New research explores authoritarian mind-set of Trump's core supporters
A new book by a psychology professor and a former lawyer in the Nixon White House argues that Trump has tapped into a current of authoritarianism in the American electorate, one that’s bubbled just below the surface for years. In “Authoritarian Nightmare,” Bob Altemeyer and John W. Dean marshal data from a previously unpublished nationwide survey showing a striking desire for strong authoritarian leadership among Republican voters.
They also find shockingly high levels of anti-democratic beliefs and prejudicial attitudes among Trump backers, especially those who support the president strongly. And regardless of what happens in 2020, the authors say, Trump supporters will be a potent pro-authoritarian voting bloc in the years to come.
Altemeyer and Dean define authoritarianism as what happens “when followers submit too much to the authorities in their lives.” They measure it using a tool Altemeyer developed in the early 1980s, called the right-wing authoritarian (RWA) scale.
The “right-wing” label refers not to left and right political leanings as they’re popularly understood today, they write, but rather to a more legalistic sense of “lawful, proper, and correct.” It’s used to identify authoritarian tendencies among people of any political persuasion — supporters of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union, for instance, would have scored high on the scale despite having decidedly leftist economic and political views. The scale remains one of the most widely used measures of authoritarianism to this day.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/10/12/trump-voter-authoritarian-research/
Right Wing Authoritarianism Scale https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2020/08/AuthSurveyKeyScales_8-25-2020-Link.pdf
Here's the link to Professor Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians. It's worth a read. https://theauthoritarians.org/Downloads/TheAuthoritarians.pdf
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