The Authoritarians
Page 21
With corruption in Congress adding to their revulsion, independent and moderate voters gullied the Republican Party in the 2006 midterm election. How did the GOP fall so far so fast?
Power, the Holy Grail of social dominators, remains an almost uncontrollable two-headed monster. It can be used to destroy the holder’s most hated enemies, such as Saddam. But it often destroys the dominator in the process. Lord Acton put it succinctly with his famous statement that “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
When your life is a long power trip, it’s hard to get enough because it’s hard to get it all. And when a dominator does get power, we can’t be surprised if it is badly used. Social dominators do not use a moral compass to plot their plots—which is particularly ironic because in the case of Double Highs such as George W. Bush they seem to be so religious. But as we have seen, hypocrisy is practically their middle name. And the more power they have, the more disastrously they can hurt their country, their party, and themselves. It’s remarkable how often they do precisely tha t.[19]
Notes
1 See Pratto, F., J. Sidanius, L. M. Stallworth, and B.F. Malle, 1994. “Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 741-763.
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2 See Altemeyer, B., 1998. “The Other ‘Authoritarian Personality,’” In M. Zanna (Ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 30, San Diego: Academic Press.
As far as demographics go, social dominators tend to be males—and I’d be very surprised if you’re surprised by that. They do not have more education than is average for my samples, nor do they have higher incomes. (They most certainly would like to have lots more dough, but dreams do not always come true.)
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3 Usually in the .60s.
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4 Were you as astonished as I was by how immediately the Republican leadership and its ardent supporters fell upon one another after the mid-term election in 2006? From everybody blaming the Congressional leaders about corruption, to the Congressional leaders blaming the Neocons for Iraq, to the Neocons blaming Donald Rumsfeld for his management of the war, to James Dobson blaming the G.O.P. for abandoning “values voters,” to Newt Gingrich blaming Karl Rove for the election strategy, to Karl Rove blaming the candidates for not doing what he wanted them to do, to Rush Limbaugh’s saying he was glad about the outcome because “I no longer am going to carry the can for people who I think don’t deserve having their water carried”—it was hard to find much group cohesiveness after that campaign. Indeed, as the Italian Fascist Galeazzo Ciano wrote in his diary in September, 1942 (which JFK quoted after the Bay of Pigs debacle) “Victory has a hundred fathers; defeat is an orphan.”
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5 Around .60.
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6 And lying often pays. One established propaganda technique is called the Big Lie, in which one says something outrageous, completely false, the complete opposite of what is true. Take Holocaust Denial. The Holocaust is one of the best documented and best known events of the twentieth century. Yet I found that today’s university students showed virtually no resistance to a pamphlet written by a S.S. officer who served at Auschwitz which denied it was a death camp. Their belief in the Holocaust tumbled like bowling pins before the flimsiest of arguments. Most surprisingly to me, low RWAs were just as likely to be affected as highs. See Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1996, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, chapter 10.
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7 See Authoritarian Dynamics and Unethical Decision Making: High Social Dominance Orientation Leaders and High Right-Wing Authoritarianism Followers. Son Hing, Leanne S.; Bobocel, D. Ramona; Zanna, Mark P.; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 92(1), Jan 2007, pp. 67-81.
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8 See Altemeyer, B., 2004. “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities,” Journal of Social Psychology, 144 , 421-447.
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9 George W. Bush gave his version of this famous statement at a Gridiron Club Dinner held in March 2001 when he quipped, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.” This annual dinner features jokes and political satire, so the president probably did not mean to be taken seriously. The trouble is, it’s pretty hard to find evidence that he doesn’t truly believe it.
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10 I’m not saying, incidentally, that everyone who becomes important in society is a social dominator. People without a dominating bone in their bodies can become leaders of movements for greater equality, for example. One thinks of Gandhi. Conversely, a social dominator can become the leader of a movement for equality and freedom, but after succeeding become just the next dictator in a string of dictators. One thinks of many. I see no reason why social dominators would not head for left- wing movements, if they see those as the faster route to power.
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11 Carter, J., 2005. Our endangered values: America’s moral crisis. New York: Simon Schuster, p. 34.
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12 See Altemeyer, B., 2003. “What Happens When Authoritarians Inherit the Earth? A Simulation. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 3, 161-169.
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13 Oceana was a reworked “Pacific Rim” from the 1994 simulation. The Global Change Game is updated, and the world re-divided, as some economies improve, environmental problems are dealt with or grow worse, and so on.
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14 I don’t think there’s any chance the facilitators consciously or unconsciously affected the different outcomes of these two high RWA runs of the Global Change Game. None of them had ever heard of social dominance orientation, and they would have only been confused by the similarity of dress, presence of religious symbols, and so on over the two nights. Furthermore, if the facilitators had been trying to tweak things, they probably would have found a way to let the simulation run five more minutes on the second night when regions were arming their ballistic missles.
