From the Archives
A brief primer about some of my work on "authoritarian personality" and America's political divide
Warning - a little self-indulgence forthcoming.
A lot of you, but perhaps not all of you, know that I’ve collaborated over many years with a close friend of mine, the eminent political scientist Marc Hetherington. Marc and I met when we were both teaching at Bowdoin College at the turn of the century. When we were there, our primary activities were bowling and talking politics (and sports). We watched with a combination of fascination and horror at the unfolding Florida recount in the fall of 2000. We started having conversations about what seemed like a change in the nature of political division in the United States and began presenting work at conferences in 2004 and 2005, arguing that the fundamental divide in American politics was not policy- or ideology-based, but rather anchored in basic personality differences.
More specifically, we said that a sorting process was under way that was increasingly driving those we described as non-authoritarian toward the Democratic Party and those who were more authoritarian toward the Republican Party. That sorting process was, in turn, creating a depth and intensity of division that made it feel like our political conflicts had become irreconcilable. Why? Because partisan conflict was now rooted in the most basic, gut-level differences in what we called worldview. On one side were people who were generally open to new experiences, comfortable with social change and celebrated racial and ethnic diversity. On the other were people for whom tradition, the tried and true and the predictable were their safe haven. When a politics is riven by such fundamental differences, it’s very hard to bridge them.
The above paragraph represents a gross simplification of a set of issues about which countless volumes have been written and endless debate has ensued. Many people, including many on the right, have chafed (or much worse) at the suggestion that the left is any more tolerant and open-minded about ideas and people they don’t like than anyone else. We’ll leave that for another time. But the way we “operationalized” this argument was by analyzing how respondents answered four questions about parenting. Specifically, these questions ask what attributes people believe it is most important to instill in children. Marc and I wrote a book about this, in 2009, with the sexy title Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics.
(And here are the four questions, or rather pairs of attributes, with respondents choosing which is more important for children to have):
independence or respect for their elders;
curiosity or good manners;
self-reliance or obedience;
being considerate or being well-behaved.
That book received a generally nice reception in our field, adding to what was then an already robust debate about the nature, causes and consequences of political polarization in the United States.
Then Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015, and the book came to the attention of a much wider audience. As Trump was emerging as the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination in 2016, media outlets came calling. That led, among other things, to me appearing on CNN with Fareed Zakaria.
Houghton Mifflin then approached us to write a popular and updated version of the original academic work. We published Prius or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide, in 2018. By then, we’d decided to change some terminology. We no longer labeled the two antagonistic sides authoritarian and non-authoritarian. We now called them “fixed” and “fluid.” The older terminology has been contested since the publication of the landmark study, The Authoritarian Personality, in 1950. We wanted to sidestep some of those entanglements. We also had extended the argument from the first book beyond the realm of politics and into arenas of consumer choice, pet preferences and more. In that context, we thought it made less sense to think about whether one likes Dunkin’ or Starbucks as a question of “authoritarianism.”
Regardless, the implications of the argument in the second book were no less dire. Indeed, in the decade since our original book, more or less everything we’d argued in had only intensified. Incidentally, we also made a point in the second book of noting that the divide we were describing had emerged outside the United States, in Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere. And those four parenting questions - which we now had data for in the above-named countries - explained just as potently how people found their political homes outside the US. As is now clear to just about everyone, what has unfolded in the United States is a species of a broader phenomenon. Recognizing that fact is itself important in understanding the depth and character of what we’re now confronting.
I’m writing this out for two reasons. First, because a goal of this substack is to introduce myself and my writings to whatever audience may be interested. And second, despite refinements in how social scientists theorize and measure what draws people to their side of the political barricades, I think the broad strokes of our arguments are still important for making sense of what often feels like the bewildering and incomprehensible polarities in values, information processing and political priorities. Even if I don’t make it explicit, this is the basic framework I still rely on to think about our politics.
A final note. Of course, Marc and I each have our biases and limitations. That’s the nature of the beast. But in our books, we tried to step back from our own worldviews to think dispassionately about what has been going on in America over the past generation. I mention this because we all wear different hats in different contexts. As a blogger/writer, I am much more unabashed, less circumspect in opinionating - “strident,” some of my friends may or may not say - about the state of the world. In the mode of writing a scholarly book, I am more careful. As a teacher, I do my absolute best (however imperfectly) to ensure that there is a space for everyone in a classroom to feel able to explore their own intellectual path.
It doesn’t always come across here, in part because I think of this outlet as serving a particular expressive purpose, but I do wrestle with my own opinions and biases. I don’t, however, wrestle with my fundamental values, my belief in the central imperative to defend the vulnerable and the historically marginalized, and to advocate for a society that makes that imperative central to its social, political and economic arrangements.
Anyway, thanks, as always, for reading.