Back in 2007 I had an exchange on my blog with Robert Altemeyer, author of The Authoritarians. I don’t feel free to post his parts of the exchange here, aside from brief quotes, so this will be my half of the argument; readers can see the whole thing by following the links in my
The most appropriate answer to too many of those questions should be AYFKM?
Anyway, they certainly read as if they were written by an authoritarian.
I taught polling methodology, off and on, to grad students. If that had been turned in as a grad project it would have been returned with "No Grade" in red letters, and a list of changes and improvements attached. For instance, no compound questions. And no leading questions.
Those questions just mostly suck and I can't see how they are measuring what is claimed.
I feel like it's easy to draw parallels between the left and the right (like you do in the post), but what's more interesting is to see where they are different.
And it seems to me that the left achieved some new levels of authoritarianism. This became evident to me with all the recent moral panics, COVID etc.
This authoritarianism is self righteous, which also explains why it seems to completely misunderstand any criticism.
Some people, like C.S Lewis saw it coming long ago:
"... a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
To be fair, my exchange with Altemeyer was back in 2007 and his book still earlier. I don't know if he still believes authoritarianism is more common on the right.
Mr. T's point was not about the right having become less authoritarian but about the left having become more, which is the reason Altemeyer might have changed his views.
So far I haven't been able to find an email address or other contact information for him. I wanted to tell him that I had put up the post so he could respond to it if he wanted to.
The left not only calls mainstream right-leaning beliefs "nazism" or "fascism", but arrogates labels such as Antifa to themselves, not from sincerity but as a way to silence their opponents. It's all confession through projection, as is the entire notion that authoritarians are mostly on the right. The opposite is true. But most public debate on the topic is poisoned by the fact that the left controls nearly all of the "mainstream" media (and have turned them so extreme as to forfeit the public's trust that used to make them mainstream).
For what it's worth, my answers to most of the list are that the questions are so sweeping and/or vague that "sometimes true" is the only accurate short answer.
My major reason for saying that the left is more authoritarian is that it is willing to use outrageous methods to shut its opponents up (such as deplatforming, swatting, violently attacking, or getting the opponent fired from his job, jailed for peacefully demonstrating, removed from ballots, or expelled from professional organizations) that the right will not attempt.
Most of these questions seem to be measuring how conservative the subject is, and not how authoritarian s/he is. The author is equating the two without any evidence to show how appropriate that is.
As Mr T says, the left has shown a great deal of authoritarianism in recent years, especially in the CoVid realm, but also wrt the climate issue, and the gender and crt movement. Their answers to all these problems involve believing "the experts" (but really only the ones they approve of) and utilizing the power of the government to compel others to go along with their solutions.
Thanks. When I knew how to compose HTML it was a much simpler language. I tried following your instructions but when I opened the page in Firefox and tried to search what I got appeared to be a google search of the web, not of my particular documents. Is it obvious from that what I did wrong? Here is my code:
How can something labelled "right wing authoritarian" be identified in a politically neutral way? The name itself makes clear that it excludes left wing authoritarians, not to mention authoritarians from political systems that don't distinguish between "left" and "right" in a way that can be mapped into the American usage of that term ?
In practical terms, someone would appear to be an authoritarian to the extent that he advocates the legal overriding of people’s choices as regards their own bodies and their external property. And someone is a libertarian to the extent that he advocates not doing this. This only gives us a libertarian-authoritarian spectrum. But then that spectrum can be turned into an axis that is orthogonal to the better-known left-right spectrum: with the left as property-authoritarians and the right as personal-authoritarians. https://jclester.substack.com/p/the-political-compass-and-why-libertarianism
You say in the article that “Altemeyer’s book starts off by defining ‘right wing authoritarian’ (RWA) in a way which purports to be politically neutral”. Unfortunately, you do not then quote the definition. However, you do quote this, “In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives”. But if that contains the implied definition of being an “authoritarian”, then it is highly dubious. The problem is the apparent equivocation involving “authorities” and “authoritarian”. The “authorities” themselves could be very libertarian or very authoritarian. So, to “submit to the established authorities” would only seem to be authoritarian if those authorities are authoritarian. Hence, Altemeyer appears to be confused, rather than “neutral”, about what it means to be “authoritarian”.
I remember becoming a libertarian and reading a lot of libertarian writing. I found one argument in an article I read that was especially persuasive. I sent the article to a relation, who is not a libertarian.
He wrote back and had picked apart the article I'd sent. I saw immediately that my relative's arguments were correct, and that the article I had originally found so persuasive was anything but.
I immediately realized the implication - when we read things that are ideologically consonant with our own views, it's hard to see defects in argument. When we're predisposed to disagree with something however, we're much more attuned to the logical failings of the things we read.
