Liberal Bullies E-Book

Luke Conway

• Herausgeber: Forum
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 422

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The political left has an urgent and rising problem with authoritarianism. An alarmingly high percentage of self-identified progressives are punitive, bullying, and intolerant of disagreement – and the problem is getting worse. Using his own cutting-edge research, leading psychologist Luke Conway shows that it's not just right-wing extremists who long for an authority figure to crush their enemies, silence opponents and restore order; it' s also those who preach 'be kind' and celebrate their 'inclusivity.' A persistent proportion of left-wingers demonstrate authoritarian tendencies, and they're becoming more emboldened as they gain cultural and political power. On a range of scientific and social issues, they are increasingly advocating censorship over free debate, disregarding the rule of law, and dehumanising their opponents. These tendencies are part of an accelerating 'threat circle' of mutual hatred and fear between left and right that could tear apart our basic democratic norms. Concluding with an eloquent call for firm but rational resistance to this rising tide of liberal bullying, Conway presents a way forward for our hyper-partisan era.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction 1 Authoritarian Followers, Right and Left 2 Intellectual Apathy: A Virus that Kills Rational Argument 3 Misinformation Obsession: The Psychology of the Elephant’s Tusk 4 Inconsistency: Groups In, Principle Out 5 Simplicity: Authoritarian Black-and-White Thinking, Literally 6 Self-Ignorance: The Left-Wing Authoritarianism Blind Spot 7 We’re Doing This Wrong 8 The Paradox of the Authoritarian Deterrence System 9 How to Fight Fire with Fire without Burning Everything Down Notes

Introduction

I remember the moment I became truly worried about liberal bullies.

I had just presented evidence to my university’s Faculty Senate on a resolution concerning vaccine and mask mandates. I was a long-time liberal,1 but I had never just unthinkingly walked the party line; and this was one of those instances where I had gone against the mainstream academic position. In stating my opposition to these mandates, I had cited research from Brown University2 and Yale University (co-authored with a Stanford University scholar),3 and quoted a top researcher at the University of Minnesota.4 And then I sat down expecting the predictable, yawning, biased responses.

Rarely have I ever been more wrong.

What came instead was a cannonade of vitriol unlike anything I have ever experienced in academia. Suddenly, I wasn’t a scientist who had presented evidence from Ivy League universities and made arguments; I was a heretic who had dared oppose the current left-wing orthodoxy. Among other things, a colleague called the research I had presented ‘conspiracy theories that anyone could get off of the internet,’ to uproarious support from the rest of the Faculty Senate.

That was my moment. I knew that if research from Yale, Stanford, Brown, and the University of Minnesota could be called ‘conspiracy theories anyone could get off of the internet,’ something new and afoul was afoot. This wasn’t just the usual and predictable bias; this was something truly different. It was time to start getting genuinely worried.

The Warning Signs Were All There

Truthfully, I should have seen this coming sooner.

In the summer of 2018, Pedro Pascal – star of the hit Disney show The Mandalorian – tweeted two pictures that compared the US to Nazi Germany.5 Roughly three years later, Gina Carano, his co-star on the show, posted a tweet that similarly compared the US to Nazi Germany. Pascal’s tweet went largely unnoticed and was active (as far as I can tell) until he deleted his Twitter account in November 2022.6 Gina Carano, on the other hand, was forced under immense social pressure to delete her tweet, and Disney fired her anyway. Disney did so with a very harsh dismissal essentially claiming she was a mean and racist person.7 Why did Pascal keep his job and Carano lose hers? After all, polling showed that a whopping 72% of Americans, upon reading Carano’s tweet, did not think she should be fired for it.8 It is hard to get 72% of Americans to agree that ‘Rocky Road ice cream tastes good’ these days, much less to agree on something political. But Carano was fired nonetheless. Why was she fired, while Pascal kept his job?

Maybe it is pure coincidence that Pascal’s post criticized conservatives and Carano’s post criticized liberals.

But I don’t think it is pure coincidence. In fact, Carano’s firing is indicative of a growing syndrome of leftist authoritarians who want authority figures to crush their opponents with ruthless ambition. And a lot of people in my home country are beginning to wonder about all these bullying, strong-handed, punitive, angry liberals roaming the internet and getting people fired. Many average Americans woke up one day to a world where they suddenly had to speak just so and act in a certain way to simply keep their jobs and their social lives intact. They woke up in a world where it is commonplace for people in the media to actually say they want their left-wing president to rule ‘with an iron fist’.9 And the people waking up to this increasingly left-wing authoritarian world want answers. Where did all these liberal authoritarians come from? How many of them arethere? What drives them? What are they like? Why are they canceling and firing people? And what can we do about it?

In this book, I answer these questions by providing a comprehensive psychological look at who left-wing authoritarians are, how the modern authoritarian movement grew, and how we can stop it. In the first section of the book (Chapter 1), I lay out the case that left-wing authoritarianism is a real and pervasive problem. In so doing, I discuss what authoritarianism is, how it differs from positive instances of mere obedience to authority, and why you should care about it. Even if it hasn’t touched your life yet, there is a very real chance that it will, and this section highlights that fact.

