Authoritarian Politics Quotes

Trump channeled ethno-populist rage as naturally and charismatically as George Wallace had during the 1960s, while seating a billionaire cabinet.

I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living.

Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.

I am a longstanding critic of British foreign policy - and an opponent of the authoritarian, quasi-imperialist, racist, homophobic politics of Putin.

Personalist regimes mute factional differences the most .... Dictators usually retain the loyalty of elites through some combination of coercion, personal favors, and material rewards. Elites are frequently rotated or jailed to avoid factionalism. The military is usually a depersonalized instrument for the dictator's power, holding no sense of independent institutional identity. Divisions between so-called hard-liners and soft-liners are virtually non-existent...

The Left is totalitarian in its nature

If we look at the last decades, we see that the US rightist-fundamentalist alliance demonized partnership-oriented families and painted women's rights as a threat to "tradition" - which of course it is to traditions of domination. These people had an integrated political agenda that recognizes that a "traditional" authoritarian, male dominated, punitive family is foundational to an authoritarian, male dominated, punitive politics. We can see this connection in sharp relief in brutal top-down regimes, be they secular like Nazi Germany or religious like ISIS in the Middle East.

Fascism is not just a word. It's not just a way to insult someone with whom you disagree. It is a specific thing. It is a specific form of far right politics that involves a sort of narcissistic cult of superman action around the leader of the party.

We have come to discover what we suspect is a new political mindset emerging among a younger generation of political leaders socialized on Internet communications. Their politics are less about right versus left and more about centralized and authoritarian versus distributed and collaborative.

The regime is in trouble economically and can no longer offer anything to its citizens. That's why [Vladimir] Putin has to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, so he can serve his people the fairy tale of Russian pride and regaining its strength as a major power.

I wrote a study about this question, The Lessons of October, which served as a pretext for my elimination from the government.