These are the Americans you are most afraid of, because they are not afraid of themselves.
Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian
leaders cook up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too
much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do
whatever they want—which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and
brutal…I'm going to present the case in this book that the greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.
We know a lot, scientifically, about Authoritarian Republicans. Or we would if enough of us were paying attention. Very few of us read about this research, even the non-technical accounts such as Robert Altemeyer gives us in
The Authoritarians. Fewer believe it, and fewer act on it.
Robert Altemeyer can explain a lot about Republicans. What he cannot explain is Democrats who do not take this information seriously, who mostly don't want to know about it or believe it if they do hear of it. Neither can I.
Last Monday we looked at John Dean's rogue's gallery of Conservatives Without Conscience, including his summary of Robert Altemeyer's work on the Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) personality, along with other relevant research on Social Dominance Orientation and the Religious Right. This week we look at what Altemeyer himself says about it in his book The Authoritarians, available for free download from Altemeyer's Web page. This particular book was inspired by John Dean's use of the earlier research, and by detailed discussions with Dean about applying the research to modern Republicans. Unlike Altemeyer's early, more technical publications, this is a popular survey of the whole field.
We got a rather compressed view of the theory last time from John Dean. Altemeyer's book goes into much more detail, much more than we can review here. So I hope you actually read it.
The Problem of Authoritarianism
Research on Authoritarianism began by asking how the Holocaust was possible, and expanded to Stalin, Mao and others responsible for millions of deaths each, along with other mass misery. The fact that Southern Democrats and then increasingly Republicans have been of similar mind, notably Jim Crow in the South, Nixon in Cambodia, and others since, is a scientific fact, not just a political opinion. But they are not there. We can clearly distinguish several kinds of Republican from any kind of Nazi, Fascist, or Communist. For one thing, they have different enemies, and different approaches to their enemies. Currently only the Armageddonists are overtly genocidal, although Neo-Cons don't care how many locals or US Military they kill in what they claim to be the service of democracy and human rights. Other factions (racists, bigots, misogynists, nativists, the 1%…) just want everybody else in their supposedly "traditional" place, with themselves on top.
We have two primary measurement scales for different kinds of Authoritarian to work with, both carefully designed and validated by means of many experiments, and then applied to a variety of important questions. Numerous other scales connect these two to many particular issues.
I don't care for the technical terminology that Altemeyer and others originally cooked up in their research, and in this book Altemeyer himself does better.
Right Wing Authoritarianism
"Right Wing Authoritarianism" is not inherently of the political Right. It applies just as much to Communism on the far Left, and has been verified in experiments in Russia. But it hardly matters in the US, where the Loony Left is dead. We can call people who score high on Altemeyer's standardized RWA scale Authoritarian Followers, as he does in this book. These include dedicated Nazis and Stalinists "just carrying out orders", and more recently proud Dittohead followers of Rush Limbaugh and fanatical devotees of the Religious Right and the Tea Parties busy casting out the insufficiently pure.
Obedience to accepted authority and rejection of supposedly illegitimate authority is a key trait, along with unrealistic fears, aggression, difficulties with facts and logic, extreme self-righteousness, blindness to themselves, hypocrisy, ethnocentrism, and dogmatism. Hence Birtherism, the claim that Obama isn't the President, and you don't have to do anything he says. Hence Federal government tyranny, a claim as old as the Republic, resulting in veneration of the Constitution combined with ignoring anything it says, and Biblical literalism except for what it actually says.
…research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and—to top it all off—a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic. These seven deadly shortfalls of authoritarian thinking eminently qualify them to follow a would-be dictator. As Hitler is reported to have said,“What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.”
Social Dominance Orientation
"Social Dominance Orientation" is a more descriptive phrase for the SDO scale created by Felicia Pratto and Jim Sidanius, but it is simpler to call those who score high on that scale Authoritarian Leaders.
The SDO scale was created as a measure of a belief in social inequality, that is, a desire for social dominance. It then turned out to be an excellent predictor of racism, one that had a low correlation, 0.20, with the RWA scale. But the two taken together predict most of racism, which neither can do on its own. Dozens of other scales have been proposed for measuring and predicting racism, but only RWA and SDO do so at all well.
But it turns out that there is much more to this scale. SDO people are found in many kinds of leadership position where self-promotion is the key, but much less so in meritocracies. Their defining characteristics are amorality and a firm belief in the virtue of inequality. They tend not to be religious, but they can fake it. They are even more conservative on economics than RWAs.
