WWJD?

 

Work with me here on this hypothetical….

Assuming Jesus actually existed/exists, and assuming that Jesus could cast a modern-day vote in a U.S. presidential election:

Question: Do you foresee Jesus the man as voting Democratic, Republican, Independent, Other (give Party)?

Since you are not God (omniscient) and therefore can’t know in advance how Jesus would vote, provide the "circumstantial evidence" as to why you chose as you did.  I.e., what evidence led you to your conclusion?

Thanks for hypothesizing and recommending.

Christian Propaganda: Fomenting Fear, Anger and Violence

Evangelical rhetoric:

10:40 to 12:00: “The madder they are, the more fearful they are, 

the more money they're gonna send you.”

Boy, oh boy, those Evangelical preachers really know how to make the congregation fearful and angry. An article by The American Prospect, The Religious Right’s Rhetoric Fueled the Insurrection, makes that clear. TAP writes:

The morning after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol interrupted but failed to stop congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election, The Dove Christian television network’s morning news program featured hard-right activist John Guandolo telling viewers that the insurrectionists showed “restraint” by not executing the “traitors” in Congress.

“I don’t see any other way out than a real armed counterrevolution to this hostile revolution that’s taking place, primarily driven by the communists,” said Guandolo, who trains law enforcement agencies to view Muslims as terrorist threats.

These leaders and media outlets inflated the stakes of Trump’s re-election campaign and post-election efforts to “stop the steal” by portraying them as part of a spiritual war between good and evil. In their telling, Trump was the divinely anointed leader of the forces of light, and his opponents were agents of Satan bent on crushing religious freedom and destroying the American republic. Prayer and calls for spiritual warfare were blended with invocations of “1776.”

Paula White, a longtime spiritual adviser to Trump, used her position as a White House aide and campaign spokesperson to engage in the fearmongering strategy to get conservative Christians to vote for Trump. “They want to take our churches,” she said at an Evangelicals for Trump rally last summer. “They want to take our freedoms. They want to take our liberties. They want to take everything.”

At that same event, Atlanta-area megachurch pastor Jentezen Franklin warned that if evangelicals didn’t mobilize to keep Trump in power, they wouldn’t get a second chance to protect their freedom or their children’s future: “Speak now or forever hold your peace. You won’t have another chance. You won’t have freedom of religion. You won’t have freedom of speech.”

In September, Pentecostal televangelist and religious-right activist Rick Joyner announced on Jim Bakker’s television show that God has “seeded” the country with military veterans to head up Christian militias in preparation for civil war. In October, he assured his viewers that life for most Americans would go on pretty much as usual during the coming civil war because the militias would be focused on “inner cities.”

At a religious-right rally on the National Mall in September, Frank Amedia, a former Trump campaign adviser who founded the POTUS Shield network to wage spiritual warfare on Trump’s behalf, warned people not to stand in the way of God’s plans to return Trump to office, saying, “This is not a time to contend with God and his plan upon this nation and this Earth right now, for the fury of the Lord has gone out and shall accomplish that which he has said he shall do.”

When it became clear that Trump had lost, and that his response would be to deny the legitimacy of the election, most of his religious-right backers joined him. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and other right-wing leaders associated with the Council for National Policy—a secretive umbrella group of right-wing organizations—signed a letter in mid-December urging state legislatures to override voters and stating, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.”

Jericho March, organized by two Trump administration staffers who said God had given them visions to get Christians into the streets to protest “corruption” in the election, teamed up with religious-right activist Ed Martin and Stop the Steal activist Ali Alexander to organize a December 12 “prayer rally” on the National Mall. They called it “Let the Church ROAR.”

Among the roaring speakers was Stewart Rhodes, founder of the extremist Oath Keepers, who warned that if Trump didn’t use the military to stay in power, militias like his would be forced to engage in a “much more bloody war.” Metaxas, the rally’s master of ceremonies, was apparently not troubled by Rhodes’s threat, responding with a “God bless you” and telling the crowd that Rhodes was “keepin’ it real, folks.”

