The Authoritarian Republicans
For the longest time I have wondered what people are thinking when they identify themselves as “Republicans”. Former White House Counsel, John Dean’s recent article on FindLaw explains one reasone. This article is the first of three to elaborate on his recent book Conservatives Without Conscience.
The reason lies in a personality type known as Authoritarian. The Authoritarian personality type has been the subject of research for many decades with most of the research happening in a post-Hitler world that was trying to figure out why in the world people would give up their freedom willingly to Hitler.
From Understanding the Contemporary Republican Party: Authoritarians Have Taken Control:
While not all conservatives are authoritarians, all highly authoritarian personalities are political conservatives. To make the results of my rather lengthy inquiry very short, I found that it was the authoritarians who took control of the conservative movement in the 1980s, and then the Republican Party in the 1990s. Strikingly, these conservative Republicans – though hardly known for their timidity — have not attempted to refute my report, because that is not possible. It is based on hard historical facts, which I set forth in considerable detail.
Authoritarian control continues to this day, so it is important to understand these people. There are two types of authoritarians: leaders (the few) and followers (the many). Study of these personalities began following World War II, when social psychologists asked how so many people could compliantly follow an authoritarian leader like Adolf Hitler and tolerate the Holocaust. Early research was based at the University of California, Berkeley, and it focused primarily on followers, culminating in the publication of a The Authoritarian Personality (1950) – a work that broadly described authoritarian personalities. The book was quite popular for decades, but as the Cold War ended, it had been on the shelf and ignored for a good while.
