Liberals, Conservatives, and Authoritarians

All right, so back to authoritarianism, what is it?  I have suggested in my own taxonomy that liberals prefer social breadth to social depth, conservative prefer depth to breadth, and authoritarians take a hostile or punitive attitude toward outsiders.  We have to be careful here, as Jonathan Haidt often warns, to avoid definitions that simply conflate conservative with authoritarian, definitions like, "People who score high on the authoritarian scale value conformity and order, protect social norms, and are wary of outsiders."

But Haidt does endorse the work of researcher Karen Stenner on the subject.  This overview of her work is interesting.  Critical to the theory of authoritarianism is the theory of activation:

In an influential 2005 book called The Authoritarian Dynamic, Stenner argued that many authoritarians might be latent — that they might not necessarily support authoritarian leaders or policies until their authoritarianism had been "activated." 

This activation could come from feeling threatened by social changes such as evolving social norms or increasing diversity, or any other change that they believe will profoundly alter the social order they want to protect. In response, previously more moderate individuals would come to support leaders and policies we might now call Trump-esque. 

Other researchers, like Hetherington, take a slightly different view. They believe that authoritarians aren't "activated" — they've always held their authoritarian preferences — but that they only come to express those preferences once they feel threatened by social change or some kind of threat from outsiders. 

But both schools of thought agree on the basic causality of authoritarianism. People do not support extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing certain kinds of threats.
The third insight came from Hetherington and American University professor Elizabeth Suhay, who found that when non-authoritarians feel sufficiently scared, they also start to behave, politically, like authoritarians. 

But Hetherington and Suhay found a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. 

 Okay, so let's give credit for an important insight here.  People do not desire authoritarianism as such, they turn to authoritarian leaders for protection from threats, i.e., what really underlies authoritarianism is fear.  But people are divided into two either/or categories, ones who are activated only by an actual physical threat, and ones who are activated by any sort of change.

But there is another way of seeing things, treating "activation" not as an either/or, but as a spectrum.  Anyone feeling threatened enough will respond in an authoritarian sort of way.  But different people have different threat thresholds.  And here is where I think the liberal/conservative distinction and the belief that conservatives are more prone to authoritarianism than liberals can be valid.  People who prefer depth to breadth have a lower threat threshold from outsiders than people who prefer breadth to depth.  In other words, people who value depth over breadth (conservatives) take less of a threat to "activate" into hostility toward outsiders (authoritarianism) than people who value breadth over depth (liberals).

Or, put differently, people who complain about conflating authoritarianism with conservatism are right.  There is nothing "anti-other" about conservatism, although it is indifferent and incurious toward outsiders.  But people who equate conservatism with authoritarianism have half a point there too.  The more conservative people are (i.e., the more they value depth over breadth), the less it takes for them to feel threatened by outsiders and be "activated" into authoritarianism.

Recall Robert Altemeyer's iteration of the Global Change Game (pp. 181-182) with a group of players who valued depth over breadth -- conservatives Haidt would say, authoritarian followers according to Altemeyer.  They worked well together in their arbitrarily assigned groups, never showing the slightest aggressiveness or belligerency toward outsiders, but also not showing any interest in cooperation or interaction with anyone but their own sub-group.  "There were no wars on this night, not even a hint of a threat. The basic high RWA attitude seemed to be, 'You don’t bother us, we won’t bother you.'"  In other words, people who value depth over breadth have no desire to infringe on others.  All is well (or at least peaceful) so long as they are surrounding by other people equally unwilling to infringe.  But all it takes is a few belligerent types who want to infringe on others, and suddenly the others have little choice but to become hostile toward outsiders as a matter of self-defense.  (See Altemeyer's book, pages 32-34 and 183-186.  Especially interesting now is 183-186, describing how authoritarian leaders were good at making deals, but never learned to cooperate for the greater good.  Hm. . . ).

I should also add that an excessive emphasis on breadth over depth can lead to a pathologically low threshold of activation.  People who responded to terrorists flying planes into the World Trade Center by talking about loving one's enemies are enough to make anyone roll their eyes.  People who prefer breadth to depth are often uncommonly naive in not realizing that not everyone shares their priorities, that many if not most people in the world out there prefer depth to breadth and would rather just be left alone, and that a significant number are authoritarians and actively hostile to all outsiders.