California pastor Ché Ahn, a leader of the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation, called the “stolen” election “the most egregious fraud” in U.S. history and said, “I believe that this week we’re going to throw Jezebel out … and we’re gonna rule and reign through President Trump and under the lordship of Jesus Christ.” (emphasis added)

The TAP article continues like this. There is plenty of evidence of how some or most pro-ex-president Evangelicals viewed the 2020 election. Those people were made fearful and enraged on the basis of blatant lies. 

After the coup attempt of Jan. 6, a few of the radical religious preachers stepped back and disavowed the political violence. That does not absolve them of their culpability or the immorality or evil of misleading their flocks and opening their minds to a civil war based on no real threat. The only threat was and still is the centuries old Christian persecution myth. 

The church is the state

Assessing threat

Lots of data from social science research makes it clear that humans are generally lousy at estimating risk. Various unconscious biases tend to skew risk assessments unless people are shown risk data. Even then, some reject the data because they unconsciously feel threat, not consciously assess threat. The unconscious mind often overrides or distorts facts and reasoning when emotions like fear and anger are in play. Uncontrolled emotions tend to make most people, me included, less rational.

In view of the rhetoric TAP article cites, what is the risk of radical right Christianity starting a bloody civil war? Some of the rhetoric explicitly calls for violence. Under current circumstances, a large-scale civil war seems very unlikely. The threat of Christian violence is now on the radar screens of everyone who is paying attention and the ex-president does not have his national platform to keep spewing his poison and lies from. Those factors probably lessen the Christian threat.

Did the preachers and others who incited violence cross the line and break laws against inciting violence? If not, should the laws be made clearer or broader, or is that too risky? Is it unreasonable to even consider pro-violence right-wing Christianity a significant threat? 

Legitimate threat or innocent posturing?

It goes from posturing to threat the instant the 

trigger is pulled and innocents are harmed or killed

Thanks to PD for pointing out the TAP article.

Christian Nationalism and Violent Christian Extremism

A long Politico article, It’s Time to Talk About Violent Christian Extremism, reports an interview with Elizabeth Neumann. Neumann is a former official at the Department of Homeland Security. She is a devout Christian. She resigned from the T**** administration in April 2020. Politico reports:

Now, after the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory helped to motivate the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, with many participants touting their Christian faith — and as evangelical pastors throughout the country ache over the spread of the conspiracy theory among their flocks, and its very real human toll — it’s worth asking whether the time has come for a new wave of outreach to religious communities, this time aimed at evangelical Christians.

“I personally feel a great burden, since I came from these communities, to try to figure out how to help the leaders,” says Elizabeth Neumann, a former top official at the Department of Homeland Security who resigned from Trump administration in April 2020. The challenge in part is that, in this “particular case, I don’t know if the government is a credible voice at all,” she says. “You don’t want ‘Big Brother’ calling the local pastor and saying, ‘Hey, here’s your tips for the week.’”

Neumann, who was raised in the evangelical tradition, is a devout Christian. Her knowledge of that world, and her expertise on issues of violent extremism, gives her a unique insight into the ways QAnon is driving some Christians to extremism and violence.

She sees QAnon’s popularity among certain segments of Christendom not as an aberration, but as the troubling-but-natural outgrowth of a strain of American Christianity. In this tradition, one’s belief is based less on scripture than on conservative culture, some political disagreements are seen as having nigh-apocalyptic stakes and “a strong authoritarian streak” runs through the faith. For this type of believer, love of God and love of country are sometimes seen as one and the same.

Christian nationalism is “a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom,” Neumann says, referring to teachings that posit America as God’s chosen nation. Christians who subscribe to those teachings believe the United States has a covenant with God, and that if it is broken, the nation risks literal destruction — analogous to the siege of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible. In the eyes of these believers, that covenant is threatened by cultural changes like taking prayer out of public schools and legalizing abortion and gay marriage, Neumann says.

“[Christian nationalists] see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us,” she says. “When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.”