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15 Remember the 1987 NATO-Warsaw Pact experiment from chapter 1, in which five-man teams of high RWAs reacted aggressively to ambiguous moves by the Warsaw Pact and precipitated a crisis? Gerry Sande and I followed up that experiment with a version in which NATO had developed a perfect “Star Wars” defense against nuclear attack. When low RWA teams thought they were unbeatable, they made virtually no threats against the Warsaw Pact—just as they had made no threats in the first run of the experiment. But when the high RWA teams knew they had the upper hand, they did one of two things. Some of the high RWA NATO teams became quite non-belligerent. But just as many became enormously aggressive. Believing that another group of students in the next room was playing the Warsaw Pact part of the simulation, they felt, as one of their members said, “We wanted them to realize we could wipe them out at any time.” A member of another very aggressive high RWA group put it more graphically: “We had all the power, and we wanted them to kiss our asses.”
We were puzzled at the time, because we thought having ultimate power would relax the high RWAs and make them less aggressive—which it did in half the groups, but not the other half. What caused the difference among the high RWA groups? I’ll bet you my chance of getting to heaven—which may be slim anyway after chapter 4-that the aggressive groups had some Double Highs in them. But this was some years before the Social Dominance Orientation scale was developed, so there’s no way of knowing.
We also ran a condition in which the enemy, the Warsaw Pact, had perfected a defense against nuclear attack while NATO had none. Incredibly, this produced an increase in aggressiveness among the low RWA teams, and an even bigger, record-breaking level of hostility in the high RWA groups. This produced counter-aggressiveness in their superior enemy. Why were the NATO players
such idiots? Usually, they said, they wanted to send a signal that they would not be intimidated just because they were at a (hopeless) disadvantage. But they did not wait to see if their enemy would become threatening; they simply made him so in a situation in which they could not possibly win.
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16 Dean, J. Conservatives without conscience, 2006, New York: Viking, pp. 123-135.
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17 There’s always a problem in fitting an individual to a statistical conglomerate. No one matches the overall model perfectly. It’s like the old joke that the average American family had two-and-a-half kids. As well, everyone is so unique that you will surely find parts of a trait missing in an individual who seems, in general, to possess the trait. Thus people who know Tom DeLay well might observe that he is not at all (let’s say) prejudiced against racial minorities or hostile toward women. Be that as it may, so much of his behavior seems to match up with the distinctive attributes of Double Highs that I feel comfortable citing him as an example.
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18 But it doesn’t always work out as planned. You have to be careful when shifting your supporters around, because if you get too greedy you might spread yourself too thin, and end up with a net loss should enough of the electorate unexpectedly turn against you. Thus in Pennsylvania the Republicans lost several Congressional seats because they moved too many voters from supposedly safe GOP districts to try to defeat Democrats in other districts.
But the incredible 2003 gerrymandering of Texas, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in all but one particular, served the Republicans well. In an election that saw so many GOP incumbents around the nation go down to defeat, the Republican delegation in Texas lost only two of its seats in spite of everything. One of the losses occurred in the 22nd District, where Tom DeLay’s late resignation forced the Republicans to have to use a write-in campaign for their nominee.
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19 I am not a Democrat, not even in Will Roger’s sense when he famously said, “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” I understand the necessity of having political parties in a democracy, but I also believe that when the interests of any party conflict with the interests of the country, the party will almost always butter its own bread first. So I basically don’t trust political parties, and consider myself an Independent.
If the Democratic Party had been swarmed by authoritarians the way the Republican Party has been, I would be talking about it now rather than the GOP. I want the Republican Party to be recaptured by its Grand Old Principles and go back to presenting the conservative options to the American people, not imposing the authoritarian one.
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Chapter 6.
Authoritarianism and Politics
Authoritarianism among American State Legislators
First of all, these studies all happened before the Social Dominance Orientation scale was available. So—because time-travel is strictly forbidden in social science research—I have no answers from legislators to that scale per se. But I do have some data almost as good, and they will tell us a lot when the time comes.
Next, you might rightly be wondering how state lawmakers had time to fill out surveys mailed to them by an obscure Canadian researcher, when they were supposed to be busy with The Public Business. Lawmakers are busy, and that’s probably one of the reasons I only heard from 1,233 (or 26%) of the 4,741 U.S. legislators I sent surveys to. Such a low return rate immediately raises the question of a self-selection sample bias, right? What would the results have been if everybody had responded, instead of only one-quarter?
Luckily you can estimate this with one of the crafty stratagems in the survey-givers’ bag of tricks. Let’s say, just to pick a wild possibility, you’re interested in whether Republican lawmakers score higher on the RWA scale than Democrats do. You look at the states you barely heard from, and then at the states where you got a much better return. Obviously you’re inclined to trust the latter results more. Making this comparison, you find that the higher the return rate was, the more Republicans tended to differ from Democrats. The smaller samples tended to cloud this relationship—which is a major problem with small samples. But it also means that if I had heard back from everyone, the difference would likely be substantially bigger than what actually turned up.
