Resolved: You cannot understand Trump's support without understanding RWA and SDO

Politics & Elections
1

For anyone who doesn’t know what right wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) they are personality metrics.

People high in RWA tend to see the world as threatening, they feel that social cohesion is necessary to keep society safe and stable, and they see marginalized groups as threats. They do not want an egalitarian society because they think it’ll cause society to fall apart and will make it easier for foreign and domestic threats to hurt them.

People high in SDO see the world as a dog eat dog world, and they like the relative privilege and status their skin color, religion, gender, nationality, etc gives them over others. They do not want an egalitarian society becuase they will lose advantages.

Bob Altemeyer, the Canadian-American social psychologist who first coined the term and its meaning in 1981, defined right-wing authoritarian as someone who exhibits:[4]

  1. a high degree of submission to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
  2. a general aggressiveness, directed against various persons, that is perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities.
  3. a high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.
    Authoritarian Tendencies in the American Electorate (Part 1) | Monmouth University Polling Institute | Monmouth University

Individuals who score high in SDO desire to maintain and, in many cases, increase the differences between social statuses of different groups, as well as individual group members. Typically, they are dominant, driven, tough, and seekers of power.[citation needed] People high in SDO also prefer hierarchical group orientations. Often, people who score high in SDO adhere strongly to belief in a “dog-eat-dog” world.[3] It has also been found that men are generally higher than women in SDO measures.[4][5] A study of undergraduates found that SDO does not have a strong positive relationship with authoritarianism.[2]

In the US, about 25% of adults score high on RWA, vs about 10-15% in other developed nations.
I’m not sure what % score high in SDO, but it may be around the same range, about 15-20%.

These two articles from 2020 are interesting.

Especially this part (it won’t let me post photos, but it discusses how the vast majority of people who strongly support Trump score high on RWA and/or SDO, and the vast majority of people who disapprove of Trump score low on RWA and SDO.

78% of Americans who strongly approved of Trump scored high in RWA, SDO or both.

Among people who scored low in both RWA and SDO, 74% disapproved of Trump. Only 5% of people who scored high on RWA, SDO or both approved of Trump.

This helps make it easier to understand why this country is so fucked up, but the question is what can be done? I have read that attitudes about RWA and SDO are fairly stable over time.

There really wasn’t much middle ground. 463 people strongly disapproved, 346 strongly approved. And 43 somewhat disapproved and 119 somewhat approved.

The vast majority of people fell into the strongly disapproved category or the strongly approved category, and they were largely sorted by whether they scored high or low on RWA and/or SDO.

I don’t know what the answer is, or if there is an answer. But it sucks that this is society, where about ~40% of voters score high on RWA or SDO and they are overwhelmingly republicans now.

In 2020 when Trump ran, about 40% of his voters scored in the highest quartile for RWA, while virtually none of Biden’s voters scored in the highest quartile of RWA.

2

This is interesting, and has obvious parallels in Canadian politics, too. Presumably these people are made, not born, and so social measures may help reduce their numbers. Of course such social measures–health, education, non-authoritarian teaching, greater social equality–are exactly what those folks oppose.

3

You can’t understand Trump’s support without understanding patriarchy, feminism, and why this is patriarchy’s last stand.

They’re doing a terrifyingly good job of a last stand, I have to say. But they’re doomed.

4

I think we should take over Greenland and then send all those people there. Maybe the same thing will happen to them as happened to the Viking settlement.

Also, this is not patriarchy’s last stand. We wish.

5

Yes, and? People with certain personality traits tend towards certain political parties. That’s obvious. And we have a label for the personality traits that tend towards the modern Republican party. What does that buy us? Even if it’s occasionally useful to have a label, we already had one of those: “Republican”.

6

Your summary is mostly not supported by your link. One could certainly be RWA without seeing the world as being threatening (for example, using SDO to justify it), and one could view the world as threatening without supporting RWA (say, if one were a legitimately oppressed minority).

I’m not sure there’s even a RW association here, let alone RWA. There’s plenty of admiration for the social cohesion of the Nordic countries, which is associated with egalitarianism, not authoritarianism. It’s sort of strange to consider social cohesion RW.

There might be a correlation here between RWA and the things you mentioned but you haven’t demonstrated it.

7

Social cohesion is also especially valued by minority groups, and is supported by the left.

8

You also must understand the general Republican philosophy that they are the natural leaders of the hoi polloi, and that when circumstances conspire to put them out of power, the natural world order is upset and must be restored. Any Democrat holding office is an affront to the way things should be.
This leads them – in a “the ends justify the means” reasoning with a strong dose of entitlement – to gerrymander districts, disenfranchise voters, and just generally lie and cheat to win elections.
Charles Blow had a great column in the NYT on this 3-4 years ago, but I’m having trouble with Googling it.
He had a term for it, which escapes me now. It’s not manifest destiny, but it’s something close to that spirit.

9

And as was said in another thread, this is all because they can’t defend their actions, administrations and certainly not their policies.

They don’t think they have to defend their illegal activities (they can’t). They are just ‘better’ than everyone else, and as it should be, they will just take what they want.

