- Why, why, why use the term populism???? What does this have to do with 19th century social movements that at least originally were organized to counter elite power? (I agree with historians who see this concept as having been debased for political purposes, with protosocialist and socialist movements of the 19th century getting lumped with Huey Long, and Huey Long getting lumped with George Wallace.)
- Foucault described popular disciplinary spectacles in which the sovereign authority demonstrated its power over the transgressing subject. His most famous example is the execution of a regicide, an enemy of the sovereign, not the people. The Terror brought a shift in thematic.
- "The dynamics revolves around the drama of the authority figure exercising raw power over the outcast in the name of the core values purportedly defining the collective, and thus allowing members of the collective to vicariously "participate"in the drama, identify with the punishing authority figure and at the same time bond with each other." You refer to the Authoritarian Personality; what I'd pull from the AP is the emphasis on intolerance of ambiguity. The shaming of the liberal wimp is a distortion of public dialogue that is also intended to model internal dialogue. Any identification with the victim is cut off, shouted down, shat upon. Another poster referred to someone -- Liddy? -- talking about 'putting steel in the spine.' It's really about -- to play off Theleweit's "Male Fantasies" -- armoring yourself against empathic contact with the Enemy. Remember those fluctuating poll figures? --->
- I agree that it is difficult to not refer to presocial mechanisms. Some psychologists are heavily pumping evolutionary social psychology in a way that often goes overboard teleologically. But there are some convincing points. Child observation studies stress how children look to parents for cues on how to respond to strange situations; the child doesn't refer to what they know, they look to the parent. It can at least be argued that this mechanism has survival value; whether it is genetically grounded is another matter. In any case, I think that such a response remains a kind of metacognitive option, and it can be organized around group processes, resulting in terrible dumbing down, literal mindlessness (in the sense of a forswearing of cognitive functions and mimicing of attitudes and ideas) when people are afraid and they are pushed into this kind of coerced and coercive (pseudo)solidarity.
Randy