We were puzzled at the time, because we thought having ultimate power would relax the high RWAs and make them less aggressive—which it did in half the groups, but not the other half. What caused the difference among the high RWA groups? I’ll bet you my chance of getting to heaven—which may be slim anyway after chapter 4-that the aggressive groups had some Double Highs in them. But this was some years before the Social Dominance Orientation scale was developed, so there’s no way of knowing.
We also ran a condition in which the enemy, the Warsaw Pact, had perfected a defense against nuclear attack while NATO had none. Incredibly, this produced an increase in aggressiveness among the low RWA teams, and an even bigger, record-breaking level of hostility in the high RWA groups. This produced counter-aggressiveness in their superior enemy. Why were the NATO players such idiots? Usually, they said, they wanted to send a signal that they would not be intimidated just because they were at a (hopeless) disadvantage. But they did not wait to see if their enemy would become threatening; they simply made him so in a situation in which they could not possibly win.
16 Dean, J. Conservatives without conscience, 2006, New York: Viking, pp. 123-135.
17 There’s always a problem in fitting an individual to a statistical conglomerate. No one matches the overall model perfectly. It’s like the old joke that the average American family had two-and-a-half kids. As well, everyone is so unique that you will surely find parts of a trait missing in an individual who seems, in general, to possess the trait. Thus people who know Tom DeLay well might observe that he is not at all (let’s say) prejudiced against racial minorities or hostile toward women. Be that as it may, so much of his behavior seems to match up with the distinctive attributes of Double Highs that I feel comfortable citing him as an example.
18 But it doesn’t always work out as planned. You have to be careful when shifting your supporters around, because if you get too greedy you might spread yourself too thin, and end up with a net loss should enough of the electorate unexpectedly turn against you. Thus in Pennsylvania the Republicans lost several Congressional seats because they moved too many voters from supposedly safe GOP districts to try to defeat Democrats in other districts.
But the incredible 2003 gerrymandering of Texas, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in all but one particular, served the Republicans well. In an election that saw so many GOP incumbents around the nation go down to defeat, the Republican delegation in Texas lost only two of its seats in spite of everything. One of the losses occurred in the 22nd District, where Tom DeLay’s late resignation forced the Republicans to have to use a write-in campaign for their nominee.
19 I am not a Democrat, not even in Will Roger’s sense when he famously said, “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” I understand the necessity of having political parties in a democracy, but I also believe that when the interests of any party conflict with the interests of the country, the party will almost always butter its own bread first. So I basically don’t trust political parties, and consider myself an Independent.
If the Democratic Party had been swarmed by authoritarians the way the Republican Party has been, I would be talking about it now rather than the GOP. I want the Republican Party to be recaptured by its Grand Old Principles and go back to presenting the conservative options to the American people, not imposing the authoritarian one.
Chapter 6.
Authoritarianism and Politics
RWA, Social Dominance, and Political Preferences Among Ordinary People
After all you’ve learned about right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance, you’ll probably be disappointed to learn that these personality traits connect only moderately to the political preferences of ordinary peopl e.[1] But the modest connections can be easily understood: people, darn it, are more complicated than psychologists want them to be.
First, a lot of people have as much interest in politics as I do in rutabaga—and for the same reason. These political drop-outs compose the bulk of that 40 to 60 percent of the population who do not vote in elections. That’s an awful lot of people whose RWA and social dominance scores are not going to correlate with anything political. Then one has the virtuous, heroic, cream-of-the-crop, super- dooper, world class heros, the Independents. (Uh, see note 19 from chapter 5.) The personalities of these party-poopers also won’t correlate with party preference, because they haven’t got any party preference.
Then come the members of the electorate who support a party but have very little idea what it stands for. You might call them political nincompoopers, but we have to recognize that political parties often make it hard to find out what they stand for. But some folks—not as keenly interested as one might perhaps wish—support the Democrats because their parents were Democrats, or their union says they should vote Democrat. Or they support the Republicans because “all the right people do,” or because they think the Republican candidate looks nice on TV. So with all these nonstarters and breakdowns, you can expect personality and party preference to often be strange bedfellows . [2]
If you now have concluded that we could fit all the informed, concerned voters in your community into a phone booth, that’s not true. For one thing, very few phone booths exist any more. But for another, pollsters regularly find that a significant number of ordinary citizens appreciate the importance of politics, and may even be involved in the political process. Generally, men are more likely to be interested than women are, well-educated people care more, and the older you get the more you scrutinize the candidates with your weary, wary eyes. Studies show that the more interested people are in politics, the more likely their party preference will correlate with their authoritarianism.
That implies the connection ought to be strongest among the biggest party animals among us, politicians. But how do you give personality tests to politicians? Well if you are willing to settle for studying lots of successful, important politicians, you can send surveys to legislatures and ask for the lawmakers’ personal, honest, anonymous answers. So I did. I sent the RWA scale to at least one chamber of forty-two of the state legislatures in the United States (all except Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Rhode Island, and West Virginia), mainly between 1990 and 1993. I also sent surveys to most of the legislatures in Canada, including the federal House of Commons. We’ll spend the first part of this chapter digging around in those results. Then we’ll talk about the biggest development in American politics in the past twenty-five years, the growth of the “Religious Right.”
Authoritarianism among American State Legislators
First of all, these studies all happened before the Social Dominance Orientation scale was available. So—because time-travel is strictly forbidden in social science research—I have no answers from legislators to that scale per se. But I do have some data almost as good, and they will tell us a lot when the time comes.