10

Maybe some personal satisfaction of calling someone what they are? I mention that because even though I haven’t read this thread until just now, I had an idea come to me on my commute this morning. Considering all of Trump’s accomplishments, there’s one thing they all come down to. Trump has made it OK to be an asshole again. Thinking about it in those terms, and realizing that all of MAGAs efforts come down to “it’s OK to be an asshole again”, gives me some odd satisfaction.

11

Socialism - the definition of left wing politics - was an anti-Capitalist movement.

Mussolini positioned Fascism as a 2nd wave of Socialism that, rather than organizing the economy under the state, organized the economy under state-sanctioned syndicates. It was still an anti-Capitalist movement, but - to be sure - somewhat of a compromise. That makes it a middle-position, not an edge position.

People who practiced authoritarianism include:

  • Stalin - Socialist Communist
  • Pinochet - Free Market Capitalist
  • Mussolini - Socialist Fascist
  • Catherine the Great - Mercantilist
  • Emperor Augustus - Agrarian

Authoritarianism creates yes-men and sycophants. That’s not unique to any particular political view.

The left-right dichotomy is just something that someone said once that left-wing university professors picked up to try and distance themselves from the Fascists. I don’t begrudge them that. Nevertheless, it’s junk science, every bit as much as Freudianism or the idea that the face is divided into ratios on the golden ratio.

If we want to call Republican and Democratic politics “right” and “left”, respectively, until recently that was a split between individualists/free market types and collectivist/social welfare types. Mussolini wasn’t an Anarcho-Libertarian.

12

Coincidentally, this just ended on TCM. The things they say we need to be on the lookout for, the danger authoritarian rising again, are sickeningly familiar today.

Hitler Lives (1945)

13

No, but Mussolini was an authoritarian. I think you’re conflating two different axes, the economic and the political. On top of that, I think (but could very well be wrong), that you’re overestimating the importance of the economic axis on how people are voting in the current climate. It seems to me that the determining factor is mostly the political axis (authoritarian vs. democracy) and that the economic stuff comes in a distant second at best.

In other words, people aren’t voting for Trump because of his economic policies, they’re voting for him (or against him) because he’s an authoritarian asshole.

ETA. My evidence to support this hypothesis is that Trump’s economic positions are all over the map. The one thing that they all have in common is that they are sold to his base as screwing over some group or another that they want to screw over, and they support him and his positions for that reason alone.

14

I’m struggling with this paragraph. Is there a typo or do I need to get good re: reading?

15

If more people understood the motivation of Republicans, there would be less talk of “when the good Republicans take back the party.” That naïveté did incredible harm to America as people sat on their hands waiting for someone to fix things.

16

Yeah, I think it’s a typo for “disapprove,” but also a misreading of the chart. What it actually says is that 74% of the people who strongly disapprove of Trump scored low on both RWA and SDO, while only 5% of the strong-disapprovers scored high on either or both of these scales. (The rest of the strong disapprovers fell somewhere in the middle on the RWA / SDO scale.)

17

There is the RWA scale and the SDO scale. Some people score high on one, some score high on both. Its the same with scoring low. Some score low on one, some score low on both.

Among the people who strongly approve of Trump, 78% score high on either RWA or SDO, or they score high on both. 4% of people who strongly approve of Trump score low on both RWA and SDO metrics.

Among the people who strongly disapprove of Trump, 5% score high on either RWA or SDO, or they score high on both. 74% of people who strongly disapprove of Trump score low on both metrics.

Thats what I meant by this thread. You can’t understand Trump support or opposition unless you understand RWA and SDO.

78% of people who strongly approve of Trump scored high on RWA, or SDO, or both. Only 4% of the people who strongly approve of Trump scored low on both RWA and SDO.

74% of people who strongly disapprove of Trump scored low on both RWA and SDO. Among people who strongly disapprove of Trump, only 5% scored high on RWA, or SDO, or both.

18

So it was a typo.

19

Stalin was also an authoritarian. Authoritarianism is not limited to right or left. And the economy (specifically inflation) was easily the biggest reason voters gave for voting for Trump. People felt they were doing better during Trump’s first term than under Biden, and never mind all the external factors: that was enough for many to vote for him.

20

Stalin’s economic policies were left wing. I won’t dispute that. That’s why I was distinguishing between left and right economic positions and left and right political positions. By my reckoning, Stalin was on the far left of the economic axis and on the far right of the political axis.

On the political axis, I think of it as left wing = democracy and right wing = authoritarian. To be more precise, I think the horseshoe theory applies to the political axis, with left wing = anarchy, middle of the road = democracy, and right wing = authoritarianism, but with left wing / anarchy being inherently unstable and by it’s very nature almost always ending up leading to a right wing / authoritarian political system (present day Haiti is a good example of this). Given that this is the case, I end up classifying democracy as left, even though it is really in the middle of the spectrum, since a true left (anarchy) is unstable and will only last for very short periods of time.

As far as inflation goes, I really don’t get it. Yes, that’s the reason some of the voters gave as the reason they voted for Trump, but other than eggs and maybe one or two other things, I don’t think inflation was actually any worse at the end of the Biden years than at any other time in recent memory. At least I didn’t notice it.