We saw any number of people spending more time online looking for answers. You had increases in militia movements. The Moonshot CVE Group, which studies radicalization, said that in states with stay-at-home orders that lasted 10 days or longer, [online] searches for white-supremacist content increased by 21 percent. In states where there either weren’t stay-at-home orders or they lasted nine days or fewer, that increase was only 1 percent. We weren’t sure how it was going to happen, but we predicted that we would see violence in some form or fashion. The militia that attempted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — that was horrible, but not really shocking. The violence at protests? Not surprising. And the fact that you had white-supremacist groups using the protests to commit accelerationist violence was also not surprising — even though the president thought it was Antifa. We knew we were going to see more radicalization and violence.

The combination of that on top of a pandemic, on top of a campaign where the president was sowing his own conspiracy theories and laying the groundwork for what eventually became [the lie] that the election had been stolen — well, some would say he started laying the groundwork four years ago. For people who studied disinformation, it became clear that the call was coming from inside the house. That kind of primordial soup makes conditions ripe for vulnerable individuals to move into this space. QAnon is not designed to be logical; it’s designed to meet these emotional and psychological needs. 

Q: Do you see anything about the evangelical tradition that could make its believers more susceptible to QAnon? 

A: I really struggle with this question. I’ve been trying to figure out how it is so obvious to me — and I don’t mean to pat myself on the back. I actually do read the Bible. Yet there are people who read scripture and attend church but are also die-hard into believing the election was stolen or have gone down the QAnon rabbit hole. What’s the distinction there? I find that hard to answer.

There is, in more conservative Christian movements, a strong authoritarian streak, where they don’t believe in the infallibility of their pastor, but they act like it; they don’t believe in the infallibility of the head of the home, but they sometimes act like it; where you’re not allowed to question authority. You see this on full display in the criticisms of the way the Southern Baptist Convention is dealing with sexual abuse, which is so similar to the Catholic Church [sex abuse scandal]. There is this increasing frustration that church leaders have [this view]: “If we admit sin, then they won’t trust us to lead anymore.” But if the church is not a safe place to admit that you messed up, then I don’t know where is — or you clearly don’t believe what you preach. 

Another factor is Christian nationalism. That’s a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom. It’s subtle: Like, you had the Christian flag and the American flag at the front of the church, and if you went to a Christian school, you pledged allegiance to the Christian flag and the American flag. There was this merger that was always there when I was growing up. And it was really there for the generation ahead of me, in the ’50s and ’60s. Some people interpreted it as: Love of country and love of our faith are the same thing. And for others, there’s an actual explicit theology. 

What [threatens] that covenant? The moment we started taking prayer out of [public] schools and allowing various changes in our culture — [the legalization of] abortion is one of those moments; gay marriage is another. They see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us. They view the last 50 years of moral decline as us breaking our covenant, and that because of that, God’s going to remove His blessing. When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.  

Now, here’s the caveat: Some of that fear is not out of thin air. There is a real “cancel culture,” where you see a mob mentality swarm on somebody who holds a biblically based viewpoint on, say, gay marriage, and you see someone forced out of a position or lose sponsorships or advertising. But they follow that to what they think is a logical conclusion — that eventually, pastors will not be able to preach against homosexuality or abortion, and if [they do], they’re going to end up arrested and unable to preach. I’ve heard that argument made multiple times over the last 10 years. The irrationality is the idea that there are no protections, that the courts wouldn’t step in and say, “No, the First Amendment applies to Christians as well.” (emphasis added)

The article goes on at length in this vein. One point is clear: Christian Nationalism and other Christian practices has led to a fusion of God with country and violence in defense of God and country is justified. This is the kind of mindset that fits with anti-democratic authoritarianism, including fascism.

A past discussion here discussed the tactics that church leaders use to generate money. At ~10:40 to 12:00 of the interview below, Evangelical Rev. Rob Schenck discusses what he was told by professional fundraisers about how to keep his revenues flowing. Specifically, to keep revenues up he had keep his congregation angry and fearful: “The madder they are, the more fearful they are, the more money they're gonna send you.”

It is easy to see that congregations are irrationally being made fearful and angry by church leaders they trust, the Christian persecution myth. In turn, that unjustified fear and anger can lead to acceptance of fascism and use of violence in defense of God and country, which are one and the same. Democracy and political opposition become the enemy of the people.

