Let’s Have a Welfare Crackdown

To set the scene, I want to quote some words from Bob Altemeyer's book "The Authoritarians".

"Everybody submits to authority to some degree but some people go way beyond the norm and submit to authority even when it is dishonest, corrupt, unfair and evil."

"Over the years I have found that right wing authoritarian (RWA) followers blissfully tolerated many illegal and unjust government actions. They seem to have a “Daddy knows best” attitude toward authority. They do not see laws as social standards that apply to everyone. Instead, they appear to think that authorities are above the law, and can decide which laws apply to them and which do not because high RWAs generally favour punishing the bejabbers out of misdoers. But they proved less likely than most people to punish a police officer who beat up a handcuffed demonstrator."

"When I say right wing authoritarian followers are aggressive I don’t mean they stride into bars and start fights. First of all high RWAs go to church enormously more often than they go to bars. Secondly, they usually avoid anything approaching a fair fight. Instead they aggress when they believe right and might are on their side. Right for them means more than anything else that their hostility is endorsed by established authority or supports such authority. Might means they have a huge physical advantage over their target in weaponry say or in numbers as in a lynch mob. It’s striking how often authoritarian aggression happens in dark and cowardly ways in the dark by cowards who later will do everything they possibly can to avoid responsibility for what they did. Women children and others unable to defend themselves are typical victims. Even more striking the attackers typically feel morally superior to the people they are assaulting in an unfair fight."

So you might want to bear these things in mind when you are thinking of supporting Monsignori Abbott’s *Welfare Crackdown*. The other things you might want to consider are these;

"Social Dominators and high Right Wing Authoritarian's have several things in common besides prejudice. They both tend to have conservative economic philosophies - and they both favour right-wing political parties."

"Persons who score highly on the Social Dominance scale do not usually have all the contradictions in their mental life that we find in high RWAs. Most of them do not show weak reasoning abilities or highly compartmentalized thinking and certainly not a tendency to trust people who tell them what they want to hear. They’ve got their head together. Nor are most of them dogmatic or particularly zealous about any cause or philosophy. You have to believe in something to be dogmatic and zealous and what social dominators apparently believe in most is not some creed or cause but gaining power by any means fair or foul."

"The soundness of their thinking hardly means you can believe them. They are quite capable of saying whatever will get them ahead. After all they hold that there’s no such thing as right and wrong. It all boils down to what you can get away with. And one of the most useful skills a person should develop they say is how to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly. So like high RWAs social dominators are quite capable of hypocrisy - the difference being that the RWAs probably don’t realize the hypocrisy because their thinking is so compartmentalized whereas the dominators do but they don’t care."

"Given all of this, do you really believe the social dominator who says people should have to earn their success in life? He’s quite willing to let the children of the rich get rich merely through inheritance. Do you trust him when he says he’s in favour of a level playing field? He’s against programs that would give the disadvantaged a better chance. Does he really believe the poor can pull themselves up by their bootstraps or is he content to let them face an uphill struggle that very few can overcome? It doesn’t bother the social dominator that masses of people are poor. That’s their tough luck. And some racial groups are just naturally inferior to others he believes. Justice should not be applied equally to all. The rich and powerful should have advantages in court even if that completely violates the concept of justice. Who cares if prejudice plays a role in the justice system? He certainly doesn’t. The right people should have more votes than everybody else in elections. And so on. If you stare deeply into the souls of social dominators they believe equality is a sucker word. Only fools believe in it they say. And if people took equality seriously if society did try to provide equal opportunity for all and if the playing field really were made level so that bootstraps could be pulled up and multitudes of lives bettered the social dominator knows he would get less. And he very much dislikes that notion."

And that dear reader is why we have Monsignori Abbott and his cronies in the Liberal party - doing their best to shaft those Australian's who are on welfare.