Authoritarian-minded people, the people that John Dean wrote about in his book "Conservatives Without Conscience". There's a small number of authoritarian leaders, there's a large number of authoritarian followers and most of the people who voluntarily and enthusiastically become police officers or members of the military are authoritarian followers. Not all of them, certainly not all of them, but probably well over half.

And if you look at the history of other countries, when authoritarian regimes came to power, whether it was Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain, look at all the countries in Central and South America, the history that we see over and over and over again is that when an authoritarian leader comes to power the the structures of power and authority within the country which is principally the military and the police, and secondarily the court systems which Donald Trump is right now as Mike Papantonio just pointed out, 650 federal judges. He's fixing to completely reinvent the entire federal judiciary. Those institutions, being inclined toward authoritarianism to begin with, become more authoritarian.

So the most enthusiastic people at rooting out the Jews in Germany, the most enthusiastic people at finding the Communists in Spain, the most enthusiastic people at finding the trade unionists in Italy and utterly destroying them during the 1930s were the police.

Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't have police, I'm not saying that the whole thing needs to be changed - the police number one and the military number two. If you look at the military during the Vietnam era when we had a draft, or during World War Two when we had a draft, our military represented a broad cross-section of Americans and so the percentage of authoritarian followers was probably about the same percentage as it is in the general population as a whole, which is around 20 percent.

-Thom


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