I think that may have been true for Altemeyer. I am a libertarian, not a conservative, and he doesn't claim that libertarians are authoritarian, so my reaction was mainly to what seemed to me a patently dishonest argument.
It is funny how invisible the rules are to people who believe in them, and I think that explains the lack of awareness of the authorities this author mentioned.
Aside from the fact that his survey strikes me as somewhat glib, are we not back at the simple starting point that people believe what they want to believe? I’m reminded of Twain’s essay “Corn-Pone Opinions”. For example, “…hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.” Twain argues that our thinking is mostly conformed, rather than through cold calculation and analysis. He was speaking broadly of the general population, but often this assessment is valid for even so-called scholars. Charitably then, perhaps it isn’t dishonesty so much as it is simply unthinkable (literally) for a person entrenched and muddled by their priors and in-group.
The difficulty is in realising when you're the one whose reasoning is motivated. It's eye opening reading serious history written by European historians of different nationalities that examines wars or competition between them. Read separately, each nation has produced, in its own language, a varied, rigorous and compelling body of scholarship; read alongside the body of work created by a competing nation, they all look ridiculous. And they all look particularly ridiculous when they are trying their hardest to be impartial and superior to the base impulses of nationalism.
Along somewhat related lines, I once taught a class at Chicago called, I think, "Solution Unsatisfactory." It consisted of looking at issues where there appeared to be only two solutions, neither of which worked. Having shown that one of them doesn't work it is natural to conclude that one should go with the other — until you look at it. The universe provides no guarantee that all problems are soluble.
"6. Atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions are no doubt every bit as good and virtuous as those who attend church regularly.
...The only reason I can see why someone would respond with "strongly agree" is that he is an authoritarian accepting the authority of his bubble’s orthodoxy."
The only reason? Though I have no hard data, I would strongly agree that "Atheists no doubt have every bit as many arms and legs as those who attend church regularly." For the same reason I strongly agree with your number 6. It has nothing to do with being an authoritarian or living in a bubble - it's having lived a long life and observing those around me. Even in the public sphere, I see nothing but virtuous atheists with the possible exception of Trump, who I suspect is an atheist, but certainly not good and virtuous.
You think you have observed a random sample of atheists? Of church attenders? You are certain not only that atheists are not less good than church attenders but also not more good? The question says "no doubt every bit as good and virtuous."
Your reason to expect atheists to have the same number of arms and legs as other people isn't observation of atheists, beyond the fact that if many of them were missing limbs you would have noticed, it is your knowledge of human beings, almost all of whom have the same number of limbs. Would you also claim that almost all human beings are equally good and virtuous? That would be the equivalent basis for belief.
I didn't claim to observe a random sample. I indicated that by admitting a lack of hard data. I'm not even trying to argue the truth or falsity of statement we are asked to evaluate - though I do believe it and am certainly not an authoritarian. By giving reasons why someone might strongly agree, I'm arguing against your characterization of those people. It's absurd to baldly claim they are crypto authoritarians or in thrall to some ideology bubble.
The most appropriate answer to too many of those questions should be AYFKM?
Anyway, they certainly read as if they were written by an authoritarian.
I taught polling methodology, off and on, to grad students. If that had been turned in as a grad project it would have been returned with "No Grade" in red letters, and a list of changes and improvements attached. For instance, no compound questions. And no leading questions.
Those questions just mostly suck and I can't see how they are measuring what is claimed.
As you mentioned with compound questions and other issues, I'm not sure you could say that those questions are measuring anything at all.
I feel like it's easy to draw parallels between the left and the right (like you do in the post), but what's more interesting is to see where they are different.
And it seems to me that the left achieved some new levels of authoritarianism. This became evident to me with all the recent moral panics, COVID etc.
This authoritarianism is self righteous, which also explains why it seems to completely misunderstand any criticism.
Some people, like C.S Lewis saw it coming long ago:
"... a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
To be fair, my exchange with Altemeyer was back in 2007 and his book still earlier. I don't know if he still believes authoritarianism is more common on the right.
Well, a brief internet search shows that he jumped on the "Trump is a Fascist" bandwagon.
Mr. T's point was not about the right having become less authoritarian but about the left having become more, which is the reason Altemeyer might have changed his views.
So far I haven't been able to find an email address or other contact information for him. I wanted to tell him that I had put up the post so he could respond to it if he wanted to.
The left not only calls mainstream right-leaning beliefs "nazism" or "fascism", but arrogates labels such as Antifa to themselves, not from sincerity but as a way to silence their opponents. It's all confession through projection, as is the entire notion that authoritarians are mostly on the right. The opposite is true. But most public debate on the topic is poisoned by the fact that the left controls nearly all of the "mainstream" media (and have turned them so extreme as to forfeit the public's trust that used to make them mainstream).
