Today, I want to lay out why I think childhood could be really high-leverage in preventing/reducing authoritarianism. First, as recently discussed, authoritarianism is both an ideology and a personality trait.
Authoritarians and their shitty childhoods
There’s good evidence that life has been getting worse for bottom-half Americans over past decades. Market concentration is up. Wages are stagnant. Major costs like housing, transportation, education, healthcare, and childcare are skyrocketing. Inequality is rising. Economic mobility is decreasing. Zip code is, increasingly, destiny. Fewer Americans are moving to opportunity. Precarity is increasing, along with intensive parenting and teen depression and suicide. Before Covid, average life expectancies decreased in the US for the first time in decades. Deaths of despair are up.
cathyreisenwitz.substack.com