We’ll focus on the results obtained, not what I imagine they might be. But if you are admirably wondering about the response rate—which few readers do, and which few survey-takers even report— a self-selection sample bias certainly compromises my lawmaker studies. The numbers I obtained are “low balls.” Right-wing authoritarianism probably packs a bigger punch in American state legislatures than my data will show. We should keep that in mind. If I had heard from everyone, the bad things would likely be even worse.
Well, what differences did turn up? I sent the thirty-item RWA scale I was using in my research then to fifty legislative chambers, and in every single one except the Louisiana House, the Republicans scored higher overall than the Democrats.
Although the “right-wing” in right-wing authoritarianism refers to a psychological trait that endorses submission to established authority (see chapter 1), not a political ideology, the RWA scale finds different levels of this trait in politicians from the two parties.[3] The Republicans scored almost 40 points higher than the Democrats on the average, on the 30-item scale.
Figure 5.1 shows the average score of each caucus in each of the chambers I approached (viz., eleven senates and thirty-nine lower chambers). (The numbers on the scale have been reset in terms of the twenty-item measure we have been talking about since chapter 1.) Several things may leap out at you. First, the Democrats landed all over the place. The Republicans on the other hand crowd together so much that the person who drew this figure almost went crazy trying to jam all the names into such a small space. Second, as you would expect from the last paragraph, very few Democratic caucuses posted RWA scale scores as high as most of the Republicans did. The Democrats may be all over the place, but they’re mainly all over a less authoritarian place than Republican Country. Third, with the inevitable exceptions, southern legislators posted the highest scores.
Other Issues
I usually included some other measure besides the RWA scale on the surveys I mailed to the state capitols, and accordingly I found that high RWA lawmakers tended to:
-not think wife abuse was a serious issue (a weak relationship; see note 12 of Chapter 1)
- have conservative economic philosophies (a moderate relationship)
- score highly on items assessing racial and ethnic prejudice (a moderate relationship)
- reject a law raising the income tax rate for the rich and lowering it for the poor (a moderate relationship)
- favor capital punishment (a sturdy relationship)
- oppose gun control laws (a sturdy relationship)
- favor a law prohibiting television broadcasts from a foreign country’s capital (such as Baghdad during the Gulf War) when the United States is at war with that country (a sturdy relationship)
- favor a law requiring Christian religious instruction in public schools (a sturdy relationship)
- score high in dogmatism (a sturdy relationship)
- oppose a law requiring affirmative action in state hiring that would give priority to qualified minorities until they “caught up” (a sturdy relationship)
- favor a law giving police much less restrictive wiretap, search-and-seizure, and interrogation rules (a strong relationship)
- favor a law outlawing the Communist Party “and other radical political organizations” (a strong relationship)
- oppose the Equal Rights Amendment (a strong relationship)
- favor placing greater restrictions on abortion than “Roe versus Wade” (a strong relationship)
- favor a law restricting anti-war protests to certain sizes, times, and places— generally away from public view—w
hile American troops are fighting overseas (a very strong relationship)
- have a “We were the good guys, the Soviets were the bad guys” view of the Cold War (a very strong relationship)
- oppose a law extending equal rights to homosexuals in housing and employment (a very strong relationship)
Figure 5.1
Average RWA Scale Scores of American State Legislators, by State and Party
Notes: Scores have been re-scaled from a 30-item basis to a 20-item basis. The midpoint of the scale is 100. The sample includes 549 Republican legislators and 682 Democrats. Scores from upper chambers are presented in larger print (e.g. CONNECTICUT versus Connecticut). No Connecticut Democratic senator, and only one Mississippi Republican and one Wyoming Democratic senator answered, and hence no scores are given for those caucuses.
If you have read the preceding chapters, or been paying attention to what’s going on in your state capitol lately, none of this will astound you. What surprised me was how strong the relationships usually were. The RWA scale can predict what many lawmakers want to do about a wide variety of important issues.
Because they harbor so many authoritarian sentiments, Republican legislators naturally differed from Democrats overall on the matters above. But the differences were sharpest when you compared high RWA versus low RWA lawmakers, whatever their party affiliation. Many high RWA Democrats, and some low RWA Republicans appeared in these samples. The problem, as I see it, does not arise from Republicans per se but from the right-wing authoritarians on both sides of the aisle. But the data make it quite clear that when you see a bunch of Republican lawmakers huddling, you’re probably looking at mainly high RWAs, whereas when (non-southern) Democrats cluster, they’re probably a pretty unauthoritarian lot overall.