For what it's worth, my answers to most of the list are that the questions are so sweeping and/or vague that "sometimes true" is the only accurate short answer.
My major reason for saying that the left is more authoritarian is that it is willing to use outrageous methods to shut its opponents up (such as deplatforming, swatting, violently attacking, or getting the opponent fired from his job, jailed for peacefully demonstrating, removed from ballots, or expelled from professional organizations) that the right will not attempt.
I also found this piece which seems relevant to this question:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/left-wing-authoritarianism-mirrors-far-right-research-finds-1.4729300
Most of these questions seem to be measuring how conservative the subject is, and not how authoritarian s/he is. The author is equating the two without any evidence to show how appropriate that is.
As Mr T says, the left has shown a great deal of authoritarianism in recent years, especially in the CoVid realm, but also wrt the climate issue, and the gender and crt movement. Their answers to all these problems involve believing "the experts" (but really only the ones they approve of) and utilizing the power of the government to compel others to go along with their solutions.
To add a search option on your site, you will want to take the code from https://pagedart.com/blog/how-to-add-a-search-bar-in-html/ and replace the single site search with a multiple site search:
const site1 = 'http://www.daviddfriedman.com/'
const site2 = 'https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/'
const site3 = 'https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/'
const url = 'https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A' + site1 + '+OR+site%3A' + site2 + '+OR+site%3A' + site3 + '+' + q.value;
Thanks. When I knew how to compose HTML it was a much simpler language. I tried following your instructions but when I opened the page in Firefox and tried to search what I got appeared to be a google search of the web, not of my particular documents. Is it obvious from that what I did wrong? Here is my code:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Search Bar Demo</title>
<style>
body {
background-color: #3745c2;
margin: 200px 40%;
}
form {
background-color: #4654e1;
width: 300px;
height: 44px;
border-radius: 5px;
display:flex;
flex-direction:row;
align-items:center;
}
input {
all: unset;
font: 16px system-ui;
color: #fff;
height: 100%;
width: 100%;
padding: 6px 10px;
}
::placeholder {
color: #fff;
opacity: 0.7;
}
svg {
color: #fff;
fill: currentColor;
width: 24px;
height: 24px;
padding: 10px;
}
button {
all: unset;
cursor: pointer;
width: 44px;
height: 44px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<form role="search" id="form"> <input id="query" name="q"
placeholder="Search..." aria-label="Search through site content"
type="search"> <button>
<svg viewBox="0 0 1024 1024"><path class="path1" d="M848.471
928l-263.059-263.059c-48.941 36.706-110.118 55.059-177.412
55.059-171.294 0-312-140.706-312-312s140.706-312
312-312c171.294 0 312 140.706 312 312 0 67.294-24.471
128.471-55.059 177.412l263.059 263.059-79.529
79.529zM189.623 408.078c0 121.364 97.091 218.455 218.455
218.455s218.455-97.091
218.455-218.455c0-121.364-103.159-218.455-218.455-218.455-121.364
0-218.455 97.091-218.455 218.455z"></path></svg> </button>
</form>
<script>
const f = document.getElementById('form');
const q = document.getElementById('query');
const google = 'https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A+';
const site = 'pagedart.com';
const site1 = 'http://www.daviddfriedman.com/'
const site2 = 'https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/'
const site3 = 'https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/'
const url = 'https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A' + site1 + '+OR+site%3A' + site2 + '+OR+site%3A' + site3 + '+' + q.value;
function submitted(event) {
event.preventDefault();
const url = google + site + '+' + q.value;
const win = window.open(url, '_blank');
win.focus();
}
f.addEventListener('submit', submitted);
</script>
</body>
</html>
There is a simpler way here:
https://pagedart.com/blog/add-google-search-to-a-website/
It also uses javascript.
The idea is to get a string like this into the browser address:
"https://www.google.com/sear
ch?q=site:http://www.daviddfriedman.com/+OR+site:https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/+OR+site:https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/+Altemeyer"
But where "Altemeyer" is replaced by the text that was entered in the search box.
Edit: substack may have mangled the search link. Copy/paste instead of click.
How can something labelled "right wing authoritarian" be identified in a politically neutral way? The name itself makes clear that it excludes left wing authoritarians, not to mention authoritarians from political systems that don't distinguish between "left" and "right" in a way that can be mapped into the American usage of that term ?
In practical terms, someone would appear to be an authoritarian to the extent that he advocates the legal overriding of people’s choices as regards their own bodies and their external property. And someone is a libertarian to the extent that he advocates not doing this. This only gives us a libertarian-authoritarian spectrum. But then that spectrum can be turned into an axis that is orthogonal to the better-known left-right spectrum: with the left as property-authoritarians and the right as personal-authoritarians. https://jclester.substack.com/p/the-political-compass-and-why-libertarianism
That's a reasonable way of using the term but not the way Altemeyer is using it.
