The Republican Brain (18 page)

Studying a sample of nearly 1,200 Canadian students and parents with such statements, Altemeyer failed to find
any
really strong left-wing authoritarians. Interestingly, though, he found that some right-wing authoritarians affirmed some of the left-wing authoritarian statements. Perhaps these more confused and ambiguous authoritarians (Altemeyer called them “wild cards”) just wanted something to smash. As he concluded: “If you want authoritarians on the right, I have found tons. But if you want a living, breathing, scientifically certifiable authoritarian on the left, I have not found a single one.”

Is it possible that cases of left-wing extremism seen in the past and occasionally in the present—the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, or the Earth Liberation Front—are attributable to a few politically ambiguous authoritarians who found their way into left-wing movements? Such was Altemeyer's speculation. The trouble is, there really aren't many such movements in the United States today to look at. Psychologists weren't around to study the Russian Bolsheviks of 1917, the Jacobins of the French Revolution, and so on. There just isn't much data.

What there is, though, is a growing volume of psychological data on left and right in modern democracies. And “the data don't really support the rigidity of the left hypothesis,” explains the University of Arkansas's Scott Eidelman. You might find
some
rigid left extremists, but the distribution of rigid ideologues does not appear to be politically balanced or symmetrical. That is
not
to say that in a very different political context, such as a communist country, you wouldn't find more authoritarians lined up on the left, supporting the left-wing status quo. “If you don't think Pol Pot was a left authoritarian, I don't know what to say,” says Philip Tetlock. “It's just manifestly obvious that such creatures exist.” If the status quo becomes the far left, and this situation persists for several generations, then we would surely expect authoritarians to flip sides, because they are conventional and defer to the established authorities. But are these people really “left wing” any longer at that point?

That's a matter of definition, but Altemeyer would then call them right wing authoritarians or psychological right wingers, even in an established leftist regime. During the Cold War, for instance, he suggests that the hardliners on the American and Soviet sides were
both
authoritarians who wanted their country to fight the out-group—from whom they were separated only by an accident of birth.

Why Not Better Distinguish Conservatives from Authoritarians?

A related objection is that when it comes to resisting new information and belief change, we're not really talking about conservatism at all, we're talking about authoritarianism, an extreme or at least separable incarnation of it. In one version of the argument, there are at least three different types of conservatives:
laissez-faire
or
economic
conservatives,
status quo
conservatives (like Edmund Burke), and finally
authoritarian
conservatives, who are socially conservative and traditionalist, and motivated most of all by their distrust of otherness and their groupthink.

In this account, the first two groups of conservatives are intellectual and principled. The latter are more primal, driven more by visceral negative responses to otherness and a desire to impose their way of doing things on people not like them. And thus, while all the types of conservatism may find themselves joined together (as they currently are in the United States), they are, in principle, separable and have become disjointed at other places in the world or at other times in the United States itself.

The objection doesn't really matter in a practical sense, given that the U.S. Republican Party today combines all three strains, and the U.S. Republican Party is my central target. By this token, whether I'm criticizing Republicanism, conservatism, or authoritarianism, these are distinctions without a difference because the party that calls itself conservative blends together all these strands, acting together as a team. “What we see having happened since the 1970s and 1980s is that conservatism has become an authoritarian conservatism,” explains Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt University.

But I think one can go farther. On the one hand, it is possible to imagine a right-wing revolution that authoritarians would support, but that honest status quo conservatives, like Edmund Burke, would abhor. Consider, for instance, a strong erosion of core civil liberties and protections for minorities that have persisted since the Bill of Rights. So I agree that you could theoretically find a way to pit the groups against each other, whereupon principled conservatives ought to come out strongly against authoritarians.

At the same time, though, they would appear to lie on a continuum psychologically because the resistance to change is so deeply rooted in both groups. True, this resistance leads different people to different actions or positions, with authoritarians more likely to support some dangerous right-wing fantasy that could crash the servers of democracy. But both groups, on a psychological level, need order, structure, and certainty. And they have far more problems with their opposite: disorder, chaos, uncertainty, and ambiguity.

What about Centrists and Independents?

Not everybody is a staunch liberal or conservative. In fact, in recent years, the number of independents in U.S. politics has been on the rise, from 30 percent of the electorate in 2005 to 37 percent today. How does this theory account for that?

A psychological perspective on independents, moderates, and centrists must first recognize that not only are they often different from liberals and conservatives, but they're also different from each other. A recent Pew study of independents, for instance, found that they included four distinct groups:
libertarians
, who lean conservative economically and basically are individualists;
post-moderns
, who are young, hip, and highly secular and pro-environment but not very liberal on classic economic issues or race;
disaffecteds
, who are financially stressed by the recession and have a very negative view of politics, but tend to be strongly religious and conservative; and
bystanders
, who tend to be young and just aren't politically engaged. How do you make sense of this complicated stew?

First, and as these descriptions show, an independent isn't necessarily the same thing as a centrist or moderate. In particular, those who aren't politically engaged may have personalities or dispositions that could very well lead to the adoption of strong ideological views. It could just be that they're not knowledgeable enough about politics to see how their values align with the current political parties. Even among authoritarians, who have a deep affinity for the right, it has been shown that a process of ideological “activation” often needs to occur, through political engagement and learning about the issues, before they really realize who they are and become their political selves. Given the relationship that we've already seen between political sophistication and motivated reasoning, that makes lots of sense.

