05/31/10
Comments:
Bob -
Thanks for your good work in identifying a stable specification for the "authoritarian personality."
Two comments, to add a couple additional dimensions to your approach.
Religion and the authoritarian personality: People tend to characterize religion as a belief, as if the world's inherited religions were a food court to pick and chose from. But in fact religion is by and large inherited the same way genetic race is: children have their parents' religion (regardless of content). Religion is many things, but as a practical matter it is primarily the ideological dimension of ethnicity. The things that produce an authoritarian personality must also tend a person to the group's religion. The two are co-determined.
Authoritarian Politics in History: The old military-monarchical-clerical states of Europe look like what the authoritarian personality would choose. Europe spent centuries in the transition to liberal, republican institutions, starting in the mid-1600s in Britain and running into the 1900s. The authoritarian personality has fought a rear-guard action against this through Conservative parties, which idolize the military, the monarch, and the national religion.
The United States was exceptional in that it was born liberal, never having had an indigenous military-monarchical-clerical state. By coincidence, it was founded at a moment of "enlightenment" when the transition to liberalism in Britain was reasonably far advanced. The elite among the Founders succeeded in writing liberal institutions into the Constitution of 1787, something that probably could not have happened any time since then.
A U.S. Conservative party (European, military-monarchical-clerical style: authoritarian, in other words) probably would have developed -- Jackson's movement, the founding of Texas, and all that -- but for the peculiarity of black slavery and its sectional isolation. The Civil War ended up dividing the party of the army (the Republicans) from the army's natural geographical base (the solidly Democratic South), leaving both major parties internally heterogeneous and not Conservative.
FDR inadvertently opened the door for reconciliation of the essential ingredients of a Conservative party when, realizing that demographic shifts in the North would allow him to govern without the Dixiecrats, he changed the two-thirds vote rule that had given the South a veto on the Democrats' Presidential nominees. From this moment on, a continuous process led the South through splinter candidacies (Thurmond) to third parties (Wallace) to reintegration with the army in a Republican party prostrated by the Nixon disaster (and Gerry Ford's close loss in 1976). Traditional Republican liberals were liquidated and Ronald Reagan won easily in 1980 on the Wallace-LeMay platform.
American exceptionalism is no more. As we look back at it, we can see how lucky we were. The urban mobs of the 1760s and 1770s that we complacently idolized in our school histories are an example of the bullet we dodged for so long. Well, they're back, and it's not surprise that they use the old name.
To sum up, I think you could adopt a multidisciplinary approach to authoritarianism, of which the authoritarian personality would probably be the core.
Best regards,
Joe Ryan
05/29/10
Comments:
Well I think feeling that way about Bush is completely fair. Of the Americans who bothered to vote, fewer than half voted for Bush. Even fewer voted for Clinton in 92. Both presidents struggled with legitimacy problems.
Obama by contrast won 53%, beating decades of non-incumbent/VP Presidential candidates. Compare with Bush 2000: 48%; Clinton 1992: 43%; Reagan 1980 51%; Carter 1976 50%; Nixon 1968 43%; Kennedy 1960 50%.
By that standard - comparing Obama with other newly inaugurated outsider Presidents - he comes into office with the support of the largest fraction of the electorate in living memory.
But at the same time Obama won a mere 43% of the White vote, barely higher than Kerry's total. At the Presidential level, Democratic candidates have not won the White vote in ANY election since LBJ.
I read an article (can't remember the link) that showed if you sliced the 2008 election results demographically (age, White/Hispanic/Black, Protestant/Catholic, urban/suburban/rural), and reweighted them according to the demographic profile of the 1980 electorate, then McCain would have won. Actually in this Reagan-Fantasy-World, McCain would have won by a greater majority than Obama did in 2008.
In other words, even in the wake of Bush, it was actually demographic changes (fewer White Protestants) and a wave election (more first-time voters, elevated Black and Latino participation) that made Barack Obama president.
This goes a long way to explaining the Tea Party's rage and some of the televised tantrums they made at Town Halls about "their America" slipping away. For the TPers, the non-White voter is the outsider - only White votes, from the "Real America", count towards a legitimate Presidency. And they are terrified at the inevitable prospect of a White-minority America. I think people like Glenn Beck really tap into this fear and run with it.
05/22/10
Comments:
Thanks for your comment and wish that the D.C. pundits might read the book. (They've got lots to read as it is, I'm sure.)
I don't think I predicted that Sarah Palin would appeal to high RWA voters. But once she appeared on the scene, it was easy to see that she would appeal to them, and still does. Part of this, I think, is because her thinking is as unorganized as theirs.
