We've Always Lived Under Authoritarianism
On the vision of a little-known sociologist whose urgent warnings are a guidebook for truly understanding authoritarianism... and its antidote.
In 1991, a once-popular author and well-respected sociologist warned that America was an authoritarian nation and that it was on track to become even more authoritarian.
His name was Philip Slater and he had a track record of being right. In 1970 he had published his most famous book: The Pursuit of Loneliness, in which he warned that if the hippie and counter-cultural movements didn’t realize that the structure and culture of America, they would eventually succumb to the very values they were trying to subvert.
The Pursuit of Loneliness remains as relevant today as ever, but it was his lesser known 1991 book called A Dream Deferred. In it, he argues that anyone who is against authoritarianism must understand if they want to truly combat it and tear out its roots so that we can bring about the democratic and pluralistic society we dream of.
His book takes a wide approach to defining authoritarianism. Most modern writers and thinkers approach it in the ways we are used to: they look at Hitler, Putin, Trump. Very few would claim that Biden is an authoritarian.
Slater looked at it differently. He claimed that humanity had been living under authoritarian rule for about five or six thousand years. This argument was based in his definition of authoritarianism: “A highly centralized social organization developed in order to exercise coercive control over unwilling participants in the community.” He described authoritarianism more as a “megaculture” which spanned throughout any civilization that had left behind its hunter-gatherer past.
Although he believed that this approach was seeded when humanity learned to dominate nature through agriculture, the authoritarianism he defined above was, he believed, rooted in the enslavement of defeated tribes, one of the earliest times in human history when we needed to “exercise coercive control over unwilling participants in the community.”
From that lens, it is easier to understand why Slater believed America, even in 1991, was an authoritarian country. It was because:
1. Humanity had, for thousands of years, been living under authoritarianism in which a hierarchy of control was exercised over the population with various groups controlled more or less depending on their place in the hierarchy.
2. Democracy was not just about the right to vote and authoritarianism is not just about one ruler with an iron fist rule. Democracy is about the participation of the members of a society and the decentralization of power.
3. Authoritarianism and democracy were not all or nothing realities but lived on a spectrum: and the democracy we live in today is the very early stages of the democratic revolution he envisioned for humanity.
Within that construct, it is easier to understand why there is actually a group that has been warning us that we have lived under authoritarianism since the very founding of American society: Black Americans.
The difficulty with democratic revolutions is that they often happen in stages. It rarely, if ever, occurs for all groups at once. The Revolutionary War was a war for the freedom of a very small group of people. People that were completely unashamed to make explicit who this freedom was for: white men who owned property. White women were given a lower status but were still well above Black people.
All of this isn’t news, of course, but when we look at it through this lens it is stunning that anyone could truly claim we have left authoritarianism behind. And ask many Black Americans and voices today and you’ll hear what we should have understood all along: there is no point at which America has left behind its authoritarian nature.
This isn’t just about race, though. It’s about every aspect of our society.
From Slater’s perspective, since authoritarianism has not only been a governmental institution but the megaculture that has been the main organizing principle of society until very recently, it is part of almost every aspect of the way we live and organize our societies.
There is perhaps no more authoritarian structure in our society than the military. It is literally structured in an authoritarian framework, with obedience, hierarchy, and centralization of power at its core.
Now think about how much of America’ budget goes to the military. And our militarized police (the NYPD has almost double the budget of the Ukrainian military). And our militarized populace.
And what could be more authoritarian than America’s corporations which are built through strict hierarchy and centralization of power? As well as the massive disparity in both control and income of CEOs, especially the new tech leaders like Elon Musk who structure their boards in order to escape accountability.
As inequality gets entrenched further, think about the power a manager (and their manager) has over a worker. How the worker knows that in a country without support for the poor, their lives may literally be on the line if they lose their job? Every step towards inequality, especially without a social safety net, is a step closer to authoritarianism.
Think about the definition of authoritarianism that Slater provides: “A highly centralized social organization developed in order to exercise coercive control over unwilling participants in the community.”
In a country where workers are under the coercive control of their bosses, it would be hard to imagine how we have actually moved past authoritarianism on a deeper level. Under this definition, it would mean that as inequality grew and safety nets died away in our country, we were becoming more authoritarian far earlier than when Trump took power.
And this goes beyond power structures. Culturally, we are enmeshed in authoritarianism. Our two biggest film grossers are superhero movies and action movies. Both of these, particular superhero movies, are authoritarian dreams: the few chosen, higher than the rest, are able to exert their power over others in order to save the world. A superhero story is the story that Trump sells to his audience. They are positive authoritarians where the story implies that a few deserve to have immense power if they have pure hearts as opposed to a message that any such power is inherently corrosive and dangerous (there are superhero movies and comics that subvert this, but even in that case they are in contrast to this message specifically).
Depending on how we practice our religions, many of us are waiting on a Messiah.
In Slater’s words, “Despite our democratic tradition, Americans have a touching faith in the myth of the Incorruptible Man. In this scenario a hero rides out of the West, assumes absolute power, cleans up town, and then rides off into the sunset.”