In the second section of the book (Chapters 2–6), each chapter diagnoses one characteristic of the left-wing authoritarian movement. To understand the cure, you have to first understand the disease. Thus, in this middle section, I dig deeply into the psychology of what makes a left-wing authoritarian person tick by discussing cutting-edge research in my own field.

In the third section of the book (Chapters 7–9), I talk about where left-wing authoritarianism came from – and what we can do about it. By showing direct parallels between what you might see in your everyday life and what we can prove by science, I hope to make the modern science of authoritarianism come alive for you.

I don’t know how you personally feel about liberal bullies at this moment, but if you are concerned about them, you aren’t alone. For example, in the spring of 2020, our research lab debated prominent New York University professor John Jost’s lab on left-wing authoritarianism.10 At that time, left-wing authoritarianism felt somewhat on the fringe of my field of social psychology. I was thus a bit surprised when our debate-style symposium was accepted (the acceptance rate for these prestigious symposia is 35%). I was even more surprised when I checked out the room the morning of the debate and realized that the organizers had put us in one of the large ballrooms – instead of placing us in a small side room as I had expected. I began to imagine the embarrassment of a small crowd in a large ballroom. After all, this was a fringe topic in the field: Who would show up?

So imagine my shock when the large ballroom was nearly full with inquisitive people for what turned out to be a hotly contested, vigorous, and entertaining session. And I realized then that this topic was not so fringe after all. People – even the overwhelmingly liberal group of people known as social psychologists – really seemed to care about left-wing authoritarianism.

Maybe you have experienced liberal bullies yourself. Maybe you think leftist authoritarians aren’t really that big a problem and the whole thing will just blow over. Maybe you find yourself uncertain what to think or who to believe.

No matter where you land on these issues or what your political background is, I hope this book is for you. You’ll see in these pages that I’m a former liberal with many liberal sympathies. You’ll see that I think conservative authoritarians are a huge problem too, and that we have to solve both liberal and conservative authoritarian issues together. My goal here isn’t to bash liberals – it is to provide an objective psychological account of what is really happening in both the US and other parts of the world.

Liberal bullies are a worldwide reality that, I strongly believe, will only become more powerful if we don’t do something about it. Fortunately, psychology research tells us exactly what to do – and I’m going to tell you all about that too. This isn’t something that’s going to go away on its own, but it isn’t a hopeless fight either. It is possible to curb authoritarianism on both sides, and I’m going to show you how.

Chapter 1

Authoritarian Followers, Right andLeft

In the movie The Avengers, Loki – playing the part of the consummate authoritarian leader – orders a group of average Germans to kneel before him.1 It seems to work, as almost everyone complies. But one solitary man refuses, saying that he will ‘not [kneel] to men like you’. Loki arrogantly asserts, ‘There are no men like me.’ Then the German man utters the great hidden truth of authoritarian psychology: ‘There are always men like you.’

Probably the most common misconception about authoritarianism is that it is largely about the authority figures in charge, the Loki types of the world. In fact, that is often the direction the conversation turns when I present evidence of left-wing authoritarianism. On The Rick Ungar Show, for example, one of the guests criticized our lab’s work because it didn’t clearly identify left-wing authoritarian leaders. An alarmingly high percentage of news stories about authoritarianism in the last seven years also referenced one particular right-wing leader: Donald Trump.

It is easy to see why there is a focus on authoritarian leadership. ‘Authoritarian’ has ‘authority’ – that is, the person in charge – built into the word. When people think ‘authoritarian’ they often think of the leaders. So it’s only natural to think that the authoritarian problem is only a problem with leadership.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The hidden truth of authoritarian psychology is that there are always people like that. There are always people who will fill the power vacuum, who want to rule and order and dictate. Every movement has authoritarian leaders. Every movement has people who want to gain power and use it harshly. Every movement has leaders who wish to control, manipulate, and crush. So to spend time talking about authoritarianism as if what changes is in the leadership is futile. Nothing changes in the leadership. What changes is in the people they presume to lead.

Indeed, leaders are irrelevant if no one will obey them. It requires a lust in the masses for authoritarians to punish their enemies, to create and enforce norms for which dissent is not allowed, to promote intolerance and hatred. Authoritarian leaders are pathetic stooges if the masses are uninterested in them. So ‘Are there authoritarian leaders?’ isn’t the primary question – the primary question is ‘Will the people submit?’ It doesn’t matter if Congresswoman Maxine Waters tells protestors to ‘get more confrontational’ if they don’t like a trial verdict;2 it only matters if everyone thinks that kind of authoritarian fear-mongering is OK. Will they submit? Do they wantleaders to boss others about, to lead them to aggression?