To what extent are the Tea Partiers partisan? I tried to answer that in my "Comment" on the movement posted on this web site. I think the polls show the members are overwhelmingly Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents. The former are the high RWAs who comprise the GOP "base." That's what's infuriating to the Republican National Committee: they've lost control of their surest supporters in many places. The Independents are mainly, I suspect, libertarians whose goals of small government, lower taxes, and states rights make them natural supporters of the GOP in most years. Yes, there will be some Democrats, and some Democrat-leaning Independents in the movement as well. (But beware of phrases such as, "up to a quarter.") As I tried to explain at the beginning of Ch. 6 of the book, people identify with political parties for many reasons, and some of them have only a vague idea what the party stands for. And the Democrats have a "bigger tent" than the Republicans, with many more conservatives in it than there are liberals in the GOP. But overwhelmingly the Tea Partiers, as you point out, will more likely vote Republican than Democratic. Still, most Americans don't see them that way.
The Tea Partiers are a big headache for the Republican Party, because they are trying to get "pure conservatives" nominated for elections. In some places their candidates have been trounced by less "pure," GOP-supported nominees. But in others they have embarrassed the Republican leadership by wiping out their candidates at the ballot box. As predicted, their favored candidates hold such extreme views that they will probably turn "sure thing" Republican victories into real struggles. Behold Rand Paul in Kentucky and Susan Lowden in Nevada.
Not many people were surprised that Paul's defenders said he had been unfairly bushwhacked by the liberal media. That statement will not persuade those familiar with the facts. But it will reassure the Tea Partiers who might otherwise be wondering about the thunderstorm of criticism that came Paul's way after his appearance on the Maddow show. The media-alibi will work, however.
I'm sure many Tea Party supporters went to bed Wednesday night thinking Paul was right to criticize the Civil Rights Act as an infringement on private property, and then went to bed on Thursday thinking Paul was right when he said he would have voted for the Act. The followers will flip-flop in synchronization with their leaders. But Paul has said so many extreme things, somebody better give his supporters spatulas, because they're going to have to do a lot of personal flipping over as he denies what he's said over the years.
Certainly I agree with your observations about Tea Partiers compartmentalized thinking and their belief that they are the normal people. I don't think they are in denial in a strict psychodynamic sense about the 2008 election. They know who was declared the winner. They do however believe that the winning shouldn't count, and if that's a kind of denial, I felt the same way about George W. Bush's victory in 2000.
05/20/10
Comments:
I was glad to see you comment on the Tea Party movement - all the more relevant as Rand Paul of Kentucky may become our first official Tea Party Senator this fall. Just as your book was surprisingly predictive of Sarah Palin's appeal it seems to now be almost prophetic w/r/t the Tea Party movement.
What do you think of the Tea Party's claims to be non-, bi- or trans-partisan?
The polls you cited showed up to a quarter of Tea Party members (not supporters) were registered Democrats. You may be aware that party registration is no longer a great predictor of voting behavior in America, especially in the South, and also in functional one-party states across the nation where the primary IS the election.
I bet if a poll was conducted to see how Tea Party members voted at the presidential level, fewer than 3% would admit to having voted for Kerry, Gore or Obama.
The Tea Party is essentially an insurgency within the Republican Party but it presents itself as a wider populist movement, as a purveyor of "common sense solutions," as a "political awakening," and/or as a revolt against "Washington" incumbents of all stripes.
I think there might be a variety of reasons for this:
1. Compartmentalized thinking: Desire to disown or distance themselves from the Bush/DeLay legacy (and their past support of these politicians and their deficit-spending, pork-barrel ways).
2. Denial: pretending the Tea Party represents "new ideas" (not the ones the American electorate already considered and rejected) a "new political party" (not the one that got drubbed in 2006 and 2008), or a "political awakening" (not the same voters who were already committed and involved but just weren't numerous enough to send Palin to DC). Essentially, a wish to "do over" the 2008 election.
3. Desire to be conformist or claim "the normal": Remember your study that showed the authoritarian thinks he is more normal than he actually is and his ideas more mainstream than they actually are? The Tea Partiers think they represent a silent majority of "real Americans" - and the rallies, the demonstrations, the "We The People" rhetoric, the appropriation of our history and heritage (down to dressing up as Paul Revere!), are all part of this.
They view themselves as an "offended majority", they see "their America" vanishing thanks to Obama - a marginally legitimate outsider, or even an outright usurper. The TPers travel in whiter, more conservative, possibly more rural circles than the average American - they simply don't know many Obama voters. And like Clinton, Obama lost the White vote.
