The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer
Introduction
" What is Authoritarianism?
Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want—which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal. In my day, authoritarian fascist and authoritarian communist dictatorships posed the biggest threats to democracies, and eventually lost to them in wars both hot and cold. But authoritarianism itself has not disappeared, and I’m going to present the case in this book that the greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.
We know an awful lot about authoritarian followers. In one way or another, hundreds of social scientists have studied them since World War II. We have a pretty good idea of who they are, where they come from, and what makes them tick. By comparison, we know little about authoritarian leaders because we only recently started studying them. That may seem strange, but how hard is it to figure out why someone would like to have massive amounts of power? The psychological mystery has always been, why would someone prefer a dictatorship to freedom? So social scientists have focused on the followers, who are seen as the main, underlying problem.
I am going to tell you about my research on authoritarianism, but I am not going to give the kind of technical scientific report I lay on other scientists. Whatever ends up getting crunched in this book, it’s not going to be a pile of numbers. Instead, I’ll very briefly describe how the studies were done and what then happened. In many cases I’ll invite you to pretend you are a subject in an experiment, and ask what you would say or do. I hope you’ll generally find the presentation relaxed, conversational, even playful, because that’s the way I like to write—even on serious topics—to the annoyance of many a science editor. (A sense of humor helps a lot when you spend your life studying authoritarians.)
But I have not “dumbed down” anything. This is not “Authoritarianism for Dummies.” (“Six months ago I couldn’t even spell ‘authoritarian,’ and now I are one.”) It’s an account of some social science research for people who have not sat through a lot of classes on research methods and statistics—a good many of which, it so happens, I also never attended, especially on nice days. I’ll put some of the technical mumbo-jumbo in the optional notes for pitiful people such as I who just can’t live without it. If you want to bore through even denser presentations of my research, with methodological details and statistical tests jamming things up, the way poor John Dean had to, click here for note"
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