This truth maps onto decades of authoritarianism research in my own field of social psychology. That research has largely been built around personality and attitude scales that measure authoritarianism.3These scales are not built to measure authoritarian leaders; rather, they are built to measure authoritarian followers. They include items like this: ‘Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.’ That item doesn’t say ‘I want to lead my people to destroy my enemies.’ It isn’t a measurement of the leader. It is a measurement of the follower.

Thus, most of what we know about authoritarianism – most of the actual data used in the primary questionnaires that have come to define what we think about authoritarianism – is about the people who follow, and not the people who lead.

Scientific work justifies the importance of studying followers. In one study, for example, our lab evaluated whether we could predict changes in authoritarian leadership from the psychological traits of the populace. Did changes in the average authoritarian tendencies of the populace predict future authoritarian governments, or did changes in authoritarian leadership predict changes in the followers? In other words, which come first – authoritarian followers or authoritarian leaders?

Our work over a 30-year span suggests that changes in the authoritarian status of governments were predicted by the predisposal of the populace to authoritarian followership traits like collectivism; but authoritarian governmental changes had comparatively little effect on followers’ psychology.4 This work suggests that certain psychological features predispose followers to accept authoritarian dictatorships. This empirical fact is quite remarkable. So many things influence the rise of dictators that have nothing to do with the internal culture – military power, foreign politics, the status of a nation’s immediate neighbors – that it would seem like the cultural beliefs of the followers in the populace hardly matter. And yet not only do they matter, they matter primarily. They are central. An authoritarian dictator may take over a country, but if the people never wanted that to happen, it won’t last. A democracy may be installed from the outside, but if the people want authoritarian leadership, it won’t last.

Thus, when we come to the potential for left-wing authoritarianism, the primary question we should be asking is not ‘Are there authoritarian leaders on the left who will grab power and enforce dictates?’ The real question is ‘Do lots of left-wing people want authoritarian leaders to crush their enemies?’

Obeying Authority Isn’t the Problem

Perhaps we move too fast. Let’s take a step back and ask a broader question: What are authoritarian followers like?

And the first thing to get straight is that, to a psychologist, ‘authoritarian’ doesn’t just mean ‘obeying authority’ or ‘ordering someone to do something’. Parents who punish their kids for being mean to their siblings aren’t authoritarian leaders. People who obey the speed limits aren’t authoritarian followers. Authoritarianism means something specifically nastier. Authoritarians don’t merely enforce reasonable rules or obey those rules – they want a strong leader to crush and silence their opponents. They want that leader to hurt people for the benefit of their group.

The authoritarian is thus vastly different than the person who merely complies with authority. In fact, merely obeying authority is largely a positive thing as far as it goes. If students in my classes refused to do what I ask of them, no one would ever learn. If they interrupted my lectures to discuss Taylor Swift, or yelled at their fellow students about line dancing, or wrote ‘Luke stinks’ on top of the notes I was trying to write on the board, then there would be little point in my class. Their obedience accomplishes a positive goal. We teach children to respect their teachers because it is a positive thing to respect their teachers.

Similarly, we want people to obey the law. We want them to respect the authority that tells them ‘do not murder’. We’re glad when people obediently decide not to drink and drive, when they follow directives to evacuate burning buildings in an orderly manner, and when they refuse to vandalize our property. Obeying authority in this way isn’t authoritarianism, because we don’t want those things primarily to hurt or crush or silence anyone. We just want people to behave well.

Authoritarians also want people to obey – but they differ in several respects from those who merely obey. The classic definition of authoritarianism is that authoritarians want a strong authority figure to hurt others (called ‘authoritarian aggression’), to enforce radical group norms (called ‘authoritarian conventionalism’), and to require submission to those norms (called ‘authoritarian submission’).5 Authoritarians want to obey strong authority figures, but they are largely motivated by a desire to have their group dominate other groups.

In the words of the most famous authoritarianism researcher of all time, Bob Altemeyer, authoritarians

support unjust and illegal acts by governments. They support police who abuse their power … After viewing a film about [psychologist Stanley] Milgram’s famous ‘obedience’ experiments, they tended to blame the Teacher and the Learner for what happened more than most people do, but not the authority, the Experimenter. In turn, they themselves aggress in laboratory experiments involving electric shock, when authority sanctions it. They harbor many prejudices against many minorities, accepting stereotypes uncritically. In fact, most highly prejudiced persons turn out to be either social dominators or right-wing authoritarians. High RWAs strongly believe in punishment, and admit that they derive personal pleasure from administering it to ‘wrongdoers’.6

This isn’t merely obedience – it is a particularly nasty and aggressive kind of obedience. Authoritarians aren’t especially interested in obeying the law – they are actually less likely to obey the law if their own authority commands them not to.

The distinction between good and bad authority can be seen in remarkable work on parenting by Cal Berkeley professor Diana Baumrind. This work suggests there are two primary dimensions of parenting: Responsiveness/Warmth and Authority/Control. How parents score on these two dimensions defines their parenting style.7 Parents who are low on both responsiveness and authority are Neglectful parents who basically don’t attend to their children at all. Parents who score high on responsiveness but low on authority are Indulgent parents who spoil their kids.

