The Authoritarians Read online

  You could have left-wing authoritarian followers as well, who support a revolutionary leader who wants to overthrow the establishment. I knew a few in the 1970s, Marxist university students who constantly spouted their chosen authorities, Lenin or Trotsky or Chairman Mao. Happily they spent most of their time fighting with each other, as lampooned in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the People’s Front of Judea devotes most of its energy to battling, not the Romans, but the Judean People’s Front. But the left-wing authoritarians on my campus disappeared long ago. Similarly in America “the Weathermen” blew away in the wind. I’m sure one can find left-wing authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient numbers now to threaten democracy in North America. However I have found bucketfuls of right-wing authoritarians in nearly every sample I have drawn in Canada and the United States for the past three decades. So when I speak of “authoritarian followers” in this book I mean right-wing authoritarian followers, as identified by the RWA scale.

  The RWA Scale

  The what? The Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale. Get out a pencil. I’m going to take you into the inner sanctum of a personality test. Just don’t be FRIGHTENED!

  Below is the latest version of the RWA scale. Read the instructions carefully, and then write down your response to each statement on a sheet of paper numbered 1-22.

  This survey is part of an investigation of general public opinion concerning a variety of social issues. You will probably find that you agree with some of the statements, and disagree with others, to varying extents. Please indicate your reaction to each statement on the line to the left of each item according to the following scale:

  Write down a -4 if you very strongly disagree with the statement.

  Write down a -3 if you strongly disagree with the statement.

  Write down a -2 if you moderately disagree with the statement.

  Write down a -1 if you slightly disagree with the statement.

  Write down a +1 if you slightly agree with the statement.

  Write down a +2 if you moderately agree with the statement.

  Write down a +3 if you strongly agree with the statement.

  Write down a +4 if you very strongly agree with the statement.

  If you feel exactly and precisely neutral about an item, write down a “0.”

  (“Dr. Bob” to reader: We’ll probably stay friends longer if you read this paragraph.) Important: You may find that you sometimes have different reactions to different parts of a statement. For example, you might very strongly disagree (“-4”) with one idea in a statement, but slightly agree (“+1”) with another idea in the same item. When this happens, please combine your reactions, and write down how you feel on balance (a “-3” in this case).

  ___ 1. The established authorities generally turn out to be right about things, while the radicals and protestors are usually just “loud mouths” showing off their ignorance.

  ___ 2. Women should have to promise to obey their husbands when they get married.

  ___ 3. Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.

  ___ 4. Gays and lesbians are just as healthy and moral as anybody else.

  ___ 5. 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

  ___ 6. 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.

  ___ 7. The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas.

  ___ 8. There is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps.

  ___ 9. Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people.

  ___ 10. Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs.

  ___ 11. Everyone should have their own lifestyle, religious beliefs, and sexual preferences, even if it makes them different from everyone else.

  ___ 12. The “old-fashioned ways” and the “old-fashioned values” still show the best way to live.

  ___ 13. You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting for women’s abortion rights, for animal rights, or to abolish school prayer.

  ___ 14. What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil, and take us back to our true path.

  ___ 15. 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.”

  ___ 16. 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.

  ___ 17. There are many radical, immoral people in our country today, who are trying to ruin it for their own godless purposes, whom the authorities should put out of action.

  ___ 18. 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.

  ___ 19. Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the “rotten apples” who are ruining everything.

  ___ 20. There is no “ONE right way” to live life; everybody has to create their own way.

  ___ 21. Homosexuals and feminists should be praised for being brave enough to defy “traditional family values.”

  ___ 22. This country would work a lot better if certain groups of troublemakers would just shut up and accept their group’s traditional place in society.

  Done them all, as best you could? Then let’s score your answers, and get an idea of whether you’re cut out to be an authoritarian follower. First, you can skip your answers to the first two statements. They don’t count. I put those items on the test to give people some experience with the -4 to +4 response system. They’re just “warmups.” Start therefore with No. 3.

  If you wrote down a “-4” that’s scored as a 1.

  If you wrote down a “-3” that’s scored as a 2.

  If you wrote down a “-2” that’s scored as a 3.

  If you wrote down a “-1” that’s scored as a 4.

  If you wrote down a “0” or left the item unanswered, that’s scored as a 5.

  If you wrote down a “+1” that’s scored as a 6.

  If you wrote down a “+2” that’s scored as a 7.

  If you wrote down a “+3” that’s scored as an 8.

  If you wrote down a “+4” that’s scored as a 9.

  Your answers to Items 5, 7, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 19 and 22 are scored the same way.

  Now we’ll do the rest of your answers, starting with No. 4.

