The Authoritarians

A fascinating work, both for its content and its incidental biographical interest. Bob Altemeyer (1940-2024) wrote The Authoritarians in 2006 in a mood of doom-laden despondency about the direction America had taken under the Republican presi-dency of George W Bush. He finished with an extended exposition of Fascism, the Milgram experiments on authoritarian submission and the compliance of those mul-titudes that supported the Holocaust: ‘The biggest problem we have now, in my view, is authoritarianism. It has placed America at one of those historic cross-roads that will profoundly affect the rest of its history, and the future of our planet’. This was to have been Altemyer’s last book. In a subsequent edition in 2018 he adds, ‘I show more obviously had no idea in 2006 how much worse things would be now’. He returned to the fray in 2020, as co-author of Authoritarian Nightmare, an attack on Donald Trump and his presidential candidacy. His companion in arms was his long-time associate, John W Dean (1938-2024) whistleblower nemesis of the Nixon presi-dency.
The Authoritarians is informative, engaging and very readable. Altemeyer’s ac-count of his extensive research on authoritarianism over the decades is conven-iently split for readers between his text and readily accessible and extensive notes. For an Australian reader the book is a salutary warning. We can only hope that it is not a forecast of disaster.
I do have doubts about Altemeyer’s central concept of ‘authoritarianism’. It is es-sentially unexamined. Early in the book he says that ‘Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves’ (10) Uncertainty over what it is that leaders and followers share in common persists throughout. The distinctive nature of ‘Right Wing’ authoritarianism is another factor that obcures understanding of the concept. On reflection it seemed to me that the essential characteristics of those Right-Wing Authoritarians in Altemeyer’s exposi-tion was their lack of rational capacity, their disorganized inconsistency of thought and their wilful ignorance. In short, their stupidity. (We are not surprised when we read that 40% or so of Americans believe in Edenic Creation). As a concept, au-thoritarianism seems relatively neutral in its range of applications. Our legal system is a doctrinally authoritative and authoritarian discipline practiced, for the most part, by highly educated and well-informed professionals. Its nature is inherently con-servative and dogmatic. Changes require complex and usually expensive proce-dures involving the exercise of authoritarian power by specially qualified individu-als. It is no paradox that we look to this conservative, authoritarian structure to pro-tect us against Right Wing Authoritarians. It is a cause for outrage that Donald Trump is currently engaged in subverting the conservative and authoritarian struc-tures of the law. As for example, in his assaults on the separation of powers and the convention that courts may determine whether his exercise of executive power or disregard of legislation is valid. The basic principles that he violates, like those of fundamentalist Christianity, are authoritarian. They are authoritative only because a sufficient number of ordinary citizens believe them to be true. Which brings me back to my starting point. What’s objectionable about Right Wing Authoritarians is their stupidity, not their recourse to authoritarian structures of thought. show less

This book is that wonderful combination of an academic who really knows his stuff and is also able to write about it in a way that will appeal to the non-expert reader. In this case, the academic is a psychologist who has studied the traits of people who have an unhealthy respect for authority: the ones who would sign up to a posse to drum gays out of town if their sheriff said it was a good idea, for example. Combine that type of person with an individual who is motivated by power and is willing to adopt the same views for political gain and you've got a recipe for the demise of democracy.

It makes for scary reading, particularly in the light of the current political situation in Canada, where we seem to be zombie-walking into a similar show more sort of situation in regard to care of the natural environment and a respect for our past. And it's being driven by these sort of people. show less

Was highly informative, and offers a compelling framework for understanding and predicting the things that his authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders will do

BUT also displayed a "West Wing" idealism about the purity and necessity of the GOP, causing him to fail to connect the underlying first principles of American Conservatism with the ends he finds so repugnant.
His insistence that Barry Goldwater is a paragon of conservative political thought, while neglecting to mention the ways in which he led the party in its obviously racist anti desegregation campaign which cemented racism in the Republican party, showcases his naive belief that the GOP used to be principled in some golden age that they should aspire to return to

This is an interesting little study about a personality type, and its possible political implications.