It is the contrast of the two high-authority parent types that is most relevant here. Parents who score high on authority but lowon responsiveness are Authoritarian parents who are strict, dogmatic, and uncaring. However, parents who score high on authority but also score high on responsiveness are Authoritative. They expect obedience but they listen to their children and show warmth to them.

In my experience, it occasionally surprises some Americans that lots of research suggests kids have the best outcomes under Authoritative parents. Indulgent and Neglectful parents tend to raise unhappy and unsuccessful kids. So parents with no authority at all don’t do very well. Parents who have nothing but authority – cold authoritarians – also don’t do well. But parents with a combination of authority and responsiveness raise successful kids at very high rates.8

This work highlights an important point for our larger study of authoritarianism. The proper substitute for authoritarianism isn’t chaos. The proper substitute is good authority that is responsive to the populace. We need leaders. Authoritarianism is essentially a desire to put strong-but-bad leaders in power. The proper substitute for authoritarianism isn’t to put no leaders in power, but to put responsive and warm leaders in power. We shouldn’t want less leadership; we should want better leadership.

Authoritarianism to What?

That leads us to another common misconception about authoritarian followers. I think we tend to imagine authoritarians as the kind of folk who indiscriminately obey any authority figure who happens to walk by. After all, aren’t authoritarians obedient sheep who just do what they’re told? If an authoritarian is walking down the street and someone orders them to do something, wouldn’t they be more likely than non-authoritarians to do it?

But a moment’s reflection shows how wrong that view is. Imagine an authoritarian Trump supporter walking down the street and subsequently being commanded by Joe Biden to support climate change research. Do you see? It matters very much to an authoritarian who is giving the command and what the command is about. Authoritarianism is highly domain-specific: Authoritarians get very attached to particular leaders in particular domains, but they aren’t likely to obey just any old leader.

This means that people can be authoritarian about almost anything. If people really hate bats, they might form an authoritarian movement to kill bats. But if people think that bats are awesome, they might be just as likely to form an authoritarian movement to save bats. Authoritarians are more likely to seek out and obey authority figures, yes – but only authority figures who care about their preferred domain. And that domain can literally be anything. That means one of the questions we have to ask about authoritarians is: Authoritarianism to what?

Consider the religion-versus-science dichotomy. We commonly associate authoritarianism with religion. And rightly so – religion is often one of the most pernicious purveyors of authoritarian evils.9 People less commonly associate science with authoritarianism; and yet an increasing amount of evidence shows that science isn’t a cure-all for authoritarian ills and, in fact, can actually serve as a conduit for them. For example, in one of my favorite studies, participants were told to do something they believed would seriously harm a fish.10 (Don’t worry, fish-lovers, the fish was actually a very lifelike robot – but participants didn’t know that.) Beforehand, the researchers put some of these people in a ‘scientific mindset’ by having them write about science, while other control participants were not. Did approaching the situation with a scientific approach make participants less likely to obey the authoritarian command to harm a presumably innocent fish? Not at all. In fact, the opposite occurred: Putting people in a scientific mindset made them more likely to obey scientific authority to inject toxic chemicals into a fish.

This example illustrates the complex and domain-specific nature of authoritarian behavior. Putting people in a science-loving mindset can make them more authoritarian if the authority figure in question is a scientist asking them to do immoral things. This is important because, psychologically speaking, there is no reason that liberals can’t be just as authoritarian as conservatives, if the situational domain meets the right set of authority figures for the right kind of people.

So that brings us to the question: Is that convergence of situations, leaders, and people currently happening on the left? Do we currently have a left-wing authoritarian problem? The answer to this question is scientifically indisputable:

Without a doubt.

Left-Wing Authoritarian Leaders

What has happened in the Trump era, the media convinced itself, the corporate media, that the real threats to the United States were no longer the CIA, and the Pentagon, and the NSA, and Wall Street and Silicon Valley, all of whom are on their side in trying to undermine Trump. It’s the Trump movement and people who are conservative. Those are criminals in their eyes. And they’ve moved their media lens from the people who used to be the target of it – people in power centers – to individual citizens whose only crime is that they have the wrong ideology. And they are using their vast resources, the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, not to challenge actual power centers, but to destroy and wreck the lives and reputations of people who they regard as having the wrong politics. That’s all this is about.11

– Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald

We are going to spend a lot of time in this book diagnosing left-wing authoritarian followers. But of course, leaders do matter too. For one thing, in a democracy, the success of left-wing authoritarian leaders is in part a marker of how authoritarian the populace is. If people want a strong leader to crush their enemies, they are more likely to vote for strong leaders who say they will crush their enemies. If people want leaders to silence their foes, they will follow media personalities who argue for censorship of their foes.

So it is still important that we complement evidence based on scientific research of authoritarian followers with evidence that there are left-wing authoritarian leaders. We’ll see in Chapter 6 that liberals in the US are especially reticent to admit their own leaders are authoritarian – even when they obviously are. As noted earlier, I’ve been asked a lot about instances of left-wing authoritarian leadership – generally with the idea that there really aren’t a lot of examples. Left-wingers don’t like to see their own authoritarian leaders as authoritarian.