You say in the article that “Altemeyer’s book starts off by defining ‘right wing authoritarian’ (RWA) in a way which purports to be politically neutral”. Unfortunately, you do not then quote the definition. However, you do quote this, “In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives”. But if that contains the implied definition of being an “authoritarian”, then it is highly dubious. The problem is the apparent equivocation involving “authorities” and “authoritarian”. The “authorities” themselves could be very libertarian or very authoritarian. So, to “submit to the established authorities” would only seem to be authoritarian if those authorities are authoritarian. Hence, Altemeyer appears to be confused, rather than “neutral”, about what it means to be “authoritarian”.
I try not to ascribe to malice what can be explained by ignorance; of course the consequences of either can be catastrophic.
Stupid can do more damage than malice, because malice occasionally takes a break.
I remember becoming a libertarian and reading a lot of libertarian writing. I found one argument in an article I read that was especially persuasive. I sent the article to a relation, who is not a libertarian.
He wrote back and had picked apart the article I'd sent. I saw immediately that my relative's arguments were correct, and that the article I had originally found so persuasive was anything but.
I immediately realized the implication - when we read things that are ideologically consonant with our own views, it's hard to see defects in argument. When we're predisposed to disagree with something however, we're much more attuned to the logical failings of the things we read.
I suspect something similar is at work here.
I think that may have been true for Altemeyer. I am a libertarian, not a conservative, and he doesn't claim that libertarians are authoritarian, so my reaction was mainly to what seemed to me a patently dishonest argument.
Yes, that is what I meant, though I wasn't clear about it.
It's an issue that applies to me too. I discussed it in an old post:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/why-i-believe-things
Thank you for saving me the trouble of reading The Authoritarians.
Elegant exposition, BTW. I would expect no less of you.
It is funny how invisible the rules are to people who believe in them, and I think that explains the lack of awareness of the authorities this author mentioned.
Aside from the fact that his survey strikes me as somewhat glib, are we not back at the simple starting point that people believe what they want to believe? I’m reminded of Twain’s essay “Corn-Pone Opinions”. For example, “…hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.” Twain argues that our thinking is mostly conformed, rather than through cold calculation and analysis. He was speaking broadly of the general population, but often this assessment is valid for even so-called scholars. Charitably then, perhaps it isn’t dishonesty so much as it is simply unthinkable (literally) for a person entrenched and muddled by their priors and in-group.
The difficulty is in realising when you're the one whose reasoning is motivated. It's eye opening reading serious history written by European historians of different nationalities that examines wars or competition between them. Read separately, each nation has produced, in its own language, a varied, rigorous and compelling body of scholarship; read alongside the body of work created by a competing nation, they all look ridiculous. And they all look particularly ridiculous when they are trying their hardest to be impartial and superior to the base impulses of nationalism.
That could be an interesting college class.
Along somewhat related lines, I once taught a class at Chicago called, I think, "Solution Unsatisfactory." It consisted of looking at issues where there appeared to be only two solutions, neither of which worked. Having shown that one of them doesn't work it is natural to conclude that one should go with the other — until you look at it. The universe provides no guarantee that all problems are soluble.
"6. Atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions are no doubt every bit as good and virtuous as those who attend church regularly.
...The only reason I can see why someone would respond with "strongly agree" is that he is an authoritarian accepting the authority of his bubble’s orthodoxy."
The only reason? Though I have no hard data, I would strongly agree that "Atheists no doubt have every bit as many arms and legs as those who attend church regularly." For the same reason I strongly agree with your number 6. It has nothing to do with being an authoritarian or living in a bubble - it's having lived a long life and observing those around me. Even in the public sphere, I see nothing but virtuous atheists with the possible exception of Trump, who I suspect is an atheist, but certainly not good and virtuous.
You think you have observed a random sample of atheists? Of church attenders? You are certain not only that atheists are not less good than church attenders but also not more good? The question says "no doubt every bit as good and virtuous."
Your reason to expect atheists to have the same number of arms and legs as other people isn't observation of atheists, beyond the fact that if many of them were missing limbs you would have noticed, it is your knowledge of human beings, almost all of whom have the same number of limbs. Would you also claim that almost all human beings are equally good and virtuous? That would be the equivalent basis for belief.
I didn't claim to observe a random sample. I indicated that by admitting a lack of hard data. I'm not even trying to argue the truth or falsity of statement we are asked to evaluate - though I do believe it and am certainly not an authoritarian. By giving reasons why someone might strongly agree, I'm arguing against your characterization of those people. It's absurd to baldly claim they are crypto authoritarians or in thrall to some ideology bubble.