Almost two years ago I posted on DU an article titled “The Five Pillars of George W. Bush’s Republican Party”. In that post I identified the “five pillars” as: The Economic Royalists; the militarists; the propagandists and destroyer of our First Amendment rights; the crooks; and the gullible – while noting that there is a great deal of overlap in these categories.

Reading Bob Altermeyer’s book, “The Authoritarians”, has given me a deeper appreciation of the psychology of the characters who comprise this movement and the roles they play in upholding its five pillars. I believe that this is well worth thinking about because these people have the potential to perpetrate unimaginable damage on our country and the world. They’ve already achieved a great deal of that potential. We need to understand them better in order to stop them from achieving more of their potential.

In my 2007 post I described the five pillars and the evidence for them. In this post I emphasize how Altemeyer’s research on authoritarians helps to explain the five pillars. Thank you to Larry Ogg for recommending this very important and interesting book to me.


A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF AUTHORIATARIANS

Bob Altemeyer is a retired psychology professor who spent most of his life researching authoritarianism. More of his book is devoted to the authoritarian followers than the leaders, reflecting the fact that the followers are much more numerous. Individually, they are not nearly as dangerous as the leaders, but when a nation has millions of them (as most large nations do) they can represent a very powerful force.


Followers

Several weeks ago I posted an article about the authoritarian followers. To briefly summarize, Altemeyer defines them as having three core characteristics:

1) High degree of submission to authority
2) Willingness to attack other people in the name of the authority
3) Highly conventional attitudes

Altemeyer provides a 22 question personality survey that measures a person’s right wing authoritarian propensity. He calls it the right wing authoritarian (RWA) scale. That particular scale relates to the authoritarian followers, not the leaders.

Altemeyer notes that not all authoritarians are right wing. Yet he consistently refers to authoritarian followers with the acronym RWA. There are two primary reasons for this. First, he points out that in our country, the vast majority of authoritarian followers are right wingers. Perhaps that’s because their great propensity to submit to authority combines with the fact that in our country our authorities (though not most of our people) lean to the right. In support of that idea, Altemeyer notes that in the former Soviet Union, most authoritarian followers were politically left wing – because their authorities were politically left wing. But in the psychological sense, even in the former Soviet Union the authoritarian followers were right wing.

Please keep in mind three cautionary notes about the RWA scale: As with the traits measured by any other psychological scale, there are gradations in between, people have the capacity to change and grow, and psychological tests don’t accurately characterize everyone.


Leaders

The primary characteristics of the authoritarian leaders, which Altemeyer also refers to as “Social Dominators”, is their great desire for power over other people – not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. To give you a quick idea of what these people are like, Altemeyer notes that there is a very strong correlation between the Social Dominator scale and what he refers to as the “Exploitive Manipulative Amoral Dishonesty” scale. Here is Altemeyer’s summary of the psychological characteristics of the social dominator – or authoritarian leader:


This description is very similar to what psychologists refer to as the psychopathic personality. In fact, the two are so similar that I was surprised to hear Altemeyer only speculate that they might be the same thing. Perhaps he was worried about a law suit if he came right out and claimed that they are the same thing.


Differences between leaders and followers

As I noted above, authoritarian followers are far more common than authoritarian leaders.

Authoritarian followers have such a deep need to submit to authority that they are willing to use any tortured logic that they can concoct in order to convince themselves that their beloved authority figures are truly great and wonderful people – despite abundant evidence to the contrary. In the service of doing that they allow themselves to be easily fooled and make themselves willfully ignorant in order to avoid confronting uncomfortable facts. Altemeyer says of them:


Authoritarian leaders typically do not have that kind of cognitive problem. They do not have to use psychological tricks to convince themselves that they are moral or “righteous” in the way that the followers do. Rather, they simply have a very different world view. Their philosophy is the “law of the jungle” or “might makes right”. They have less need than authoritarian followers to use mental gymnastics to convince themselves of their worth. For that reason they tend to be formally “religious” much less frequently than authoritarian followers – though they are certainly capable of putting on a show of religiosity in order to convince the followers to follow them.

