SEE THE PROJECTION INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM.

Thom Hartmann aimed at Donald Trump but might have hit Justin Trudeau.

We've always had authoritarians among us. These are people who paradoxically love to submit to an authority figure above them while at the same time desperately need to assert their own authority over others "below them" in order to feel safe.

They see the world in binary terms: there are those in control and those who are controlled, those who lead and those who follow, those who dominate and those who are dominated. And when a severe authoritarian leader has significant success in society, authoritarianism becomes, essentially, a contagious mental and cultural illness.

Yes, for the past two years of two weeks to slow the contagion, there have been a lot of people who don't use spray tan or comb their hair over who fit that description.

While the vast majority of authoritarians are authoritarian followers, a small percentage are authoritarian leaders. They exist together with their followers in a symbiosis like pilotfish and shark, gang leader and gang, alpha dog and pack.

When authoritarian leaders emerge and are celebrated in the broader society authoritarian followers are drawn to them, realigning their worldview, value system, and behavior to mirror those of the authoritarian leader.

Authoritarian followers submit to control by their chosen leader because it makes them feel like they're drawing power (and, thus, authority) from that person.

You can find the usual suspects enumerated in his column. His claims, though, are more general.

In their personal lives, authoritarian followers are constantly on the lookout for people they can assert their own power over, particularly people they think should either serve them (like a restaurant server or flight attendant) or should simply defer to them because they think they have higher social status (whites going off on people of color, tyrannical bosses, husbands beating their wives and/or children).

That "higher social status" bit is rich, what with the governing professional managerial classes thinking their Ivy League degrees or their ability to call out the right secular sins confer the right to exert power or demand deference.  That includes more than a few elected officials, whether as mayor or governor, or on school boards.