RWNJs

ok! now we get down to ground!

james delingpole's 365 ways to drive a liberal crazy #254 has at last revealed (as if we didn't know) what the authoritarian right wing really believes in: big lies, elitism, and violence (all of which the right projects onto the left). take a look here:

Pick a fight with a liberal on:
FAIRNESS.
The top 5 percent of taxpayers contribute 60 percent of government revenue; the top 10 percent of taxpayers contribute 75 percent of revenue; another two-fifths make up the rest. Half the U.S. population is now exempt from paying tax. 2012 may turn out to be the first presidential election in American history where non-taxpaying voters outnumber taxpaying voters. At this point, remind the liberal: "Still, I guess the imbalance will find a way of working itself out in the end. Your side thinks it can go on taking more and more of our money. Our side has most of the guns and ammunition."

see the implied threat at the end? that's no joke.

and the justification for that threat is that "your side" [which means us] is taking "more and more of our money" [which means their money]. that big lie is based on the false statistics cited earlier, culminating in the assertion that "Half the U.S. population is now exempt from paying tax."

in reality, 40% of federal revenue in FY 2010 came from social security and social insurance taxes. all wage earners pay those taxes, not just the richer half of americans, and they are the most regressive taxes of all because of the income cap on social security tax.

you may be interested in wikipedia's article on right-wing authoritarianism, which includes this:

Authoritarians are generally more favorable to punishment and control than personal freedom and diversity. For example, they are more willing to suspend constitutional guarantees of liberty such as the Bill of Rights. They are more likely to advocate strict, punitive sentences for criminals, and they report that they obtain personal satisfaction from punishing such people. They tend to be ethnocentric and prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities, and homosexuals.

In roleplaying situations, authoritarians tend to seek dominance over others by being competitive and destructive instead of cooperative. In a study by Altemeyer, 68 authoritarians played a three hour simulation of the Earth's future entitled the Global change game. Unlike a comparison game played by individuals with low RWA scores, which resulted in world peace and widespread international cooperation, the simulation by authoritarians became highly militarized and eventually entered the stage of nuclear war. By the end of the high RWA game, the entire population of the earth was declared dead.

a related article on authoritarian personality contains these tidbits:

The focus of RWA research is political preferences as measured through surveys, that suggest three tendencies as noted in attitudinal clusters. These are: 1) submission to legitimated authorities; 2) aggression towards sanctioned targeted minority groups; and 3) adherence to values and beliefs perceived as endorsed by followed leadership. McCrae & Costa (1997) report that the big 5 dimension of openness to experience is negatively correlated to RWA....

More recently, Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway (2003) have proposed that Authoritarianism, RWA and other similar constructs of political conservatism are a form of motivated social cognition. These researchers propose that conservatism has similar characteristics as to authoritarianism, with resistance to change, and justification for inequality as the core components. In addition, conservative individuals have needs to manage uncertainty and threat with both situational motives (e.g., striving for security and dominance in social hierarchies) and dispositional motives (e.g., terror management and self-esteem).

of course, i've taken quotes out of context, and there are objections to the conclusions of those researchers, so i suggest you investigate fully before making up your mind.