Conservative, radical right, authoritarian, fascist, tribe, cult

They all loved it and supported it --

now they own the beast and its legacy

The GOP's opinion 

What are the best labels for the pro-ex-president wing of the GOP and the less pro-ex-president wing? Today, the GOP tends to refer to itself as moderate to conservative, patriotic, democratic and fully grounded in facts, true truths and sound reasoning. It sees itself as a big tent party and open to competing ideas and internal dissent.

My opinion

Years ago the GOP was generally conservative and moderately tolerant of internal dissent and differing policy choices. After Obama won the election in 2008, the party morphed into a radical right authoritarian tribe, although that process had been underway since the 1980s or maybe even earlier. Obama's election crystallized the transition. 

Then on Jan. 6, most of the GOP leadership and rank and file membership supported the coup attempt to keep the ex-president in power. That crossed a line and converted that part of the GOP into a fascist personality cult. Both the radical right authoritarian tribe and the fascist personality cult sharply departed from reliance on facts, truths and sound reasoning. Instead, those phases of the party's evolution turned to full blown embrace of lies, deceit, emotional manipulation, partisan motivated reasoning and fantasy, often including some crackpot conspiracy theory or another. 

Upon conversion to the radical right authoritarian variant, the GOP went from moderately or mildly pro-democracy to solidly anti-democratic, e.g., via aggressive voter suppression and constant attacks on the legitimacy and motives of political opposition. It also fully converted to a small tent party with little to no tolerance for dissent or competing ideas. Years of RINO hunts had mostly ideologically cleansed the party of center-right, moderate and liberal republican voters and politicians. The last great RINO hunt is underway now between the remnants of the old radical right authoritarian GOP and the new fascist personality cult GOP. Each side is fighting tooth and claw for total dominance.

Experts opinions

One expert, Robert Paxton, Columbia professor and author of The Anatomy of Fascism who embraced the fascism label for Trump, has this definition of the pro-Trump movement from his book:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Another expert, Sheri Berman, (political science, Barnard College, author of The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century), disagrees:

We should reserve the term “fascism” for leaders or movements that are not merely authoritarian. Fascists were revolutionaries, they aspired to control the state, economy and society (totalitarian vs authoritarian), had large, organized mass movements behind them (which included institutionalized paramilitaries alongside control of the military as well as extensive secret police and intelligence services) and of course came to power after democracy had largely failed. So to my mind Trump (and the Republican party) remain better characterized as pseudo-authoritarian rather than fascist — both because of their particular features/characteristics and because for all its weaknesses and flaws, American democracy (at least thus far) has not deteriorated to the point where constraining institutions no longer operate.

Commentary:

#1: The the ex-president's slogan and ethos of “Make American Great Again” is intended to evoke a sense of national decline, humiliation, and victimhood, particularly on the part of white Americans. And on January 6, at least, the movement attempted to use redemptive violence unchecked by the law to achieve a kind of “internal cleansing,” complete with killings of opposition lawmakers.

But a few caveats: Fascist movements in the 1930s genuinely rejected liberal democracy, not just in practice but as an ideal worth aspiring toward. The de facto position of Trumpists in recent weeks has been to overturn democratic election results, but importantly, that is not what they perceive themselves as doing.

#2: There’s a distinction between more modern forms of authoritarianism and historical fascism. Fascists saw themselves as challengers to elected institutions and democratic forms of government. Hitler and Mussolini canceled elections once they consolidated power; today, regimes like Putin’s in Russia or Erdogan’s in Turkey simply use crackdowns on opposition forces and election rigging to ensure they are not electorally challenged.

The latter model at least pays lip service to constitutional and democratic norms, much as Trump continues to insist that he should be president not because the democratic system is corrupt but because he in fact won according to democratic norms. This approach is no less authoritarian, but for the reasons Berman describes, it’s arguably less fascist.

