A recession might be just around the corner, but for experts in the field of “authoritarian studies,” these are boom times. Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has spent much of his career studying the appeal of authoritarian figures: politicians who preach xenophobia, beat up on the press and place themselves above the law while extolling “law and order” for everyone else. He is one of many scholars who believe that deep-seated psychological traits help explain voters’ attraction to such leaders. “These days,” he told me, “audiences are more receptive to the idea” than they used to be.
Could it be that millions of President Trump’s supporters are simply wired to see the world very differently from his critics? “In 2018, the sense of fear and panic — the disorientation about how people who are not like us could see the world the way they do — it’s so elemental,” Mr. Weiler said. “People understand how deeply divided we are, and they are looking for explanations that match the depth of that division.”
Recent social scientific research has paid special attention to the supposedly authoritarian personalities of many Republican voters. “Trump’s electoral strength — and his staying power — have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations,” wrote Matthew MacWilliams, a political consultant who surveyed voters during the 2016 election. But what, exactly, is an “authoritarian” personality? How do you measure it?
Long before the rise of Mr. Trump — for more than half a century — social scientists have tried to figure out why some seemingly mild-mannered people gravitate toward a strongman. They have created methods to dig below economics, religion and other social factors in the hope of uncovering a set of more essential political instincts. Sometimes these efforts veer into dangerous reductionism, but nonetheless they’re probably on to something.
In the years after World War II, the philosopher (and German refugee) Theodor Adorno collaborated with social scientists at the University of California at Berkeley to investigate why ordinary people supported fascist, anti-Semitic ideology during the war. They used a questionnaire called the F-scale (F is for fascism) and follow-up interviews to analyze the “total personality” of the “potentially antidemocratic individual.”
The resulting 1,000-page tome, “The Authoritarian Personality,” published in 1950, found that subjects who scored high on the F-scale disdained the weak and marginalized. They fixated on sexual deviance, embraced conspiracy theories and aligned themselves with domineering leaders “to serve powerful interests and so participate in their power,” the authors wrote. Some of their conclusions hold up well — Adorno and his colleagues could easily have been describing Alex Jones’s paranoid Infowars rants or the racist views expressed by many Trump supporters.
Skeptics complained that the F-scale conflated fascism with conservatism. Others noted that the study’s psychoanalytic speculations on the subconscious childhood roots of authoritarianism were impossible to verify (the authors wrote that they “leaned most heavily upon Freud” and made much of the finding that many high-scoring subjects grew up with overbearing fathers). Yet their preoccupation with childhood and “primitive and irrational wishes and fears” have influenced the study of authoritarianism ever since.
How do Trump supporters feel about being dragged onto the therapist’s couch? Allen Strouse is not the archetypal Trump voter whom journalists discover in Rust Belt diners. He is a queer Catholic poet and scholar of medieval literature who teaches at the New School in New York City. He voted for Mr. Trump “as a protest against the Democrats’ failures on economic issues,” but the psychological dimensions of his vote intrigue him. “Having studied Freudian analysis, and being in therapy for 10 years, I couldn’t not reflexively ask myself, ‘How does this decision have to do with my psychology?’” he told me.
He published a half-playful, half-serious essay about his complex relationship with his own father, a union worker in Pennsylvania. “Globalized free trade has shafted American workers and left us looking for a strong male leader, a ‘real man,’” he wrote. “Trump offers exactly what my maladapted unconscious most craves.”
When I called Mr. Strouse, he emphasized that researchers’ psychologizing too often overlooks real suffering. “I grew up in Appalachia, and I know these people intimately,” he said. “I love them. I’ve seen what has happened to them over the last few decades. I’m a working-class person, a former labor organizer, and I feel the Democrats have stabbed them in the back over a number of years. I now live in New York and live a lifestyle that most of my former neighbors wouldn’t approve of, but I think it’s a bummer when people here misunderstand people back home and pathologize them.”
Are these scholars pathologizing or just exploring the nonrational impulses that help explain why some Americans see Mr. Trump as a swindler of working-class people, while others declare him their savior?
Political scientists often dismiss “The Authoritarian Personality” as a relic of its time, but some still speculate about Republican voters’ relationships with their fathers (and Mr. Trump’s own relationship with his). And perhaps the most popular method for studying modern authoritarianism takes its cue from one of the F-scale’s prompts: “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.” Today’s researchers often diagnose latent authoritarians through a set of questions about preferred traits in children: Would you rather your child be independent or have respect for elders? Have curiosity or good manners? Be self-reliant or obedient? Be well behaved or considerate?
