John Dean, speaking with Amy Goodman:
"we know an awful lot about this type of personality. There are people who submit very easily to an authority figure. They do it because they're frightened. 9/11 drove an awful lot of people into submitting to authoritarianism, and they're very aggressive once they submit. This explains a lot of the incivility, the nastiness, the mean-spiritedness. They're not self-critical [. . .] ."
"And we don't think it in democracies in terms of authoritarianism. It is very real. It has a real presence in government today. It is the controlling group within the conservative ranks. And for that reason, it needs to be watched. The other thing is these people, Amy, don't change their behavior. Once they get into this mold, very few of them can be influenced or told to do anything other than what they're doing. "