#3: A dispute over another word — “coup” — can shed some light on if and why the dispute matters. Multiple scholars of international relations who study coups argued in the wake of the riot on January 6 that the term “coup” was inaccurate. One observer wrote this about that:

“At no point did yesterday’s protestors attempt to actually seize control of the levers of state power— nor did anyone watching think these goons were now running the government,” Erica De Bruin, assistant professor of government at Hamilton College and author of How to Prevent Coups d’État, wrote.

To critics, this is splitting hairs. In a pointed meme, sociologist Kieran Healy translated commentators saying, “It’s not a coup because it doesn’t meet the technical conditions of the military branch yadda yadda yadda …” as actually saying, “I have a very comfortable job.”

The split on “fascism” feels akin to the split over “coup,” and both arguments seem to suffer from some confusion over what exactly we’re arguing about. On the one side are academics who value these definitions because they enable better research and analysis. If you study coups, you need to have a clear definition of what a coup is before you start compiling data sets, looking for causes and patterns, etc. And that definition may not perfectly anticipate what people want to call coups in the future.

.... a couple of concerns about whether it’s wise for laypeople to use “fascism” to express alarm and outrage at Trump and Trumpism. The first has to do with the future, and the second has to do with America’s past.

My first concern about using the word “fascism” now is that things could get much, much worse — and at that point, will we have the vocabulary to describe what is happening? I first heard fascism comparisons flying in American politics back in the mid-2000s. I remember an adult I knew from church forwarding me a list of “warning signs of fascism” enumerated by writer Lawrence Britt back in 2003. The list, clearly constructed to evoke aspects of the Bush administration, included items like “religion and ruling elite tied together,” “power of corporations protected,” and “obsession with national security.”

#4: Living in an alternative information ecosystem that has falsely told the ex-president's supporters over and over again that the election was rigged, they view themselves as defenders of the Constitution, protecting America from rampant voter fraud. Their rhetoric suggests that they see their mission as saving constitutional democracy, not undermining it. That’s distinct from, say, Nazism or Mussolini’s fascism, which did not attempt to uphold democracy even in rigged form but rejected it as undesirable.

My technical analysis

At what point does the reality of intentional propaganda that deceives, deludes and enrages people excuse their utterly baseless attempt to overthrow a government by violence in the name of saving it? The Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt was the first time in American history that the transfer of power was violent and bloody, not peaceful. Most of the GOP leadership in congress and some or most red state governments supported it.

What happened on Jan. 6 was an attempted coup by actual fascists. Those people and their supporters in the GOP intended to overthrow the US government by force. They said so. They all claimed to believe that the election was illegitimate, despite not one shred of evidence of widespread vote fraud, vote or vote count cheating, or widespread voter or count irregularity. The only major fraud attempts were by the ex-president, his crackpot liar supporters including the fascists Lou Dobbs, Rudi, Sydney, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marjorie Greene, Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy and the ex-president itself.

Clearly, reasonable minds will differ. 

The source for this OP: https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/2021/01/27/the-f-word/

The fascist and maybe authoritarian wings of the GOP have either forgotten that episode 

or they self-delude and propagandize their own fascism into 

something they falsely believe is democratic

SAY WHAT? UN names Mike Bloomberg special envoy for climate change

 Story at a glance

• Bloomberg will be appointed to serve as a Special Envoy for Climate Ambition and Solutions.
• Bloomberg will work with governments, businesses, cities and financial institutions to secure new pledges to significantly reduce emissions over the next several decades.
• The former New York City Mayor previously held roles as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action in 2018 and UN Special Envoy on Cities and Climate Change in 2014.

• The United Nations has tapped former New York City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg for a top climate post geared toward engaging governments and businesses to take action on climate change. 

  United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Friday announced Bloomberg will be appointed to serve as his Special Envoy for Climate Ambition and Solutions, a role in which Bloomberg will “mobilize stronger and more ambitious climate action” ahead of the COP 26 climate summit set to take place in Scotland later this year. The summit is seen as a key moment in the global effort to curb global warming six years after the Paris climate agreement was created. 

• The UN said Bloomberg will work with governments, businesses, cities and financial institutions to secure new pledges to significantly reduce emissions over the next several decades. 

  He will also work with high-emitting nations and industries to accelerate the phase out of coal and a transition to a clean energy economy. 