  If you wrote down a “-4” that’s scored as a 9.

  If you wrote down a “-3” that’s scored as an 8.

  If you wrote down a “-2” that’s scored as a 7.

  If you wrote down a “-1” that’s scored as a 6.

  If you wrote down a “0” or left the item unanswered, that’s scored as a 5.

  If you wrote down a “+1” that’s scored as a 4.

  If you wrote down a “+2” that’s scored as a 3.

  If you wrote down a “+3” that’s scored as a 2.

  If you wrote down a “+4” that’s scored as a 1.

  Now simply add up your twenty scores. The lowest total possible would be 20, and the highest, 180, but real scores are almost never that extreme. Introductory psychology students at my Canadian university average about 75. Their parents average about 90. Both scores are below the mid-point of the scale, which is 100, so most people in these groups are not authoritarian followers in a
bsolute terms. Neither are most Americans, it seems. Mick McWilliams and Jeremy Keil administered the RWA scale to a reasonably representative sample of 1000 Americans in 2005 for the Libertarian Party and discovered an average score of 90.[3], [4] Thus the Manitoba parent samples seem similar in overall authoritarianism to a representative American adult sample.[5] My Manitoba students score about the same on the RWA scale as most American university students do too.

  Let me give you three compelling reasons why you should treat your personal score with a grain of salt. First, psychological tests make mistakes about individuals, which is what you happen to be, I’ll bet. Even the best instruments, such as the best IQ tests, get it wrong sometimes—as I think most people know. Thus the RWA scale can’t give sure-thing diagnoses of individuals. (But it can reliably identify levels of authoritarianism in groups, because too-high errors and too-low errors tend to even out in big samples. So we’ll do the group grope in this book, and not go on the individual counseling trip.[6])

  Second, how you responded to the items depended a lot on how you interpreted them. You may have writhed in agony wondering, “What does he mean by _______?” as you answered. If I failed often to get the gist of what I was saying over to you, your score will certainly be misleadin g. [7]

  Third, you knew what the items were trying to measure, didn’t you, you rascal! The RWA scale is a personality test disguised as an attitude survey, but I’ll bet you saw right through it.[8] In fact, you could probably take each statement apart and see how I was trying to slyly tap the various components of the RWA personality trait. Take that first-scored item, No. 3: “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader (authoritarian submission) who will do what has to be done to destroy (authoritarian aggression) the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us” (conventionalism). Well if you’re smart enough to do that, you’re smart enough to realize how easily you might have slanted your answers to look goo d. [9]

  So I didn’t ask you to answer the RWA scale to see if you’d find true happiness and fulfillment as a stormtrooper in some dictator’s army. It’s not a vocational test. Instead, I wanted you to experience for yourself the instrument used to identify and study authoritarian followers. Most of what I have uncovered about authoritarianism, I have dug up with this tool, and now you know what it is and how it work s.[10]

  Is the RWA Scale Valid?

  According to the High Laws of Science (you do not have to genuflect here), ideas must be repeatedly tested to see if they fail. So the next (and extremely important) question is, does the RWA scale really measure what it says it measures? Are the test scores valid? If they are, we should find that high scorers submit to established authority more than most people do, aggress more in the name of such authority, and are much more conventional. What’s the evidence?

  Authoritarian Submission. Everybody submits to authority to some degree. Imagine a world in which people ignored traffic laws and sped through red lights. The cost of auto insurance would shoot through the roof (although the line-ups to buy it would become much shorter). But some people go way beyond the norm and submit to authority even when it is dishonest, corrupt, unfair and evil. We would expect authoritarian followers especially to submit to corrupt authorities in their lives: to believe them when there is little reason to do so, to trust them when huge grounds for suspicion exist, and to hold them blameless when they do something wrong. We don’t expect absolutes here; people are much too complicated to completely, always, blindly submit, no matter what. But IF the RWA scale truly measures the tendency to be an authoritarian follower, those who score highly on it should tend to do these things, right? So do they?

  Well, they will tell you that people should submit to authority in virtually all circumstances. If you give them moral dilemmas (e.g. should one steal an absurdly expensive drug to save a life?) they’re more likely to say, “The law is the law and must be obeyed” than most people are. High RWAs also say they would bow more to show respect for their fathers, the president of companies where they worked, and so on, than most people indicate. (An astronomer suggested I ask about the bowing, which I thought was silly, but he was right. “Social scientists are such blockheads!”)

