What Turns A Normal Baby Into A Right Wing Sociopath?

Born in 1911, Ronald Reagan came from a normal working class Illinois home. He was a labor union activist in the 1940s and the president of his union from 1947 until 1952 and again in 1959 but at some point in there he sold out to management and started secretly ratting out other actors to the FBI as "communist sympathizers." He remained a Democrat and even helped California Senator Helen Gahagan Douglas defend herself against the deranged attacks from a sleazy, fascist-oriented political newcomer, Richard Nixon. By then, though, he was dating Republican Nancy Drew and he started shifting his flimsy political beliefs rightward. Once General Electric, an overtly conservative firm, hired him as a TV host in 1954 he worked to please them by adopting their right-wing agenda, including a new anti-union stance. By 1962, he switched parties and became not just a Republican, but a far right Republican, even embracing racism. Opposing civil rights legislation, he said "if an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so" and he actively campaigned against Medicare.

Many people point out that Reagan wasn't as extreme as Republicans are today. They're incorrect. His actual beliefs may have been shallow but his intent was always to go hard right. He would be as much a crackpot today as Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, or Jim Inhofe. He'd fit right in. You may find a liberal saying something respectful about him but you'll never find a liberal claiming Reagan was ever anything else than what he was, a right-winger.

Last week, as normal people commemorated the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy, lots of delusional Republicans and right-wing trolls tried claiming JFK was a conservative. In fact, in 1960, when JFK accepted the nomination of New York's Liberal Party, he was widely quoted as saying "if by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties-- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal,'" then I'm proud to say I'm a 'Liberal'."

In their scholarly new book, Predisposed, John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford investigate what makes one person a conservative and someone else a progressive. Their premise is that people experience and process different world. "We taste and smell the same things differently," they wrote. "We cognitively and subjectively interpret the same paintings or stories or jokes differently. We have different personalities, moral foundations, and personal values-- and we have different politics… Openness means openness to experience and information and refers to people who are curious, creative and arty, those who enjoy and seek out novel experiences and are more likely to adopt unconventional beliefs… People who score high on openness, for example, tend to like envelope-pushing music and abstract art… Those open to new experiences are not just hanging Jackson Pollock prints in unorganized bedrooms while listening to techo-pop reinterpretations of Bach by experimental jazz bands. They are also more likely to identify themselves as liberals."

Social scientists have suspected for the better part of a century that political orientations are tied to personality. In fact, in some instances the controversy has been less about whether personality traits influence ideology than whether ideology is a personality trait. Personality can be thought of as the particular patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that make an individual unique.

…Liberals and conservatives might differ on such eclectic non-political tastes as literature and salads for the same reason people with particular personality traits have different tastes and preferences. Maybe “liberal” and “conservative” are just handy terms for describing people who happen to have distinct bundles of traits driving their thoughts, feelings and actions. The big trick, of course, is figuring out the specific traits that consistently distinguish liberals from conservatives… This research, to put it mildly, has been controversial. It began with reflections on the traits that make for a good Nazi.

Erich Jaensch was a psychologist in pre-World War II Germany who was best known for his work on eidetic imagery (an eidetic image is an image that is perceived as real but is not). He began classifying people on their eidetic capabilities and then, ominously, began attaching cultural significance to these capabilities. Somewhere in the process this agenda morphed into providing scholarly cover for some of the more odious racial elements underpinning Nazi ideology. Jaensch’s argument that eidetic individuals are more likely than non-eidetic individuals to possess certain traits does not seem particularly freighted with political importance. Yet from this basis he started to develop a classification scheme for two personality types that accrued major political ramifications.

The “J” type personality was athletic, practical, and decisive. The “S” type was individualistic, egocentric, and liberal. J-types were likely to be upstanding Nazis; S-types, according to Jaensch, were more likely to be Jews and perhaps Frenchmen. He saw these personality types as biologically (read racially) rooted and connected to, not just different views of the world but maybe even different forms of humanity that would take predictably different sides in any cultural conflict. There is no prize for guessing who Jaensch viewed as the good guys in such conflict.

After the J-types jackbooted themselves and everyone else into a bloody, global conflict and lost, they were viewed less as practical and decisive than as existential threats to humanity.

During and immediately following World War II a number of social scientists investigated the inner workings of J-types. No one really believed in Jaensch’s chain of inference-- the conclusions were not only morally repugnant but empirically unsupported-- but the concept of an authoritarian personality type had been floating around in academic circles for quite a while. Maybe humanity was not divided into J- and S-types biologically fated to clash in a global struggle for cultural dominance but maybe there was something to the notion of certain personality traits being more acceptant of authoritarian social structures. This possibility was a very big deal in the middle of the 20th Century, when authoritarian ideological systems aggressively sought to replicate themselves through persuasion or force.

The big ideological “isms” that threatened democracy-- fascism on the right and communism on the left-- were clearly aided not just by the acceptance but in many cases the enthusiastic support of large numbers of seemingly ordinary people. This support came despite the indisputable fact that these regimes often fostered scientific ideas that were specious: Jaensch’s extrapolation from eidetic capabilities to justifications of Nazi racial purity or Trofim Lysenko’s rejection of Mendelian genetics for a new form of “anti-bourgeois” agronomy.

