Even though NBC executives were delightfully, thoroughly bashed upon when Ronna McDaniel was hired-fired one interesting, important element was left out: the rare occurrence of authoritarians losing face.
Trust me, this is a very pertinent political occurrence, but I hesitated to write about it at the time because of my own family experience with authoritarianism (everyone who knows me has instantly rolled their eyes, dude, will you ever get over it?) and my employment status, I work for authoritarians.
Most of us do, there’s a chain of command and there isn’t any element of democracy in implementing your superior’s blunt orders. Many families are heavily authoritarian, the patriarch/matriarch ruthlessly runs the show, and believe you me there is no appeal for a bad decision. As we all know frantically too well around 30% of the American electorate joyfully embraces the reeking authoritarianism of white male rule.
Understanding authoritarians is very important, and god if we could only find the key for them to gracefully, forgivably lose face for the heinous mistake of Donald Trump America would be so much better off.
So I’m reading Jeremy Barr of the Washington Post Saturday, March 25th, NBC News has been rocked with a week of bedlam after smashing criticism for the hiring of McDaniel and anchors like Maddow are in open revolt. Barr DC-classically uses an anonymous source, who says that despite all the uproar and mutiny Maddow’s call to reverse the decision is unlikely to happen.
Why? Why would a terrible embarrassing mistake be so unlikely to be reversed, to be so casually accepted as just the way the world works? Barr never says, the why is just left hanging there.
Because the NBC executives who made the decision are classic authoritarians, they rule and decide, and authoritarians never, ever lose face and admit a mistake.
Why is that? Because they’re emotionally, basely insecure, they know full well they have no moral or intellectual basis whatsoever to don the powerful mantle of authority. Oh my god to the heavens above, if it’s shown they’re fallible the basis and rationale of their power fails!
Why is it so important that the basis of power never fails? Because authoritarians are infatuated with power, they get off on it. Their egos like so very much a position of authority that automatically grants them status, then that status so magically gives them the power to make humans do what they say.
Humans adopt characteristics and behaviors to certain degrees, right, many souls in a hierarchy know full well what their power means and can do, what their limitations are and how important it is to collaborate. I’m positive we’ve all known asshole power-tripper authoritarians in a human organization, god they are a misery, but they’ve always been with us.
Amazingly the vast facade of NBC infallibility crumbled to dust the very next day, NBC reversed itself and fired McDaniel, everyone knows if Maddow and her peers hadn’t revolted the heinous decision would have stayed but for once righteousness prevailed and NBC so terribly, horribly lost face.
Then what happened? Nothing, so far as we know. The NBC executives who were so gleefully flayed in public kept their jobs, their cars, their homes and families. Their careers weren’t written off for one mistake, their authority was not stripped away, they were not shunned or shamed.
Any 15 year old has instantly seen the core kernel issue of authoritarianism by now, the vast base immaturity of it all, most of us grow up and soon learn we all make mistakes, many of us mature into human paths of fulfillment and joy that have nothing to do with exercising power whatsoever. There’s much more to the world than telling people what to do, but authoritarians are simply oblivious, their petty infatuation with their superiority upon others crowds out most of their human consciousness.
One of the horrifying phenomena of Donald Trump is the ability of his authoritarian supporters to take on any new felonious behavior or act of Trump’s and still stay with him, they will not admit they made a mistake, even if Trump takes down American democracy they’ll still stand there and shout at the filthy liberals they did the right thing.
Unless Trump somehow gets jettisoned at the convention–stranger things have happened–just don’t vote for him, Republican brothers and sisters. Nothing in your world will change, the Republican Party will have lost the Presidential race again, that’s all. Nothing will be taken from you or lost, no one will demean you or laugh at you. You’ll just be human in America like the rest of us, it’s a good place to be.