The Authoritarians Chapter One
Fri Mar 16, 2007 at 10:16:26 PM PDT
Chapter one concerns the measurement of people to be authoritarian followers. It will end with a simulation game called the Global Change Game played by high authoritarians and low authoritarians. The basic measurement is a test called the RWA Scale i.e. The Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale. And you can take it yourself in this chapter for the purpose of understanding how an authoritarian thinks. You will be taken into the statistics used to establish the reliability and validity of this test.
Checkout my diary on the preface and introduction and watch for Chapter Two tomorrow.
OK time to jump!
But ultimately, in a democracy, a wannabe tyrant is just a comical figure on a soapbox unless a huge wave of supporters lifts him to high office. That’s how Adolf Hitler destroyed the Wiemar Republic and became the Fuhrer. So we need to understand the people out there doing the wave. Ultimately the problem lay in the followers.
This means all those people blabbing on talk radio. It means Rush and O'Reilly and their adoring audience. It means FOX News.
So he tells us about them"
Authoritarian followers usually support the established authorities in their society, such as government officials and traditional religious leaders. Such people have historically been the “proper” authorities in life, the time-honored, entitled, customary leaders, and that means a lot to most authoritarians. Psychologically these followers have personalities featuring:
- a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in
their society;
- high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
- a high level of conventionalism.
Gulp. Then he gives you the test, tells you how to take it and grade it and cautions you in interpreting it. He discusses the validity which is the measure that tells you how excellent a test is as it gives you a number that says how well it measures what it says it measures. Then he goes into how it was validated. Made up circumstances are submitted to students and correlated with their RWA scores. Do people who score high on the RWA scale submit to authority more than those who score low. How about those who believed Nixon did nothing wrong? Or that Hitler did not murder 6 million Jews? Or electronic spying on American citizens? Or torture? Can all these instances be rationalized by high RWA's? Read and you will see. And shudder.
He discusses Authoritarian Submission in terms of our present political danger. His made up stories that are presented to high and low RWA students and the results can be predicted by any person here. He mentions Milgram's famous experiement the Milgram Experiment and the results as interpreted by high RWA and low RWA scorers.
Authoritarian Aggression is investigated in much the same way. Stories and judgements of them are correlated with high and low scores. The relevance is particularly important in evaluating juries, as high RWA's give longer sentences, harsher punishment. Then he creates informal inventories of prejudice, racial stereotypes and behavior. He pushes these examples to the extreme to showthat high RWA's will persecute even those people who are most like themselves!
Finally, just to take this to its ludicrous extreme, I asked for reactions to a “law
to eliminate right-wing authoritarians.” (I told the subjects that right-wing
authoritarians are people who are so submissive to authority, so aggressive in the
name of authority, and so conventional that they may pose a threat to democratic rule.)
RWA scale scores did not connect as solidly with joining this posse as they had in the
other cases. Surely some of the high RWAs realized that if they supported this law,
they were being the very people whom the law would persecute, and the posse should
therefore put itself in jail. But not all of them realized this, for authoritarian followers
still favored, more than others did, a law to persecute themselves. You can almost hear
the circuits clanking shut in their brains: “If the government says these people are
dangerous, then they’ve got to be stopped.”
Unauthoritarians and Authoritarians: Worlds of Difference
This is the part where the Global Change Game is described as played by highs and lows, on separate nights in October 1996. Read the description of the game and weep. It is a fascinating account.
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