“The normal response from people is: ‘I want both. I want them to be curious, and I don’t want them throwing food around in a restaurant,’” said Mr. Weiler (who teaches at the same university I do, although we had never spoken before I began to work on this article). “The reality is surely messier than what we’re capturing in this survey data,” he said. “What makes me comfortable with this is that politics forces us to make choices too.”
These questions seem to offer unmediated access to people’s pre-political temperaments. Yet a glance at the Christian group Focus on the Family’s “biblical principles for spanking” reminds us that your approach to child rearing is not pre-political; it is shorthand for your stance in the culture wars.
Moreover, using the child-rearing questionnaire, African-Americans score as far more authoritarian than whites. This result forced researchers to grant what should have been obvious: Attitudes toward parenting vary across cultures, and for centuries African-Americans have seen the consequences of a social and political hierarchy arrayed against them, so they can hardly be expected to favor it — no matter what they think about child rearing. The child-trait test, then, is a tool to identify white people who are anxious about their decline in status and power.
Mr. Weiler and his co-author, Marc Hetherington, have tried to shift the debate in their new book, “Prius or Pickup?,” by ditching the charged term “authoritarian.” Instead, they divide people into three temperamental camps: fixed (people who are wary of change and “set in their ways”), fluid (those who are more open to new experiences and people) and mixed (those who are ambivalent). “The term ‘authoritarian’ connotes a fringe perspective, and the perspective we’re describing is far from fringe,” Mr. Weiler said. “It’s central to American public opinion, especially on cultural issues like immigration and race.”
Other scholars apply a typology based on the “Big Five” personality traits identified by psychologists in the mid-20th century: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. (It seems that liberals are open but possibly neurotic, while conservatives are more conscientious.)
Then there are the trailblazers who have pushed past the conscious mind to locate the sources of political convictions in our physiology, and even our DNA. Studies contend that people with more sensitive gag reflexes and who blink more when they are startled are more likely to be conservative. In 2008 two pioneers in “genopolitics” at the University of California, San Diego, used twin studies to propose a link between specific genes and voting behavior.
Yet our expression of some traits is historically relative and depends on the bounds of political possibility. If there is a “voting gene” — and it’s almost certainly not that simple — how did it express itself before the age of representative democracy? Has “openness to experience” been equally possible in rural Afghanistan, or medieval Europe, as it is in the modern West?
Historical context matters — it shapes who we are and how we debate politics. “Reason moves slowly,” William English, a political economist at Georgetown, told me. “It’s constituted sociologically, by deep community attachments, things that change over generations.” Still, he said, “it is a deep-seated aspiration of many social scientists — sometimes conscious and sometimes unconscious — to get past wishy-washy culture and belief. Discourses that can’t be scientifically reduced are problematic” for researchers who want to provide “a universal account of behavior.”
The researchers themselves usually qualify their claims. “We ask that you banish ‘determine’ from your vocabulary and replace it with words such as ‘shape,’ ‘influence,’ ‘mold,’ and ‘incline,’ wrote John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith and John A. Alford in their book “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences.”
But in our current environment, where polarization is so unyielding, the apparent clarity of psychological and biological explanations becomes seductive. There is something entrancing and terrifying about any deterministic theory that predicts the role we are destined to play in society and lets you believe that you understand your opponent better than he understands himself.
“All the social sciences are brought to bear to try to explain all the evil that persists in the world, even though the liberal Enlightenment worldview says that we should be able to perfect things,” said Mr. Strouse, the Trump voter. “If everyone had access to the right education and the right therapist, they would make the right decision — we know that’s not going to happen. People have wicked tendencies.” In one of the ironies of history, as the social scientific portrait of humanity grows more psychological and irrational, it comes closer and closer to approximating the old Adam of traditional Christianity: a fallen, depraved creature, unable to see himself clearly except with the aid of a higher power.
The conclusions of political scientists should inspire humility rather than hubris. In the end, they have confirmed what so many observers of our species have long suspected: None of us are particularly free or rational creatures.
Molly Worthen (@MollyWorthen) is the author, most recently, of “Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism,” an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a contributing opinion writer.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Is There Such a Thing as an Authoritarian Voter?