  Bloomberg, who has campaigned on the issue of climate change, previously held roles as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action in 2018 and UN Special Envoy on Cities and Climate Change in 2014. 

  “Fighting climate change is a global challenge that requires strong global collaboration. I’m honored to be returning as Special Envoy to the UN Secretary-General to help drive the fight forward and secure a greener, healthier future for generations to come,” Bloomberg said in a statement. 

  The appointment comes as the Biden administration has moved forward to rejoin the Paris climate accord, reversing former President Trump’s withdrawal from the pact aimed at limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

• https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-change/537609-un-names-mike-bloomberg-special-envoy-for
  

• 

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  

Authoritarianism: Heritable or Inheritable? Does it matter?

Personality traits: Stable over time, maybe due more to 

genes (inheritance) than nurture (non-genetic effects)

Heritability vs. inheritability of traits

Heredity refers to the likelihood or probability of traits running in families or groups. A trait can arise from genetics (nature), environment (nurture), or usually some combination of both. Environmental or nurturing influences include habits, behaviors, and various physical, emotional and psychological experiences. Families often demonstrate similar habits and behavior because they tend to share at least some experiences. Heritable traits are not necessarily genetic.

On the other hand, inherited traits are due only to genes. Eye and hair color and blood type are inherited as a gene(s) from each parent. Body shape is both inherited (genetic) and heritable (nurture influenced), but probably mostly influenced by inheritance (genes). Body shape can be affected to some extent by exercise and eating habits, which can arise from heredity, e.g., family habits. In the case of eye and hair color and blood type, nurture effects do not influence those traits. Being a good cook can run in families and that trait might be significantly or nearly all a heritable (nurture) trait with little or no known inheritance (genes) effects.

In a 2016 research paper, The Heritability Fallacy, two researchers wrote about the confusion that commonly plagues the concept of heritability vs. inheritability:

Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how ‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is. Further, it does not inform us about what causes a trait, the relative influence of genes in the development of a trait, or the relative influence of the environment in the development of a trait. Because we already know that genetic factors have significant influence on the development of all human traits, measures of heritability are of little value, except in very rare cases. (emphasis added)

My read of the data is that most human behavior traits arise from a variable combination of nature and nurture and are thus both inherited and heritable. One expert estimated that in terms of political beliefs and behaviors, the average person's politics is is about 35% nature or genes and about 65% nurture. Another estimated it was about 50:50. Clearly, this is not a precise science.

Authoritarianism 

Authoritarianism: a form of government characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of a strong central power to preserve a political or social status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting; authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic in nature and may be based on the rule of a party or the military, limited plurality, political legitimacy based on appeals to emotion and characterization of the regime as necessary to combat threats, which are often ill-defined, suppression of political opposition, etc.  

Declining respect for democracy

Some portion of all populations appear to include people with an authoritarian mindset or susceptible to authoritarian appeals (which seem to be usually heavily grounded in dark free speech). In the 1950s and until recently, authoritarianism was generally considered to be a personality trait. recent research suggested that authoritarianism is not stable enough to be a personality trait and instead is a personal adaptation or a trait that is variable.

A 2013 paper, Authoritarianism as a personality trait: Evidence from a longitudinal behavior genetic study, generated data indicating that the source of authoritarianism is mostly genetic and stable enough to be considered an actual personality trait, i.e., it's a genetic problem.[1] The authors wrote:

Authoritarianism has long been conceived of as a highly stable personality trait (Adorno et al., 1950; Altemeyer, 1981), though recent accounts have argued that authoritarianism is too malleable to justify this conception. We provided a test of the trait conception of authoritarianism by measuring its stability in a community sample of twins over a 15 year period, and by identifying the source of any stability with biometric modeling. Our results showed that authoritarianism exhibited a high degree of rank-order stability (r = .74). Biometric analyses indicated that this stability derived primarily from genetic influences, with changes in authoritarianism due to the unique experiences of the individual. In both of these respects, our results were highly comparable to those reported for other personality traits in previous work, indicating support for the trait conception of authoritarianism. .... Our results were consistent with the conception of authoritarianism as a highly stable personality trait. .... This stability was particularly pronounced among the more educated segment of the sample. Among those with 14 or more years of education (N = 285), the correlation between Time 1 and Time 2 scores was .78, significantly higher than the correlation of .64 among those with 13 or fewer years of education (N = 240; p < .001). (emphasis added)