To be honest, I find this kind of questioning quite startling. My problem in preparing material for this book was not ‘Can I find enough material from left-wing authoritarian leaders that I can fill a book?’ No; my problem was rather the opposite. I am bombarded by obvious examples of left-wing authoritarian leaders on a near daily basis, and it was hard to winnow these examples down to fit the comparatively small space I had. As it is for Glenn Greenwald, it is obvious to any casual observer that there are a lot of left-wing authoritarian leaders in politics and in the media who are using their ‘vast resources’ to ‘wreck the lives of people who they regard as having the wrong politics’.

If you are interested in the larger picture, you can go to our website at leftwingauthoritarianism.org, where we have a ‘left-wing authoritarianism tracker’. I will here list only a few examples. Consider Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada. Trudeau seized the assets of Canadian truckers because he disagreed with them politically. He vilified them. He stopped their peaceful protests. Glenn Greenwald said of the treatment of these truckers: ‘The tactics Trudeau is employing are a decade in the making, and are part of a much broader plan to criminalize and then crush dissent,’ noting in another tweet that ‘episodes like this demonstrate just how propaganda functions. We’re so well-trained to instantly recognize these tyrannical attacks on dissent as autocratic and tyrannical when used by enemies of the West, but barred from seeing them the same way when used by our own governments.’12

Indeed, Trudeau has consistently used autocratic and authoritarian measures to stop his political enemies from protesting against him peacefully. He’s stolen millions of dollars of their money and sent the police after them, all because they disagreed with him.

It’s probably no coincidence that Trudeau has praised leftist authoritarian leaders in other countries, saying of China that ‘there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime’13 and of former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro that he is a ‘remarkable leader’.14

Western Europe, too, abounds with liberal authoritarian leadership. For example, one study of European Union nations during the Covid pandemic not only revealed deeply authoritarian leadership, but also provided a sober warning about the post-pandemic Western world. The author summarizes the findings this way:

The multifaceted analysis carried out in this study on linkages between private companies and state security agencies, pandemic legislation, and essential good classifications in the realm of shopping reveals that during the pandemic, liberal democracies implemented policies that are akin to authoritarian liberalism and that a post-pandemic social order is likelier to be defined by an overt sense of authoritarian liberalism rather than some of the incremental erosions of constitutional democracy that scholars have associated with democratic backsliding over the last decade.15

This study suggests that Europeans are in danger of ceding their world to overtly liberal bullies. But this isn’t just a problem for Europeans. And that brings us to … Dr Tony Fauci, the de facto leader of the Covid response in the US. As one example, read what Fauci says about a US court – the legitimate entity in this particular case for deciding what is legally appropriate – making a decision he disagrees with:

I’m surprised and disappointed because those types of things really are the purview of the CDC. This is a public health issue and for a court to come in, and you look at the rationale for that it’s not particularly firm. We are concerned about that, about the courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally a public health decision. This is a CDC issue, should not have been a court issue … So for a court to come in and interfere in that is really unfortunate. It’s unfortunate because it’s against public health principles, number one. And number two, is because that’s no place for courts to do that. This is a CDC decision.16

This is absolutely chilling. One of the authoritarianism items on the well-respected World Values Survey says this: ‘Having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country.’ In other words, authoritarians want their own side’s individual expert to be able to override governments and laws. Authoritarians want to exert power over others to restrict their freedoms. So authoritarian experts don’t want to bother with democracy and consensus.

Fauci’s statement could be taken word for word from the authoritarianism questionnaire. Forget the government; forget the laws; forget checks and balances; forget all that legal stuff, let the experts decide unilaterally. Never mind that this isn’t just a public health decision, it is a decision with implications for freedom, for human psychology, for all kinds of things. There is a reason that we don’t let one single-issue expert of any ilk unilaterally decide what impacts the freedoms of the entire country. But Tony Fauci thinks he should have the power to force people to wear masks. It’s not surprising that Fauci also tried to dismiss people who criticized him as attacking science itself (after all, in his words, attacking him is ‘really criticizing science, because I represent science’17) and that he told unvaccinated people to just ‘get over it’.18 That’s what authoritarians do – they claim they know what’s best for you and tell you that if you have questions, you should ‘get over it’ because they are ‘science’.

Similarly, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill making it illegal for doctors to say certain things to their patients about Covid-19.19 In short, doctors must state the liberal party orthodoxy or be quiet – an orthodoxy that, as we’ll see in Chapter 3, is at least worth questioning. Newsom wants to take away doctors’ rights, rights likely guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, to talk honestly with their patients about their own opinions. (Indeed, the bill was in fact later overturned in court.20) The common denominator across Fauci and Newsom that defines them as authoritarian is that they want power to be centralized into their own hands to exert on their political enemies. I’m happy for Fauci to have an opinion, I just don’t think he should be allowed to force it on the whole country. I’m fine for Gavin Newsom to have an opinion, but it is glaringly authoritarian for him to demand that it be shared by every doctor in his state.

