Very interesting work.'

Most people are not alphas. Only alphas want to decide. Everyone else wants to follow. Totalitarian states, right and left, make following mandatory for everyone who cannot rise to lead. That structure has a strong Darwinian appeal. So much energy is wasted on disagreement. (Look at the US Congress.) Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But power gets things done.

If we imagine a scale with corrupt power at one end and feckless democracy at the other, it's not clear where we should cast our plumper, and different people will settle at different points under different environmental pressures. (Wouldn't live be saved if we could enforce anti-pandemic behavior in a draconic way?)

Fascism's appeal manifests when democracy fails to get things done. Donald Trump is the "something else" that seemed worth trying after eight years of Mitch McConnell (may he eat shit and die) doing everything in his power to make Obama and, therefore, the country, fail. When "What the Hell have your got to lose?" becomes a viable slogan, fascism carries the day.

So, interesting and instructive as the psychological analyses in this article may be, they are a sort of machine code version of a what in higher-level language is simply the perceived need to get things done when a non-fascist regime is failing to do them.