Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers

by John W. Dean

Anthony Scaramucci,

“People ask me if the president lies. Are you nuts? He’s a fucking total liar,” Scaramucci reported. “He lies all the time. Trump called me one night after I was on Bill Maher and he said, ‘How come you always fucking figure me out?’ I said, ‘I’ve seen you around for twenty years. I know your act. I know when you’re saying shit you don’t really mean, and I know when you’re saying bullshit.’ He laughed.” Scaramucci recalled that he then asked Trump, “ ‘Are you an act?’ Trump replied, ‘I’m a total act and I don’t understand why people don’t get it.’

Are the contradictory ideas in the compartmentalized minds of authoritarian followers truly so sealed off that even conspicuous inconsistency goes unnoticed? This was tested in a study in which subjects responded to ten statements at the bottom of a survey page, turned the page over, and then responded to ten other statements that were the opposites of the ones they had just answered.

For example, “A government should allow total freedom of expression, even if it threatens law and order,” and then on the next page, “A government should only allow freedom of expression so long as it does not threaten law and order.” High RWAs showed a tendency to say “Yes” and “Yes,” thus rejecting an idea they endorsed just a minute earlier. They had “turned the page,” so to speak. Low RWAs were significantly more likely to answer consistently, such as answering “Yes” and “No.”

Low RWAs appear to be more careful thinkers, hence much less vulnerable to exaggeration. Demagogues would find them prickly and argumentative. (If people find you that way, it could be a good thing.)

Mary Wegmann

high RWAs had trouble accurately remembering information they had just read and heard along with trouble reaching sensible conclusions from information presented.

Research has subsequently shown that high RWAs especially have trouble realizing a deduction is wrong. When asked to take a reasoning test, billed as such, that presented the syllogism, “All fish live in the sea. Sharks live in the sea. Therefore, sharks are fish,” they said the conclusion logically followed. (It does not.)

We know this because of a trail-blazing researcher at the University of Western Kentucky, Sam McFarland, and his collaborator Sherman Adelson. In 1996 they produced one of the most remarkable discoveries in the history of the social sciences that you never heard about. They “pitted” eighteen different personality tests against one another to see which could best predict prejudice against Black people, women, and homosexual people. The personality measures were chosen because past studies indicated they could predict prejudice, however weakly. The results could not have been clearer: Only two of the scales in the studies climbed victoriously out of the pit: the Social Dominance Orientation Scale and the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale. The sixteen other tests could add barely a penny to what these two tests revealed together when it came to predicting prejudice. The results were quickly confirmed.23 Furthermore, the two tests could explain most of the prejudice against Black people, women, and homosexual people. These results verified one of the earliest discoveries in social psychology to a degree not previously seen, namely that prejudice results mainly from the personalities of the discriminators, not the behavior of the disliked group.

If Trump now has a Messiah complex on top of everything else he got the idea from these preachers. When he told reporters on August 21, 2019, that he was “the Chosen One,” he was just saying what various prominent religious leaders such as Robert Jeffress of Dallas had told both him and the parishioners in their mega-churches.

When tested on the RWA scale they consistently say atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions cannot be as good as those who go to church regularly. When tested on some prejudice scales they say that religions such as Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism do not produce as much “good behavior” as Christianity, and that people cannot lead the best life unless they belong to the Christian religion. In short, with their faith guiding them, they should never have accepted someone as obviously immoral and un-Christ-like as Donald Trump as their political lord and savior. So how could they have?

You have a guilty conscience. What do you do? When given a list of possible reactions to guilt, high RWAs were very likely to say they ask God for forgiveness. They did not check off things like “I discuss what I did with those who may have suffered and make it up to them” or “I talk to someone close, such as a good friend or relative, about what I did.” Low RWAs did those sorts of things but received little relief. They still felt crummy afterward, maybe because they had seen firsthand the damage they had done or knew knowledge of their misdeed had now spread. But authoritarian followers felt almost completely forgiven by God.

A large sample of university student parents were asked to react to, “If we have faith in Jesus, accepting him as our personal savior and asking forgiveness of our sins, we will be saved, no matter what kind of life we live afterwards.” Forty-two percent of the evangelicals in the sample agreed.