It has always amazed me how the Right went from insane frothing rage under Clinton to almost complete complacency under Bush - even as Bush piled up huge deficits, enlarged the powers of the federal government, and failed to stop abortion, flagburning or gay marriage. I predicted that with an Obama or (god forbid) Hillary presidency we would see the switch flip back to "incoherent rage" and, well... here we are.
IMO this "two mode" behavior of the Right has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with identity politics and voter psychology. Your book should be required reading for DC pundits.
05/20/10
Comments:
To Gary Williams: I'll skip to the end of your comment. Let me know if there's something central that I'm passing over. As for natural selection and authoritarianism, I think you can find just about any kind of animal society you want somewhere in the natural world. But in general animals that have prolonged social contact with one another usually have a social status system featuring dominance/submission. That was pretty common among early human society as well, as I understand it., and has definitely been the rule since. The usual explanation is that this helps the species propagate successfully by making sure some members at least have enough to eat, a defensible territory, and so on.
From this perspective all our experiments in democracy, gender and racial equality, providing a safety net for the poor, and so on seem quite unwise. Yet oddly enough the ideas have taken hold and are even spreading. I myself feel the "natural order" can be improved upon, and our values as well as our selfish genes can shape our lives. We don't have to live as we once did have to live.
I hope I've addressed the point you were making. I know you'll let me know if I haven't.
To lepto: Thank you very much. I'm very glad I put the book on-line. I intend to keep it there as long as there is enough interest in it.
To LP: It's an interesting idea that today's conspiracy theorists might be left-wing authoritarians. While not disagreeing with you about the dogmatism and compartmentalized thinking you can find in some conspiracy believers, I'm still stuck on why they should be called "authoritarians." Do the 9/11 conspiracy theories or the UFO conspiracy theories or The World Is Controlled by "X" conspiracy theories have an authority they submit to? The Maoists I knew in the 1970s had Chairman Mao and they literally carried around his "little red book." Arguments were made in his name. His enemies were their enemies. His dictates on how to live were their rules. The conspiracy theories today of course have their spokespersons, but I don't see larger-than-life authorities leading the conspiracy-thinkers. Tell me why I'm wrong.
To Rev. JO, of the Church of the LDDs. Thanks. I'm glad if the book has helped people understand what is so strange and puzzling. And I'm glad it made you laugh at times, just as you did for me with your self-description.
To RMB: Thanks to you too, especially for telling your friends about the book and encouraging them to read it. That's very gratifying, the kind of promotion that ad agencies dream about provoking. And the research was only "painstaking" when I had to wrestle with my local ethics committee about "the next step." In truth, it was like solving a giant jigsaw puzzle, one that took about 40 years. If you like puzzles, you know how much fun that got to be over time. It also helped that I felt it was an important puzzle to solve. But the truth is I didn't realize how much it explained about contemporary American society. John Dean saw that.
To Russ: Well, your comment's a bit ad hominem, but I'll answer it as best I can.
In a world of ever-advancing knowledge, one can't know a lot about everything. So you do have to listen to those who have expertise. In some fields (economics would sure be one) the experts often disagree, and the wise non-expert makes sure he listens to the differing opinions.
Now as for TARP, I have some background in economics. I took two years of econ as an undergraduate business major, including a memorable semester of macroeconomic theory from an anti-Keynesian young turk. I also had a semester course in corporate finance. So I probably had some sort of a handle on the crisis that hit the American financial sector in the summer of 2008. I believed that the economy would plunge into a deep depression if the major banks failed and credit virtually disappeared. It was difficult to imagine where the dominoes would stop falling as one sector after another collapsed. And I haven't heard anyone who has criticized TARP acknowledge what would have happened if the government had not stepped in.
In the case of TARP, I've only heard of one economist who said the government should not step in. The experts seemed virtually unanimous, and what they said made sense to me. It was also true that the Bush administration, including the secretary of the treasury, and the Democratic nominee, Barrack Obama, and his economic advisers agreed TARP had to happen. True, most of the Republicans in Congress voted against it, but their reasons seemed short-sighted to me. I didn't like the idea of bailing out the banks any more than Sen. McConnell did. But I thought it was more important to keep the economy from collapsing.
I think you'll find, by the way, that a lot of the TARP loans have already been paid back, and in one way or another, most of the government investment will return to the treasury.
