-Scale—the “F” standing for Fascism.
Developed in 1950 by Theodor Adorno and a team of researchers at Berkeley, the F-Scale was designed to measure the “authoritarian personality.” Coming directly out of the horrors of WWII, these researchers were trying to answer a terrifying question: What makes a “normal” person crave antidemocratic control? Looking at their findings today is like reading a diagnostic chart for the modern Conservative movement. As summarized by historian Christopher Browning in his analysis of the era:
“[R]igid adherence to conventional values; submissiveness to authority figures; aggressiveness toward outgroups; opposition to introspection, reflection, and creativity; a tendency to superstition and stereotyping; preoccupation with ‘toughness’; destructiveness and cynicism; projectivity (‘the disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world’ and ‘the projection outward of unconscious emotional impulses’); and an exaggerated concern with sexuality.”
— Browning, C. R. (2017). Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Revised ed.). Harper Perennial.
Symptom 1: Submissiveness to the “Strongman”
At the very top of Adorno’s list is Authoritarian Submission. This isn’t just about agreeing with a political leader; it’s a deep-seated, uncritical, and emotional need to believe that “The Authority” is fundamentally infallible. It is the active surrender of critical thinking in exchange for the comfort of being told what is true.
Does this sound familiar? Consider the absolute silence when Kristi Noem spent a whopping $220 million on a DHS advertising campaign, paid out to an agency that was exactly eight days old. Crickets.
When you are suffering from Authoritarian Submission, corruption at the top doesn’t bother you, so long as the Strongman is hurting the people you fear.
But the most chilling manifestation of this submission is how it rewires a person’s core values overnight. This was put on full display after the extrajudicial murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year.
- The Psychological Pivot: For the MAGA base, the police officer or the state agent is an extension of the Strongman. To question the extrajudicial killing of a citizen is to question the “Father” of the state.
- The Submission Trap: This is exactly why the “Rugged Individualist” disappears the moment a badge is involved. Their submissiveness to authority is so deeply wired that they will abandon their own sacred “Stand Your Ground” dogmas to defend the state’s absolute right to execute.
According to the F-Scale, a potentially fascistic individual views a citizen’s autonomy as a threat to the collective “Order.” When Good and Pretti were killed, my former peers on the Right didn’t see a tragedy or a violation of Constitutional rights; they saw the Strongman cleaning up the “wild and dangerous” world they’ve been conditioned to fear.
Symptom 2: Aggressiveness Toward Outgroups
The authoritarian bargain requires a release valve. Adorno noted that because the authoritarian cannot—and will not—challenge the Strongman they submit to, they must redirect all their suppressed frustration and fear downward.
The F-Scale defines this as the tendency to be on the lookout for, condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values. It is the “punching down” mechanism of the authoritarian psyche.
We see this aggressive outgroup targeting utilized as a direct political tool. Let’s circle back to Kristi Noem’s $220 million taxpayer-funded ad campaign. In the modern Conservative playbook, the undocumented migrant is the ultimate boogeyman—an existential threat to every ‘American value’ you hold dear. Do you see how the trick works? When you trigger that primal, authoritarian fear, you get a blank check to get away with absolutely everything. You can funnel nine figures of public money into an eight-day-old shell company run by your political cronies, and your base won’t bat an eye. Why?
Because as long as you promise to protect them from the monster at the gates, they will happily let you pick their pockets.
Dehumanization as Defense
We saw this play out in real-time. Within minutes of the Minneapolis murders, the right-wing media machine didn’t just report facts; they performed a character assassination. By the time the masses reached for their keyboards, Renee Good and Alex Pretti had been scrubbed of their humanity and rebranded as “The Outgroup.” Before their bodies were even cold, pundits inside the Trump cabinet flocked to the cameras to call these two US citizens “domestic terrorists.”
- The Tactic: Newsmax and Fox immediately focused on any perceived “non-conventional” trait—past records, lifestyle choices, or political leanings.
- The Goal: To trigger the authoritarian’s innate aggressiveness. If the victims can be framed as outsiders or “troublemakers,” their deaths are no longer a violation of civil rights; they become a necessary cleansing of the social order.
Selective Outrage and the “Ingroup” Rule
This highlights the glaring hypocrisy that finally drove me away. “Stand Your Ground” is a right strictly reserved for the Ingroup—the “law-abiding” conservative. But if you are perceived as part of the Outgroup, you have no ground to stand on. Your mere non-compliance is treated as an act of war.
For the MAGA conservative, the demand to “Just Comply” is a weapon pointed exclusively at those they despise. They will violently storm the Capitol to “protect their rights” against a state they view as the Outgroup, but will turn around and cheer for the extrajudicial killing of citizens in Minneapolis.
They aren’t fighting for freedom. They are fighting for the right to submit to their chosen master, and for the power to force the rest of us to do the same.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
