The Republican Brain

by is Mooney

  These are all areas where I feel it imperative to keep an eye on my intellectual compatriots and hold them honest—as this book will do further in chapter 12. However, when we scrutinize classic test case issues where we might expect liberal, progressive, or environmental reasoning to go astray—vaccination, nuclear power, and fracking—we find some pretty interesting things, but we do not find liberals acting like conservatives.

  What about Leftist Regimes?

  Just as economic and social conservatism can sometimes become disentangled (but generally go together), so too for resistance-to-change and resistance-to-equality conservatism (though they generally go together). Here, the key case study is communist countries.

  In countries where left-wing movements come to power following revolutions—communist countries like the former Soviet Union, Cuba, or China—those who resist change to the post-revolutionary system would fall on the traditional left in terms of their economic and egalitarian views. At the same time, however, even as they defend a left-wing status quo, those craving stability and order in such countries may be very culturally traditional. By contrast, those seeking change may want to undermine or “liberalize” that status quo by opening the society up to the free market.

  This is where the resistance to change and the resistance to greater equality spin apart, and there is nothing to do other than simply admit it. It is a complex world out there. Indeed, consider one telling case study of the need for closure in two European groups that differed in their communist experience. In Poland, which had a communist past, the more open-minded were more supportive of an economically conservative or free-market system. But in Flanders, which lacked such a past, the more open-minded were the opposite—similar to economic liberals in the U.S. And yet at the same time, in both groups, the closed-minded were more culturally conservative, and more authoritarian. (A similar result was found of Eastern and Western Europeans after the fall of communism.)

  The fact that resistance-to-change and defense-of-inequality conservatism can demagnetize in the communist context is really more a strength than a weakness of the psychological account of ideology. After all, there is every reason to think that support for the status quo and resistance to change ought to be context dependent.

  As mentioned, psychological needs don’t have any explicit ideological content to them. They merely predispose us to favor whatever ideology is available to us at a particular time that satisfies those needs. And ideologies morph over time, as do political systems. Thus conservatism can simultaneously be a human universal, in the sense that people will always seek an ideology that provides stability and order by resisting change, and yet it can also take different forms in different contexts.

  Another way of putting this is to say that when we talk about the substantive meaning of “left” and “right” today—social safety nets and progressive taxation versus free markets and deregulation, the extension of minority rights versus the preservation of traditional views of marriage and the family, and so on—we are hardly capturing the substance of all human political disputes since our very origins. The left and right distinction is of far more recent vintage, and is most applicable in the West since the time of the French Revolution. From then until now, the two types of conservatism—status quo and anti-egalitarian—have glommed together most of the time, but there have been exceptions.

  Beneath all this lies psychology, the rarely discovered continent in our politics. The need for order and stability is more constant, older, and surely part of our evolutionary heritage. It is a superstructure undergirding the two-century-old left-right distinction, but it has been operating in many different contexts for far longer than that. And if for some reason we ever drop the left-right distinction, it will still be operating.

  What about Left Wing Ideologues?

  Another very persistent objection is that rather than talking about conservatism, we ought to be talking about ideological extremism, on either the left or the right, because both will feature closed-mindedness, defensiveness, intolerance of ambiguity, and all the rest. In other words, an extreme left winger will be just as rigid and dogmatic as a right-wing authoritarian. In particular, we can expect to hear conservatives say that.

  The trouble is, the evidence doesn’t really support that conclusion (at least, I stress, for noncommunist countries). Rather, it suggests that as you depart from the center and approach the political poles, ideological extremism does increase, but rigidity and inflexibility increase more on the right than on the left. Again, that would make sense if the two aspects of the resistance to change—political resistance and resistance to changing one’s beliefs—go together.

  To show this, John Jost and his colleagues specifically looked at the subset of studies of conservatism that allowed for a direct contrast between a “rigidity of the right” hypothesis and an “ideological extremism” stance, which would posit symmetrical rigidity on both political poles. There were 13 of these studies in all, from 6 countries (the U.S., England, Sweden, Germany, Israel, Italy), none of them communist. The test was whether rigidity and inflexibility increase in a linear way from left to right; whether they instead increase equally in either direction as you depart from the political center; or whether a “combined” model fits the data best: Rigidity increases in both directions as you depart from the center, but increases more on the right than on the left.

  The result was that not a single study showed more left rigidity than right rigidity. But 6 out of 13 showed somewhat more left rigidity than center rigidity, even though right wingers were more rigid than either the left or the center in these studies. This usually occurred when the psychological trait being measured was “integrative complexity.” Therefore, a combined model—more rigidity at both extremes, but considerably more on the right than on the left—seems the best fit to the available data. (Acknowledging, of course, that the center is not “fixed,” but rather, is culturally and socially determined; and that you might expect a different outcome in communist countries.)