Even our memories of real events get shaped in the authoritarian image. Martin Luther King Jr. is often the only civil rights leader taught in schools and celebrated in our society. Yet King himself emphasized the vision of a beloved community, one where we each contribute our part towards the grander vision.
“No matter what area and all fields, we should be ready. We need more skilled laborers. We need more people who are competent in all areas and always remember that the important thing is to do a good job. No matter what it is. Whatever you are doing consider it as something having cosmic significance, as it is a part of the uplifting of humanity.”
And the civil rights movement was far more distributed, with the Black Panthers, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Nation of Islam, and others contributing, among many others. The marches, the organizing, the various voices: they all contributed.
Yet, even with all that, most of America is taught about one man. This is because even our vision of democracy is often still steeped in the vision of authoritarianism.
All of this matters deeply because often those of us who are “anti-extremist,” believers in democracy, those of us most afraid of the rise of authoritarianism and fascism, have not freed our minds and imagination to truly understand what we are dreaming of. In so doing, we often end up approaching our work through the framework of authoritarianism, unknowingly entrenching it and its structure further in our lives and our society.
Even if we didn’t do that, we’d still limit our own dreams and thus hurt a fight that requires us to be able to envision what we’re even fighting for.
When Robert Mueller began his investigation into Trump, many Democratic Party voters saw him as a sort of messianic figure who would save us from Trump and the evils of authoritarianism. This fantasy was not only based in authoritarian dreaming, but also infected them with the belief that they needn’t contribute to the cause of democracy: they just needed this mystical man to solve the problem and that alone would free America of not just Trump but all Trump represented. Mueller was their superhero and they were the gaping civilians looking into the sky as he fought the supervillain.
Our obsession with the presidential race, important as it is, also reveals our misunderstanding of democracy. 60% of Americans vote in the presidential race, 40% in midterms, and about 25% in local elections.
This is why Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, and the current campus movements are and were so important: they were distributed. It was their decentralized nature that at times made them vulnerable but it was what they taught that made them so powerful: that each person must contribute to make larger change.
But the larger left itself can also fall into the trap of authoritarianism, a big reason the movement often collapses in on itself.
For example: it is not enough to simply protest. And despite what the leaders of these movements often try to tell their participants, for many this alone is the contribution one must make. Yet democracy is about decentralization: we are supposed to each contribute to a larger cause in the way we are most empowered to do so.
We also still think in an old, borders-based, nationalist style while authoritarians are learning to network and work together across borders.
If you use a smartphone, laptop, or drive an electric vehicle it is quite likely that you are benefitting from slavery in the Congo. But unfortunately, many of us on the progressive and leftist side of things tend to accept something that would outrage us if it happened in our country.
And since the corporations that largely benefit off these batteries are based in the United States, our capitalist-authoritarian system has empowered these companies, including absolving them of any wrongdoing.
More commonly known is the left’s issue with purity tests, one that is more than just the impractical approach to change we often associate it with. The bigger problem is that even if the wing of the left which engages in purity tests were to succeed in its goals, it would by its nature be an authoritarian movement.
This gives very practical meaning to Martin Luther King’s argument for loving an enemy and nonviolence. In his words, “The ends are preexistent in the means.”
It is for all these reasons and many more that I think Philip Slater’s expansive vision is so important. Having a clear-eyed view of authoritarianism as a larger concept and why we are against it is part of how we can have an expansive vision of where to go.
We can’t achieve freedom from authoritarianism while authoritarian structures exist all around us and with a unipolar idea that it only exists in the government. We can’t achieve freedom without knowing what freedom actually is. We can’t fight for democracy if we wait for a messiah to save us. We can’t escape our own authoritarian mindsets if we keep absorbing authoritarian culture without an awareness of what it represents. We cannot achieve a multifaceted, decentralized, participatory democracy if we do not invest in community and appreciate that everyone has their own part to play, that this is not just about activism.
Just as importantly, Slater’s vision is important because it deconstructs much of what we think can solve global authoritarianism. We cannot truly solve our fight against these issues by going to war with them: war spreads authoritarianism both in our country and in those we attack. Same with our approach to domestic authoritarianism, such as surveillance and militarized policing.
And if we don’t know where we’re going, and our current means will result in our ends, how can we truly achieve the society we dream of?
In other words, the fight against authoritarianism is actually the fight for democracy. Defining it purely as “anti” is what allows authoritarianism to fester: we see it in others but not in ourselves. We see it in one area and not in others.
The good news is that most of our movements are becoming aware of all of these issues: MLK taught us this decades ago. Similar leaders have existed throughout history, from some of the prophets of the antiquity all the way up to those arguing for abolition today.
This is not new. Slater was not telling us what others hadn’t already. Rather, he pointed out the larger dynamics they were part of and how they were and weren’t reflected in his time.
It is in that vision that we can find hope in a chaotic and painful time: we were never truly free. And so we can understand that the times we have nostalgia for were not where we want to go, but a vision that is truly democratic.