The Authoritarians

No, not The Aristocrats. (I first heard that joke when I worked in theater more than 40 years ago, but the punchline was The Debonairs, which I actually like better.)

Psychologist Bob Altemeyer wrote The Authoritarians in 2006, but it is more relevant than ever today. On the website promoting the book he has provided a summary of its relevance to the present situation in the form of what amounts to a blog post, written in August of last year. Do read the whole thing. After noting that yes, he has appointed right wing extremist judges and eliminated environmental regulations and that sort of thing, which some people apparently like, he asks the obvious question:

[T]he fidelity of Trump’s base remains astounding. He has made so many unforced errors because of his lack of understanding and low problem-solving intelligence, his vast ignorance, his enormous, never-ending dishonesty which seems as reflexive as his breathing, his explosive hostility, his uncontrollable vanity, his despicable demeaning of women, his squalid vulgarity, the stupidity of his stereotypes, the shabbiness of his thinking, the buffoonery of his parading, his attacks on the institutions he needs most to safeguard the country, his incredibly poor judgment about the character of those whom he has brought into his administration, his equally mind-numbing lack of judgment about foreign leaders, friend and foe, and  his willingness to inflame Americans’ disagreements and turn them into conflagrations which make us that deeply divided house which the Gospels and Abraham Lincoln warned against—how can his supporters have stood so solidly behind him? You’d think they’d be having some second thoughts at least.

The answer is that people with authoritarian personalities don't actually think. They just want to be told what to think. They don't know why they believe what they believe, other than that somebody told them to think it. That's what they want. They are impervious to facts and logic because they never used them in the first place. He has a lot of interesting specifics to say about this but I'll pull a summary .

Compared to most people, studies have shown that authoritarian followers get their beliefs and opinions from the authorities in their lives, and hardly at all by making up their own minds. They memorize rather than reason. Religion provides a good example of this: authoritarians tend to believe strongly in whatever religion they were raised, the result of having had their religion strongly emphasized to them while they were growing up. . . .

Researchers discovered decades ago that people validate their social opinions socially to a certain extent by selecting news outlets, friends, and so on that will tell them they are right. This produces an illusion of consensus, at least among all the “right” people like themselves. Almost everybody does this, but authoritarian followers do it much more because they don’t have many ideas of their own, beliefs they have worked out for themselves and can defend. And they are much more likely to expose themselves only to sources of information that tell them what they want to believe. Getting only one side of a story raises the chances you will get it wrong, but as Ralph Peters, formerly the military analyst at Fox News, said recently, “People that only listen to Fox have an utterly skewed view of reality.”

So read it all, but you won't recognize yourself there if you should. Because you don't think.