RWAs and SDOs agree on almost all of the political issues, but they are radically different on
- Their desire for power, not to achieve some possibly worthy goal, but as an end in itself. Altemeyer put together a Personal Power, Meanness and Dominance Scale/Power Mad Scale that goes into this much more.
- Their religiousness. They don't care about homosexuality as much as RWAs, but are more racist. RWAs believe themselves to be extraordinarily moral. SDOs may pretend that in public, but they are quite clear that they are not.
- The roots of their aggression. They feel much more in control and much less fearful than RWAs, and much less self-righteous than the Religious Right.
- Their thinking processes. RWAs have many holes in their thought processes. SDOs are quite clear on what they want and how to get it. Having achieved power, however, they are almost incapable of cooperating with other SDOs in positions of power elsewhere.
An important item on the related Exploitive Manipulative Amoral Dishonesty Scale/Exploitive MAD Scale is
One of the most useful skills a person should develop is how to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly.
Both of the MAD scales correlate highly with SDO, but not with RWA.
Double High Authoritarians
We can keep the Double High category for those who score high on both scales. These are the scariest people in politics and religion. Unlike plain SDOs, they tend to profess strong religious beliefs, most often Fundamentalist, conservative Catholic, or in Utah and nearby states Mormon beliefs, since that gets them the most followers. The pre-scientific study of tyranny, tyrants, and their connection to religion goes back to Aristotle in The Politics.
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
Muslim Double Highs are not significant in US politics, but are a plague around the world. Christian Double Highs are the most hypocritical among US politicians and religious leaders, relying on the theology of "cheap grace", as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it, of ready forgiveness via Catholic confession or the Protestant doctrine of the Elect, Born Again to salvation no matter what they might do after. Thus IOKIYAC. Inversely, they deny the possibility of either divine or human forgiveness to all other religions, including mainstream Christianity, and especially to atheists, unless it is to ultra-Zionist Jews. We can recognize Jewish Double Highs not only in Israel but in the US. Sheldon Adelson is a good example. The worst Hindutva Indian nationalist Hindus and Sinhalatva Sri Lankan nationalist Buddhists also fit the pattern. Japanese Imperial State Shinto was one of the worst cases in modern history.
There is only a little overlap between those who score high on RWA and SDO. It comes to 5%–10% of subjects. They are by a significant margin the most racist, the most bigoted against LGBTs, the most misogynist, and so on down the line of hate.
The Religious Fundamentalism Scale
[Double Highs] also score higher than anyone else on a “Militia” scale I developed after the Oklahoma City bombing which measures belief that a Jewish-led conspiracy is plotting to take over the United States through such dastardly devices as gun control laws and the United Nations.
Altemeyer reviews many other scales that correlate in one way or another with SWA and SDO. Of particular importance to us is the Religious Fundamentalism scale, which applies to Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist fundamentalists as much as to Christians. Go read about it. It's pretty much just what you think it is, but the details matter.
The most important fact about fundamentalists/evangelicals is how many of them and especially their children fall away, a few percent a year, not made up with the much lower rate of conversions to Evangelical Christianity. Furthermore, more than half of Evangelicals admit to having doubts about their religion as part of psychological tests, doubts that they cannot admit to among fellow believers. What if they could all come out of the closet?
The original Fundamentalism of the early 1900s, focused on Biblical inerrancy, morphed into the Evangelical movement later, focused on these concepts put forth by Evangelical pollster George Barna.
- Do you believe Jesus Christ lived a sinless life?
- Do you believe eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not works?
- Do you believe Christians have a personal responsibility to share their religious
beliefs about Christ with non-Christians?
- Is your faith very important to your life today?
- Do you believe Satan is a real, living entity?
- Do you believe God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created
the universe and still rules it today?
- Do you believe the Bible is totally accurate in all that it teaches?
Evangelicals score high on the Religious Fundamentalism scale. On the problem of young Evangelicals falling away, Barna reported recently that 38% of Millennial Evangelicals fact-check sermons on their smart phones.
Validity and Applications
It is important to understand that SWA and SDO are both scientifically validated scales, the results of years or decades of testing, measurement, and refinement. The very first Fascism scale had to be abandoned for a very simply methodological reason: all of the items in the scale were oriented in the same direction, which resulted in false positives among people who were inclined to agree to some extent with everything on a questionnaire, regardless of their own opinions. (It did not help that the analysis in The Authoritarian Personality, where the Fascism scale was introduced, was primarily untestable Freudian and Marxist supposition.) Valid scales have to be balanced between agreement and disagreement, as in the two sample items below, so that meaningless going-along cancels out. These statements are to be rated on a scale from -4 (complete disagreement) to 4 (complete agreement).
Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.
Gays and lesbians are just as healthy and moral as anybody else.
No, I did not make those items up. As ludicrous as it seems to Liberals, the first one is exactly how a lot of RWAs and Double Highs think.
To say that these scales have been validated is not to say that they are entirely precise, just that they have turned out to be a lot more reliable than most Social Science measurements. One cannot predict the behavior of individuals with precision from their scores on these scales, but one can reliably predict certain behaviors of groups along the lines of the Tea Parties and Rush Limbaugh's proud Dittoheads from such scores.
One measure of the reliability of these scales is the Alpha coefficient, which measures the internal consistency of items on the scale. The RWA scale has an Alpha of 0.90, which is fantastically high for a social science measure. Each of the items is consistent with the trait being measured, while about 300 other items have been discarded over the years for not measuring the same things, or not doing so as accurately. Testing on US and Canadian politicians has given even higher Alpha values, 0.95 and 0.94 respectively.
One of the most revealing sets of tests that Altemeyer did was to send his RWA scale to politicians in Congress, state legislatures, the Canadian Parliament, and Canadian provincial legislatures. (The SDO scale did not exist at the time.) He got a decent response rate, and found that almost all Republicans and Southern Democrats in the states tested scored higher on the RWA scale than non-Southern Democrats. Moderate Republicans in Connecticut were the only exception among the states in the study, but not enough of them took the test to be sure of that result. Certainly Joe Lieberman seems like a counterexample. Similarly for Conservatives in Canada vs. all other parties, with important differences among the other parties that I will not go into.
US State legislature RWA scores, 1990-1993
Altemeyer also asked legislators about a variety of social issues. Not surprisingly, high RWAs were on the negative side of every issue he asked about, in varying degrees of correlation from weak to very strong. I'll let you read the list yourself.
This is the real Culture War.
An particularly revealing application of the RWA scale was in recruiting players for a global simulation game. A group with all low RWA scores cooperated, beginning with substantial trust and increasing it in global planning meetings organized by the players, and solving a multitude of global problems. The setup was difficult enough that there were still mass deaths in some parts of the simulated world, but players worked hard at minimizing them. A second group, all with high RWA scores, began with mistrust and rapidly made things worse, never engaging in any form of cooperative planning. They succeeded in nuking the planet in the first round, and even when they avoided that killed a large fraction of the planetary population, among other problems.
Compare these results with those in Prisoner's Dilemma contests, described in this series in Grokking Republicans: The Non-Cooperator's Dilemma. So how do we get the nations of the Earth to put people with low RWA scores in charge, people with nice, forgiving, but sufficiently retaliatory strategies to discourage non-cooperators over time? There is no secret in that in principle. We low-RWAers encourage freedom, democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and international cooperation, starting with More and Lower-RWA Democrats here at home, and we confront the high-RWA leaders and followers strongly enough to deter them, but not enough to provoke more. We are actually getting there, and would have been a lot farther along if it had not been for Double High Crusader Neo-Cons in the Bush administration leading the rest of the Party and a lot of Democrats by the nose.
The first time Altemeyer ran this game, he did not have the SDO scale available. That meant that there were probably several Double Highs among the RWA group that nuked the world. He decided to run it a second time, with a group of RWAs including no Double Highs, and another with seven Double Highs. There were significant differences in both runs.
In the all-RWA group, there was a decided unwillingness of participants to take charge of groups, and then there was no cooperation whatsoever between groups, and little imagination in attempting to solve problems locally. The high level of Fundamentalism present meant that all groups refused to do anything about birth rates anywhere other than obstruct, leading to monstrous rates of death. Charity was attempted on a feeble scale, but no government interventions. Those in charge of the disaster areas gave up. There were no wars between regions.
The seven Double Highs in the next run were assigned to separate regions, without letting participants know, so that each could become an undisputed leader, or in a few cases the power behind the throne. Dealing was intense, but there was no charity and no global action. Where a market solution to a problem of resource distribution existed, it was fully utilized, but no non-market solutions were even considered. Nuclear blackmail and an arms race broke out. It looked as though all-out nuclear war was imminent at the end of the last round.
In all of the simulations, the players were Canadian college students, but the teams treated each other as though they were despised Africans and Asians and so on, or the proverbial Ugly Americans, setting up barriers that had no basis in anything but the names of the continents they were assigned to and their preconceptions about the regions.
