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Sunday, November 19, 2023
POLITICO Massachusetts Playbook: Transportation temperature check vvv
Altemeyer on Trump’s Supporters
Altemeyer on Trump’s Supporters
When writing my book Conservatives Without Conscience (Penguin, 2007) about the authoritarianism that was gaining influence in the Republican Party in the early 2000s, I read most everything that social scientists had to say about folks with such dispositions. Particularly helpful was psychology professor Bob Altemeyer’s book for Harvard University Press, The Authoritarian Specter (1996). No one has done more ground-breaking work in testing the nature of these people than this professor, who was then at the University of Manitoba in Canada. A native of St. Louis who had done his graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Bob is also a keen student of American politics. Indeed, his son is in the business in Canada, and a member of the Manitoba Legislature.
I thought it would be helpful to many Americans to be exposed to Bob’s scholarly studies, and convinced him to write them up in a book for the general reader. He did, and placed it online for anyone to read for free. See The Authoritarians. (Last time I checked, over 670,000 people had visited the book, and hopefully read it!)
Bob Altemeyer saw Donald Trump coming. More accurately, he saw the kinds of men and women who would vote for a Donald Trump-type candidate for high office. These are people he described in earlier works as Right Wing Authoritarians, and Enemies of Freedom. Without going too deep into the weeds, let me note a few of these people score high on testing that shows they not only can be devoted followers of authoritarian leaders, the so-called social dominators like Trump who want to be in charge, but they also test high as social dominators themselves. These seemingly incongruous testing results—testing high as both followers and leaders—have been explained as the social dominators envisioning the type of follower they want as leaders, or their willingness to be good followers until they get their chance to become leaders. I labeled these “double high” people as conservatives without conscience, because it is a perfect description of those who top both scales in this testing.
When I started writing about these authoritarian personalities in 2005, I was looking for an explanation of the people who had taken charge of the Republican Party. That’s when I found Altemeyer’s work, which was (and still is) widely accepted. In fact, he was awarded the prestigious prize for behavioral science research in 1986, when the American Association for the Advancement of Science recognized his work. Working in 2005, I asked him what percentage of the American population might he estimate (or intelligently guess) were authoritarian followers, and he thought maybe 30 percent. Working on my book it seemed inconceivable that so few could ever elect a president. When Trump emerged in 2015 as a GOP contender, while I thought he could win the nomination, I was certain that was the end of the road: “Of only one thing am I absolutely certain: Donald Trump will never be President of the United States, so rest easy. Authoritarians remain a minority in America, thankfully,” I declared on July 24, 2015.
Authoritarians do remain a minority, but with non-voters and anti-Hillary Clinton voters, Trump pulled off a historic upset. It appears his core supporters remain faithful—regardless of what he does or doesn’t do. So, I asked Bob Altemeyer, what if anything would get through to the Trump supporters, given the fact Trump has shown himself, so far, totally incompetent as President of the United States. Set forth below in italics is material from Bob, who is now enjoying his retirement.
It took many months for Americans to stop supporting President Nixon during Watergate, and even at the end he could count on a hard knot of supporters who would believe him, as he said to [his chief of staff] H. R. Haldeman, because they wanted to. (NYT, 11/22/1974, p. 20). A few days before he resigned, 24% of a Gallup sample approved of the way Nixon was doing his job, including 38% of the Republicans polled.
Most of Donald Trump’s supporters are probably people whom social psychologists call authoritarian followers, because they are so supportive of the authorities they consider legitimate. These are the people Trump was talking about when he famously bragged that he could shoot somebody in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and it would make no difference to his backers. They are the people who so willingly took the “loyalty pledge” at Trump rallies in the early primaries—even calling on Trump to “do the swearing” when he had skipped it.
We know enough about authoritarian supporters from research, and history, to know it will be very hard to change their minds about the leader they adore.
- They are extremely ethnocentric, dividing the world sharply into people in their in-group, and automatically disliking all others. They feel politicians who promote minority rights and immigration discriminate against them. Donald Trump tells them they are right. He is their champion.
