Who Said It? Bob Altemeyer.

 

OK, I hope this was worth the guessing game and the wait, and that the discussion of what kind of person would write something like that was worthwhile.

 

The answer is Bob Altemeyer, author of The Authoritarians, available free online here. (I apologize for sticking the answer in the title. Even we filthy peasant rebels, if we’re bloggers, must bow to the dictates of the all-mighty search engine.)

 

The book is very interesting. It details and documents Altemeyer’s development of the Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) scale. This is a measure of conformity to system “authority”. It’s not ideology-specific. Instead, Altemeyer defines “right wing” authoritarianism as submissiveness toward constituted structures and the willingness to be their active tool. He gives a good example – during the Cold War, the flag-waving American patriot and the Russian Communist party member were likely to be the same kind of right wing authoritarian type.

 

So what’s the most obvious example of this today? It’s clearly how Obama’s cultists are every bit as stupidly and aggressively tribal as Bush partisans were, and on behalf of the exact same policies, on democratic* political participation, the economy, banks, corporations, transparency, the wars, civil liberties, energy policy, and even liberal social issues like abortion and gay rights.

 

[*From here on I’m going to dispense with the “small-d” disclaimer and assume readers will understand what I mean based on whether or not I capitalize the word. I’ll be extra-vigilant to avoid typos there.]

 

What’s most amazing is how the liberals and “progressives” claim to support Obama and the Democrats based on a belief that he’s doing the opposite of what he obviously really is doing. Bush supporters may have supported very stupid things, but at least they were less often wrong on a basic factual level about what they were supporting. They wanted escalating war and got it. Obama supporters support a president who is also escalating the war, but claim to believe he’s winding it down, and many of them are probably ignorant enough that they do believe this. The RWA phenomenon doesn’t get more typical than this. (And how characteristic of liberals – most of those who are pro-war are too cowardly to openly want escalation, and those who in their moods are anti-war are still too cowardly to demand full immediate withdrawal, because of some unarticulated but implicitly horrible consequences which would allegedly ensue. No, they want a gradual winding down. That gives their RWA trait full room to range. If Obama says we withdraw now, that’s great. If he says it’ll take years, that’s great. If he says we’ll be there for a hundred years, which is in fact what he has implicitly been saying, that’s great too.)

 

So guess who is himself one of these RWA cultists? After all his decades of studying the phenomenon, Altemeyer himself is completely un-self-aware of how his entire world view is simply derived from Democrat and corporate propaganda, evidently going back to his student days.

 

I’ll reproduce the short exchange, which can be found here. (I think it runs onto the next page. I haven’t read the entire thread since then to see if anyone else challenges him on the same point.)

 

I saw how Altemeyer had written a note on the tea partiers as RWAs, which is insightful as usual because he’s talking about Republicans, his partisan enemy. So I asked if he was going to write a similar note on the Obama cultists. He starts out denying there’s such a thing as an Obama cult. (It’s also funny how he says, “I read two liberal blogs and two conservative blogs”, and names the Huffington Post.)

 

Knowing there was a problem, I expanded my question to include himself as a possible cultist.

 

Here’s the full exchange:

 

Russ
04/23/10 at 05:06 PM

Comments:

Are you planning on also writing a note on the Democratic RWA followers who persist in believing Obama and the Democrats are “progressives” even as they continue and in most cases escalate Bush/Cheney policies on the Bailout, the war and war crimes, the assault on civil liberties, and corporatism in general, just to name a few?

—————-

Bob Altemeyer Email

05/11/10 at 11:46 AM

Comments:
Hey, I got here in only three tries!

To Michael: Yes, putting the Global Change Game on-line would be wonderful, if it could be done right. But I doubt anyone is interested in investing the time and money it would take, and running the thing would probably be a beast.