And some people (not many, but some) are just inherently authoritarian, naturally hostile rather than indifferent to outsiders and eager to offend and intrude for the sake of offending and intruding.  (Or for personal gain).

Next, I will indulge in a bit of whimsy on how science fiction may be said to engage this issue.

I Suppose a Brokered Convention Can Happen Even If It Doesn't Make Sense

I previously argued that the Republican Party would grudgingly accede to a Trump candidacy and not hold a brokered convention.  The basic reason behind my argument was that a brokered convention was completely irrational.  No matter what the Republican Party wanted to achieve -- whether winning the Presidency, winning as many down-ballot offices as possible, damage control, or living to fight another day -- transforming itself into a circular firing squad would harm, rather than enhance, its chances.  Even a willingness for the party to harm itself in the interest of ideological purity or personal grudge seemed like a poor way to advance its goals.  Only a willingness to destroy itself for the good of the nation made sense, but that showed a degree of statesmanship that seemed most unlikely.

Well, speculation on how to find an establishment nominee who is neither Trump nor Cruz, or even to nominate Cruz despite his having fewer delegates than Trump, continues.  I still think the Republican Establishment will end up coming to its senses (though rather late in the game) and supporting Trump or at least Cruz.  At the same time, I have to admit that, irrational as a brokered convention is, previous convention deadlocks have been irrational, too.  The party knew, or should have known, that its behavior was self-destructive and could only lead to defeat, but it just couldn't resist the urge to clean house.

I still think that earlier convention deadlocks were different, not merely in degree, but in kind from a brokered convention today.  Appalling though the slow-motion train wreck could be, at least back in the day of contested conventions it was the accepted, indeed, expected, practice for the convention to choose the nominee.  If the power brokers chose a dark horse who was not particularly popular won, his nomination was nonetheless accepted as legitimate and the party faithful voters were expected to rally behind him.  These days it is the well-established practice that the nominee is chosen by voters and the power brokers are expected to recognize the people's choice as legitimate and rally behind him.  For the power brokers to defy the people's will and choose someone else is quite simply seen as illegitimate and far worse than even the worst convention deadlock back when conventions were expected to do the actual nomination.

But if the Republican Establishment refused to come to its senses and insists on denying the nomination to the people's choice, I can think of at least two possible reasons for their action that I overlooked last time.

The Republican donor class sees the Republican Party as its personal fief and is ready to destroy it rather than lose control.  That one is just a little to plausible for comfort, actually.

The Republican donor class still doesn't recognize how destructive such a course of action would be.  That sounds hard to believe, given that basically everyone else has been shouting such a warning at the tops of their lungs.  But then again, I have commented before on how breathtakingly dense elites can be and how skilled at confusing their own power and privilege with the common good.  So maybe the Republican donor class really is so stupid as not to realize that trying to impose their own candidate against the wishes of the voters amounts to political suicide.

If so, I really do need to start a new blogging category -- Why Are Our Elites So Stupid?

Another Quick Comment on Trump

Trump has now spelled out how he will make Mexico pay for a border wall.  He will put the squeeze on Mexico until they cough up the dough.  The squeeze will include tariffs on imports, fees on visas, a threat to cut off visas altogether and, above all, a threat to require proof of citizenship or legal residency to wire money out of the country.  Mexican immigrants to the US (legal and illegal) send remittances home to their families that are an important form of support.  Trump will threaten to cut them off.

The Washington Post has commented, sensibly enough, that there is a political flaw here in that Trump will be threatening a shutdown of remittances unless Mexico helps us -- to dry up the source of those remittances altogether.  Hm. . . .

But less convincing is that attempt to argue that the attempt is overly intrusive and will not be enforceable.  Why not?  How hard can it be for Western Union and other such services to ask for an ID whenever they wire money out of the country?  If liquor stores and airports can ask for ID's, why not money wire transfers?