  Later, Jost and a new team of researchers tackled this question in yet another way. In three more studies, they measured political views and ideological extremism simultaneously, by giving subjects lots of gradations to choose from in how they described their beliefs. Were they moderately liberal, very liberal, extremely liberal, and so on. Those who picked the farthest ends of the distribution, on either side, were the extremists. Those closer to the center counted as less extreme, but of course, were still liberal or conservative.

  By setting it up in this way, it was again possible to distinguish between an “ideological extremism” hypothesis on the one hand, and the “rigidity of the right” view on the other. And the result was that neither liberalism nor left wing extremism wound up being linked to psychological traits like the need for closure, the intolerance of uncertainty, and so on. Rather, conservatism was linked to these traits.

  On the far left, this approach even yielded a hint of more tolerance of uncertainty and Openness—which makes sense. For someone living in a liberal democracy, it probably requires real novelty and complexity to rationalize a very ideological left wing position. It may require plowing through Das Kapital. But this is not the kind of behavior we expect to see in right wing authoritarians, the conservative ideological extreme (although when sophistication and authoritarianism do coincide, you can find inflexibility and ingenious arguments going hand in hand).

  The idea of left-wing closed-mindedness was also tested in another form by Robert Altemeyer, who went on a very extensive and amusing chase for what he labeled “the Loch Ness Monster of political psychology”—namely, a left-wing authoritarian.

  Altemeyer came up with a variety of statements to try to find lefties who showed authoritarian tendencies—following leaders unquestioningly, showing aggression, wanting to force conformity on others—but did so in service of a revolutionary or anti-establishment movement, rather than a reactionary or conservative one. Some of the statements he came
up with, to mirror the types of views that right-wing authoritarians tend to espouse, are kind of hilarious:

  The members of the Establishment deserve to be dealt with harshly, without mercy, when they are finally overthrown.

  A leftist revolutionary movement is quite justified in attacking the Establishment, and in demanding obedience and conformity from its members.

  If certain people refuse to accept the historic restructuring of society that will come when the Establishment is overthrown, they will have to be removed and smashed.

  Studying a sample of nearly 1,200 Canadian students and parents with such statements, Altemeyer failed to find any really strong left-wing authoritarians. Interestingly, though, he found that some right-wing authoritarians affirmed some of the left-wing authoritarian statements. Perhaps these more confused and ambiguous authoritarians (Altemeyer called them “wild cards”) just wanted something to smash. As he concluded: “If you want authoritarians on the right, I have found tons. But if you want a living, breathing, scientifically certifiable authoritarian on the left, I have not found a single one.”

  Is it possible that cases of left-wing extremism seen in the past and occasionally in the present—the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, or the Earth Liberation Front—are attributable to a few politically ambiguous authoritarians who found their way into left-wing movements? Such was Altemeyer’s speculation. The trouble is, there really aren’t many such movements in the United States today to look at. Psychologists weren’t around to study the Russian Bolsheviks of 1917, the Jacobins of the French Revolution, and so on. There just isn’t much data.

  What there is, though, is a growing volume of psychological data on left and right in modern democracies. And “the data don’t really support the rigidity of the left hypothesis,” explains the University of Arkansas’s Scott Eidelman. You might find some rigid left extremists, but the distribution of rigid ideologues does not appear to be politically balanced or symmetrical. That is not to say that in a very different political context, such as a communist country, you wouldn’t find more authoritarians lined up on the left, supporting the left-wing status quo. “If you don’t think Pol Pot was a left authoritarian, I don’t know what to say,” says Philip Tetlock. “It’s just manifestly obvious that such creatures exist.” If the status quo becomes the far left, and this situation persists for several generations, then we would surely expect authoritarians to flip sides, because they are conventional and defer to the established authorities. But are these people really “left wing” any longer at that point?

  That’s a matter of definition, but Altemeyer would then call them right wing authoritarians or psychological right wingers, even in an established leftist regime. During the Cold War, for instance, he suggests that the hardliners on the American and Soviet sides were both authoritarians who wanted their country to fight the out-group—from whom they were separated only by an accident of birth.

  Why Not Better Distinguish Conservatives from Authoritarians?

  A related objection is that when it comes to resisting new information and belief change, we’re not really talking about conservatism at all, we’re talking about authoritarianism, an extreme or at least separable incarnation of it. In one version of the argument, there are at least three different types of conservatives: laissez-faire or economic conservatives, status quo conservatives (like Edmund Burke), and finally authoritarian conservatives, who are socially conservative and traditionalist, and motivated most of all by their distrust of otherness and their groupthink.

  In this account, the first two groups of conservatives are intellectual and principled. The latter are more primal, driven more by visceral negative responses to otherness and a desire to impose their way of doing things on people not like them. And thus, while all the types of conservatism may find themselves joined together (as they currently are in the United States), they are, in principle, separable and have become disjointed at other places in the world or at other times in the United States itself.