Opinion | Is There Such a Thing as an Authoritarian Voter?
A recession might be just around the corner, but for experts in the field of “authoritarian studies,” these are boom times. Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has spent much of his career studying the appeal of authoritarian figures: politicians who preach xenophobia, beat up on the press and place themselves above the law while extolling “law and order” for everyone else. He is one of many scholars who believe that deep-seated psychological traits help explain voters’ attraction to such leaders. “These days,” he told me, “audiences are more receptive to the idea” than they used to be.
Could it be that millions of President Trump’s supporters are simply wired to see the world very differently from his critics? “In 2018, the sense of fear and panic — the disorientation about how people who are not like us could see the world the way they do — it’s so elemental,” Mr. Weiler said. “People understand how deeply divided we are, and they are looking for explanations that match the depth of that division.”
Recent social scientific research has paid special attention to the supposedly authoritarian personalities of many Republican voters. “Trump’s electoral strength — and his staying power — have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations,” wrote Matthew MacWilliams, a political consultant who surveyed voters during the 2016 election. But what, exactly, is an “authoritarian” personality? How do you measure it?
Long before the rise of Mr. Trump — for more than half a century — social scientists have tried to figure out why some seemingly mild-mannered people gravitate toward a strongman. They have created methods to dig below economics, religion and other social factors in the hope of uncovering a set of more essential political instincts. Sometimes these efforts veer into dangerous reductionism, but nonetheless they’re probably on to something.
In the years after World War II, the philosopher (and German refugee) Theodor Adorno collaborated with social scientists at the University of California at Berkeley to investigate why ordinary people supported fascist, anti-Semitic ideology during the war. They used a questionnaire called the F-scale (F is for fascism) and follow-up interviews to analyze the “total personality” of the “potentially antidemocratic individual.”
The resulting 1,000-page tome, “The Authoritarian Personality,” published in 1950, found that subjects who scored high on the F-scale disdained the weak and marginalized. They fixated on sexual deviance, embraced conspiracy theories and aligned themselves with domineering leaders “to serve powerful interests and so participate in their power,” the authors wrote. Some of their conclusions hold up well — Adorno and his colleagues could easily have been describing Alex Jones’s paranoid Infowars rants or the racist views expressed by many Trump supporters.
Skeptics complained that the F-scale conflated fascism with conservatism. Others noted that the study’s psychoanalytic speculations on the subconscious childhood roots of authoritarianism were impossible to verify (the authors wrote that they “leaned most heavily upon Freud” and made much of the finding that many high-scoring subjects grew up with overbearing fathers). Yet their preoccupation with childhood and “primitive and irrational wishes and fears” have influenced the study of authoritarianism ever since.
How do Trump supporters feel about being dragged onto the therapist’s couch? Allen Strouse is not the archetypal Trump voter whom journalists discover in Rust Belt diners. He is a queer Catholic poet and scholar of medieval literature who teaches at the New School in New York City. He voted for Mr. Trump “as a protest against the Democrats’ failures on economic issues,” but the psychological dimensions of his vote intrigue him. “Having studied Freudian analysis, and being in therapy for 10 years, I couldn’t not reflexively ask myself, ‘How does this decision have to do with my psychology?’” he told me.
He published a half-playful, half-serious essay about his complex relationship with his own father, a union worker in Pennsylvania. “Globalized free trade has shafted American workers and left us looking for a strong male leader, a ‘real man,’” he wrote. “Trump offers exactly what my maladapted unconscious most craves.”
When I called Mr. Strouse, he emphasized that researchers’ psychologizing too often overlooks real suffering. “I grew up in Appalachia, and I know these people intimately,” he said. “I love them. I’ve seen what has happened to them over the last few decades. I’m a working-class person, a former labor organizer, and I feel the Democrats have stabbed them in the back over a number of years. I now live in New York and live a lifestyle that most of my former neighbors wouldn’t approve of, but I think it’s a bummer when people here misunderstand people back home and pathologize them.”
Are these scholars pathologizing or just exploring the nonrational impulses that help explain why some Americans see Mr. Trump as a swindler of working-class people, while others declare him their savior?
Political scientists often dismiss “The Authoritarian Personality” as a relic of its time, but some still speculate about Republican voters’ relationships with their fathers (and Mr. Trump’s own relationship with his). And perhaps the most popular method for studying modern authoritarianism takes its cue from one of the F-scale’s prompts: “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.” Today’s researchers often diagnose latent authoritarians through a set of questions about preferred traits in children: Would you rather your child be independent or have respect for elders? Have curiosity or good manners? Be self-reliant or obedient? Be well behaved or considerate?