To Russ: Well, if somebody shows me the studies that demonstrate the Democratic RWA followers supporting these things, while they condemned Bush/Cheney for doing the same things, I’ll write that note. But I read two conservative blogs and two liberal blogs each day, and both TPM and (especially) Huffington Post have been at least as persistent at pointing out when Obama continues Bush policies as Matt Drudge and Politico have been. Moreso, in fact. Which fits into my findings rather well. Anybody who expects liberals to march together to the same drum, compared to the way high RWAs insist on group loyalty, is probably going to be proved quite wrong.

(For the record, I personally supported TARP as necessary, and the war in Afghanistan. As my wife will tell you, I am not much of a progressive.)

———————–

Russ
05/20/10 at 10:01 AM

Comments:
Bob says:

Quote:
“For the record, I personally supported TARP as necessary, and the war in Afghanistan.”

Out of your own expertise, or because you were told so by your betters, and never mind the evidence?

Looks like you better retake the RWA follower test yourself.

How about assassinations?

———————-

Bob Altemeyer Email

05/20/10 at 03:12 PM

Comments:

To Russ: Well, your comment’s a bit ad hominem, but I’ll answer it as best I can.

In a world of ever-advancing knowledge, one can’t know a lot about everything. So you do have to listen to those who have expertise. In some fields (economics would sure be one) the experts often disagree, and the wise non-expert makes sure he listens to the differing opinions.

Now as for TARP, I have some background in economics. I took two years of econ as an undergraduate business major, including a memorable semester of macroeconomic theory from an anti-Keynesian young turk. I also had a semester course in corporate finance. So I probably had some sort of a handle on the crisis that hit the American financial sector in the summer of 2008. I believed that the economy would plunge into a deep depression if the major banks failed and credit virtually disappeared. It was difficult to imagine where the dominoes would stop falling as one sector after another collapsed. And I haven’t heard anyone who has criticized TARP acknowledge what would have happened if the government had not stepped in.

In the case of TARP, I’ve only heard of one economist who said the government should not step in. The experts seemed virtually unanimous, and what they said made sense to me. It was also true that the Bush administration, including the secretary of the treasury, and the Democratic nominee, Barrack Obama, and his economic advisers agreed TARP had to happen. True, most of the Republicans in Congress voted against it, but their reasons seemed short-sighted to me. I didn’t like the idea of bailing out the banks any more than Sen. McConnell did. But I thought it was more important to keep the economy from collapsing.

I think you’ll find, by the way, that a lot of the TARP loans have already been paid back, and in one way or another, most of the government investment will return to the treasury.

As for Afghanistan, it was a rogue state under the Taliban that was the breeding ground for terrorist attacks around the world, including 9/11. I knew both the British and the Soviets had come to grief fighting wars in Afghanistan, and I knew the power of the war lords in the countryside and the refuges available in Pakistan would make the military mission difficult. But I believed the Taliban had to be defeated in their home base, and I still believe that today, although the problems with Karzai remind me more and more of Vietnam. I also feel we owe something to people in Afghanistan, especially the women there who have become educated,
to stay and see the mission to its close.)

You suggested that my beliefs came from “what I was told by my bettors, never mind the evidence.” I can’t even think whose opinion I cared about regarding Afghanistan. I mean, everybody knew where the terrorists were being trained, and where Osama bin Laden was based. You’ll have to tell me about the evidence I ignored.

I’ve told you why I thought as I did. Maybe you could tell me what and why you believe in these matters.

 

At that point I was frankly amazed and gave up on the exchange. It was a surprise to realize how unused I am to talking to total ignoramuses. I know how to discuss with fellow informed citizens, and how to argue with liars, but not how to tell it like it is to people who know it like it ain’t.

 

I should have sent the link to The Truth About the Bailout, although that doesn’t include stuff like the basics on the TARP being only one part of the Bailout and so on.

 

So I thought that was an interesting case study in how rampant and insidious the cult-think is, that even a commenter who is known specifically for analyzing this kind of tribalism is such a tribalist himself. (I meant to post this earlier but it kind of fell between the cushions and I forgot about it.)

 

So I hope people found this interesting.