Thus, Altemeyer summarizes the relationship between authoritarian leaders and their followers like this:


This contrasts markedly with the authoritarian leaders, whom Altemeyer characterizes like this:



THE ROLE OF AUTHORITARIAN FOLLOWERS AND LEADERS IN MAINTAINING THE 5 PILLARS OF THE RW MOVEMENT

The roles that authoritarian leaders and followers play in sustaining the right wing movement in the United States are complementary. The leaders are in charge, but they are too few in number to achieve their goals by themselves. They need the help of a mass base to sustain their power. For that purpose they cultivate the right wing authoritarian followers because they are the ones who are gullible enough for that purpose.

With that in mind, let’s consider the role of authoritarian leaders and followers in maintaining the five pillars of the right wing movement in the United States.


Economic Royalists

As alluded to above, the primary goal of the social dominators, or authoritarian leaders, is to add to their wealth and power. These are ends in themselves, and the most important thing in life to these people. Al Gore, in his book, “The Assault on Reason”, characterizes them like this:


It is the authoritarian leaders, not the followers, who are the “economic royalists”. The political ideology of the leaders happens to coincide with a system that will add to their wealth and power. This system does not benefit the authoritarian followers in any way. But they are gullible enough to allow the leaders to convince them that it does. The authoritarian leaders convince the followers that their political ideology is the only moral political ideology – and it will benefit them economically as well.

Here are some of the statements from Altemeyer’s book, which support the economic royalists, and with which authoritarian leaders tend to “strongly agree”:



The militarists

Both the authoritarian leaders and their followers tend to be militarists – but for different reasons. The authoritarian leaders tend to be those who profit from war, by gaining either wealth or power from it.

The leaders have several levers they can use to convince their followers, not only to passively accept war, but to actually fight in its cause. One lever they use is fear, creating enemies where none exist, or making our enemies out to be a lot more dangerous than they really are. The Bush administration’s painting of Iraq as an actual threat to the United States was a masterstroke of successful propaganda that, hard as it is to believe, actually fooled a large number of Americans – predominantly authoritarian followers.

When the Iraq threat to our country was exposed as being a gigantic fraud, in order to keep the war going they made it out to be a great moral cause (We’re bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqis), and kept the fear alive by claiming that we had to fight al Qaeda in Iraq in order to prevent them from invading our country. The authoritarian followers never wondered very much how transporting our military to Iraq (where al Qaeda didn’t even exist prior to our invasion of Iraq) would serve to prevent al Qaeda from coming here.

And then there is the “patriotism” card. “Patriotism” is defined by them as a belief that our country is superior to all others and therefore has the right to do to other countries whatever they (the authoritarian leaders) say needs to be done – even if that means invading them and killing their people. And anyone who disagrees is “unpatriotic”.

A discussion of militarism would be incomplete without consideration of the widespread abuse and torture of our prisoners. I used to have a very difficult time understanding why the Bush administration went this route. It alienated our allies, motivated our enemies with anti-American hatred, and ruined our international reputation – while seemingly providing no benefits whatsoever. We now know that part of the motivation was to obtain false confessions that could be used as an excuse for war. But when we consider some of the statements with which the authoritarian leaders strongly agree, their involvement in a torture regime becomes far more understandable, if not downright predictable:



The propagandists

The preceding discussion should make it obvious why the authoritarian leaders need to make widespread use of propaganda in order to achieve their goals. What they care most about is their own wealth and power. That is hardly a political agenda on which one would like to wage a campaign. Their only hope for getting themselves or their supporters elected to positions of power is to engage in mass deception.

