Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers

by John W. Dean

The Low RWA World. One evening, sixty-seven low RWAs, drawn from more than twenty sections of their university’s introductory psychology course in which they had earlier answered the RWA scale, played the game for three hours. They had been invited to participate, they were told, through a random draw of more than twenty-six hundred intro students. They were assigned to ten different regions within the constraint that there be about as many women as men in each region. Seven men and three women stood up and volunteered to be leaders when the simulation began. Right away, the leader of the Pacific Rim called a meeting of all the “elites” on the “Island Paradise of Tasmania,” where they agreed to meet again any time there was a global problem that needed cooperative action. Meanwhile most of the regions independently reduced their military spending and invested in health, education, and economic development. Elites negotiated mutually beneficial deals, and most of the regions made headway solving their problems in sustainable ways. An hour into the simulation, its administrators announced that the ozone layer was seriously diminished and some of the players were in danger of “dying” from skin cancer. It would affect everyone and would take a lot of money to fix. The elites met on Tasmania and successfully negotiated how much each region would pay, with the richest paying the most, and the crisis was averted. It became clear however that the Third World regions would not be a...