As for Afghanistan, it was a rogue state under the Taliban that was the breeding ground for terrorist attacks around the world, including 9/11. I knew both the British and the Soviets had come to grief fighting wars in Afghanistan, and I knew the power of the war lords in the countryside and the refuges available in Pakistan would make the military mission difficult. But I believed the Taliban had to be defeated in their home base, and I still believe that today, although the problems with Karzai remind me more and more of Vietnam. I also feel we owe something to people in Afghanistan, especially the women there who have become educated,
to stay and see the mission to its close.)
You suggested that my beliefs came from "what I was told by my bettors, never mind the evidence." I can't even think whose opinion I cared about regarding Afghanistan. I mean, everybody knew where the terrorists were being trained, and where Osama bin Laden was based. You'll have to tell me about the evidence I ignored.
I've told you why I thought as I did. Maybe you could tell me what and why you believe in these matters.
05/20/10
Comments:
05/20/10
Comments:
Bob says:
Quote: For the record, I personally supported TARP as necessary, and the war in Afghanistan.
Out of your own expertise, or because you were told so by your betters, and never mind the evidence?
Looks like you better retake the RWA follower test yourself.
How about assassinations?
05/19/10
Comments:
Thanks for making your work available free. I very much enjoyed reading your book and am busy recommending it to everyone I speak to on this topic. It is a great public service. I hope a lot of people read it. Thank you for making it possible for everyone with an interest to learn from your painstaking labor.
05/17/10
Comments:
I should add, hoping not to offend, that your book often brought me to laughter, which I believe to be the most wonderful of all human responses to life.
05/17/10
Comments:
Prof. Altemeyer,
Warm and heartfelt thanks from a young person (25) on your very entertaining and informative work here. I am not a psychology student (I studied music, actually) but I have always had a fascination and appreciation for social sciences, and I just wanted to add my voice to what I hope is a chorus of appreciative readers.
I make no apologies for being a very liberal person (also a dirty stinking atheist) as far as individual freedoms go, and very much an economic moderate (if I understand the term correctly; I believe the government, representing the collective will of its people, should take all reasonable steps to ensure the employment and physical well-being of its citizens), and as such I found myself frequently baffled by the extreme cognitive dissonance of the U.S. political right. Your work did much to illuminate my understanding of people in general and authoritarians in particular.
Kudos, sir!
All my best,
Rev. Jeffrey Oldham
The Church of the Latter-Day Dude
05/14/10
Comments:
Dear prof. Altemeyer, thank you for putting the book online! I found it extremely interesting, and more than a bit disturbing. I really appreciated reading it, of course I found some point more convincing than others, some conclusions more insightful and some anecdotes lacking rigor. But this is what you expect from a pop science book, I was not the slightest disappointed. However, there is something, actually just small detail, on which I would like to comment. You say you consider the specie of left-wing authoritarians almost extinguished, on the contrary I think they are still very common. Of course, you don't find many blind followers of marxism nowadays, yet I think the modern conspirationists (i.e. followers of one or more conspiracy theories) can pretty much fit in the category. Provided that the extremists in the category are pretty much crazy loons, the moderates present dogmatism, compartmentalized beliefs, and double-standard together with a complete lack of trust in the established authorities. Anyway, thank you again for the book and for the thinking I had to do to digest it. Regards
05/11/10
Comments:
Wonderful book! Thanks for putting it online!
05/11/10
Comments:
Thanks for the response. And yes, your comments on how to proceed debating the topic are well taken.
After discovering, via the internet, that a whole lot of people actually believe (that, like RWA-SDO theory itself, was something of an epiphany for me) much of the crap being said in newspapers, TV, etc. I decided to attempt trying to talk some sense into the Freeper et al types. If you "google" either my name or "Mycos", you'll find literally hundreds of posts I've made since that initial discovery. And after a while, I have to admit that my patience has grown pretty thin with a lot of them, resulting in my having sometimes taken the "low road" by moving the argument toward the quickest way of using research citations to, well... basically insult them. And the Wilson quote is exactly that...a shortcut that allows me to paint them with everything and anything that history and research has revealed about dictators and their followers.
As for an equivalence between conservatism and authoritarianism, yes, I can see in some that they adhere to something like a true "Burkesean" or similar ideology. But they seem few and far between these days, especially in the US where a lot of what I see is motivated solely by fear and hostility toward what they perceive (often wrongly) as the sources of those fears. And it seems to me regardless that even the ideas put forward by Burke have as their origin the same fears sparked by the French Revolution as evoked today by 9/11 and the installment of black man as POTUS.
