Pol psychology
Are conservatives just born that way?
BY Ray Conlogue
Illustration by Dave Donald
With all the energy that right- and left-wingers spend on preaching to and persuading their ideological opposites, wouldn’t it be disquieting to learn that most people’s political views are set for life by the time they can ride a tricycle?
Bob Altemeyer, a personality psychologist at the University of Manitoba, has spent three decades studying what he calls Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) personalities. He built his research on pioneering work by Theodor Adorno after World War II, when psychologists hoped they could identify the personality traits of potential Hitlers and Mussolinis.
Altemeyer recently became a media celebrity when John Dean, who was U.S. president Richard Nixon’s White House attorney, published a book called Conservatives Without Conscience. In this best-selling volume, Dean used Altemeyer’s research to identify what he calls a coterie of authoritarians who have taken control of the Republican Party.
The obvious Canadian candidate for Altemeyer’s attention would be Stephen Harper, whom I whimsically think of as Vlad the Impaler for the number of underlings he has fired or punished for disagreeing with him. He slaps gag orders on entire ministries (Foreign Affairs isn’t allowed to talk about Afghanistan, for instance) and ordered Status of Women Canada to remove the words “women’s equality” from its mandate. Conservative MPs, described as “muzzled windup toys” by Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, have to obey a 200-page rulebook.
This behaviour jibes with Altemeyer’s survey of 1,233 members of U.S. state legislatures, where Republican leaders demonstrated strong RWA behaviours. These included a persistent belief (often associated with Biblical literalism in the kind of fundamentalist church that Stephen Harper attends) that men and women are not equal.
Not surprisingly, right-wing journals such as Reason have declared Altemeyer’s research a thinly veiled attempt to “pathologize conservatism.”
But this misunderstands Altemeyer’s intentions. His “right wing authoritarians,” for example, are not necessarily supporters of capitalism or revival-tent Christianity. When his research methods were used by Russian researchers it was found that RWAs in that country were usually communist or Marxist.
“RWAs just have extra portions of quite common human frailties,” says Altemeyer. They are attracted to the “bedrock” or founding principles of the society they live in, and become anxious and fearful when others challenge those principles.
Using cognition testing, Altemeyer found that RWAs are able to keep conflicting ideas in separate mental compartments. They can believe in “freedom of speech” and “my country, love it or leave it” without seeing the contradiction. This permits them to support legislation such as the U.S. Patriot Act without perceiving the damage it has done to fundamental democratic freedoms.
Altemeyer’s controversial findings have critics. John Martin, a University of Wisconsin sociologist, points out that Theodor Adorno’s early work was discredited. He says that Altemeyer’s work is “far, far better than the early research,” but does not agree that authoritarians exist as a psychological type.
“The error is to assume that the personality explains the politics [and] that all those holding the politics have the personality,” says Martin.
Ian McGregor at York University in Toronto has found it works the other way as well. People with liberal/centrist views will often adopt right-wing views if they have been humiliated by an event in their life.
Conservative senator Hugh Segal finds it easy to agree that conservatism embodies the bedrock values of a society more than liberalism does: “A conservative would say, some things aren’t negotiable. We want people from around the world, but some things about our society aren’t negotiable.” But this, he argues, is not the same thing as ethnocentricity.
Canadians should still be concerned about the effect Harper’s personality has on his policy. Although perceived as a strong leader, he is actually (in Altemeyer’s terms) more of a follower. Domestically and internationally, his policies emulate those of George W. Bush. Unlike British and Australian leaders, he has failed to challenge the imprisonment of one of his country’s citizens at Guantanamo Bay. His unconditional support for Israel mimics the Christian Zionist ideology of the American religious right.
As Altemeyer says of Harper, “the mailed fist and striking need to control everybody is unmistakable.”