Fewer and Less Bad Authoritarians
So what do we do about RWAs and SDOs and Double Highs in charge of countries, religious sects, political parties, and terrorist organizations? History says that this has been the problem of politics for millennia, one that has yielded only very gradually, with a very uneven tendency to ratchet forward over the centuries. One can trace the reining in of British monarchs and the growth of Parliamentary power from Magna Carta limiting the power of Good King John, through the trial and execution of Charles I (of Divine Right of Kings, one of the most extreme forms of SDO theory before Hitler and Stalin), to Constitutional Monarchy. The process has not been completed. Similarly for Constitutional government and human rights in the US. The extension of the franchise from rich White men to all adults was gradual in both cases, and is still ongoing, with attempts to roll it back by voter suppression laws and gerrymanders in many Red states.
We have been able to contain some Double High regimes until they collapsed under the weight of their own internal contradictions (Soviet Union), and we had to go in and dismantle some (Nazis, Fascists, and Japan in WW II, most obviously). Judging which alternative is least bad, and indeed whether effective action is even possible is no light matter. We have failed through inaction (the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide, and many others) and we have failed through action (Vietnam, the Cambodian bombing, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya). The worst failures of the US have been in propping up Double High regimes all around the world (Iran, most of Latin America, much of Africa, and more). But we have also in some cases succeeded, where the people were ready to continue the work as soon as Authoritarians were no longer the main obstacle. Rwanda, for example, after the initial failure of other governments to do anything. The questions of the day include Russia, particularly in Ukraine, ISIS/ISIL in Syria and Iraq, North Korea, and several others, but there are far fewer of them than a few decades ago.
Perhaps you detect a theme here. Dealing with our own Authoritarians is essential before we go meddling elsewhere. In the bad old days of United Fruit Company, American Red scares, racism, bigotry, misogyny, and other ills of the political and religious right, the Authoritarians were often in charge, and it has been a long, hard slog to displace them even as much as we have. Demographic and generational trends are currently running strongly in our favor, resulting in shifts of about 1% a year in our direction in popular opinion on the issues. At the same time Authoritarians are determined to fiddle elections with gerrymanders and voter suppression for as long as they can hold out.
But one day that dam will break.
And then there is some good news.
High RWAs are highly conforming. When moderate RWA is the norm in society, they moderate their Authoritarian impulses.
There are many moderate Evangelicals who don't make the kinds of noise that the Religious Right does. Environmentalists are making common cause with Christians who believe in Stewardship, who turn out to be good organizers for good causes, and our best ambassadors to the rest of the Evangelical world.
The theory of cooperation that we looked at earlier makes the point that we need to interact as much as possible with each other, and provide as many opportunities as possible for cooperation with those who think they are our enemies. We need Blacks and other minorities, women, LGBTs, immigrants, many kinds of religious and non-religious, and others to be as visible as possible in the media and on the Net, and to take part in other social activities with other groups. We need high RWAs and high SDOs to encounter us in their families, in the media, on the Net, in their communities, indeed everywhere. Far too many Whites know no Blacks to talk to seriously, and far too many Blacks know no Whites to talk to seriously. I have long experience with talking to Blacks who have never heard a White person express sympathy for their problems to their faces.
When we have those conversations about race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, science denial, and all the rest, as we increasingly do, the Right can howl about it, but they cannot pretend any longer that it isn't happening, or keep their children from finding out.
Disclosure: I am an extreme non-RWA, with the minimum possible score on the scale. Also a strong non-SDO. I have stepped forward on various issues involved in global poverty when I did not see anybody else doing it and I had something to contribute, but not just to be in charge.
Next time: The True Believer
In modern times the version of the question most discussed is the Nazis, and second the Communists. Religious fanaticism, and the fanatics of the French and other revolutions are well-known, even if insufficiently understood. Before the scientific studies discussed above one of the most important attempts to understand these and other groups with similar ideas and methods was Eric Hoffer's book The True Believer, available as a free PDF.
How close did Hoffer get without the later science? Well, he could tell something about what had been going on, but far too much of what he put into the book turns out to be unsubstantiated opinion (his and others') and he missed a lot, saying almost nothing about the fanaticisms of the American Republic. So much so, in fact, that Republicans from Eisenhower to Reagan thought his book was wonderful. On the other hand, he looked into areas where the scientists have yet to experiment, and some of his insights would be well worth following up scientifically.
The Grokking Republicans Book List is updated weekly with links to published Diaries and dates for books to be read next.
