Here are some questions to consider and answer, if only in your head. Attribution of these questions will come later.
- Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders?
- Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance?
- Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?
- Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?
A distracting picture of a fall leaf; it has no other significance
OK, so what’s the point? My Arts Editor sent me this article by Amanda Taub on Vox that explores the scientific research on the rise of the far-right within the GOP, what it meant in the past, and what it means for the future. This is some fascinating research:
[PhD student Matthew] MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.
So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump.
He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator.
Meanwhile, Professors Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt and Jonathan Weiler of University of North Carolina were publishing a book on the same subject:
Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.
Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.
This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which “activated” authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.
So the questions posted above come from that article and are considered a very slick way to elicit the information necessary to build the personality profile of a person with respect to their responses to an authoritarian figure. It’s quite interesting to consider how much you think your style of raising a child will affect their adult lives; from a discussion with my AE last night, and a long-ago discussion with my Mother, I know that some people can break free of their childhood training, especially if they perceive it as detrimental to their personal well-being; but in my experience, most people are more likely to build on, even strengthen their own training – so long as it has some perceived value in their lives.
A good summary of the typical ‘authoritarian’:
What these policies share in common is an outsize fear of threats, physical and social, and, more than that, a desire to meet those threats with severe government action — with policies that are authoritarian not just in style but in actuality. The scale of the desired response is, in some ways, what most distinguishes authoritarians from the rest of the GOP.
The article has way too much to summarize and talk about in a mere blog post, so I’m going to skip to one of Amanda’s conclusions as of the most interest to me:
To my surprise, the most compelling conclusion to come out of our polling data wasn’t about Trump at all.
Rather, it was that authoritarians, as a growing presence in the GOP, are a real constituency that exists independently of Trump — and will persist as a force in American politics regardless of the fate of his candidacy.
If Trump loses the election, that will not remove the threats and social changes that trigger the “action side” of authoritarianism. The authoritarians will still be there. They will still look for candidates who will give them the strong, punitive leadership they desire.
And that means Donald Trump could be just the first of many Trumps in American politics, with potentially profound implications for the country.
And so Amanda, and perhaps her professors, worry about a de-facto 3-party system.
But it doesn’t have to be so. If, in fact, this research is verified, it can also be acted on. And that will raise a lot of questions. By acting on it, I mean identifying processes by which we train children to not have these characteristics, or at least minimize them. But this, of course, raises questions of freedom: the freedom to raise our children as we wish. While that freedom is somewhat limited, as society comes to certain communal conclusions concerning corporal punishment, vaccinations, schooling, and other matters, our freedom to raise children is fairly remarkable, for both good and bad. I think attempting the social engineering that would reduce the salience of these particular motivations in individuals prone to them may be resented and actively fought by those who already have them and are raising children in their mode. After all, why should society have the right to judge an individual as being ‘authoritarian’ (or, more accurately, ‘authoritarian-responsive’), and to classify them as … undesirable?
I know I’d resent it.
So this research, like most good research, starts with one question and will leave a herd of them in its wake. They may tax the liberty-loving, even as those who they may protect do not appear to be liberty-loving in themselves.
