Authoritarians

I always get a kick out of the uber-pedantic tone of robertdfeinman's comments on various econ-related forums. He is one of those I describe as practicing the ideology-free ideology: he, among all of us, has somehow managed to purge himself of all bias and has become the unbounded rationalist. After getting some attention from similarly unbiased Mike Huben for an article which dissects Masonomists such as Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, and Bryan Caplan by pointing out that they must be wrong because - ready? - their institution received funding from Charles Koch [1], Mr. feinman has discovered a new whipping boy: Bob Altemeyer.

Bob Altemeyer is a professor of psychology and author of a book, freely available over the internet, called The Authoritarians. It's definitely worth a read. This is a mostly even-handed book about people who have authoritarian tendencies. It includes a quiz which becomes the basis for a wide variety of experiments to test what authoritarians will do. He calls the quiz score the "Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA)" scale.

Curiously, by "right-wing", he doesn't mean "Republican". At times, I get the impression that he may actually be a Republican who happens to resent the takeover of that party by religious conservatives (except that he's Canadian and would therefore be something altogether different, eh?). And he cautions readers to avoid conflating "conservative" with "Right wing authoritarian"; he says

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:

1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society;
2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
3) a high level of conventionalism.

Because the submission occurs to traditional authority, I call these followers right-wing authoritarians. I'm using the word "right" in one of its earliest meanings, for in Old English "riht" (pronounced "writ") as an adjective meant lawful, proper, correct, doing what the authorities said.

In North America people who submit to the established authorities to so you can call extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives, them "right-wingers" both in my new-fangled psychological sense and in the usual political sense as well. But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he's someone who readily submits to the established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It's an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. [emphasis added]

Indeed, in his 1996 book, The Authoritarian Specter, he includes a chapter on Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA). It is perhaps best to understand the RWA in the context of what he has to say there:

When I began talking about "right-wing" authoritarianism (RWA, p.152), I was not using the phrase in an economic or political sense. Instead I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived authorities in one's life. In many instances, the established authorities tend to be people who hold right-wing economic and political views -- but not always. In Communist countries, the established authorities in society held a decidedly left-wing economic philosophy, but after so many tears in power, the party leaders had become the Establishment. So I predicted persons who scored highly on the RWA scale in the USSR would support the Communist leadership and oppose democratic reforms (EOF, p. 264), and by thunder they did.

Revolutions such as those in eastern Europe call off all bets for a while. But the situation in stable countries seems more predictable. Psychological right-wingers (by definition) support the perceived established authorities in society, and psychological left-wingers [emphasis in the original] (as I am using the term) oppose them.

I am not assuming anything about what the "opposers" stand for. Some may simply want society reformed so that disadvantaged groups can share more of the power. The African National Congress and civil rights groups in the united States come to mind. But others may want to seize all the power themselves, from either the far reaches of the political left (Communists) or the political right (Nazis, the Posse Comitatus, Lyndon LaRouche's National Caucus). Such extremist groups, while submissive to their own perceived "legitimate authorities," would be psychological [emphasis in the original] left-wingers on a societal level during their opposition to the Establishment. But should their movement attain power in the flash of a revolution, their strong submission to the new societal authority would make them psychological right-wing authoritarians on that level, as they became in Germany and Russia.

In other words, when robertdfeinman conflates "conservative" with "RWA", he dramatically misinterprets Altemeyer's work. An RWA is someone who supports The Establishment. Given that robertdfeinman and his allies enthusiastically support The Establishment, and that even Dani Rodrik says, "The real revolutionaries are the libertarians," I think it quite funny that robertdfeinman uses Altemeyer's work to accuse libertarians of being RWAs [2]. One wonders why the Libertarian Party would have contracted with Altemeyer to measure authoritarianism in the US if they were in favor of it. But those are questions that fall outside the ideologically-free ideologue's scope when "considering all sides".

That said, I don't understand why Altemeyer keeps coming back to statements that imply RWAs tend to be found in the Republican Party. No doubt, he can support this by his own empirical evidence. However, in my opinion the test he uses is based upon highly charged words that naturally select right-wing (political sense) biases toward those aspects of "traditional authority" which were traditional in, say, the 1950s or earlier. Were he to test RWA with biases toward the authority that has become traditional since then, I have little doubt that he would discover high correlation with RWA in the Democratic Party.

What do I mean?

• Why does statement 4 in his test state "Gays and Lesbians are just as healthy and moral as anyone else?" Politically right wing people are going to perceive the subject of the statement as both anti-establishment and politically let-wing. What would happen if you were to substitute, for example, "Homeschoolers". Homeschoolers are perceived by the left-wing as both anti-establishment and right-wing. See how Huben reacts on David Friedman's Ideas blog.
  