The independents thus include both a group that isn't very engaged—but might have a very strong latent ideology—but also individuals who may be very engaged, but end up with an ideologically blended political identity or less strong partisan attachments. Libertarians, for instance, are a classic ideological blend, socially liberal and often not very religious, but fiscally conservative.

You wouldn't call libertarians “centrists,” but this theory explains centrists or moderates very well too. First, a lot of them may be in the middle of the psychological range just as they are in the middle of the political range. If you think, for instance, about the two personality dimensions that most reliably distinguish liberals and conservatives—Openness and Conscientiousness—it immediately becomes apparent that someone who is near the midpoint on
both
measures could make for a good centrist. Centrists or moderates also probably have to have a reasonably high amount of integrative complexity, as they are forced to weigh the ideologies to both their left and right.

When it comes to party identification, Openness to Experience appears to work in two separate ways. As we've seen, it strongly predicts political liberalism. But it also predicts weaker partisan attachment—which, when you think about it, also fits the profile. People who are open are not followers of groups; they like to distinguish themselves and appear different from others. To stand out.

Thus, many independents may be Open and very socially liberal, but not willing to strongly commit to the Democrats, and very capable of finding many bones to pick with the party. The so-called
post-moderns
in the current crop of independents sound like they might have this characteristic. (This also, of course, suggests less conformism and solidarity among Democrats than among Republicans—and more opinion intensity on the right than the left. And indeed, the data back that up. In a May 2011 Pew study, for instance, 70 percent of “staunch conservatives” had very unfavorable views of President Obama, but only 45 percent of “solid liberals” had very favorable views of him.)

Clearly, this book does not focus its attention on independents or the political center—for the obvious reason that it is the two U.S. parties today that most reliably reflect psychologically grounded differences between liberalism and conservatism. In other words, a psychological understanding of left and right is probably at its best when it comes to explaining today's partisan polarization, and the recent course of U.S. politics in general. That's because the core psychological differences we're discussing here ought to be heightened, not lessened, on the political poles and among the most engaged and knowledgeable on both sides. Here, most of all, is where politics becomes an utter clash between worldviews, and also psychologies.

What about Political Conversions?

I've fielded a number of objections to the psychological analysis of our political differences, and I believe the basic approach, rooted in the work of Jost and his colleagues (but also many other researchers working in this area), remains intact. Now, let me add a new argument in its favor, one that shows its surprising explanatory power.

One thing that is deeply persuasive about the psychological account of liberal and conservative differences is that it does a very good job of explaining left-to-right and right-to-left political conversions—whether permanent or, more intriguingly, temporary.

Right-to-left conversions are all around us today in the U.S., as the Republican Party shifts further to the right and alienates moderates. I'll discuss some of these cases later, using examples like the conservative commentator and former Bush speechwriter David Frum, and the former Reagan administration official Bruce Bartlett. But let me say right now that these cases tend to have something in common. These are often people who lament the right's loss of nuance and intellectual seriousness, its betrayal of principles, and its intolerance of dissent (namely, theirs). Therefore, it appears that these de-converting conservatives, these RINOs (Republicans-in-name-only), are reacting against authoritarianism, and are people who may have more need for cognition and more integrative complexity. The death of nuance on the right, the ideological extremism, pushes them away.

What about left-to-right shifts? If the United States were moving to the left, as it was at least perceived to be in the 1960s, you might see more of these shifts for reasons of integrative complexity and nuance. But the U.S. isn't moving to the left, so you don't. (Although we may note that in the first generation of conservative revolutionaries in the U.S., people like William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol were surely quite independent-minded, nuanced, and intellectual.)

But large scale political change needn't be the only motivator of a political conversion. The psychological account of ideology also explains a surprising but regularly observed phenomenon: Liberals turning more conservative, at least temporarily, and then reverting to their liberalism again—almost as if they've woken from a trance.

When this happens, it is not generally for intellectual or principled reasons. Rather, it seems to occur for emotional or even physiological ones.

Fear makes liberals more conservative, and even authoritarian. Just make them mortally afraid, and they'll become much more inclined to support decisive leaders and crackdowns on civil liberties. This nicely explains why the United States became more conservative following 9/11—and why George W. Bush's approval ratings consistently went up following the issuance of terrorism alerts by the Department of Homeland Security.

This phenomenon accounts nicely for “liberal hawks,” like Christopher Hitchens, who wanted to attack Iraq in the early 2000s. It also explains why some of these hawks later recoiled in horror at what they had done. (I should know: I was a liberal hawk who awoke from the trance, and even felt a need to do intellectual penance for it afterwards.) As we'll see in the next chapter, a brain region called the amygdala may be implicated in this effect.

Fear isn't the only factor that can change a liberal into a temporary conservative. So can being distracted and unable to engage in complex and nuanced thought—or as psychologists put it, being placed under “cognitive load.”

In a rather ingenious study, Linda Skitka of the University of Illinois at Chicago and her colleagues set up an experiment in which liberals were forced to stop and
think
about what they would do, and go against their instinctive impulses. Only sometimes, they were distracted, and thus impaired from doing so. The results were striking.

In Skitka's study, liberals and conservatives were asked about a scenario in which four different groups of people had contracted AIDS in a variety ways. Three of the groups were blameless: they had gotten the disease from a blood transfusion, or a long-term partner who had cheated on them, gotten AIDS, and then passed it on, et cetera. One group, though, had contracted AIDS through practicing unsafe sex while fully aware of the risks. In other words, the members of this group seemed fully responsible for their own fates.