I say this as one who hates and despises Trump and everything he stands for, but let's be realistic here.

Another Quick Note on Depth Versus Breadth

And if we are going to talk about the whole matter of depth versus breadth (and, perhaps, right wing versus left wing populism) this peice is a good place to start.  It is no secret that both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are pitching to much the same set of constituents -- the white working class that has seen the good-paying blue collar jobs of yesteryear vanish.  Trump would bring them back by halting immigration (legal and illegal), while Sanders would offer government benefits to ease the hardship, but both agree on at least one measure to restore those good paying jobs -- protectionism. Both agree that a lot of those good paying jobs have gone overseas and been taken by Chinese workers making a fraction of what their American counterparts make. The hardship to the American working class has been very real.

Still, Vox takes Sanders to task:

"You have to have standards," the senator said. "And what fair trade means to say that it is fair. It is roughly equivalent to the wages and environmental standards in the United States." 

From Sanders's point of view, this makes sense. He has recognized, correctly, that freer trade with countries like China has hurt a subset of American workers (while benefiting others). 

But there's one big problem, according to development economists I spoke to: Limiting trade with low-wage countries as severely as Sanders wants to would hurt the very poorest people on Earth. A lot. 

Free trade is one of the best tools we have for fighting extreme poverty. If Sanders wins, and is serious about implementing his trade agenda as outlined in the NYDN interview and elsewhere, he will impoverish millions of already-poor people.

Note that this argument is meaningless if made to Trump and his supporters.  They don't care.  If his policies hurt people in other countries, that is the other countries' lookout, not ours.  The President of the United States should worry about U.S. interests, not anyone else's.

That is a common refrain I see among Trump supporters in blog threads.  For the first time, Trump will take our interests into account in setting immigration policy instead of the immigrants'.  I certainly don't think that is accurate.  Our immigration policy has always taken our own interest into account.  But it has made some attempt to balance our interests against the immigrants'.  What Trump supporters are really saying is not that Trump will take our interests into account, but that they will leave anyone else's out.  They may see this as a distinction without a difference, but we liberals (i.e., people who prefer breadth to depth) consider the difference very important.  I am reminded of the late, great columnist Sydney J. Harris, who always said that people who say that charity should begin at home really mean that it should end there.  Once again, I am not sure that people who prefer depth to breadth are aware of the distinction.  But we are.

But Bernie Sanders and his followers are liberals (or at least purport to be).  Hence, unlike Trump, Sanders cannot adopt a strong anti-immigration policy, much as many Trump supporters would like him to.  To a liberal, Trump's immigration policy looks very much like scapegoating a powerless minority, and our morality does not allow that.  But Sanders' protectionism, though it does inflame anger against scapegoats in the way that Trump does, really does scapegoat a vulnerable population in the sense that it makes the most vulnerable in the world bear the costs of his policies.  To a Sanders supporter, this is a serious matter.  To a Trump supporter, it is meaningless.

I should add that I think a lot of liberal opponents of trade don't fully comprehend the implications of their views.  It was much the same during the 1990's and uproars over the World Trade Organization (WTO).  Liberals wanted to link trade to labor and environmental standards; conservatives did not.  And it is true (as columnist Ellen Goodman said at the time) that there are serious problems to allowing multinational corporations to define global trade according to their own interest.  The environment is also global after all, and labor can be trans-national.  We need basic standards to avoid a race to the bottom.  But expecting all countries to have "roughly equivalent to the wages and environmental standards in the United States" is utterly unrealistic and asking the impossible.  To say that you don't want to throw people in China out of work, only for them to have wages comparable to ours is the equivalent of saying that you want everyone to have a pony.  Painful trade-offs exist and must be faced.  Sanders' approach, in all cases has been one of denial.

What Does it Mean to Call Trump Supporters Authoritarian?

So, having defined liberals as people who prefer social breadth to social depth and conservatives as people who prefer social depth to social breadth, what are authoritarians?

