For years I have given friends and colleagues who want to try to understand the mind of Tea Baggers and other hardcore righties a reading assignment; Read Bob Altemeyer's - The Authoritarians. In today's climate it may be time to read it for myself again.
For those of you who haven't read it I wanted to do a summary, but it's been a little too long since I read it for me to do it justice so I did a quick search for some on-line summaries. I found two. They'll give a good understanding and in some cases an extended conversation. (See Manny's review on Good Reads) The other is a little less involved but gives the highlights. (see Reggie's Blog)
Below I'll give a highlight from both summaries which I'll link to so you can read them yourself, but I highly recommend you read all of Bob Altemeyer's work. It's only 254 pages.
From Manny's review;
In this unassuming little book, Bob Altemeyer, a 60-something Canadian professor of social sciences, presents a straightforward theory explaining how authoritarian leaders arise, and what people compose their power base. He starts with the followers. What kind of person wants to support a leader like Hitler or Stalin? Altemeyer started investigating this question during the Nixon era. He developed a simple questionnaire, which he scores to produce what he calls "the Right Wing Authoritarian scale" (RWA scale). Typical questions are things like the following, where in each case the subject is asked to give a response ranging from -4 (strongly disagree) to +4 (strongly agree):
The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas.
Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people.
The "old-fashioned ways" and the "old-fashioned values" still show the best way to live.
The questions seem laughably transparent, and I am indeed a little surprised when Altemeyer says that the RWA score has a great deal of predictive value. It correlates well with other ways of testing submission to established authority and also with tendency to xenophobia and bigotry. If you want to compute your own RWA score, you can find an online version here. It takes a few minutes to complete.
Most interestingly, the RWA score correlates very well with fundamentalist religious beliefs. Altemeyer has developed a second scale to measure this, based on a similar type of questionnaire. Typical questions on the Religious Fundamentalism scale look like the following:
The basic cause of evil in this world is Satan, who is still constantly and ferociously fighting against God.
When you get right down to it, there are basically only two kinds of people in the world: the Righteous, who will be rewarded by God, and the rest, who will not.
Whenever science and sacred scripture conflict, science is probably right.
You can find an online version of the Religious Fundamentalism test here.
Manny has a conversation with some of those registered on Good Reads.
From Reggie's Blog
Authoritarians are often referred to by researchers (including Altemeyer) as "right-wing authoritarians", but this term is very misleading. Authoritarians are not ordinary mainstream conservatives; indeed, they are sometimes very left-wing. They tend to support - passionately and uncritically - whichever ideology is currently or has traditionally been in power, whether that means capitalism/conservatism (as in the United States), communism (in North Korea, Cuba or the Cold War-era USSR), Islamism (in Iran and Saudi Arabia), or something else. On the other hand, they are sometimes violently hostile to the state authorities - think of the Nazi Party in the Weimar Republic and various neo-Nazi and Trotskyite factions today - and in such cases their authoritarianism is reflected in the fanatical, sectarian culture and dogmas of their own groups. It should also be remembered that there are plenty of authoritarians who have zero interest in politics, and whose authoritarianism is manifested instead in their behaviour at work, in their religious life or in some other sphere.
Authoritarians are characterised by three qualities:
"a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society"
"high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities"
"a high level of conventionalism" - which means not merely that they are conventional themselves, but that they want everyone else to be conventional too.
They stand up for the law, except when their leaders break it. Then they can be remarkably forgiving:
[Authoritarians] trusted President Nixon longer and stronger than most people did during the Watergate crisis. Some of them still believed Nixon was innocent of criminal acts even after he accepted a pardon for them. (Similarly the Allies found many Germans in 1945 refused to believe that Hitler... had ordered the murder of millions of Jews and others. “He was busy running the war,” Hitler’s apologists said. “The concentration camps were built and run by subordinates without his knowing it.”) To pick a more current example, authoritarian followers believed, more than most people did, President George W. Bush’s false claims that Saddam Hussein had extensive links to al-Qaida, and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And they supported the invasion of Iraq, whereas less authoritarian Americans tended to doubt the wisdom of that war from the start.
Authoritarians in America and the Soviet Union tended to be the most passionate supporters of their respective sides in the Cold War. Rather worryingly, they continue to be the most militant supporters of the two sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When asked to play a political simulation called the Global Change Game, people who scored low on Altemeyer's authoritarian personality test held international summits and engaged in environmental co-operation while those who scored high wiped out the planet in a nuclear war.
Hopefully these snippets have piqued your interest enough to at least read the reviews with the real goal of having you read
Altemeyer's work.
On with the games!!
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