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.

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.

So if a man and a woman do the same thing, the man is much more likely to be labeled a homosexual. The double standard was especially pronounced among the male students, and everyone knows how freaky guys get about male homosexuality. But you could find it in the thinking of both sexes. Why does the double standard exist? I suspect it's because people consider male homosexuality so much worse than female-female love making. The greater social taboo implies that if a guy does something seriously "homo," it says more about what he must be, about impulses he can't control, than it would say about a woman doing the same thing, because it's not condemned for women. It's a pernicious attribution, to be sure, but double standards are not known for their fairness. Neither, for that matter, is homophobia.

Often one person can steel another, and another and another, until many are working together. You don’t have to form a majority to have an effect. Two or three people speaking out can sometimes get a school board, a church board, a board of aldermen to reconsider authoritarian actions. Lack of any opposition teaches bullies simply to go for more. But it takes one person, an individual, to start the opposition.

Despite all the factors handicapping the Republicans from the start, and the painfully inept, lurching, hypocritical, unfocused campaign they ran, some 60 million Americans voted for McCain/Palin. That’s a pretty sobering realization. I think it shows Barack Obama was working against a significantly stronger headwind than John McCain was, yet he prevailed.

One consequence of the followers’ strong need for consensual validation, experiments have found, is that they will trust someone who says things they believe, even if there is a lot of evidence that the person does not really believe what he says. They’re just so glad to hear their views coming back to them, they ignore solid reasons why the person might be insincere or outright lying. Relatively UNauthoritarian people, on the other hand, are downright suspicious of someone who might have ulterior motives for reinforcing their beliefs. It is therefore much easier to “con” authoritarian followers, as many a TV evangelist, radio shock-jockey and flag-waving politician knows. It’s no accident that Donald Trump, who had only loosely organized and not particularly right-wing political beliefs, became a Republican politician when he decided to declare war on both the Democrats and Republicans. That’s where the “suckers” are most concentrated, the people you can fool all of the time. (It’s another story, but the GOP largely brought this on itself by deliberately courting these folks.)

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.

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.”

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.

Our studies have focused upon the religious decisions made by college freshmen both because they are a convenient group for psychology professors to examine and because they have just emerged from an often turbulent time when they scrutinized the family religion. But will the decisions reached by eighteen-year-olds hold for the rest of their lives? If they have decided to stay in the fold, will they still be found there decades later? If they have decided to chuck the family religion, will they come back to it when they have children of their own? Speaking as middle-aged adults who once thought that "Fifty is really old," but who now consider fifty "much younger than sixty," we can testify that one's views can change as the growth rings accumulate. So maybe youthful decisions to keep or abandon the family religion will be reversed later.

Authoritarians did not disappear after George W. Bush left office and the United States avoided financial collapse. Instead they flocked to the Tea Party Movement, which the Republican Party cleverly (it thought) helped create and gathered unto itself. But the movement drove moderates from the GOP and sent radical conservatives to Congress. The “Tea Party Party” produced eight years of non-compromising stalemate in Washington as they imposed their own agenda on the Republican leadership. Now American authoritarians have united behind a presidential candidate who unabashedly says he wants to destroy the traditional Republican Party and deal a devastating blow to the Democrats as well. Is that anything to worry about?

Today’s Tea Party movement began in early 2009 in reaction to the American government’s efforts to stabilize the banking system and keep the nation from sinking into economic turmoil. In October, 2008 the Democrat-controlled Congress passed a “Wall St. bailout” bill (the “TARP” bill) proposed by the Bush administration, which Bush immediately signed. This bill deeply offended some economic conservatives who held a “let the chips fall where they may, no matter what” view of free market economics. Anger among economic conservatives rose yet higher in early 2009 when Congress responded to President Obama’s call for a massive economic stimulus to keep the recession from turning into a Depression. Almost every major Western government, whatever its political stripe, went deeply into the red at this time to keep its economy afloat. Republicans in Congress voted massively against the bill, and Democrats took the heat for trying to stop a recession that the Republicans had largely caused by deregulating the banking system.

The New York Times found the death rate from COVID in counties which Trump won handily in November 2020 was nearly five times as high as the rate in counties where he ran poorly. And even those who thus far have remained unaffected are unwittingly developing a mini-herd immunity to herd immunity, creating a residue of targets for the disease that mass inoculations cannot protect. Yet they support and even adore the person who has caused their suffering more than anyone else, Donald Trump. He has led many of his supporters to their graves and crippled others for life, and they love him anyway. That’s loyalty. It is also deep and abiding authoritarianism. Trump’s core supporters have plighted their troth to him whole hog. They have crossed over into his reality and become anti-matter to the truth. You cannot reach them with facts, studies, or logic. If you try to have a rational conversation with them about Trump, immigrants, COVID, the election, capitalism versus socialism versus communism, whatever, the righter you are, the more they will cling to their beliefs. No matter what Trump does, they will believe his account of it. No matter what he asks them to do, they will trust his reason for doing it. They are ready to risk death rather than doubt. So, many, many of them are doomed.

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.

Eleanor now considers herself an agnostic, having stopped thinking of herself as a Lutheran in a religious sense whens he was about seventeen. However, "I'm still a member of the Lutheran church. I still go on Christmas Eve and all that," and "if I get married, I'm going to get married in a Lutheran church." She is now at peace with her agnosticism and no longer feels any guilt or fear because of her beliefs. "Just because I don't believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, I'm not going to be damned to some eternal hell, if there is such a thing. It just does not make any sense to me." If she could find some way to reconcile religious teachings with her current belief, Eleanor could conceivably go back to being an active Lutheran. But it isn't likely because "I just don't believe that, really, any religion has the absolute answer." In response to the "Back to the Future" scenario, Eleanor said that she would tell her younger self about the intolerance, contradictions, closed-mindedness, and so on that she saw in religion. Her fourteen-year-old self would have been surprised at all this, and "a bit stubborn," but she "would have gone home and thought about it and started looking at things on her own." Why is Eleanor different from most people her age, who question but then accept religious teachings? "I have always considered myself to be really analytical about things. I can't knowingly have two beliefs that contradict each other." Also, it would be hypocritical to pretend to believe in something that she cannot accept, something she believes many "religious" people do.