Having said all that, I sometimes fear that I myself have been over-simplifying many political and social matters using sociological research. I can now see it at play in virtually every aspect of our civilization. Indeed, I've often thought about trying to establish at what point in our evolution it took such an extreme turn, then trying to follow it's course through history to today. He he... No small undertaking needless to say, but it underscores how frequently I keep seeing historical events as contests between competing high RWA-SDOs, and even between high and low RWAs domestically. I often think if only that one problem could be addressed, mankind will have leaped far ahead of where we are now, and at least begin to approach equivalence with the technological progress we've made over the last few millennium.
And no doubt due to my own background in biology, I can't help it seems to wonder what possible reason natural selection could have found for the genesis of such hostile and unreasonable people. Yes, the demands placed on us were very much different than those seen prior to our adoption of sedentary lifestyle. But still, I have to wonder if a lot of this isn't an extreme reaction by a genetically predisposed portion of mankind to the change in environmental stimuli - that based on their widespread and (relatively) stable proportion - or just where it is they came from, because I just can't see this kind of behavior being selected for.
I suppose there's a couple things I can think of off the top of my head that don't seem to jive with a "selfish gene" theory of behavioral predisposition, but still.... Any thoughts ?
GW
05/11/10
Comments:
Hey, I got here in only three tries!
To Michael: Yes, putting the Global Change Game on-line would be wonderful, if it could be done right. But I doubt anyone is interested in investing the time and money it would take, and running the thing would probably be a beast.
To Russ: Well, if somebody shows me the studies that demonstrate the Democratic RWA followers supporting these things, while they condemned Bush/Cheney for doing the same things, I'll write that note. But I read two conservative blogs and two liberal blogs each day, and both TPM and (especially) Huffington Post have been at least as persistent at pointing out when Obama continues Bush policies as Matt Drudge and Politico have been. Moreso, in fact. Which fits into my findings rather well. Anybody who expects liberals to march together to the same drum, compared to the way high RWAs insist on group loyalty, is probably going to be proved quite wrong.
(For the record, I personally supported TARP as necessary, and the war in Afghanistan. As my wife will tell you, I am not much of a progressive.)
To Barbara Cooper: Thanks, I'm glad the book has "put things in perspective." I hope you'll recommend it to others.
Gary Williams No. 1: I've never agreed with Glenn Wilson's assertion that one cannot distinguish between conservatism and authoritarianism. I did a critique of the research on which he based that conclusion in my first book, Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Basically, I thought the studies were very unconvincing of anything.
I think you can be a political conservative and not be a high RWA nor a high SDO, and I can find people like that in every one of my studies, including those involving American state legislators. (Not tons of them, of course, but they are there and illustrate the possibility.)
Yes, racists seldom understand they are racists, and it is in the interest of the high SDOs whose lead they follow to tell them that they're not racists at all. The followers readily believe them. (See the Comment on the Tea Party Movement on this website for an example of this involving the Republican candidate for governor of New York.)
Thanks for referring to this website in your correspondence with others. I truly appreciate that.
Gary Williams No. 2: First let's deal with the semantic issue. "Authoritarian" was originally an adjective, and most dictionaries give its first meaning as something like favoring blind submission to authority, and a second meaning as favoring a concentration of power in a leader. Both high RWAs and high SDOs would agree to each meaning
.
"Authoritarian" as a noun appeared first as a synonym for "dictator," and of course the commenter you mention was certainly right in saying Hitler and Stalin were authoritarians. The widespread use of authoritarian as a noun meaning a supporter of such dictators goes back to 1950 with the publication of a book called The Authoritarian Personality. The term is pretty widely used nowadays, especially in the social sciences, as designating the follower of a would-be dictator. But some people may not accept that meaning.
I try not to let semantic issues get in the way of finding the truth. So my response to your commentator would have been, "Do you think people vary very much in the extent to which they are gullible and manipulable?" "Do you think people vary much in how accepting they are of unfair and dictatorial acts committed by authoritarian governments?" And so on. Then I'd bring in the evidence that people do vary, and they vary systematically across a whole range of issues involving submission, aggression, and conventionalism, and they seem quite supportive of the leaders they like assuming dictatorial powers, and will work to make that happen. You don't have to call these people who score highly on the RWA scale "authoritarians." You can call them "X's"if you like. But they're there, and understanding "X-ism" ties an awful lot of things together.
Maybe your commentator will still insist dictators basically do it by themselves, or with a few cronies, and the degree of "X" in the population doesn't matter. But hopefully others will see the point, and maybe even agree that such supporters might sensibly be called "authoritarians" too.
05/11/10
Comments:
|