In the United States today, the biggest purveyor of propaganda is our corporate news media, which I discussed in detail in my last DU post, titled “The Dilemma we Face in an Era of Right Wing Control of our News Media”. Control of our news media has been consolidated during the past several years into the hands of a small number of wealthy and powerful individuals, who have no compunction about slanting the news, or outright lying in order to advance their own political agenda.

Here are some statements from Altemeyer’s book, with which the authoritarian followers tend to strongly agree (when filling out an anonymous survey), which explain how comfortably they fall into their role as propagandists:



The crooks

A lack of conscience and contempt for the law greatly facilitate the quest for wealth and power that characterizes the authoritarian leaders.

The crookedness of the right wing movement in our country was clearly exposed in 2006 by several high profile cases of bribery (or accepting bribes), involving such men as Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, and Bob Ney.

The Bush administration’s firing of their federal attorneys for either refusing to investigate non-existent election fraud by Democrats or for pursuing too aggressively cases of election fraud by Republicans is a good example of how these people manipulate our election system in their attempts to maintain their power.

James Galbraith explains in his book, “The Predator State”, how the Bush administration operated more like a criminal syndicate than a government serving in a democracy:


And Altemeyer speculates in his book on how the origins of the social dominator/authoritarian leader contribute to his typical contempt for the law:



The gullible

Despite all their money, the support of most of the corporate news media, and widespread election fraud, the right wing movement nevertheless must still rely on many millions of gullible Americans to push them over the top… They must convince many millions of Americans to buy into the absurdity that their economic policies are not weighted heavily in favor of the rich and powerful; that their tough talk and excessive eagerness to pull their country into war is a manifestation of their courage; and finally, the absurd idea the Republican Party is the party of Christian values. Al Gore describes the situation in his book:


I used to wonder how a political movement that is so gung-ho for war and the death penalty and that is routinely against efforts to ensure that children receive the health care that they need can at the same time call themselves “pro-life” and claim to be so concerned about the life of unborn fetuses that they would criminalize the act of having an abortion. Let me say that I don’t doubt that there are some people who wish to criminalize abortion out of a sincere concern for unborn fetuses. But as part of a political movement that is so anti-life in so many other ways, it makes no sense unless seen as a mindless act of obedience to authority figures – authority figures who profit from war and many other anti-life policies. Such a political movement has to throw in something to make their followers feel self-righteous. The so-called “pro-life” movement is that something, and it costs the leaders of the movement nothing, while supplying them with minions to help them achieve their goals.

Altemeyer explains in his book that the major source of the RWA need for conformity is their inability (or refusal) to think for themselves. If a person lacks the ability or inclination to think independently, then what other choice does s/he have but to accept what s/he’s told by authority figures?

Altemeyer describes an experiment in his book that sheds light on how authoritarian followers helped to perpetuate the Cold War, facilitated by their aversion to independent thought. The experiment involved asking citizens of both the United States and the Soviet Union their thoughts about the Cold War, their own country, and the other country:



THE ULTIMATE IN AUTHORITARIANISM

Altemeyer defines double authoritarians as those rare individuals who have the traits of both authoritarian followers and leaders. Those are the most dangerous people in the world because they combine the immorality of authoritarian leaders with the self-righteous idealism of the authoritarian followers, and also because the followers tend to be more attracted to (and therefore more avid followers of) those whom they are more likely to see as similar to themselves. Altemeyer describes George W. Bush as a double authoritarian.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is perhaps the most anti-authoritarian institution in the world. Prominent authoritarian leaders hate the ICC because it is the international institution that is most responsible for combating international bullies whose actions have the potential to destroy the world. Authoritarian leaders are the international bullies who would like to spread world-wide terror, and the ICC stands against them. Altemeyer comments on how this played out during the Bush administration:


These are the people who will destroy the world if we let them. They didn’t go away when the Bush II administration ended, just as they didn’t go away when the Nixon and Reagan and Bush I administrations ended. They will NEVER go away as long as better intentioned people allow them to do whatever they please.