The situation isn’t any better in academic circles. For example, at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s (SPSP) 2024 conference, a poster presentation was cancelled by SPSP leadership after it had been accepted through the normal scientific process. The reason? The poster contained statements offensive to authoritarian progressive groups.21 Such blatant bullying by academic liberals is commonplace these days. Klaus Fiedler, one of the most respected academics in my field, was forced to resign as editor of a top journal because he facilitated scientific critique of a paper promoting progressive values.22 Tracy Høeg was fired from her position at UC Davis for daring to present data that questioned the progressive Covid orthodoxy.23 More broadly, the whole country witnessed an outpouring of academic left-wing authoritarianism after the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023; to name just one example, a Cornell professor expressed that he found the massacre of Jews ‘exhilarating’.24 In each of these cases, liberal leaders engaged in classic authoritarian behaviors: They used their positions of power to censor, fire, or dehumanize their enemies.

I could go on with these examples for ages. But I don’t have to do that here, because you will see scores of such examples in the pages of this book. You will see authoritarian leftists censor, bully, silence, harass, and destroy their enemies. You will see leftists ignore the law. You will see them hate and hurt and steal – all in the name of their authoritarian cause. They won’t call it that; but it is clearly authoritarian all the same. And in this book, we are going to both diagnose the psychology of left-wing authoritarianism and discuss the cure for it.

The Rather Large Right-Wing Elephant in the Room

The proverbial elephant in any room for liberal authoritarians is this: Why the heck aren’t we talking about conservative authoritarians instead? After all, the skeptic says, haven’t right-wing authoritarians caused a ton of grief, suppressed a lot of people, and killed a lot of people? Are we just going to ignore Hitler? Are we just going to ignore the KKK? Are we just going to ignore the God Hates Gays movement of Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas? Wasn’t the infamous ‘Moral Majority’ a tool for right-wing authoritarians to bludgeon those different from them? Wasn’t Trump really a right-wing authoritarian?

I get that kind of skepticism a lot. And what I’ve consistently said is this: Yes, right-wing authoritarians are a big problem. I don’t like conservative authoritarians any more than I like liberal authoritarians. I think both kinds are dangerous and both kinds should be stopped.

But part of my reason for writing a book on left-wing authoritarianism in particular is this: The two types of authoritarianism have to be dealt with together. As we’ll see in Chapter 7, we ultimately cannot treat conservative and liberal authoritarianism independently. They are a part of the same package. If we only deal with authoritarianism on one side of the political spectrum, we are doomed to failure.

So yes, right-wing authoritarians are a real problem too – they are currently causing havoc in my own country and around the world. But I’m not going to spend a lot of time diagnosing them, because people in my field have spent 50 years doing nothing but diagnosing conservative authoritarians. You can find any number of articles or books on the psychology of right-wing authoritarians. But to my knowledge, no psychologist has written a comprehensive book on the psychology of left-wing authoritarians. And, in fact, most psychologists – wrongly, as we’ll illustrate throughout this book – have treated authoritarianism as if it is really mostly (and sometimes only) a right-wing problem.

But we’ll never solve our problems this way. As long as we refuse to address right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism together, we may be doomed to an ever-increasing cycle of authoritarian scorching. So the first order of business is to better understand how many left-wing authoritarians there are, what these left-wing authoritarians are like, and how they are similar to – and different from – right-wing authoritarians.

The Appreciably Smaller Left-Wing Elephant in the Room: The ‘Classical Liberal’

On the other side of the proverbial elephant herd lies a different objection to this book: That true liberalism would never support authoritarianism, and thus most cases of seemingly authoritarian liberals are not actually ‘liberal’ bullies.

I’ve heard that kind of comment a lot, too, and we will address this issue more completely in Chapter 6. Here, however, it is worth tackling the definitional question at the heart of this elephant: What do I mean by the word ‘liberal’ in liberal bullies? What exactly is the ‘left-wing’ in left-wing authoritarianism?

Political labels are not perfect, monolithic monikers. What counts as a ‘liberal’ in one place might not count as a ‘liberal’ in another. For example, our lab has pointed out that a ‘liberal’ in New York is pretty different than a ‘liberal’ in Montana, and both are pretty different than a ‘liberal’ in Russia.25 Colleagues I’ve worked with from around the world have frequently commented that ‘liberals’ in (for example) New Zealand and Western Europe are not really like ‘liberals’ in the US in many ways. Of course, there are many similarities in the actual beliefs of those liberal persons across places too: Liberals across the globe are more likely to accept communist and socialist philosophies, tend to favor governmental social programs, and are more likely to support climate activism. But nonetheless, the differences between people calling themselves ‘liberal’ make it hard to definitively label anyone a true liberal.

