Ordinary Americans carried out inhumane acts for Trump

[Hortensis]

5. NOT ALL OF US! No! Authoritarians are wired by nature

to choose leaders to follow and then trust their leaders' "consciences" guide them instead of their own. "I was just following orders." Most conservatives have some degree of authoritarianism in them, but it is far stronger in hard-core religious and social conservatives (the world's big troublemakers) than economic conservatives or more moderate ones of all types.

Notably, some from the more radical or extreme left wing also seek authoritarian leaders and "just follow orders" when they find them. No accident that 2016's left-wing populist movement coalesced around a leader with a bit of an authoritarian tone (though it formed first around Elizabeth Warren, a moderate progressive economic conservative who lacked it).

Liberals, who make up most of the Democratic Party here in the U.S., are the world's anti-authoritarians. Generally speaking, we just don't respond that way, in fact are usually repelled and worried by it.

We know these things because after the Holocaust--committed by white Christians in an advanced European nation and supported by similar "good people" in others--researchers set out to learn how it could happen. More recently, researchers have also discovered that there are strong genetic components to our personalities, as well as the subsequent environmental influences on our basic natures.

It's important to know this, to be able to identify and understand both problems and solutions. People like Bannon and the Kochs do. They did not concentrate their take-over efforts on the right by accident. And they did not corrupt most of the right into an attack dog focused on blocking interference from the left by accident.