By now it seems clear that the ex-president, most of the GOP leadership and most rank and file republicans are significantly or dominantly authoritarian and that will probably be very hard to change without significant social violence in America, unless more effective non-violent means to address the problem are applied, e.g., maybe pragmatic rationalism, social trust building efforts, etc. If the 2013 data is fundamentally sound, it is reasonable to believe that the authoritarianism the now fascist  GOP and ex-president have unleashed cannot easily be tamped down. 

Decades of radical right lies and polarizing anti-democratic rhetoric (Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc.)  plowed and fertilized the ground for the rise of fascism in modern America. The ex-president was the toxic seed that thrived in that ground and acted as a force for authoritarian minds to coalesce around. It took American involvement in World War II to tamp American fascism down. Unfortunately, the radical right has finally succeeded in resurrecting it and bringing it into mainstream political acceptance by the political right,

The data in the 2013 paper is consistent with data analyzing the 2016 election indicating that the single most important factor in driving support for the ex-president was (probably still is) unease over social and demographic changes. Economic complaints and fears were the other co-mingled primary influencer. In view of all the data, one can begin to clearly see how a demagogic authoritarian could have and did overwhelm the old order in the GOP. That old order was replaced with the anti-democratic fascism that now arguably dominates the GOP. It was a smaller step than I thought from authoritarian GOP radical right authoritarianism to full-blown fascist cult authoritarianism.

Maybe it really does matter if authoritarianism and fascism are inherited.

Footnote: 

1. Although authoritarianism is likely to be a significantly or mostly genetic problem, that does not mean the only solution is ethnic cleansing or violence. IMO, social means and institutions, e.g., building social trust, critical thinking and defenses against propaganda, worked in the past to keep it in check and that is what will probably be needed in the future to restore a stable status quo. My brand of politics always looks for non-violent, minimally oppressive-discriminatory means to achieve good political, economic, social and environmental outcomes. 

To make this completely clear: I am not explicitly or implicitly advocating ethnic, ideological or social cleansing by force, coercion or any other non-democratic mean. That is how authoritarians and fascists operate. Pragmatic rationalists like me advocate non-violent, respectful social means to address social problems, including the rise of GOP authoritarianism and fascism. 

Research is into personality and authoritarianism is ongoing and seems to be in a fairly early state of knowledge. A 2020 paper commented: 

Philosophers have long speculated that authoritarianism and belief in determinism are functionally related. .... Authoritarianism and allied variables manifested moderate to large positive correlations with both fatalistic and genetic determinism beliefs. .... openness was negatively related to fatalistic determinism beliefs and agreeableness was negatively related to genetic determinism beliefs. Taken together, our findings clarify the nature of relations between authoritarianism and general personality, on the one hand, and free will/determinism beliefs, on the other, and suggest intriguing intersections between worldviews and personality traits. .... Scholarly recognition of potential links between deterministic beliefs and authoritarian attitudes can be traced to the origins of modern social science. Fromm (1941), a pioneering scholar of the psychology of totalitarianism, posited that individuals seek to “escape from freedom” via authoritarianism in times of uncertainty and threat. Similarly, Adorno and colleagues’ The Authoritarian Personality (1950) highlighted belief in fate, a variant of determinism, as one of 9 personality facets underlying susceptibility to fascist ideology. .... few authors have examined the more basic hypothesis that authoritarianism is related to belief in determinism writ large, the notion that “all events in this world are fixed, or unalterable, or predetermined.” (emphasis added)

Fromm may have arrived at a critically important insight in 1941, years before the full savagery and misery of German and Russian authoritarianism had been fully unleashed on the world. What Fromm seems to have intuited is that authoritarians can't handle changing reality and in their moral cowardice, they regress into force to protect their weak egos.