  The objection doesn’t really matter in a practical sense, given that the U.S. Republican Party today combines all three strains, and the U.S. Republican Party is my central target. By this token, whether I’m criticizing Republicanism, conservatism, or authoritarianism, these are distinctions without a difference because the party that calls itself conservative blends together all these strands, acting together as a team. “What we see having happened since the 1970s and 1980s is that conservatism has become an authoritarian conservatism,” explains Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt University.

  But I think one can go farther. On the one hand, it is possible to imagine a right-wing revolution that authoritarians would support, but that honest status quo conservatives, like Edmund Burke, would abhor. Consider, for instance, a strong erosion of core civil liberties and protections for minorities that have persisted since the Bill of Rights. So I agree that you could theoretically find a way to pit the groups against each other, whereupon principled conservatives ought to come out strongly against authoritarians.

  At the same time, though, they would appear to lie on a continuum psychologically because the resistance to change is so deeply rooted in both groups. True, this resistance leads different people to different actions or positions, with authoritarians more likely to support some dangerous right-wing fantasy that could crash the servers of democracy. But both groups, on a psychological level, need order, structure, and certainty. And they have far more problems with their opposite: disorder, chaos, uncertainty, and ambiguity.

  What about Centrists and Independents?

  Not everybody is a staunch liberal or conservative. In fact, in recent years, the number of independents in U.S. politics has been on the rise, from 30 percent of the electorate in 2005 to 37 percent today. How does this theory account for that?

  A psychological perspective on independents, moderates, and centrists must first recognize that not only are they often different from liberals and conservatives, but they’re also different from each other. A recent Pew study of independents, for instance, found that they included four distinct groups: libertarians, who lean conservative economically and basically are individualists; post-moderns, who are young, hip, and highly secular and pro-environment but not very liberal on classic economic issues or race; disaffecteds, who are financially stressed by the recession and have a very negative view of politics, but tend to be strongly religious and conservative; and bystanders, who tend to be young and just aren’t politically engaged. How do you make sense of this complicated stew?

  First, and as these descriptions show, an independent isn’t necessarily the same thing as a centrist or moderate. In particular, those who aren’t politically engaged may have personalities or dispositions that could very well lead to the adoption of strong ideological views. It could just be that they’re not knowledgeable enough about politics to see how their values align with the current political parties. Even among authoritarians, who have a deep affinity for the right, it has been shown that a process of ideological “activation” often needs to occur, through political engagement and learning about the issues, before they really realize who they are and become their political selves. Given the relationship that we’ve already seen between political sophistication and motivated reasoning, that makes lots of sense.

  The independents thus include both a group that isn’t very engaged—but might have a very strong latent ideology—but also individuals who may be very engaged, but end up with an ideologically blended political identity or less strong partisan attachments. Libertarians, for instance, are a classic ideological blend, socially liberal and often not very religious, but fiscally conservative.

  You wouldn’t call libertarians “centrists,” but this theory explains centrists or moderates very well too. First, a lot of them may be in the middle of the psychological range just as they are in the middle of the political range. If you think, for instance, about the two personality dimensions that most reliably distinguish liberals and
conservatives—Openness and Conscientiousness—it immediately becomes apparent that someone who is near the midpoint on both measures could make for a good centrist. Centrists or moderates also probably have to have a reasonably high amount of integrative complexity, as they are forced to weigh the ideologies to both their left and right.

  When it comes to party identification, Openness to Experience appears to work in two separate ways. As we’ve seen, it strongly predicts political liberalism. But it also predicts weaker partisan attachment—which, when you think about it, also fits the profile. People who are open are not followers of groups; they like to distinguish themselves and appear different from others. To stand out.

  Thus, many independents may be Open and very socially liberal, but not willing to strongly commit to the Democrats, and very capable of finding many bones to pick with the party. The so-called post-moderns in the current crop of independents sound like they might have this characteristic. (This also, of course, suggests less conformism and solidarity among Democrats than among Republicans—and more opinion intensity on the right than the left. And indeed, the data back that up. In a May 2011 Pew study, for instance, 70 percent of “staunch conservatives” had very unfavorable views of President Obama, but only 45 percent of “solid liberals” had very favorable views of him.)

  Clearly, this book does not focus its attention on independents or the political center—for the obvious reason that it is the two U.S. parties today that most reliably reflect psychologically grounded differences between liberalism and conservatism. In other words, a psychological understanding of left and right is probably at its best when it comes to explaining today’s partisan polarization, and the recent course of U.S. politics in general. That’s because the core psychological differences we’re discussing here ought to be heightened, not lessened, on the political poles and among the most engaged and knowledgeable on both sides. Here, most of all, is where politics becomes an utter clash between worldviews, and also psychologies.