“The normal response from people is: ‘I want both. I want them to be curious, and I don’t want them throwing food around in a restaurant,’” said Mr. Weiler (who teaches at the same university I do, although we had never spoken before I began to work on this article). “The reality is surely messier than what we’re capturing in this survey data,” he said. “What makes me comfortable with this is that politics forces us to make choices too.”
These questions seem to offer unmediated access to people’s pre-political temperaments. Yet a glance at the Christian group Focus on the Family’s “biblical principles for spanking” reminds us that your approach to child rearing is not pre-political; it is shorthand for your stance in the culture wars.
Moreover, using the child-rearing questionnaire, African-Americans score as far more authoritarian than whites. This result forced researchers to grant what should have been obvious: Attitudes toward parenting vary across cultures, and for centuries African-Americans have seen the consequences of a social and political hierarchy arrayed against them, so they can hardly be expected to favor it — no matter what they think about child rearing. The child-trait test, then, is a tool to identify white people who are anxious about their decline in status and power.
Mr. Weiler and his co-author, Marc Hetherington, have tried to shift the debate in their new book, “Prius or Pickup?,” by ditching the charged term “authoritarian.” Instead, they divide people into three temperamental camps: fixed (people who are wary of change and “set in their ways”), fluid (those who are more open to new experiences and people) and mixed (those who are ambivalent). “The term ‘authoritarian’ connotes a fringe perspective, and the perspective we’re describing is far from fringe,” Mr. Weiler said. “It’s central to American public opinion, especially on cultural issues like immigration and race.”
Other scholars apply a typology based on the “Big Five” personality traits identified by psychologists in the mid-20th century: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. (It seems that liberals are open but possibly neurotic, while conservatives are more conscientious.)
Then there are the trailblazers who have pushed past the conscious mind to locate the sources of political convictions in our physiology, and even our DNA. Studies contend that people with more sensitive gag reflexes and who blink more when they are startled are more likely to be conservative. In 2008 two pioneers in “genopolitics” at the University of California, San Diego, used twin studies to propose a link between specific genes and voting behavior.
Yet our expression of some traits is historically relative and depends on the bounds of political possibility. If there is a “voting gene” — and it’s almost certainly not that simple — how did it express itself before the age of representative democracy? Has “openness to experience” been equally possible in rural Afghanistan, or medieval Europe, as it is in the modern West?
Historical context matters — it shapes who we are and how we debate politics. “Reason moves slowly,” William English, a political economist at Georgetown, told me. “It’s constituted sociologically, by deep community attachments, things that change over generations.” Still, he said, “it is a deep-seated aspiration of many social scientists — sometimes conscious and sometimes unconscious — to get past wishy-washy culture and belief. Discourses that can’t be scientifically reduced are problematic” for researchers who want to provide “a universal account of behavior.”
The researchers themselves usually qualify their claims. “We ask that you banish ‘determine’ from your vocabulary and replace it with words such as ‘shape,’ ‘influence,’ ‘mold,’ and ‘incline,’ wrote John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith and John A. Alford in their book “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences.”
But in our current environment, where polarization is so unyielding, the apparent clarity of psychological and biological explanations becomes seductive. There is something entrancing and terrifying about any deterministic theory that predicts the role we are destined to play in society and lets you believe that you understand your opponent better than he understands himself.
“All the social sciences are brought to bear to try to explain all the evil that persists in the world, even though the liberal Enlightenment worldview says that we should be able to perfect things,” said Mr. Strouse, the Trump voter. “If everyone had access to the right education and the right therapist, they would make the right decision — we know that’s not going to happen. People have wicked tendencies.” In one of the ironies of history, as the social scientific portrait of humanity grows more psychological and irrational, it comes closer and closer to approximating the old Adam of traditional Christianity: a fallen, depraved creature, unable to see himself clearly except with the aid of a higher power.
The conclusions of political scientists should inspire humility rather than hubris. In the end, they have confirmed what so many observers of our species have long suspected: None of us are particularly free or rational creatures.
Molly Worthen (@MollyWorthen) is the author, most recently, of “Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism,” an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a contributing opinion writer.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article