HOW IMPORTANT IS THEIR RELIGION TO EVANGELICALS? Evangelicals believe the Bible is the revealed word of God, the supernatural being who created the vast universe and who is going to decide one day whether they will henceforth have an eternity of happiness or the joylessness of the dark side. And the Bible is the place where God has written down what you need to know to go to heaven, so you could know how to get there. It follows that evangelicals would read the Bible. In fact, they would read it over and over, looking for things they might have missed and reminding themselves of things they had forgotten. You can see why they might never read anything else, but instead always be cramming for “the final” that could come at any time, if they believe the Bible is what they tell everybody it is. But consider what happened when a large sample of Canadian parents was given a list of the 66 Books in the King James Bible and asked how many of them they had read from beginning to end. Only one out of five high RWA parents said they had read them all. (We tip our hats in awe to anyone who plowed his way through the first nine chapters of Chronicles I.) Just as many had not read any of the Books. On average, evangelicals had only read about a third of them.

The Low RWA World. One evening, sixty-seven low RWAs, drawn from more than twenty sections of their university’s introductory psychology course in which they had earlier answered the RWA scale, played the game for three hours. They had been invited to participate, they were told, through a random draw of more than twenty-six hundred intro students. They were assigned to ten different regions within the constraint that there be about as many women as men in each region. Seven men and three women stood up and volunteered to be leaders when the simulation began. Right away, the leader of the Pacific Rim called a meeting of all the “elites” on the “Island Paradise of Tasmania,” where they agreed to meet again any time there was a global problem that needed cooperative action. Meanwhile most of the regions independently reduced their military spending and invested in health, education, and economic development. Elites negotiated mutually beneficial deals, and most of the regions made headway solving their problems in sustainable ways. An hour into the simulation, its administrators announced that the ozone layer was seriously diminished and some of the players were in danger of “dying” from skin cancer. It would affect everyone and would take a lot of money to fix. The elites met on Tasmania and successfully negotiated how much each region would pay, with the richest paying the most, and the crisis was averted. It became clear however that the Third World regions would not be a...

QUESTION ONE: Are Trump’s Supporters Highly Authoritarian? ANSWER: Are They Ever! Happily, for our explanation, but most unhappily for the country, the poll said yes. As predicted, the more people supported Donald Trump, the more they were likely to be high RWAs. Figure 1 shows the findings with the RWA Scale. (The results for the Social Dominance Orientation Scale are quite similar, just a little less dramatic.) Figure 1 breaks down this relationship. The overwhelming majority of low RWAs disapproved of Trump, almost always “strongly.” He is anathema to low RWAs. On the other hand, high RWAs simply cannot get enough of the guy. Almost all of them approved of his performance, usually strongly.

QUESTION TWO: Are Trump’s Supporters Highly Prejudiced? ANSWER: Very Much So. Figure 2 displays the prejudice scores compiled by the white people in our survey in terms of their support of President Trump. You can see that it greatly resembles Figure 1. Compared with other Americans, Trump’s white supporters are, as a group, highly prejudiced.

as predicted in chapters 5 and 6, Trump has attracted the most prejudiced white people in America like a magnet attracts metal filings.

The verdicts are in. (1) Donald Trump’s supporters are, as a group, highly authoritarian compared to most Americans. (2) They are also highly prejudiced compared to most Americans. (3) You can explain the prejudice in Trump’s supporters almost entirely by their authoritarianism. (4) Authoritarianism is a strongly organized set of attitudes in America that will prove very difficult to reduce and control. (5) Far more, particularly dangerous, Double High authoritarians exist in the United States than we imagined,

The connections among prejudice, authoritarianism and support for Donald Trump are so strong that no other independent factor can be as important in supporting his reelection.

So, millions of Americans are seemingly primed and waiting for the word to start stomping out “the rot.” It will be their duty, they say, to help persecute whomever a vengeful Trump decides to stomp out. We realize it takes some time to get your head around this, because this is not the America people think they live in. But these results tell us most Trump supporters, willingly or unwittingly, are ready to be part of an East German Stasi-type operation by spying on their neighbors and helping the government oppress whomever it wishes. It appears that if President Trump wanted his very loyal supporters to betray whomever he wanted to persecute he would not have to order it. He would only have to ask, or, more likely, merely suggest it.

We asked, “If Donald Trump is defeated in November 2020, (should he) continue to be president if he declares the election was fixed and crooked?” Trump’s opponents answered with one voice: “No!” But Trump’s supporters proved less likely to side with the Constitution. Only two-thirds of them said no. Fourteen percent outright agreed Trump should declare the election null and void, if he wished, and 19 percent said they were unsure.