I went ahead and bought Authoritarian Nightmare by John Dean and Robert Altmeyer, even though I suspected (correctly, it turned out), that the book would do little more than recap earlier writings I had already read.
For anyone who does not know, John Dean was an aide to Richard Nixon who was implicated in Watergate, and who was the first to testify against his bosses. At the time, Dean saw the Republican Party close ranks in favor of the rule of law and against Nixon once the full extent of his criminality became clear. Dean's political career was over and he stayed out of the spotlight until he increasingly began seeing the Republican Party running off the rails. He did some research to make sense of it and ultimately found the explanation that made most sense was with social psychologist Robert Altemeyer's research on the authoritarian personality.
Altemeyer and other scholars of the authoritarian personality came to their field wanting to understand how democracies fail. Their inspiration (as is so often the case) was the failures of democracy in Europe between WWI and WWII. Central to research on the subject, and to Dean and Altmeyer's book, is that to understand how demagogues subvert democracy, understanding the demagogue is less important than understanding his followers. Obviously, Trump is a pathological personality in numerous ways. While we want to have as few individuals like him as possible, the fact remains that the United States is a big country, and out of so many people it will be impossible to avoid have some pathological individuals. But a demagogue without followers is powerless. So more important than understanding where demagogues come from is understanding why so many people flock to them.
Much of the book is unoriginal. Its speculation on how Trump got to be the pathological person that he is parallel what his niece, Mary wrote in her own book. Its general discussion of right wing authoritarians (authoritarian followers), social dominance orientation (typical authoritarian leaders) and double highs (people with both traits). Authoritarian followers are conventional people, submissive to leaders the consider legitimate, and aggressive on their behalf. They are more interested in loyalty to a leader than in a neutral set of values, more swayed by authority and group loyalty than by facts and logic, and unconcerned about people outside their in-group. And they are driven in their aggression by fear and self-righteousness.
People with a high social dominance orientation (SDO) are potential authoritarian leaders. Less common that authoritarian followers, high SDO individuals are cynically amoral and seek to advance their own fortunes with no regard for others. That sounds like Donald Trump, all right. Then there are the double highs, who have the traits of both an authoritarian follower and and authoritarian leader. They have the drive to both dominate and submit. It seems a strange combination. But a double high may seek to dominate and demand submission from others. Or a double high may not be at the top of the hierarchy and be submissive to people above but domineering to people below. Or a double high may seek domination of his (most double highs are male) group, but want submission within the group.
Double highs are not common, but they are particularly dangerous. The authors describe them as combining the worst traits of an authoritarian leader and an authoritarian follower. Double highs combine the dogmatism, religious fundamentalism and self-righteousness of authoritarian followers with the power madness and amoral manipulation of authoritarian leaders. Except that Trump does not fit that description very well at all. Whatever else the man may be, he is neither dogmatic nor a religious fanatic. Nor does he strike me as self-righteous in the manner of (say) Ted Cruz or Newt Gingrich. Trump comes across as unapologetically amoral, so maybe he is not a double high, but only an SDO.
Ah, but there is one double high feature about him that the authors strangely missed. They implausibly claim that Trump probably has not had a submissive inclination since his father died, but that manifestly is not true. His submissive behavior toward authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Erdogan, Mohammed Bin Salman, or Kim Jong-un is notorious. Yes, one can attempt to explain it away. Maybe Trump is submissive to Putin because of blackmail. Maybe he was just sucking up to Xi to get a good trade deal. Maybe fawns on Erdogan because of his Turkish investments and backs MBS to the hilt for fear he will raise oil prices. But Kim Jong-un? It seems a safe bet that Trump has no investments in North Korea, has never had any dealings with North Korea that could open him to blackmail, has nothing to gain by his friendliness with Kim and really not much reason to fear him. (Yes, North Korea has nukes, but presumably it fears U.S. retaliation if it ever uses them). I suppose Trump could be buttering Kim up in hopes of getting him to agree to a big nuclear disarmament deal. But that wouldn't explain why he so relished hearing how Kim executed his own uncle.
I would therefore be more inclined to agree with the authors when they say:
Other social dominators who have been beaten by the alpha can similarly endorse submission. They have power leader's lieutenants and sergeants and enjoy exerting it. It is in their interest that everybody else submit, so they score highly on the RWA scale as well.
Trump seems to recognize that authoritarian leaders like Putin, Xi, Erdogan, MBS and Kim exercise a kind of power he does not have the opportunity -- and perhaps not the raw brutality -- to exercise. So he submits to them and vicariously relishes their cruelty that he cannot exercise himself.
There were a few other interesting revelations not found in Altemeyer's earlier online book. A survey of state legislators taken in the mid-1990's showed a wide range of authoritarian scores for Democrats, but Republicans all tended to cluster high, except in Connecticut. This would suggest that the Republican Party has been moving in an authoritarian direction for a long time. Another quite disturbing finding was that surveys on authoritarianism found that people are endorsing more authoritarian views (i.e. answering yes on more of the statements measuring authoritarianism) than the have seen before. Where in the past many people might answer yes to a few questions, today more are more people are widely answering yes. And double highs, once rare, are becoming increasingly common -- as many as 14% of respondents in one survey. Another interesting finding -- when asked if Trump should declare the election void if he lost, two-thirds of Trump supporters said no. Only 14% said yes and 19% were unsure. Those numbers have since moved in a most alarming direction.*
But the entry in the book I found the most interesting of all was not part of the body at all, but a footnote. Apparently Altmeyer made a career studying authoritarian psychology to understand how people could reject democracy. His focus was mostly theoretical or historical -- how it happened in other societies, and the nitty-gritty of authoritarian psychology. Dean, striving to understand what had happened to what was once his party, found his answers in Altemeyer's research and approached Altemeyer to express his fear that the Republicans were becoming an authoritarian party, and that what Altemeyer had made his study was happening right here and now. Altemeyer, preoccupied with running experiments to test hypotheses, had not noticed it was happening! When Dean pointed it out, Altemeyer was dismissive, saying that if there was a threat at all, it was a long way off. He has since acknowledged the mistake.
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*Although many offer the "just asking questions" rationalization.
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