Authoritarians Exist on the Right AND Left.

I stumbled upon a few good reads on the polarization and authoritarianism in politics over the weekend. If you haven’t read my post and white paper on The Big Bang Theory of Independent Politics, I approach this topic from a different perspective but get to the same point with a lot less research!

Here are the links to the article and study referenced in this post.

To summarize, the study and article focus on the fact that while Republicans get all the blame for being authoritarian, authoritarianism is just as prevalent on the Left.

Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”

I’m linking to the Atlantic Article, hopefully you will be able to follow it and it doesn’t require a subscription to read. This article is based on Clarifying the Structure and Nature of Left-Wing Authoritarianism by Thomas H. Costello and a few others.

Abstract: Authoritarianism has been the subject of scientific inquiry for nearly a century, yet the vast majority of authoritarianism research has focused on right-wing authoritarianism. In the present studies, we investigate the nature, structure, and nomological network of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), a construct famously known as “the Loch Ness Monster” of political psychology. We iteratively construct a measure and data-driven conceptualization of LWA across six samples (N = 7,258) and conduct quantitative tests of LWA’s relations with over 60 authoritarianism-related variables. We find that LWA, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation reflect a shared constellation of personality traits, cognitive features, beliefs, and motivational values that might be considered the “heart” of authoritarianism. Still, relative to right-wing authoritarians, left-wing authoritarians were lower in dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, higher in negative emotionality, and expressed stronger support for a political system with substantial centralized state control. Our results also indicate that LWA powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and is strongly correlated with participation in political violence. We conclude that a movement away from exclusively right-wing conceptualizations of authoritarianism may be required to illuminate authoritarianism’s central features, conceptual breadth, and psychological appeal.