As seen before, Haidt defines authoritarians as people who place a high value on social cohesion and obedience to authority, and a low value on compassion.  He has expanded on this definition  elsewhere, apparently starting to recognize what I saw as a concern with moral foundations theory -- that the combination of group loyalty and purity/sanctity can turn into something very ugly -- a view of certain people outside one's in-group as impure and defiling.  He sounds almost like Robert Altemeyer when he says:

[W]hen they [authoritarians] perceive that the moral order is falling apart, the country is losing its coherence and cohesiveness, diversity is rising, and our leadership seems (to them) to be suspect or not up to the needs of the hour, its as though a button is pushed on their forehead that says “in case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant.” So its not just rising immigration and diversity that has activated American authoritarians — it may be our rising political polarization itself, which has activated and energized a subset of the electorate that is now lionizing Trump as the first major candidate in a long time who has spoken to their fears and desires. In short, Trump is not a conservative, and is not appealing to classical conservative ideas. He is an authoritarian.

He begins to see an exaggerated disgust reflex as dangerous or at least worth investigating as possibly dangerous:

I actually don’t know whether disgust is really characteristic of “status quo conservatives.” It’s possible that it is the authoritarians who drive the general correlation of disgust and self-declared conservatism. Given Hitler’s obsessive focus on disgust and vermin in Mein Kampf, and the general absence of such talk in classical conservative writings, I would guess that it is most characteristic of authoritarian psychology.

He cites favorable to a column that says of Trump:

More than any other Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump has been appealing to a particular combination of in-group loyalty and moral purity concerns. On the purity side, he often expresses disgust, often toward women and women’s bodies (e.g., Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate). But his purity appeals are most commonly in the context of group boundaries, like building walls on our national borders to prevent contamination by outsiders, who are cast as murderers and rapists, both morally and physically dirty.

And to the New Republic:

The disgust response feeds into an “in-group” response: What is disgusting is exterior, and the group must be protected from it, which in turn provides comfort and reinforces a shared sense of identity.

In short, what Haidt and the people he cites appear to see as authoritarianism is not so much placing a high value on social cohesion and a low value on compassion as a strong sense of disgust and punitive attitude toward people seen as a threat to social cohesion.

So, in the taxonomy I am forming, liberals are people who prefer breadth to depth in social commitment.  Conservatives are people who prefer depth to breadth in social commitment.  And authoritarians are people who are hostile and punitive toward people outside their circle of social commitment.  In responding to the outsider, the liberal response is to attempt to form ties, albeit in a superficial and often patronizing manner, the conservative response is indifference and incuriosity, and the authoritarian response is hostility and disgust.

Next: Authoritarian triggers.

A Few More Comments on Depth vs. Breadth

Let me make a few more comments on depth versus breadth.  To repeat, both social depth and social breadth are good.  It is unfortunate that there is a trade-off, but that is a fact that must be faced.  Only by facing the trade-off squarely can be meaningfully debate and decide where it should be drawn.

Next, while neither preference of breadth over depth or depth over breadth is a pathology, both can be pathological if taken to extremes.  Consider the forms they can take in personal relationships.  An extreme preference for depth over breadth in one's personal relationships is codependency. Codependency essentially means limiting one's personal commitments to a single person and taking care of that person with such intensity as to be self-destructive.  Pouring all one's energy into trying to fix one person can narrow one's focus to the extent of neglecting all obligations to anyone else, and even to wronging them.  (From lying about why the other person is missing work all the way to being an accomplice when the other person commits crimes).  The extreme, pathological example of preferring breadth to depth in personal relationships might be pet hoarding.  The pet hoarder wants to save as many animals as possible and ends up with too many to give proper care to any.  This being said, I know of no evidence whatever suggesting that codependents tend to be politically conservative, or pet hoarders politically liberal.

In the larger society, a pathological emphasis on depth over breadth might be "amoral familialism,"  the inability to make a moral commitment beyond one's immediate family, or gang warfare.  These are social sub-groups that have very deep commitments to one another, but none to anyone beyond their immediate circle.  The pathology of breadth might be one where conflict levels are low, but people do not know their neighbors or have any real friends, just commercial dealings. And, conservatives like to point out, pathological expressions of depth are often a reaction against its pathological absence.