Altemeyer defines a "Right-Wing Authoritarian" (RWA) personality, which is dimly related to the broad "True Believer" type found in Erich Fromm. An RWA is submissive to authority, willing to commit violence in the name of that authority, and applies strict adherence to tradition. Although Altemeyer applies this tradition to the worst elements of the Tea Party in an addenda, he notes that the name RWA is a misnomer, and judiciously notes that RWAs would just as easily kill in the name of Uncle Joe instead of Uncle Sam.

Naturally all this sounds terrifying.

The big problem, I've noted, is that all this is still self-reported behavior. You show more may make yourself sound like a bootlicking fascist on paper, but blanch at it otherwise. One thinks of internet trolls who gleefully egg on suicides on internet forums, yet cry about what they've done when confronted about it. Self-presentation is not always correlated with behavior.

Of course, actually attempting to measure prevalence of this behavior empirically tends to be a bit dangerous. Case in point: The Milgram experiments or the Stanford prison study. So I'll draw the line there. The tendency for authoritarianism is there, but I'd rather not find out by how much. show less

Encouraged by Conservatives Without Conscience, I downloaded and read this pithy, engaging and enlightening PDF about Social Dominant would-be leaders and their ready Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) ready followers. Altermeyer lays out decades of research and though on the ultra-conservatives among us, their resistance to change, and their frightening ability to act blindly in unison for the right demagogue.

I got 39 on this first test and similar on some later ones. The complicated scoring and the fact that Altemeyer tells half his ideas through footnotes made reading this PDF on a Kindle difficult.

Summary of Altemeyer's research on right-wing authoritarianism, with application to current events. (A more academic version, omitting some recent results, is his 1996 The Authoritarian Specter.)

For Altemeyer, "right-wing authoritarianism" is a particular personality construct, characterized by "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". He measures it by means of a particular personality test, which is a remote (a very remote, much-improved) descendant of one used by Adorno et al. in their clasic, flawed book on The Authoritarian Personality. High RWA scorers profess attitudes, and make show more statements, which I can only call frighteningly twisted and bigoted; taken at their word, they really would find tyranny only too congenial, provided that boot wasn't grinding into their faces. (Unsurprisingly, in the late Soviet period, Russians with high RWA scores were deeply committed to the Party.) Perhaps just as importantly, they really are worse than other people at think straight about the things which touch on their values. (See especially Chapter 3 for the experimental evidence on that point.) Altogether, the fact that a non-trivial fraction of the North American population is willing to say, in so many words, that it'd be happy to collaborate in persecution and oppression is one of the most unsettling things I've read in a long time. The most comforting finding is that right-wing authoritarianism does change over time, and higher education, in particular, lowers it significantly, substantially and durably; not so much because of propaganda by teachers, but because it exposes people to different ways of thinking and acting, and visible (sometimes, palpable) evidence that those are not all bad.

Which said, I confess to slightly mixed feelings about the research. It is, unquestionably, fascinating and disturbing to see what people are willing to put down on personality tests, and scores on Altemeyer's RWA score are indeed quite powerful predictors, as such things go, of other sorts of reported attitudes and values, etc. As personality tests go, it's pretty good. But these are all self-reports, i.e., self-presentations, and there is much less evidence (though not none) that knowing somebody's RWA score will help you predict their behavior (in non-test situations). The best of those, to my mind, are the (old! pre-institutional-review-board! hardly worth censuring!) results that high RWA-scorers show more obedience to authority in Milgram-style experiments. I would feel much more confident that Altemeyer's RWA scale measures something about how people act (when they are not presenting themselves to social psychologists) if there were more results like these. (I cannot think of any way of gathering such evidence, however, especially not in these days.) I shouldn't make it sound like Altemeyer ignores or downplays this --- he does issue all the appropriate caveats about the "fundamental attribution error", etc. — On the other hand, I have to say that anyone who finds right-wing authoritarianism a desirable self-presentation is already pretty twisted.

An important role is played in Altemeyer's larger argument by the interaction between people who score high on right-wing authoritarianism (and so want to tend to follow the Powers That Be) and those who score high on a measure of "social dominance orientation". The stuff you have to agree to (or disagree with) to get a high SDO score is even creepier than what's on the RWA test; you have to be willing to present yourself, even if only on a psych test, as a ruthless power-hungry bastard. (The fact that I got a higher SDO score than RWA score will not surprise those who have informed me that my conscience is a vestigial organ at best.) But the evidence that this predicts non-test behavior is if anything weaker than for the RWA scale.