From a scientific point of view, this measurement problem is hardly unique – it is essentially baked into most psychological or ideological categories. No two extraverts are alike, either. No two sociopaths are alike. And yet extraversion and sociopathy are still meaningful measurement categories. ‘Liberal’, in the same vein, cannot possibly capture a one-size-fits-all set of beliefs. That is one of the reasons why, in this book, I primarily rely on a tried-and-true way to measure such constructs: Asking people how they think of themselves. As such, I generally take ‘left-wing’ or ‘liberal’ to mean ‘someone who self-identifies as a left-winger/liberal’ or ‘someone who identifies with a political party that is largely considered liberal’. While not without its problems, this approach cuts across both cultural differences and potential reframing biases and allows the terms to be defined at the local level by the people most competent to judge them.

Against that backdrop, let’s return to the elephant in our room. Liberalism historically has some of its roots in free speech, equality, democracy, and the formation of consensus through dialogue.26 These roots are fundamentally anti-authoritarian, and the branches of this anti-authoritarianism can be seen in self-identified liberals’ own views of their group right down to the present in modern America – so much so that the terms ‘illiberalism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ are often used as synonyms.27 Thus, how can we legitimately say there is such a thing as a ‘liberal bully’?

On the one hand, I think liberals who claim that liberalism is inherently anti-authoritarian have a point. If you are one of those liberals, then we are likely kindred spirits, and I suspect you will find quite a bit to like in this book. I, too, would love to see liberalism return to its roots in free speech, equality, and open dialogue. That view has come to be called ‘classical liberalism’ and that’s the kind of liberal I was, when I used the word ‘liberal’ to describe myself. (I have not substantively changed any of my views except my view on what the term ‘liberal’ means to most liberals. With some qualifications, I still largely hold the same beliefs I did when I called myself a ‘liberal’.)

On the other hand, there are legitimate reasons to think that claiming most liberal bullies are not really liberal goes too far in its semantic sleight of hand.

Consider a parable. Suppose that some people create an organization devoted to the free exchange of ideas about ice cream called the National Ice Cream Exchange (NICE). Originally, there were many and varied opinions welcome in the group – but over time, NICE began to stand primarily for one thing: The removal of all ice cream types except plain vanilla. They pushed for legislation banning everything but vanilla. They tried to get anyone who said ‘Rocky Road is great’ canceled on Twitter. So, while at the beginning NICE really stood for the open exchange of ideas about ice cream, by the end the majority of its members either really supported the vanilla-only agenda or didn’t openly oppose it, and those few who stood out in favor of a free ice cream culture were largely ridiculed by the people in charge of NICE.

Now imagine that, if I tried to point out that NICE stood for anti-Rocky Road authoritarian measures, you said to me, ‘But you are defining NICE in the wrong way. Sure, there are a few bad actors there, but the true spirit of NICE is open discussion, the principle on which it was founded.’ I would respond to you by saying, ‘If the majority of the people of NICE succeed in passing legislation to stop me from eating Rocky Road, then that’s what NICE stands for. The fact that a few people in NICE are actually … nice … can’t change the fact that the organization now stands for authoritarianism.’

This analogy is exaggerated. All the same, I’m not sure it is very helpful to try and skirt around the facts on the ground. Are we going to really call the many, many authoritarian Democrats in the US ‘conservatives’? That would be bordering on the empirically absurd, given that ‘Democrat’ overlaps so strongly with ‘Liberal’ in the US that the two items are considered a part of the same scale measuring political ideology.28 And as we’ll see throughout this book, an alarming number of people calling themselves liberals are in favor of authoritarian measures.

As a result, the most empirically justified and honest way of communicating about someone who calls themselves a liberal and is also a bully is to do the straightforward thing and call them a ‘liberal bully’. They have called themselves liberals. They are implementing policies that most people agree are liberal policies (for example, the climate agenda) with authoritarian tactics. At some point, pointing to a few – seemingly shrinking – strands of liberalism that stand opposed to authoritarianism is not a very effective argument. That classical liberal elephant in our room has become increasingly small.

A second reason to be skeptical is this: If we are going to pick an issue on which to draw the ‘true’ line between liberals and conservatives, classical liberalism is an odd choice. That’s in part because classical liberalism has made strong historical inroads in conservative circles, particularly amongst American Republicans.29 Former US Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said, ‘I really call myself a classical liberal more than a conservative.’30 Grove City College (where I work) is considered one of the most conservative academic institutions in the US, and yet it has strong ties to the Ludwig von Mises classical liberalism school.31 As such, classical liberalism doesn’t provide the clearest demarcation line between typical liberal and conservative persons. While liberals no doubt have historically believed in classical liberalism more than conservatives – and our own data capture the echoes of that difference even today – if we were picking specific ideological issues on which to separate liberals from conservatives, classical liberalism wouldn’t be in the top ten.

Classical liberals have the goal right. They want to bring liberals around the world back to their roots: Back to open dialogue, to free speech, to civil rights, to equality. I do too. In fact, I really, really wish those liberals would succeed in my home country at bringing American Democrats back to a saner, less authoritarian approach to government. But they haven’t succeeded so far and very little evidence suggests that they will do so on their own. If they do – if Democrats become the bastion for free speech and open dialogue that I used to hope they were – then I will rewrite this section in the future.

