It’s not just your imagination.  Lefties really are completely un-self-aware about what tyrants they are, and one professor with five thousand study participants proved it.

October 2024’s article, The Left Has an Authoritarian Problem (but Doesn’t Know It), was written by social psychologist Luke Conway who “has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and others, as well as on the BBC and NPR” and draws from three “decades of authoritarianism research.” The article appears in an online publication called “Presser” which, according to their “What is Presser?” page, launched in 2024 and is “politically nonpartisan” but has “a clear bias toward liberalism, secularism, and humanism.”

Interestingly, Professor Conway’s research focuses on the followers of authoritarian leaders, not the authoritarian leaders themselves, and he argues, quite convincingly, that, in short, the people get what they want good and hard: were there not a crowd of people with an authoritarian ethos within themselves, an authoritarian leader would be all but powerless over them. One must precede the other. A leader of this sort must have the mob.

Indeed, leaders are irrelevant if no one will obey them. [snip] It doesn’t matter if Congresswoman Maxine Waters tells protestors to ‘get more confrontational' if they don’t like a trial verdict; it only matters if everyone thinks that kind of authoritarian fear-mongering is okay.

He gives an excellent example of what the absence of the authoritarian follower ethos would look like were it not there to precede the tyrant leader:

Imagine an authoritarian Donald Trump supporter walking down the street and subsequently being commanded by Joe Biden to support climate change research. Do you see? It matters very much to an authoritarian [follower] who is giving the command and what the command is about.

In the section “Obeying Authority Isn’t the Problem” Professor Conway describes exactly who they are: “nasty” and punishing.

The first thing to get straight is that, to a psychologist, ‘authoritarian’ doesn’t just mean ‘obeying authority’ or ‘ordering someone to do something.’ Parents who punish their kids for being mean to their siblings aren’t authoritarian leaders. People who obey the speed limits aren’t authoritarian followers. Authoritarianism means something specifically nastier. Authoritarians don’t merely enforce reasonable rules or obey those rules—they want a strong leader to crush and silence their opponents. They want that leader to hurt people for the benefit of their group. [Emphasis added.]

“For the benefit of the group” is an extremely important phrase. He notes that one of the traits necessary in a populace for an authoritarian to take over is an ethos of “collectivism,” a well-known trend among progressives — as opposed to individualism, which is a well-known trend among conservatives.  In fact, progressives will sneer at what they deride as the “rugged individualism” ethos of conservatives.  They regard it as selfish.

Professor Conway’s comprehensive research, which we will detail shortly, has shown overwhelmingly that the authoritarian blind spot “is something that is unique to left-wing authoritarians. He then adds, “And this blind spot makes liberal authoritarianism uniquely dangerous.”

Every party has potential authoritarians—but a party that denies the problem also won’t address the problem.

Right now that party is the Democratic Party. We’ve tacitly raised a generation of liberals who think that it’s normal for Disney to fire actress Gina Carano for having a political opinion that some people don’t like, and yet also think they aren’t authoritarian for doing so.

What he describes with Ms. Carano is a marquee example of the blind spot, and exactly the “nasty” and punishing aspect of leftist authoritarianism he described earlier.

Here’s where we see how comprehensive his research and findings are.  In the section “Scientific Data on Authoritarian Self-Ignorance” he goes in for the kill shot.  If you are a progressive reading this and think there’s no way this can all be true, read on.

This isn’t mere speculation. Our scientific data demonstrate this very clearly. In a national survey of over five thousand Americans, we gave people a standard authoritarianism questionnaire and then afterwards asked them a simple question: ‘Do you view yourself as a dogmatic and authoritarian person?’

Conservative Americans who scored high on the authoritarianism questionnaire had no problem saying ‘Yes, I am authoritarian.’ But liberals were a different thing entirely. Not only were liberal authoritarians less likely than conservatives to accurately identify themselves as authoritarians (when they were, in fact, authoritarian), but there was actually a negative correlation between left-wing authoritarianism (the reality) and liberals’ willingness to identify as authoritarian (their own perception). That means that the more authoritarian liberals are, the less they believe they are authoritarian!

The results of this survey were one of the most astonishing things I’ve seen in all my years conducting research. [Emphasis added.]

The inescapable conclusion:

Do we currently have a left-wing authoritarian problem? The answer to this question is scientifically indisputable:

Without a doubt.

See?  It’s not your imagination.  They really are completely un-self-aware.  Maybe that helps.  Maybe not.  It doesn’t mean they won’t continue to be monumentally frustrating — in addition to being absolute poison to Liberty.  But it may help us to know they really don’t seem to be able to help it, blind as they are to their own inner tyrant.  I’d be fascinated to know how we keep manufacturing so many millions of these people.  Seems to me we should figure that out and stop it.  Now that would be a benefit to humanity.  Perhaps Professor Conway can study that next.  So far, this is a good contribution, if for nothing else, our mental health and blood pressure.

Image from Grok.