• Why does statement 5 use the phrase "rabble-rousers" in "It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubt in people's minds"? That's a standard reference to anti-establishment left-wingers. What would happen if you subsituted "libertarians"?
• Statement 6 puts up atheists against regular church-goers. What if you put up anarchists against regular voters? In each case, you have anti-establishment vs. establishment, but one appeals to politically right-wing, the other to politically left-wing.
  
• Statement 8 asks you to pass judgement on nudist camps. What if it were Seasteading? Think that such utopian adventures would be ignored by the left? You would be wrong.
  
• In 10, why is it "perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs" instead of "runaway greed eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs"? Surely I jest.
  
• In statement 12, the use of "old-fashioned values" is slanted at political right-wingers. What if "democratic values" had been substituted?
• In 13, the changes included abortion rights, animal rights, and abolishing school prayer. What if they had been natural gas deregulation, vouchers, and abolishing tariffs? In both cases, you are asking about their reaction to change of the status quo, but in one set you include changes favored by the political left, and in the other, changes favored by the political right.
• In 14, what if you ask whether the strong leader should crush greed and corruption instead of evil? Evil is a moral judgment favored by the political right, greed and corruption are moral judgments favored by the left.
• In 15, instead of "Some of the best people in our country are those who are challenging our government, criticizing religion, and ignoring the 'normal way things are supposed to be done,'" suppose it was "Some of the best people in our country are those who are challenging our government, criticizing corporations, and ignoring 'business as usual'"?
• In 16, instead of "God's laws about abortion, pornography and marriage must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished," what if it were, "Democratic laws about trusts, outsourcing and pollution must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished."?
• In 18, instead of "A 'woman's place' should be wherever she wants to be. The days when women are submissive to their husbands and social conventions belong strictly in the past," how about "A businessman's social responsibility should be whatever he wants it to be. The days when people are submissive to the government and social conventions belong strictly in the past"?

And so on. In other words, Altemeyer's framing appears to combine both psychologically and politically right-wing frames. I suggest combining psychologically right-wing and politically left-wing frames; I predict that you would find that the Progressives, Democrats, and (surprisingly or not) the non-ideological ideologues (collectively, progdemoniis) will get a high RWA score.

In fact, it is surprising that Altemeyer hasn't seen this himself. In the quoted section above, he notes that politically left-wing groups would shift (psychologically) from being left-wing to right-wing upon winning a revolution. Given that the progdemoniis were the revolutionaries 100 years ago, and have been the Establishment since then, and given the rabid defense that some of them make (spend an hour or so perusing the posts and comments on Daily Kos, Making Light, Crooked Timber, Mark Thoma blogs to see whether "rabid" is an unfair characterization) for the state, it seems remarkable that he didn't note this already. While Republicans are busy fighting for God and Country, Democrats argue for the existing State and Social Control. In each case, they are really defending their religion and traditions, respectively, where religion is "that which is taken on faith (the facts be damned)" and traditions are "that which we do because we always have".

Incidentally, it should be noted that my own RWA score was 40. It would have been lower, but I tended to be less radical whenever I thought the question was ambiguous. For example, if the question was "Atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions are no doubt every bit as good and virtuous as those who attend church regularly," I see where the anti-authoritarian answer would have been strong agreement, but only if you also agree that regular church attenders are good and virtuous, or that atheist rebels like V. I. Lenin are in any way good or virtuous. I believe a person's claimed religious views may be completely independent of their goodness and virtuosity, but I didn't see a way to map that into the question as posed.


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[1] ad hominem:

The person presenting an argument is attacked instead of the argument itself. This takes many forms. For example, the person's character, nationality or religion may be attacked. Alternatively, it may be pointed out that a person stands to gain from a favourable outcome. Or, finally, a person may be attacked by association, or by the company he keeps.

For a longer list of variants on the theme, there is Dean and Marshall VanDruff's Conversational Terrorism: How NOT to talk. For a rule of thumb, try not to think of your opponent as DIE: Dumb, Insane, or Evil. And of course you want to avoid the Devil Shift.

[2] Judge for yourself how easily rdf's statements fall into the DIE regime of ad hominem argument. It might help to realize that Evil is an extreme description of corruption, Insane is the opposite of psychological health, and Dumb is an extreme form of ignorance:

First, are those who owe their livelihood to these corporate backers. ...

Second, are the unaffiliated libertarian or "free market" ideologues. These are the "faith based" people implied above. Like all ideological followers their need for a coherent picture of the world governs their belief system. It's a psychological thing.

Then there are the liberals who think that since their environment is a meritocracy and a bit anarchic that this must be true of their opponents as well. They tend to doubt that that can actually be a quasi-secret cabal behind the entire movement. It seems so un-American and unlikely.