On the morning of November 8, 2016, our most recent presidential election day, the mainstream news outlets were still expecting Hillary Clinton to win. But by midday, there was an early warning sign: voters in exit polls–not in the majority, but in twice the percentage as back in 2012–were telling the pollsters that the most important priority for presidential choice was “a strong leader” (Politico story). I was already feeling trepidatioun, but I started to feel much more of it when I heard that. It wasn’t, of course, that I considered Donald Trump a strong leader, but rather, I knew that for those who considered that factor to be a variable dividing one candidate from another, Trump was the candidate of choice. The trouble is, however, that in many instances people’s sense of need for a strong leader translates into the desire for not just a strong leader but a dictator, and one who will exercise dictatorial power on their behalf.
The Trump campaign and other developments in American politics before it have inspired a renewed interest in a line of research and theorizing that first got started right after the Second World War: the study of the authoritarian personality. Early in 2016, when the primaries were just about to begin and having Donald Trump as our next president still did not seem like an imminent reality in scholarly and journalistic circles, Matthew MacWilliams, a doctoral student in political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst published an article on Politico.com and another at vox.com, where he previewed a salient finding from his dissertation in progress: that the most reliable predictor of being a Trump voter was being an authoritarian personality.
Following the methodology of scholars before him, Mr. MacWilliams surveyed a randomly selected sample of 1,800 voters nationwide, found out their income levels, education levels, and some other salient variables, learned whom they were voting for, and also employed the standard test to measure authoritarian tendencies, a short battery of questions about their child reading philosophy. The most direct correlation: persons who were more concerned that their child be obedient than self-reliant were more likely to want Donald Trump for their next president. And again, this was the start of the primaries, when there were still other seriously viable candidates on the Republican primary ballots.
Interest in the authoritarian personality–the personality profile of the voter most likely to support the rise of authoritarian leaders to positions of power and to support high-handed governmental action–had already been revived before Donald Trump came on the political scene. Back in 2011, Professors Marc J. Hetherington of Vanderbilt University and Elizabeth Suhay of Lafayette College published an article titled “Authoritarianism, Threat, and Americans’ Support for the War on Terror” in the July issue of the American Journal of Political Science. Their argument, in short form, is that, while there are always some authoritarian personalities in the population, they’re usually in the minority, BUT…when there’s a higher level of perceived terror threat, many who are not normally authoritarian personalities will start to act as if they were. (In the case of that article, the behavior being measured was support for internal civil liberties violations in the name of catching terrorists.)
For much of 2016, a good exercise for college instructors was having students look at those two pieces of research side by side, and let students draw an inference: if we get a big terror attack right before the election, we’re more likely to get Trump.
Well, at least where American soil was concerned, we didn’t get the big terror attack, and it’s not clear how big a part the small-scale terror attacks played; in any event, though, we got Trump.
But the subject of authoritarian personality studies gets even more interesting when we go back to the original one: The Authoritarian Personality, by the research team of Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford, and a number of other contributors. Almost a thousand pages long, it was published in 1950, part of a set of book-length research projects orchestrated by the American Jewish Committee in an effort to make intellectual sense out of the rise of the mass-murderous regime of Nazi Germany.
(Before I go further, I want to make something clear: I am not one of the people who draw direct comparisons between Trump and Hitler, or between Trump’s America and Hitler’s Germany. That is not what this blog post is about. There are, of course, some obvious similarities, as it’s once again the scenario of a demagogue appealing to hypernationalism, prejudice, and paranoia, and indeed, that’s why we’re hearing about the authoritarian personality studies in connection with Trump to begin with. But, as I will be saying more elaborately in future editions, I am more interested in where Trump and his support base fit in with the American experience in its own right than any European comparisons. I have certainly called the Trump campaign a fascist movement enough times, but spelled with a lower-case f to refer to a style of hypernationalistic rhetoric, not with a capital F to suggest that Trump is Mussolini.)
Adorno et al., in The Authoritarian Personality, used an array of case studies to put together a profile of the personality that would be receptive to demagogues who pandered to prejudice. (The larger series to which this volume belongs is, in fact, titled “Studies in Prejudice.”) The traits they found are consistent with the ones that today’s scholars refer to, but their list is much more elaborate. Suspicion of science is one. Emphasis on power and toughness is another (among the measures of that is one’s level agreement with the statement “No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished”). And buried so deep in the voluminous work that one could easily miss it is a personal favorite of mine: intolerance for ambiguity.
The authoritarian, prejudice-prone personality, these researchers find, has great difficulty dealing with ambiguity. It follows, then, that such a person would be receptive to simplistic narratives and simplistic solutions to the nation’s most complex problems. A key element of the ambiguity-intolerant mindset, I would suggest, is the tendency to think in binaries, and thus, for instance, to view foreign policy as purely a question of whether to be weak or strong, to be taken advantage of by the rest of the world or to start saying “no more mister nice guy.”
A key part of Trump’s rhetoric through the campaigns was playing to binary thinking and the appetite for simplistic solutions. That involved making myriad false claims about the current situation and about Hillary Clinton’s intentions. More than once after a terror attack, he instantly tweeted the question of when America was going to get smart, as if it were axiomatic that stronger, more sensible policies would have prevented it from happening. He depicted Hillary Clinton as representing “open borders.” He also made the false claim, in the first debate with Hillary Clinton, that New York City ‘s homicide rate had risen in the past year. (She was ready for him on that one.)
Clearly, a lot of Americans felt under siege by hostile forces. Within the Republican Party, as shown in the primaries, they felt so much so that none of the regular Republican candidates, no matter how much those candidates demonized President Obama and distorted his actions and his motives to make him appear to have weakened the country, would do. They needed Donald Trump. The man who expressed the desire to limit press freedoms and who encouraged supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies and who played to prejudice against Mexicans and Muslims–this was whom they wanted running the country.
But it wasn’t just international forces that they felt under siege by. Trump also let cheering crowds know that, when he became president, people in this country would say “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays.” Haven’t we all seen memes on Facebook for quite some time, where people express their sense of victimization over that nonsensical issue? Indeed we have. And that relates to my recent critiques of National Review Online reporter Katherine Timpf: many Trump voters felt under siege by this entity they called “political correctness.”
In my critique of Ms. Timpf, when I went over her year-end roundup of examples of so-called “political correctness” on the college campuses, I made the point that in a number of the items she took a situation that was obviously ambiguous–not enough information available to have a qualified opinion about who did what, and how it should have been handled–and didn’t let the ambiguity stop her from acting as if it were a clear fact that “political correctness” was at work.
And she’s just an example. She is one of many spokespersons for the cultural right, and National Review is just one of many right-wing news outlets, that make an industry out of pandering to the siege mentality. It’s a symbiotic relationship between these outlets and their constituents: playing to fear and righteous indignation. With that in mind, given that “intolerance for ambiguity” is part of the profile of the American who wanted Donald Trump for a president during the primaries when there were still at least slightly saner choices available, when scholars study why we ended up with Trump for a president, the behavior of the industry that panders to the siege mentality and to intolerance for ambiguity should probably be considered as being at least one factor that played a part.