  High RWAs trusted President Nixon longer and stronger than most people did during the Watergate crisis.[11] Some of them still believed Nixon was innocent of criminal acts even after he accepted a pardon for them.[12] (Similarly the Allies found many Germans in 1945 refused to believe that Hitler, one of the most evil men in history, had ordered the murder of millions of Jews and others. “He was busy running the war,” Hitler’s apologists said. “The concentration camps were built and run by subordinates without his knowing it.”) To pick a more current example, authoritarian followers believed, more than most people did, President George W. Bush’s false claims that Saddam Hussein had extensive links to al-Qaida, and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And they supported the invasion of Iraq, whereas less authoritarian Americans tended to doubt the wisdom of that war from the start.[13]

  Caution No. 1. On the other hand, right-wing authoritarians did not support President Clinton during his impeachment and trial over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So as I said, the support is not automatic and reflexive, but can be trumped by other concerns. In Clinton’s case his administration not only had advocated for groups anathema to authoritarians, such as homosexuals and feminists, his sexual misdeeds in the White House deeply offended many high RWAs.

  Shifting our focus a bit, please give your reaction to the story below:

  It has been reported in the press that the FBI has maintained illegal wiretaps of the telephones of about 60 persons in the United States who were suspected of being sympathetic toward radical political organizations. The FBI is reported to be taking no chances that these persons might become active in their support of these groups. Under current legislation such wiretaps are legally permissible only if a judge has signed a court order authorizing them. The FBI reportedly has never sought court approval of these wiretaps because they believed their case was too weak and the courts would deny them. The FBI has denied the wiretaps exist, and described the report as a “complete fabrication.”

  If the story is true, how serious a matter would you say the illegal wiretaps are?

  0 = Not serious at all; they clearly are justified by the circumstances.

  1 = Mildly serious

  2 = Somewhat serious

  3 = Pretty serious

  4 = Extremely serious; such acts strike at the foundation of a free society.

  What would you say? You can put me down for a “4.” What’s the point of having laws protecting privacy if the law enforcers can decide to ignore them whenever they wish, and then get away with it?

  The issue may remind you of the Bush administration’s policy of authorizing the National Security Agency to engage in electronic spying, without warrants, on Americans suspected of supporting terrorism—which simply ignored the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that required prior court approval of such surveillance. And indeed, David Winter at the University of Michigan discovered that high RWAs felt Bush’s policy was “both necessary and appropriate” because of terrorism. But the wiretaps case presented above comes from a study I did over thirty years ago, in the autumn of 1974, using students from five scattered American universities. I found that persons who scored highly on the RWA scale tended to answer with 0’s, 1’s and 2’s, while those who scored low in RWA used 3’s and 4’s much more often. (The overall average in those months immediately following Watergate equaled 3.0.)

  And this is just the beginning. Over the years I have found that authoritarian followers blissfully tolerated many illegal and unjust government actions that occurred in the United States and Canada, such as:

  · a police burglary of a newspaper office to get confidential information.

  · drug raids carried out without search warrants because judges wouldn’t give them.

  · denial of right to assemble to peace
fully protest government actions.

  · “dirty tricks” played by a governing party on the opposition during an election.

  · immigration office discrimination against radical speakers.

  · placing agents provocateurs in organizations to create dissension and bad press relations.

  · burning down the meeting place of a radical organization.

  · unauthorized mail openings.

  Authoritarian followers seem to have a “Daddy and mommy know best” attitude toward the government. They do not see laws as social standards that apply to all. Instead, they appear to think that authorities are above the law, and can decide which laws apply to them and which do not—just as parents can when one is young. But in a democracy no one is supposed to be above the law. Still, authoritarians quite easily put that aside. They also believe that only criminals and terrorists would object to having their phones tapped, their mail opened, and their lives put under surveillance. They have bought their tickets and are standing in line waiting for 1984, The Real Thing. There might as well not be a Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. And when the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is used to deny people the right of habeas corpus—one of the oldest rights in western law—it is unlikely that right-wing authoritarians will object to the loss of this constitutional guarantee either.

  In fact, who even needs the whole Bill of Rights? Here is a (fake) letter-to-theeditor I asked some San Francisco State University students to respond to in 1990.

  If a person stops to think about it, most of the problems we are having can be traced to the Bill of Rights—or more precisely, to the way it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court. “Freedom of speech” has been twisted to mean that pornographers can sell their filth, and that anybody can say whatever he wants, whether it’s good for society or not. And “freedom of religion” has been twisted to mean children can’t pray in public schools any more. And the “right to happiness” has been twisted to mean women can have abortion after abortion if they’re “unhappy” being pregnant. And think how many drug pushers and criminals have gotten off scot-free because their “rights” were supposedly violated after they had robbed or killed somebody.