But I want to move on to another such pathological expression -- authoritarianism.

PS:  I forgot to add, one of the most obviously pathological manifestations of breadth over depth (at least to your average liberal) lies with Evangelical Christians, a very politically conservative bunch, and their attempts at making converts, by calling out to people in public places, asking if they have taken Jesus Christ as their personal savior.  Unsurprisingly, the attempt rarely succeeds.  Fred Clark likes to argue that successful evangelism requires hospitality and building of a relationship to get through.  No doubt your average Evangelical Christian would dismiss such talk as foolish. Anyone who doesn't take Jesus Christ as their personal savior will go to Hell for all eternity.  Surely saving people from Hell is more important than simple matters of manners.  But this would be more convincing if approaching random strangers were actually an effective way of winning converts.  It is not.

Other evangelists do not limit themselves to calling out to random strangers but try to persuade (bully?) passers by into signing a statement dedicating themselves to Jesus, or to read a prayer of repentance with them.  But really, as members of a religion that dismisses outward display in favor of what is in the heart, they should know better.  Signing a statement or reading a prayer when you don't really mean it is no more than an empty gesture.  What are they trying to achieve?  Slacktivist links to a delicious satire on the approach:  babylonbee.com/news/man-surprised-to-learn-he-gave-his-life-to-christ-at-newspring-church/

GREENWOOD, SC—Michael Garcia, 20, was extremely surprised to learn that he had committed his life to Jesus Christ at NewSpring Church’s Easter service, sources confirmed Wednesday afternoon. 

Garcia noted that the service had ended and he was getting up from his pew to leave with his family when two smiling ushers “kindly but forcibly” escorted him to a room in the church for a class titled ‘Your New Life At NewSpring,’ during which he and a roomful of others viewed a video featuring lead pastor Perry Noble. 

“We were all kind of looking around at each other, confused,” Garcia told reporters. “Then they put the video on and Mr. Noble informed us that the terms of service on the inside of the programs we were handed when we walked in the church clearly explained that by stepping foot on NewSpring’s property we were explicitly agreeing to give our lives to Jesus Christ. 

“We looked and sure enough, there it was, down in the fine print at the bottom.”
When reached for comment, Perry Noble would only repeat loudly, “1244 SALVATIONS LAST WEEKEND!!!”

Yeah, basically.  I don't know whether this shows that conservatives just don't do breadth well, or whether liberals are equally obnoxious and just not aware of it.  But it does stand of an example of what can go wrong with choosing breadth over depth.

Conservative Emphasis on Depth, Its Limits, and Its Failings

Just because I have criticized liberals for focusing excessively on social breadth and ignored the importance of depth does not mean that I am siding with conservatives, or that I think depth is superior.  If liberals tend to dismiss conservative preference for depth as mere bigotry, conservatives tend to see the liberal preference for breadth as outright treason.  They are right that liberals tend to be highly self-critical of our own society and its failings, while less so of the failings of other societies.  I can only ask them to understand:

The love of one’s own – one’s own culture, one’s own country and also one’s own person – manifests itself in self-criticism. The love of the other – of another person, another culture and even another religion – can be far more effusive; it can be unreserved. It is true that the prerequisite for love of the other is love of oneself. . . . Self-love must be a struggling, doubting, constantly questioning love if it is to avoid falling prey to narcissism, self-praise, self-satisfaction.

Exactly so.

Social depth is certainly valuable.  It makes for a tight-knit society, a more personal and more human  society than one that emphasized breadth over depth.  It answers the paradox of why conservatives, despite valuing compassion less than liberals, donation more to charity, do more volunteer work, etc. Charitable donation, volunteer work, civic engagement, and so forth are part of social depth.  A preference for breadth is going to sacrifice these things.  But depth has its problems as well.  Tight-knit societies can seem intrusive as well as caring.  They can be harsh in their treatment of non-conformists.  They are often cliquish and gossipy.  Their informal means of enforcing norms are not necessarily any more pleasant than the formal means used by broader but shallower societies.