(To descend into quibbles about his asides and footnotes: (1) Like many psychologists, Altemeyer is naive in believing that correlations between twins indicate a strong genetic component to mental traits. (2) He should have cut the long footnote about Lakoff's speculations.) show less

Bob Altemeyer, an US-American psychology professor at the University of Manitoba, Canada, has written this important book analyzing the recent descent of the US Republican Party into a totalitarian cult. Altemeyer has developed personality tests measuring submission to authority, authoritarian aggression and conventionalism. People scoring high on all three elements he calls right-wing authoritarians (RWAs). Given their nasty personality cocktail, high RWA teams unsurprisingly tend to score low in global cooperation simulations (nuking the planet and starving the poor). High RWAs dominating the Republican party have a profound effect on current US politics, but I did not find in the book how prevalent high RWAs are in the total US show more population. Altemeyer only says that the majority of Americans are not high RWAs and that Christian fundamentalists are mostly high RWAs. I infer that the 25 % die hard-Bush followers are high-RWAs but this is not covered.

Two elements contribute to becoming and being RWAs (chapter 2): a high level of fear (especially of others) and a high level of self-righteousness ("the chosen ones"). High RWAs show a lot of decision-making pathologies (illogical thinking, compartmentalized minds, double standards, hypocrisy, low self-awareness, profound ethnocentrism, dogmatism) although the causality is unclear but certainly helpful in keeping RWAs in the RWA group (chapter 3). Altemeyer next shows in chapter 4 that most religious fundamentalists are high RWAs (and vice versa). Again, not particularly controversial as the elements of fear in religion ("eternal damnation") and self-righteousness ("You go to hell") are well known.

Having thus identified a large group of pliant followers, Altemeyer examines their leaders in chapter 5 which are quite different from their followers as these "social dominators" have an intensive desire for power, low empathy and manipulative These social dominators realize that the high RWAs are unquestioning, willing followers and easy to herd. Among the social dominators, Altemeyer identifies a particularly toxic subgroup, the Double Highs: Social dominators who are also high RWAs who combine the negatives of both groups. In chapter 6, Altemeyer reports that US Republicans and Canadian Conservatives show high RWA values. Chapter 7 presents the shocking but valuable findings of the Milgram experiments and the WWII tale of Police Battalion 101, the cruelty of ordinary men. Curiously, he does not touch Hannah Arendt's banality of evil and Canetti's Masse und Macht. He ends his book by urging to befriend high RWAs to open their eyes as traditional discussion is a fruitless tactics (if discussion ever changed a single mind). Unfortunately, it is quite well known that changing personality in adults is next to impossible (see the self-righteous Old Nazis in Austria and Germany still spouting their venom), so this approach will hardly work.

Altemeyer specifically developed his scales for the US. Thus, fundamentalist Christianity functions as an attractor to ordinary people due to the dearth of other social institutions in the US. The scale would probably also have worked in the Austrian Ständestaat but I don't think that religiosity was such an important part of Weimar Germany's petty bourgeois, the Nazi mainstay. Neutralizing/Removing the Christianity-specific elements would make the tool more valuable (and probably less offensive to believers).

The dirty secret of democracy is that a lot of "we, the people" are ordinary men (and women) who, given the possibility, are all too willing to go after minorities. The transformation of the demos into a mob is a common topic. The modern state has developed a set of legal rights and protection mechanisms. Problems arise if people come to power misuse these mechanisms as is currently the case in the US. While it would be nice if ignorance and conventionality could be cured at the individual level, chances are very low. Instead it might be helpful to look at the organizational level.

The high RWAs in the US have hijacked the political system by repeatedly leveraging their power. Although they are a minority within the US and within their party, their compact voting bloc hands them enormous influence. Similar vote catching used to be practiced by unions in leftist parties. Just as Maggie Thatcher broke the power of the British Trade Union Congress, the US has to enforce the separation of church and state (eg any political position taken by church representatives should trigger taxation) to lessen the influence of the Christian fundamentalists.

Altemeyer has written an important, funny and readable primer that still does not get all the attention it deserves. Highly recommended to everyone interested in current affairs and the puzzle of the Bush administration. show less