Moreover, the moral consequences of the policies being justified were difficult to miss: Gas chambers and gulags, wars and genocide, man-made famines and a generally cavalier approach to human rights and dignity. What was truly puzzling to social scientists was that these policies were not only accepted and implemented by the ideological true believers but by the average tovarisch and burgher. To be sure, many people just acquiesced in order to protect family and others actively resisted at extreme costs to themselves. Yet, authoritarian regimes needed many average citizens to get with the program. And lots of them did. Why?

In the 1940s and 1950s, psychologists began to hypothesize that people with certain preferences-- a desire for social order and clear, universally followed rules and regulations-- were more likely to provide that support to authoritarian regimes. They began to wonder whether these preferences were deeply psychologically embedded; in other words, whether they constituted a distinct and identifiable set of traits that could be isolated as a personality type. Thus was born the notion of the authoritarian personality. Investigators accept at least parts of Jaensch’s conception of a J-type but often view such personality types as threats to rather than foundations of society. A number of names are associated with the academic work foundational to developing and testing the concept of the authoritarian personality. The most prominent, though, is Theodor Adorno, a German academic whose experience with authoritarianism was all too practical. He was a man of broad interests-- he is still remembered as a music and cultural critic-- who studied philosophy, psychology and sociology, receiving his PhD in 1924. A rising star in more than one academic field, Adorno fled Hitler’s regime after losing his right to teach. Adorno’s father was a Jew who had converted to Protestantism, a dangerous genealogy to have in Nazi Germany.

Adorno ended up at the University of California Berkeley studying, among other things, the sociology and psychology of prejudice. There he began a series of collaborative research projects with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, an Austrian-born psychologist and fellow refugee of the anti-Semitic pogroms of the Hitler regime, and Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford, two psychologists who studied ethnocentrism. These projects resulted in The Authoritarian Personality. Theories about authoritarianism had been making the rounds in respectable academic circles for a decade or more before this book was published in 1950, but this was likely the first-- and certainly best known-- systematic empirical investigation into whether there was such a thing as a personality rooted in politics. As the authors put it, their major hypothesis was “that the political, economic, and social convictions of an individual often form a broad and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a ‘mentality’ or ‘spirit’ and that this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality.” Specifically, what they were interested in were “potential” fascists-- not overt and committed ideologues, but those predisposed to accept or support fascism should it become a mainstream social movement. [Basically, teabaggers of the day]

They ended up developing the F-scale-- the “F” stood for fascist. The F-scale focused on nine traits, which for the most part ignored specific policy issues like preferences on hiring quotas and focused on “central trends in the person.” These traits included conventionalism (a rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values), superstition and stereotypy (a belief in mystical determinants of individual fate coupled with a predisposition to think in rigid categories), and anti-intraception (an opposition to the subjective or the imaginative). A number of the questions they used to try and get at these traits were prescient in that they reflected the sorts of non-political items now known to discriminate between liberals and conservatives. For example, one of the anti-intraception questions was: “Novels or stories that tell about what people think and feel are more interesting than those which contain mainly action, romance and adventure.” One of the conventionalism questions asked whether it was more important for a person to be artistic and sensuous or neat and well-mannered.

…In The Psychology of Politics, published just a few years after The Authoritarian Personality (1954), Hans Eysenck argued that personality was projected onto social attitudes. In this book, Eyesenck suggested that ideology was a product of two core underlying dimensions. One of these dimensions amounted to a basic left-right take on political and social issues. The other was “tendermindedness” or “toughmindedness.” The idea was that ideology depended not just on issue preferences but also on underlying personality. Authoritarians, be they on the left or right, were more likely to be toughminded. Eyesenck put both communists and fascists in this category since both groups were willing to pursue their political beliefs with little regard for the preferences and interests of others.

…[I]n the 1960s Glenn Wilson and colleagues in England, New Zealand, and Australia, took the basic concept of conservatism as reflecting a dimension of personality characterized by resistance to change and adherence to tradition. The result was the C-scale (“C” for conservatism) also broadly known as the Wilson- Patterson index-- versions of which we use in our own research. They measured conservatism with questions probing attitudes on everything from school uniforms to the death penalty and found it to correlate not just with the political orientations you would expect but also with tastes and preferences more broadly.

A more recent extension of the authoritarian personality research program is right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). It was developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer, who wondered whether there was a set of people “so generally submissive to established authority that it is scientifically useful to speak of ‘authoritarian people’.” Altemeyer’s answer was a decisive yes. He spent decades refining what amounted to an RWA personality test. Through various iterations this test included questions that had clear political implications, but he also experimented with questions that dealt with child rearing, music and films, and personal hygiene. RWA had much stronger psychometric properties than its F-scale predecessor and Altemeyer consistently reported that people scoring high on RWA tests were more likely to support controls on personal freedom, support harsh forms of punishment, be hostile to perceived out groups (e.g. homosexuals, feminists), and be more likely to support government persecution of these groups.

Reagan was pretty clueless about where he belonged on the spectrum. Kennedy certainly has a much keener understanding.