- They are highly dogmatic. They get their ideas from others in the in-group, especially from their leader, not from evidence and logic. They say there is no evidence that will make them change their minds. They’re quite comfortable believing “alternate facts.”
- They get great satisfaction from being part of a large movement. Being in a cohesive crowd at rallies thrills them because they silently tell one another, just by being there, that they are powerful and right. They create an echo chamber that reinforces the belief that all the good people think like they do.
- They severely limit their sources of information. They get the news that they want to get. This also produces an echo chamber when the news sources they trust are copying each other and relaying Trump’s message.
- They have highly compartmentalized minds. When an unpleasant truth forces its way into their awareness, they do not try to integrate the other things they believe with it. Instead they put it in a box and isolate it from the rest of their thinking, which proceeds as if the truth never existed.
Put all this together and you get an idea how hard it will be to change their minds about Donald Trump.
One can expect some of Trump’s followers to waver if the months ahead are thick with damaging revelations like those that brought down the Nixon White House. But a repeat of “Watergate-type scandals” may not damage Trump as much as they did Nixon.
Nixon had little means of communicating directly with his supporters. Trump’s followers eagerly await his tweets to tell them the truth they will believe and repeat to one another. And so far, they have apparently believed everything he’s said.
Second, the major news outlets in the 1970s were the three TV networks. There was no Fox News. And while there were some newspaper columnists and radio personalities who supported Nixon, today there are dozens of Trump-endorsing blogs that are on tens of millions of “Favorites” lists in American homes.
Third, Trump’s party controls all three branches of the federal government.
Given this gloomy assessment of how likely Trump’s support is going to weaken, it seems clear that the more effective strategy now is to activate the Americans who oppose him, who happily amount to a solid majority of the public.
Questions [people ask):
How do people get this way? Answer: There is evidence that authoritarian followers are more afraid than most people. And also, that they were trained in self-righteousness, and ethnocentric thinking in early age.
Will Trump supporters never change? Answer: Some will, if their personal experience shows them Trump has misled them or caused them grief, such as a loss of medical coverage. And if you anticipate a close election in 2020, these people are worth pursuing. But Trump will blame others, and his supporters will give him the benefit of the doubt more than most people will.
Isn’t all this true of Obama/Clinton supporters too? Answer: Yes, to a certain extent, but the studies show it’s much more prevalent “on the right.” If you want a generalization about generalizations, these things are about 2-3x as true among right-wingers as among left-wingers. Research has shown that “progressives” are much less ethnocentric, much less prejudiced, much more likely to be guided by logic and evidence, much more likely to have consistent ideas, much less likely to conform, much less likely to trust someone just because he says he agrees with them, have much more self-insight, and so on.
With that information in mind, from someone who may understand Trump supporters better than Trump does, it is clear that to prevail in 2018 and 2020, Democrats must focus on getting sympathetic non-voters to the polls, and bring back into the fold the anti-Hillary folks, who suffered from Clinton exhaustion—voters who are clearly not right-wing authoritarians.
A REMINDER: The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the "dumbing down" of America
The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the "dumbing down" of America
Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."
There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries. Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, describes how the vast underlying foundations of anti-elite, anti-reason and anti-science have been infused into America's political and social fabric. Famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once said:
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."Mark Bauerlein, in his book, The Dumbest Generation, reveals how a whole generation of youth is being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital "crap" via social media.
Journalist Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America, adds another perspective:
"The rise of idiot America today represents - for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power - the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert.""There's a pervasive suspicion of rights, privileges, knowledge and specialization," says Catherine Liu, the author of American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique and a film and media studies professor at University of California. The very mission of universities has changed, argues Liu. "We don't educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs."
