Some thoughts on authoritarianism and politics

Research on authoritarianism, which dates back at least to the classic set of studies published by Adorno and colleagues around the mid-20th century, is especially relevant as we move forward. There is of course authoritarianism as a form of governing, which is not where my focus is, and there is the psychology of authoritarianism. The latter is of interest to me and has been for decades. I have published a few papers on and off dealing with facets of authoritarianism as a personality trait or individual difference since about 20 years ago. I really should do more. 

The basic theory of authoritarianism at this point has its origins in the work of Bob Altemeyer. He took the original F-Scale and developed a better measure of authoritarianism. Altemeyer's questionnaire was pretty decent, but because of how its questions had been developed, it was really difficult to understand which facets of authoritarianism were most predictive of specific attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Duckitt and his colleagues and Funke have each come up with better measures of authoritarianism that allow us to look at the three dimensions of authoritarianism originally formulated by Altemeyer. Those three dimensions are conventionalism, authoritarian submission, and authoritarian aggression. What are those dimensions specifically? Think of conventionalism as dealing with your beliefs about traditions, social change and whatnot. Authoritarians tend to be very fond of their traditions and are averse to social change. Authoritarian submission is best described as another way of saying obedience - as long as the person giving the orders is considered legitimate. Think of the January 6th insurrectionists, many of whom have testified that they did what they did because they believed Trump wanted them to. They were, plainly put, just following orders. Authoritarian aggression is a willingness to accept or engage in aggressive and violent behavior if sanctioned by an authority figure who is perceived as legitimate. So if the authoritarian leader demands that a vulnerable minority group should be harmed or demands vigilante behavior, those who score as highly authoritarian will go along. 

One figure that seems to come up repeatedly when I have any time to read about authoritarianism is that about one in four individuals would likely be a high scorer on validated measures of right-wing authoritarianism. So one in four people you encounter, statistically, is an authoritarian. Now you might tell me I have to be kidding or that I could not possibly be right. All I know is that surveys like one published in Morning Consult in 2021 seem to be pretty consistent. Now keep in mind that as social animals, we are going to be selective about whom we associate. If you're not authoritarian, you probably aren't going to have that many authoritarian friends, and any family or in-laws who are authoritarian are probably not among your favorites to visit. Don't worry. They feel the same about you. I bet that seems like a comforting statement. It's no surprise that folks generally want to gravitate toward others who share their worldview. Whether or not authoritarianism is more hereditary or if it is socially learned is certainly up for debate. I'm a bit of an old-school social psychologist, so I tend to go with Altemeyer's social learning perspective, but I could be wrong on that.

So what does this mean for politics? It means that any would-be despot anywhere in the world starts with a floor of 25% support right from the get-go. Now if you live in a stable democracy during a relatively stable era economically and so forth, that 25% of the population who just happen to be authoritarian will either cast their votes for whichever mainstream candidates are available or simply avoid voting altogether. But if times are difficult (we are emerging still from a pandemic that disrupted nearly every facet of our lives) and a charismatic wannabe savior comes out of the woodwork promising you that he or she alone can fix whatever ails your society, that 25% will latch on to that leader like ticks to a dog. 

The trick is for an authoritarian leader to attract some subset of individuals who are not authoritarian but who are unhappy with the status quo in order to have a shot at dictatorship. We happen to live in a time where a lot of folks in the US have legitimate concerns and grievances that have been ignored for decades. They may decide to cast their lot with a potential dictator simply to effect some change or get some relief from what they consider their problems. All the would be dictator has to do is promise to fix their communities, the price of fuel or eggs, or whatever else it might take. Think of some of the concerns that Trump addressed in his 2016 campaign or in this election cycle. In 2016, we were still emerging from the Great Recession and I doubt too many of us felt like a recovery ever happened. In 2024, we're dealing with the fallout of the COVID pandemic, so there is genuine trauma that a despot could exploit. Normally a stable democratic society should be relatively immune to a despot's efforts to rule. I usually think of the more fertile ground for authoritarian dictatorships as fragile democratic systems that have existed only a brief time. Yet here we are. I will leave it for the historians and political scientists to explain how the US turned out to be much more of a fertile ground for an autocratic leader to get elected than would have been expected not that many years ago. I am going to make a wild guess that a number of bad (for us regular folks) policy decisions going back several decades - such as outsourcing our manufacturing, ignoring infrastructure, etc. have made enough folks either experience genuine loss or at minimum feel vulnerable. The decision to deregulate media so much that we all now seem to be stuck in our own tribal media bubbles, which was again made a few decades ago, definitely did us no favors. If institutions seem to be failing and trust is lost in them, an authoritarian leader can persuade quite a number of folks to fall in line for the promise of a return to whatever the "good old days" might have meant for them. I think this in part what we are witnessing right now in the US and elsewhere on our aching planet. 

I am not sure that there is an easy fix here. Once trust in institutions is gone, it's hard to regain that trust. It's not for a lack of trying either. We also have to deal with the aftermath of a despot once he falls. They usually do eventually. Unfortunately, we don't know if what replaces him will be better. It could be legitimately worse. Our challenge as informed citizens is to figure out how to protect whatever remaining institutions exist that still enjoy some universal trust and hope that those institutions can serve as a foundation to transition back to democracy. That will be a tall order, and one arguably already doomed to failure. We won't know until we try. I will be looking at the composition of the US House of Representatives once that data is known, which will be pretty clear within the next week. If as hoped and expected the Democratic Party flipped the House, that chamber could be a bulwark against the most draconian policies that would otherwise come our way. If I seem a bit pessimistic, it's that I often don't see a return to some form of liberal democracy once it is taken away, or in this case given away. I guess we can see some hope from last year's Polish elections, but I really don't want to hang my hat on that repeating in the US. We'll start to know quickly in the waning days of January 2025 and in the weeks that follow just how much of our democracy we will lose. The authoritarians in our communities won't care. The rest of us should.