U.S. Conservatives Are Uniquely Inclined Toward Right-Wing Authoritarianism Compared to Western Peers
Global Morning Consult data reveals a distinctive authoritarian bent in the American right
(adapted for purposes of discussion)
I too have grave concerns. Authoritarian politics almost never works well. Maybe even I have some ideas of how I would change things if I had the power to enact and enforce them. Maybe that would not work so well, and it certainly would not be popular. Many of my view might seem cranky... worse, they might even be cranky.
Liberal democracy implies that practically nobody will get everything that he wants in the political system. That has typically proved just as well for checking failure... and latent despotism.
(I'm not going to show the international comparisons. I will say that Americans on the whole are more authoritarian, especially on the Right, than are their European, Canadian, and Australian counterparts.
Global Morning Consult data reveals a distinctive authoritarian bent in the American right
(adapted for purposes of discussion)
Quote:This article is part of a deep dive on the Jan. 6 riot in Washington and creeping authoritarianism in America. See all of our work here.
- A scale measuring propensity toward right-wing authoritarian tendencies found right-leaning Americans scored higher than their counterparts in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
- 26% of the U.S. population qualified as highly right-wing authoritarian, Morning Consult research found, twice the share of the No. 2 countries, Canada and Australia.
- The beliefs that voter fraud decided the 2020 election, that Capitol rioters were doing more to protect than undermine the government and that masks and vaccines are not pivotal to stopping COVID-19 were similarly prevalent among right-leaning Americans and those that scored high for right-wing authoritarianism.
The Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol gave the country a striking wake-up call to the alarming rise in undemocratic behavior on the right side of the political aisle, and new global Morning Consult research underscores the prevalence of authoritarian attitudes among U.S. conservatives.
The research, which used longtime authoritarian researcher Bob Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarianism test and scale and builds on recent work he conducted with the Monmouth University Polling Institute, found that U.S. conservatives have stronger right-wing authoritarian tendencies than their right-of-center counterparts in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.[/font]
I too have grave concerns. Authoritarian politics almost never works well. Maybe even I have some ideas of how I would change things if I had the power to enact and enforce them. Maybe that would not work so well, and it certainly would not be popular. Many of my view might seem cranky... worse, they might even be cranky.
Liberal democracy implies that practically nobody will get everything that he wants in the political system. That has typically proved just as well for checking failure... and latent despotism.
Quote:Altemeyer defines authoritarianism as the desire to submit to some authority, aggression that is directed against whomever the authority says should be targeted and a desire to have everybody follow the norms and social conventions that the authority says should be followed. Those characteristics were all on display in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, culminating earlier this year in the attack on the Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.
The findings come from Morning Consult polling conducted from late April into early May in seven foreign countries, which in addition to the aforementioned trio included France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Responses were gathered among 1,000 adults in each of the seven countries, and were compared with a domestic poll of 1,001 U.S. adults conducted concurrently. (See more about how we conducted the study and produced our findings here.)
(I'm not going to show the international comparisons. I will say that Americans on the whole are more authoritarian, especially on the Right, than are their European, Canadian, and Australian counterparts.
Quote:The test found a number of other striking results: The 39-point gap in right-wing authoritarian scores between America’s left and right was more pronounced than it was in any of the other countries included, though the test also revealed a 30-point gap between the right and left in Canada and 28-point differences between the two groups in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morning Consult also used the Altemeyer scale to categorize segments of the surveyed populations in each country as scoring high or low on the right-wing authoritarianism scale. Adults in each country who scored in the top 15th percentile among all respondents in all countries were defined as “high RWA,” while respondents who scored in the bottom 15th percentile were defined as “low RWA.”
A comparison across the eight countries polled showed that the share of the U.S. population that scored as “high RWA” was twice the size of the next largest population: 26 percent of U.S. respondents met that designation, compared with 13 percent of Canadians and Australians and 10 percent of those in the United Kingdom.
Using these “high RWA” and “low RWA” designations, Morning Consult was able to parse how respondents on either side of America’s right-wing authoritarian divide view the events of Jan. 6, the conduct of the country’s former president and other political flashpoints — and how those views compared with those of self-identified liberals and conservatives. There was significant overlap between respondents on the left and those who scored low on RWA, and among the right and those who scored high on RWA, as indicated by a demographic profile.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.