But above all, people who prefer depth to breadth still have to figure out how to deal with the outside world.  At best, they tend to be incurious and indifferent to it, to ignore the outside world and hope that it won't bother them.  What if the outside world fails to cooperate?  I have discussed Robert Altemeyer's work The Authoritarians before and why it is the perfect example of pathologizing conservatism, i.e., the preference for depth over breadth.  Certainly, Altemeyer makes the case in favor of social breadth (which I do not dispute), but nowhere does he acknowledge the value of social depth at all, much less explain why breadth is worth any concomitant loss of depth -- or does he?

The closest if really comes to making the argument that breadth is better than depth is in his description of how differing groups played The Global Change Game, a complex, multi-player game intended to promote environmental awareness.  (Since environmentalism was not yet a culture war issue, there was no resistance to such a game among conservatives).  The liberal group (i.e., people who preferred breadth to depth) did not really see their assignment into different nationalities as meaningful and therefore were able to work together as one group to deal with the environmental problems the game threw at them (pp. 31-32).

Things were quite different (pp. 181-182, 186) when he played the game among people who he called right-wing authoritarians, and others might call authoritarian followers (no leaders), Haidt might call social conservatives (people who put a high value on social cohesion, but are not lacking in compassion), some might simply call conservatives, and I will call people who prefer depth to breadth (conservatives for short).  Assigned to separate groups, each group was close-knit and worked well together.  Leaders stayed home and sincerely addressed themselves to their groups' problems.  The various groups were not in any way hostile toward each other, but neither did they cooperate across boundaries.  They simply wanted to be left alone and were perfectly prepared to leave others alone in turn.  Wealthy countries made some charitable donations to poorer ones, but showed no interest in working with them on a serious level.  But the environmental problems thrown at them were bigger than any country could handle on its own, and no one knew how to reach beyond their groups to address them.  Indeed, Altemeyer comments, their preference for depth over breadth reached absurd lengths here.  They were, after all, among people just like themselves, people they could normally for real social depth with.  The assignment into different countries was perfectly arbitrary.  Yet once assigned, they limited their commitments to the people arbitrarily assigned to their group and showed no interest in anyone else.

I can see conservatives crying liberal bias here.  It is not as obvious as in Altemeyer's research, but the bias may subconsciously be there.  If you want people to start addressing global environmental problems, you are apt to favor people who can cooperate on a global scale to deal with them, i.e., people who value social breadth more than depth.  Doubtless other games could be devised that would show the advantages of depth over breadth.  But this game does ultimately illustrate a reality. There really are problems (environmental and otherwise) that are global in scale and that can only be addressed on a trans-national basis.  People who are absolutely dead-set against any sort of international cooperation as an intolerable threat to national sovereignty are going to be very poorly equipped to deal with such problems and can only respond by denying that they exist altogether.

Nor does this problem come up only in the context of global problems.  So far as I can make out from blog comment sections, the ideal of people who prefer depth to breadth is a society of nations all of perfect ethnic uniformity, with no migration and minimal interaction of any kind, avoiding conflict by having as little to do with each other as possible.  Even within a nation, the preference tends to be for small, tight-knit communities, as uniform as possible, with migration and interaction existent, but decidedly low.  I do not consider this approach to be a realistic one.  A country as large and as commercial as the United States cannot hold together without a significant amount of breadth in our social commitments.

Conservatives often argue against a preference for breadth over depth on the grounds that it is simply not human nature to broaden our social commitments, that the preference for depth over breadth is innate, and that liberals are trying to achieve the impossible.  To this I would respond that if there has been one long-run trend throughout the arc of history, it has been toward greater breadth.  Yes, granted, this has been paid for with a loss of depth.  And it has not always been pretty.  But it has happened.  This is not an argument for inevitable progress or being on the right side of history, or proof that breadth is preferable to depth because it has grown over time.  It is simply an argument that expansion is breadth is obviously possible, given that it has happened.

And I would make another response on the subject of preferring depth to breadth.  If the ideal of people who prefer depth to breadth is a world of self-contained units avoiding conflict by interacting as little as possible, I would ask when such a thing has ever happened.  If any social vision is impossible, it is that.