Authoritarianism on the Rise

[pbrower2a]

So how does right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)manifest itself here in the Good Old U S of A? Graph:




Well, as we can see, men are more likely than women to be right-wing authoritarians, but that matters less than:

1. Age. People over 45 are more likely to be right-wing authoritarians (RWA's). There are plenty of reasons for that. People over 45 are rarely cannon fodder in war, and youth recognize who can be killed in some War for Profit. Young adults might be willing to pay any price to make a workable world instead of a dystopian nightmare in the wake of some military or economic disaster, but they do not want to die for market share for "American interests overseas".

2. Ideology. The big one. People decidedly to the Left and in the center generally reject right-wing authoritarianism. Few on the Right can reject right-wing authoritarianism on principle. Maybe the likes of George Will and Elizabeth Cheney get cold feet when they recognize the craziness of the Hard Right, especially when it claims that "Trump really won", conducts a Putsch at the Capitol, or entangles itself with the Q-anon cult.  But those are rare.

3. Urban-rural divide: Although right-wing authoritarians are to be found in urban, suburban, and rural areas alike, rural people are more likely to be right-wing authoritarians. Rural America may be far more of an echo-chamber for the Right (although I would be leery of saying that less-rustic areas do not have their own equivalent of echo chambers). I have seen this in the continuing presence of Trump banners and signs in the rural area in which I live. These people may know practically nobody who voted for Biden except perhaps for that crazy, overeducated, cancel-culture Marxist-Leninist science teacher (well, really that teacher is none of those, but in contrast to someone on the Hard Right, someone in the political center is an extremist.

It's like this. Water is everywhere, and because oxygen is an excellent solvent but otherwise generally unreactive we define it as neutral in the acid-base spectrum. To a substance like sulfur trioxide it is a very strong base, and that for metallic potassium water is a very strong acid. Commies have seen me as a fascist, and neo-Nazis have seen me as a typical Jewish Bolshevik even if I am not Jewish (I concur with its moral standards, but I could never follow kosher dietary laws; as a German-American I have much in common culturally with some Jewish populations). Extremists, like strong bases and acids, are dangerous.  

4. Ethnicity: Non-whites are much less likely to be RWA's... but also their antithesis. I cannot tell whether the "non-white" category includes all Hispanics, some of whom are white.

5. Education: people with college and especially post-grad/professional degrees are less likely to fall for RWA ideology.


JANUARY 6, 2021:



People left-leaning (89%) and low on the RWA scale (93%) see the Capitol Putsch as an abomination (unless they see it as the final destruction, as extreme leftists often do, of the myth of a benign liberal-capitalist order).  Right-leaning Americans may think that the Putsch did less to undermine American institutions (OK -- it failed) than to call attention of the alleged inadequacies of liberalism as opposed to some right-wing dream. RWA's than right-leaning Americans were more likely to recognize that the Putsch undermined the political order... but maybe they thought that a good idea. Go figure. The vast majority of both left-leaning adults and low RWA's surely found the Putsch an abomination for purpose as well as for possible consequences. 

But such is my interpretation.



   
Right-leaning adults and RWA's are not a perfect match, but all in all the perception that the President that we have is an usurper who did not win an election fairly and squarely is ominous in the extreme. In fact we have about an equal number of wins for the more conservative nominee and the more liberal nominee since 1980 (6-5 beginning in 1980), so most of us are going to end up with some Presidents that we disagree with. If I can accept that Bush won fairly in 2000 and that even if Trump won with the aid of dirty tricks that he did not understand but was not involved in, maybe conservatives might recognize that a Presidential winner who got a larger share of the overall popular vote than did Ronald Reagan really did win. Maybe one must look beyond a narrow circle of like-minded people, especially if one is in rural America, or if one relies largely upon FoX Propaganda Channel and Newsmax (let alone Infowars) as sources. 

Finally on something that should have absolutely no connection to partisan politics:


   

Here I cite the pollster's analysis:

Quote:The divides over the use of masks, especially, illustrate the challenges involved in de-escalating the right-left tension in American society and lowering the authoritarian temperature. 
In the interview, Altemeyer raised a number of potential long- and short-term solutions that could reduce authoritarian tendencies in the populace. One of those short-term solutions he mentioned was “superordinate goals, where you have things where everybody has to cooperate and work with each other.”
“You can’t solve problems independently, and that has a remarkable effect on letting people who are enemies understand each other better and decrease the tension,” he said. “The business of masks could have been that, but it was effectively trumped by Trump, who made wearing masks a sign of weakness.”
These divides all seem to stem from the same dynamic: leaders in the political and media spaces exacerbating tensions and differences for political gain. That’s a difficult problem to stop, especially when the political incentives and inertia of the moment suggest that voters may just move on to “the craziest son of a bitch in the race,” as dubbed by conservative Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) in a March 2017 Washington Examiner article.
Thomas Costello, a psychological scientist at Emory University who studies authoritarianism, said “it seems like there is just a small minority of the population that is really sensitive” to alienation and fear toward people of different ethnicities and political and religious views, and “it exacerbates latent authoritarian tendencies.”
“I don’t know if you can change that in the same way that I don’t know that you can change someone’s height, or their level of extraversion,” he said. “But what you can do is try to mitigate the sense of the threat and the sense of difference that exacerbates authoritarianism.”
 
Rachel Venaglia, Laura Maxwell and Joanna Piacenza contributed. Special thanks to Monmouth University Polling Institute Director Patrick Murray and Bob Altemeyer, who each provided feedback to the study, and again to Murray, who also shared Monmouth’s data.