Bob Altemeyer Quotes

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to get a divorce. I'm saying that there's a teensy-weensy bit of hypocrisy in a group opposing gay marriage on religious and "save the family" grounds when one-fifth to one-third of its members have themselves been divorced.

Unfortunately, the wretchedly divisive 2008 GOP campaign will, I fear, poison the country for some time. High RWAs have been told over and over again by their trusted sources that Barack Obama is a Muslim socialist/Communist America-hating dictatorial terrorist intent on destroying the country. They have been led to intensely dislike, if not hate the president-elect, and it’s no accident, I submit, that the Secret Service noted a sharp increase in the number of threats to the Democratic standard-bearer as Palin’s crowds became more rabid. Furthermore the Republican National Committee, Fox News, and so on have sold authoritarian followers the myth that the Democrats won through massive voter fraud, because the media conspired to keep Americans from discovering “the truth” about Obama, and that the Democrats caused all the problems that have occurred over the past eight years. You could easily find postings on various blogs in the last weeks of the campaign saying people should be ready to “take up arms” against an “illegal Obama tyranny” to “preserve democracy and the Constitution.”

A wannabe dictator is all about dominance. He wants to dominate everyone and he will do whatever he can get away with to become “Number One.” Often the movement he leads becomes a personality clique, because ultimately it is really just about, only about, him. Trump appears every bit as narcissistic as he is aggressive and constantly striving for dominance. The most remarkable thing about Donald Trump as an authoritarian leader, in my mind, is that he’s so obvious about it. Look at his comments about Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong-un. While he has some negative evaluation of each, he praises all three for becoming autocrats and using their power to dominate their countries. How hard is it to see what he’s hoping to do? Who will stop him if he becomes President?

The need for social reinforcement runs so deeply in authoritarians, they will believe someone who says what they want to hear even if you tell them they should not. I have several times asked students or parents to judge the sincerity of a university student who wrote arguments either condemning, or supporting, homosexuals. But some subjects were told the student had been assigned to condemn (or support) homosexuals as part of a philosophy test to see how well the student could make up arguments for anything, on the spot. Other subjects were told the student could choose to write on either side of the issue, and had chosen to make the case she did. Obviously, you can’t tell anything about the real opinions of someone who was assigned the point of view of her essay. But high RWAs believed that the antihomosexual essay that a student was forced to write reflected that student’s personal views almost as much as when a student had chosen this point of view. In other words, as in the previous experiments, the authoritarians ignored the circumstances and believed the student really meant what she had been assigned to say--when they liked what she said.

Sometimes, when I tell people that I study authoritarian personalities, they say things like, "Oh, you mean neo-Nazis and the Klan." When these people are psychologists at conventions or the president of my university, I say "Right," because I know they will probably instantly forget whatever I reply. But I am more forthcoming with others. Most people seem surprised when I say, "No, I study normal folks, not Nazis." Few people, unless they are familiar with the history of fascism, understand that people as ordinary as you and I, and our friends and neighbors, might bring down democracy if the going got tough enough. But we are the people who, driven by fear and cuddling in our own self-righteousness, could create the wave that would lift the monsters among us to power. And once the monsters acquire the powers of the state, their evil explodes. Can one credibly talk about fascism in the North American context as we approach the year 2000? Is it even remotely possible that the horrors of Nazi Germany could someday occur in Canada or the United States? When I talk about prefascist personalities, do I seriously propose that many North Americans could act like Hitler, Himmler, Hoess, and so on? [...] although the Nazis did monsterous things, it is a mistake to thing that only ardent fascists and psychopathic killers became Nazis. Adolf Eichmann struck some as a bland person, not particularly anti-Semitic, who basically wanted to advance his career and so worked hard to impress his superiors. His evil was "banal." I can also imagine that many of those who made the arrests and transported the victims to the death camps would have been described as "good, decent people" by their families and neighbors. So would many of those who ran the slave labor camps in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners perished and maybe even the SS soldiers who massacred whole villages. You can be an ordinary Joe, or Lieutenant Calley, and still do terrible things. One of the first things Americans learned about the militias, in an Associated Press story dated April 27, 1995, is that they were "ordinary people who feel pushed."

Thus while Barack Obama may genuinely seek a more inclusive, consensual approach to the country’s dire problems, many high RWAs may say “Count me out.” Their leaders–social dominators pursuing their own agendas–will instead stoke the often racist dislike for Obama that was so evident at Republican rallies in the closing days of the campaign. Almost nothing would give me greater pleasure than seeing the research on authoritarian personalities become totally irrelevant, now that we have seemingly put the nightmare behind us and begun anew. I’d much rather people get interested in my next book instead, which is about a far more pleasant subject: my studies of the sexual behavior of university students. But I’m afraid www.theauthoritarians.org will remain worth people’s visiting for the next little while at least.

Ethnocentrism comes naturally when we identify with a group, but authoritarian followers are profoundly ethnocentric. Whereas some people will deliberately expose themselves to different ideas, experiences, cultures to avoid living in an “echo chamber,” followers want to live smack dab in the middle of one and are glad to do their part of the echoing. Surrounding themselves with people who agree with them, clapping together, chanting together, cheering together, and marching together is convincing evidence for them that their beliefs are right.

