The Authoritarians

According to the High Laws of Science (you do not have to genuflect here), ideas must be repeatedly tested to see if they fail. So the next (and extremely important) question is, does the RWA scale really measure what it says it measures? Are the test scores valid? If they are, we should find that high scorers submit to established authority more than most people do, aggress more in the name of such authority, and are much more conventional. What’s the evidence?

Authoritarian Submission. Everybody submits to authority to some degree. Imagine a world in which people ignored traffic laws and sped through red lights. The cost of auto insurance would shoot through the roof (although the line-ups to buy it would become much shorter). But some people go way beyond the norm and submit to authority even when it is dishonest, corrupt, unfair and evil. We would expect authoritarian followers especially to submit to corrupt authorities in their lives: to believe them when there is little reason to do so, to trust them when huge grounds for suspicion exist, and to hold them blameless when they do something wrong. We don’t expect absolutes here; people are much too complicated to completely, always, blindly submit, no matter what. But IF the RWA scale truly measures the tendency to be an authoritarian follower, those who score highly on it should tend to do these things, right? So do they?

Well, they will tell you that people should submit to authority in virtually all circumstances. If you give them moral dilemmas (e.g. should one steal an absurdly expensive drug to save a life?) they’re more likely to say, “The law is the law and must be obeyed” than most people are. High RWAs also say they would bow more to show respect for their fathers, the president of companies where they worked, and so on, than most people indicate. (An astronomer suggested I ask about the bowing, which I thought was silly, but he was right. “Social scientists are such blockheads!”)

High RWAs trusted President Nixon longer and stronger than most people did during the Watergate crisis.^[11] Some of them still believed Nixon was innocent of criminal acts even after he accepted a pardon for them.^[12] (Similarly the Allies found many Germans in 1945 refused to believe that Hitler, one of the most evil men in history, had ordered the murder of millions of Jews and others. “He was busy running the war,” Hitler’s apologists said. “The concentration camps were built and run by subordinates without his knowing it.”) To pick a more current example, authoritarian followers believed, more than most people did, President George W. Bush’s false claims that Saddam Hussein had extensive links to al-Qaida, and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And they supported the invasion of Iraq, whereas less authoritarian Americans tended to doubt the wisdom of that war from the start.^[13]

Caution No. 1. On the other hand, right-wing authoritarians did not support President Clinton during his impeachment and trial over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So as I said, the support is not automatic and reflexive, but can be trumped by other concerns. In Clinton’s case his administration not only had advocated for groups anathema to authoritarians, such as homosexuals and feminists, his sexual misdeeds in the White House deeply offended many high RWAs.

Shifting our focus a bit, please give your reaction to the story below:

It has been reported in the press that the FBI has maintained illegal wiretaps of the telephones of about 60 persons in the United States who were suspected of being sympathetic toward radical political organizations. The FBI is reported to be taking no chances that these persons might become active in their support of these groups. Under current legislation such wiretaps are legally permissible only if a judge has signed a court order authorizing them. The FBI reportedly has never sought court approval of these wiretaps because they believed their case was too weak and the courts would deny them. The FBI has denied the wiretaps exist, and described the report as a “complete fabrication.”

If the story is true, how serious a matter would you say the illegal wiretaps are?

0 = Not serious at all; they clearly are justified by the circumstances.

1 = Mildly serious

2 = Somewhat serious

3 = Pretty serious

4 = Extremely serious; such acts strike at the foundation of a free society.

What would you say? You can put me down for a “4.” What’s the point of having laws protecting privacy if the law enforcers can decide to ignore them whenever they wish, and then get away with it?

The issue may remind you of the Bush administration’s policy of authorizing the National Security Agency to engage in electronic spying, without warrants, on Americans suspected of supporting terrorism—which simply ignored the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that required prior court approval of such surveillance. And indeed, David Winter at the University of Michigan discovered that high RWAs felt Bush’s policy was “both necessary and appropriate” because of terrorism. But the wiretaps case presented above comes from a study I did over thirty years ago, in the autumn of 1974, using students from five scattered American universities. I found that persons who scored highly on the RWA scale tended to answer with 0’s, 1’s and 2’s, while those who scored low in RWA used 3’s and 4’s much more often. (The overall average in those months immediately following Watergate equaled 3.0.)

And this is just the beginning. Over the years I have found that authoritarian followers blissfully tolerated many illegal and unjust government actions that occurred in the United States and Canada, such as:

· a police burglary of a newspaper office to get confidential information.

· drug raids carried out without search warrants because judges wouldn’t give them.

· denial of right to assemble to peacefully protest government actions.

· “dirty tricks” played by a governing party on the opposition during an election.

· immigration office discrimination against radical speakers.

· placing agents provocateurs in organizations to create dissension and bad press relations.

· burning down the meeting place of a radical organization.

· unauthorized mail openings.

Authoritarian followers seem to have a “Daddy and mommy know best” attitude toward the government. They do not see laws as social standards that apply to all. Instead, they appear to think that authorities are above the law, and can decide which laws apply to them and which do not—just as parents can when one is young. But in a democracy no one is supposed to be above the law. Still, authoritarians quite easily put that aside. They also believe that only criminals and terrorists would object to having their phones tapped, their mail opened, and their lives put under surveillance. They have bought their tickets and are standing in line waiting for 1984, The Real Thing. There might as well not be a Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. And when the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is used to deny people the right of habeas corpus—one of the oldest rights in western law—it is unlikely that right-wing authoritarians will object to the loss of this constitutional guarantee either.

In fact, who even needs the whole Bill of Rights? Here is a (fake) letter-to-theeditor I asked some San Francisco State University students to respond to in 1990.

If a person stops to think about it, most of the problems we are having can be traced to the Bill of Rights—or more precisely, to the way it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court. “Freedom of speech” has been twisted to mean that pornographers can sell their filth, and that anybody can say whatever he wants, whether it’s good for society or not. And “freedom of religion” has been twisted to mean children can’t pray in public schools any more. And the “right to happiness” has been twisted to mean women can have abortion after abortion if they’re “unhappy” being pregnant. And think how many drug pushers and criminals have gotten off scot-free because their “rights” were supposedly violated after they had robbed or killed somebody.

A lot of people hoped the new Supreme Court, rid of the “Liberal Majority” which had made all these terrible rulings, would overturn them. But it’s clear now that they won’t. No Supreme Court can reverse the ruling of an earlier Supreme Court, so we are stuck with these interpretations as long as there is a Bill of Rights. And we will soon be destroyed as a nation because of them. So the only thing we can do, to make America the free, pure, safe Christian nation that the founding fathers intended it to be, is to repeal the Bill of Rights.