Part of the reason for the rising anti-intellectualism can be found in the declining state of education in the U.S. compared to other advanced countries:
- After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place. The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50% of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries;
- The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a civic education poll among public school students. A surprising 77% didn't know that George Washington was the first President; couldn't name Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence; and only 2.8% of the students actually passed the citizenship test. Along similar lines, the Goldwater Institute of Phoenix did the same survey and only 3.5% of students passed the civics test;
- According to the National Research Council report, only 28% of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13% of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or "intelligent design;"
- 18% of Americans still believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a Gallup poll;
- The American Association of State Colleges and Universities report on education shows that the U.S. ranks second among all nations in the proportion of the population aged 35-64 with a college degree, but 19th in the percentage of those aged 25-34 with an associate or high school diploma, which means that for the first time, the educational attainment of young people will be lower than their parents;
- 74% of Republicans in the U.S. Senate and 53% in the House of Representatives deny the validity of climate change despite the findings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and every other significant scientific organization in the world;
- According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 68% of public school children in the U.S. do not read proficiently by the time they finish third grade. And the U.S. News & World reported that barely 50% of students are ready for college level reading when they graduate;
- According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important;"
- According to the National Endowment for the Arts report in 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later only 67% did. And more than 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book--fiction or nonfiction--over the course of a year. The proportion of 17 year olds who read nothing (unless required by school ) has doubled between 1984-2004;
- Gallup released a poll indicating 42 percent of Americans still believe God created human beings in their present form less than 10,000 years ago;
- A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.
In addition, we do not see in Japan significant numbers of the types of religious schools that are designed to shield children from knowledge about basic tenets of science and accepted understandings of history - such as evolutionary theory or the religious views of the Founding Fathers, who were largely deists - which are essential to having a fundamental understanding of the world, Traphagan contends. The reason for this is because in general Japanese value education, value the work of intellectuals, and see a well-educated public with a basic common knowledge in areas of scientific fact, math, history, literature, etc. as being an essential foundation to a successful democracy.
We're creating a world of dummies. Angry dummies who feel they have the right, the authority and the need not only to comment on everything, but to make sure their voice is heard above the rest, and to drag down any opposing views through personal attacks, loud repetition and confrontation.
Bill Keller, writing in the New York Times argues that the anti-intellectual elitism is not an elitism of wisdom, education, experience or knowledge. The new elite are the angry social media posters, those who can shout loudest and more often, a clique of bullies and malcontents baying together like dogs cornering a fox. Too often it's a combined elite of the anti-intellectuals and the conspiracy followers - not those who can voice the most cogent, most coherent response. Together they foment a rabid culture of anti-rationalism where every fact is suspect; every shadow holds a secret conspiracy. Rational thought is the enemy. Critical thinking is the devil's tool.
Keller also notes that the herd mentality takes over online; the anti-intellectuals become the metaphorical equivalent of an angry lynch mob when anyone either challenges one of the mob beliefs or posts anything outside the mob's self-limiting set of values.
Keller blames this in part to the online universe that "skews young, educated and attentive to fashions." Fashion, entertainment, spectacle, voyeurism - we're directed towards trivia, towards the inconsequential, towards unquestioning and blatant consumerism. This results in intellectual complacency. People accept without questioning, believe without weighing the choices, join the pack because in a culture where convenience rules, real individualism is too hard work. Thinking takes too much time: it gets in the way of the immediacy of the online experience.
Reality TV and pop culture presented in magazines and online sites claim to provide useful information about the importance of The Housewives of [you name the city] that can somehow enrich our lives. After all, how else can one explain the insipid and pointless stories that tout divorces, cheating and weight gain? How else can we explain how the Kardashians, or Paris Hilton are known for being famous without actually contributing anything worth discussion? The artificial events of their lives become the mainstay of populist media to distract people from the real issues and concerns facing us.
The current trend of increasing anti-intellectualism now establishing itself in politics and business leadership, and supported by a declining education system should be a cause for concern for leaders and the general population, one that needs to be addressed now.
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Comment: Professor Patrick Deneen explains how kids have become a generation of know-nothings