These dangers can be parried. The United States has far more authoritarian followers in its midst than democracies usually do, but even so they do not comprise a majority of the nation’s population. If they did, Donald Trump would now be enjoying his second term—likely for the rest of his life. High RWAs can be defeated where it counts, at the ballot box, but it will take a lot of work because authoritarians vote more often than Moderates and Lows. Furthermore, various Republican state legislators are doing all they can to keep their opponents from being able to vote at all. Democracy will probably only survive in America if the non-authoritarians there plow through all the barriers and resolutely cast ballots in elections for the next decade or so. It will take yet more monumental energy and effort like that which carried the day in 2020. But the Americans who rise to defend their country in its hour of need will not only be saving themselves, they will be protecting the blessings of liberty for everyone’s posterity around the planet. We are at a crossroad in history, but take heart: You can do something about it. Involve others who do not appreciate the situation. Determine the outcome.

Demographically, the odds line up against Trump’s reelection. He draws much more support from older voters than he does from younger ones. But really old voters (and this is being written by someone in his 80s) kick the bucket a lot more than fuzzy-cheeked youths. And it turns out people do not inevitably get appreciably more conservative as they get older, but instead seem to carry forward the beliefs they formed in their younger years. Republicans have known for a long time—and that’s why they started recruiting politically inactive white evangelicals en masse—that the up-and-coming generations will be clenched-teeth liberal on balance. Generation Z could give an authoritarian leader nightmares. Add to this the fact that Trump supporters are dying faster than necessary from a disease their leader encourages them to catch, and you can see the climb is getting steeper and steeper for Republicans in 2022 and 2024. But Trump’s loyalist candidates can still win control of Congress in 2022, and he can still become president again in 2024, if enough persons who oppose him do not vote. You can’t possibly think that people who are ready to die for him won’t bother to show up at the polls, and they’ll proselytize like crazy to bring in converts the way they did in 2020. The question is, will his opponents show up too, especially given all the roadblocks Republican legislatures have thrown up to prevent them from voting? The GOP knows this is game-set-match for them personally. They are considerably outnumbered, but by no means defeated. Authoritarians commonly think they will prevail by steely force of will, and sometimes they do. You have to meet their attack with resolve and commitment, or they will win.

The main reason, I submit, is that most of Trump’s backers are authoritarian followers—people who submit too much to the leaders they consider legitimate, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want. “Well yeah,” you might say. “But that’s like saying an apple is an apple because it’s an apple.” And it would be golden delicious example of a rhetorical tautology except social scientists have had a good, independent way of measuring this kind of authoritarianism since the 1970s. And it was clear from the first studies that political “conservatives”—from ordinary voters to elected officials—tended to score highly on this personality test (Chapter 6 of The Authoritarians, the book on this website). We can gain considerable insight into Donald Trump’s supporters from the research on authoritarianism.

Fundamentalist parents could talk to their children about being Christians before talking about being Baptists. They could talk about being God’s children before talking about being Christians. They could talk about all being brothers and sisters before that. They could.

Republicans fear the wrath of Trump so much because he owns the GOP base. Always ready to emphasize the obvious, I have said many times that without a crowd of ardent supporters, a wannabe dictator in a democracy is just a clown on a soap box. The crowd is now well-assembled in America. Indeed it was brought together by Republican strategists for their own ends, with only a few like Barry Goldwater anticipating the newcomers would turn the “big tent” into a tabernacle and drive out all the non-believers. Having sown the seeds of its own destruction, the GOP is now reaping the whirlwind. We understand quite well who Trump’s followers are. The October 2019 Monmouth Poll reported in Authoritarian Nightmare found they are the most prejudiced people in America. Their prejudices and many other shortcomings are rooted in authoritarianism, and studies show that authoritarian followers have many emotional and cognitive weaknesses which explain why they are longing for a strong leader who will take their side against the “others” they find threatening. They are highly fearful, ethnocentric, and have uncritically copied the ideas of the authorities in their lives. Their beliefs are highly compartmentalized, even contradictory; they use many double-standards in their judgments; they have lots of trouble distinguishing good from bad evidence; they are highly defensive and dogmatic; they have little self-insight, and a host of other imperfections. Demographically, the two pillars of Trump’s base are white Christian evangelicals and white male blue-collar workers. Both groups score highly on a measure of submission to authority named the RWA Scale.

Could it be that the more parents and clergy stress religion to a child, the more likely the child will feel guilt or fear when questions arise later? If so, the emphasis becomes self-defeating at this critical time, because parents and clergy want children to bring these questions to them, not hide the seeds of doubt. But the more times a child has heard that her religion has a hold on the absolute truth, the harder it may be for her to ask for help in reconciling cracks that appear in the absolute.

So (to foreshadow later chapters a little) suppose you are a completely unethical, dishonest, power-hungry, dirt-bag, scum-bucket politician who will say whatever he has to say to get elected. (I apologize for putting you in this role, but it will only last for one more sentence.) Whom are you going to try to lead, high RWAs or low RWAs? Isn’t it obvious? The easy-sell high RWAs will open up their arms and wallets to you if you just sing their song, however poor your credibility. Those crabby low RWAs, on the other hand, will eye you warily when your credibility is suspect because you sing their song. So the scum-bucket politicians will usually head for the right-wing authoritarians, because the RWAs hunger for social endorsement of their beliefs so much they’re apt to trust anyone who tells them they’re right. Heck, Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany running on a law-and-order platform just a few years after he tried to overthrow the government through an armed insurrection.

In another sense, however, the 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.