I’m not holding my breath. As we’ll see shortly, rather than fixing their own authoritarianism problems, in recent history liberal elites have created a slanted playing field that essentially recasts all liberal authoritarians as conservatives.

The Shards-of-Glass Problem

Our data are directly contrary to theories that dismiss the possibility of left-wing authoritarianism.

– Peter Suedfeld (Emeritus Professor at the University of British Columbia) and colleagues, in 1994

Almost 30 years ago, award-winning research giant Peter Suedfeld warned that our field was too blasé about left-wing authoritarianism. Suedfeld is one of the most important scientists in the history of the field: He’s the past president of the world’s largest political psychology organization; he’s changed the face of two completely separate major areas of research; and he’s won multiple lifetime awards for his scientific work (including the Order of Canada, one of the highest civilian honors in that country32). You would think, with such a warning from such an academic legend, that researchers would have paid more attention.

But they didn’t. In fact, what has happened since then can be summed up in one sad sentence: Academics have really, really botched authoritarianism research. It’s important for you, as the intelligent citizen I take you for, to understand this. Part of the problem here is that academics created a tilted playing field that made it hard for us to truly solve the authoritarian problem – because they made it hard to identify left-wing authoritarians at all.

You may wonder: Given that there were plenty of warning signs, noted by famous people such as Peter Suedfeld, why haven’t we spent more time on left-wing authoritarians as a field? Understanding that question is a clue to understanding the authoritarian problem itself, so we’re going to dig in a bit on the history of left-wing authoritarian research in social psychology.

One of the most cited reasons for academics’ subsequent dismissal of liberal authoritarianism as a meaningful construct is that the most influential authoritarian researcher of all time, Bob Altemeyer, attempted to measure left-wing authoritarianism in the mid-to-late 1990s – and largely failed to find any evidence of it. In his words: ‘The “authoritarian on the left” has been as scarce as hens’ teeth in my samples.’

Altemeyer is one of the best academics in the history of our field, and I have no end of respect for him. But this oft-cited statement has done more than almost any other sentence in academic history to muddy the authoritarianism waters. And we can learn a lot by looking at the left-wing authoritarianism questionnaire he developed on which this evidence is based.

Reading the items on Altemeyer’s left-wing authoritarian (LWA) questionnaire was one of the single most stunning moments of my academic career. I had heard the lack of evidence for LWA for a long time before I saw those items. And the moment I started reading, I could immediately tell something was completely wrong. I began to suspect that, great academic though he was, Bob Altemeyer hadn’t tried very hard to seek out liberal authoritarians.

Because his LWA scale and his right-wing authoritarian (RWA) scale weren’t remotely comparable.

To understand his error, first consider another parable. Imagine I wanted to decide whether there were more broccoli lovers or donut lovers in the world. So I designed a single item for each food type and gave it to thousands of people. As seen in the ‘Glass Shards’ figure, my broccoli item said ‘I like to eat broccoli’, whereas my donut item said ‘I like to eat donuts filled with glass shards.’

Image how happy broccoli lovers were when the results came back: There were thousands of broccoli lovers out there, but donut lovers were ‘as rare as hens’ teeth’! However, could we trust those data? No. The flaw in this design is evident. I didn’t give a parallel test because I put glass shards on only one side of the food aisle. My test likely didn’t tell me anything about broccoli or donuts; rather, it told me that, regardless of what food it is in, people do not like to eat glass shards. As the bottom left of the figure shows, if you reversed the scenario and put the glass shards in broccoli instead, you’d almost certainly get the opposite result. This was never about donuts or broccoli, but about shards.

Altemeyer put metaphorical glass shards exclusively on the left-wing side of the authoritarian measurement aisle. For example, Altemeyer’s LWA scale requires participants who score high on the questionnaire to support a violent revolution to overthrow the established government. In fact, 20 of the 22 items on Altemeyer’s LWA scale reference a revolutionary movement. You can see this yourself in the ‘Altemeyer’s LWA Scale’ list below. A representative item says: ‘The members of the Establishment deserve to be dealt with harshly, without mercy, when they are finally overthrown.’ By contrast, none of the items on any of Altemeyer’s RWA scales makes a single reference to violent upheavals overthrowing the establishment.

Few people, conservative or liberal, want to uproot their lives to join a revolution to topple the government. Even most authoritarians are not like that, on either side of the political aisle. So when you throw those revolutionary glass shards only on the liberal side, you don’t get a lot of liberal authoritarians. But that doesn’t mean liberals are less authoritarian than conservatives; rather, it means that, like conservatives, most liberals – even most liberal authoritarians – don’t want to join a violent revolution. If Altemeyer instead had put the glass shards on the conservative side, we’d be talking today about how hard it was to find those darned elusive right-wing authoritarians.

Altemeyer’s LWA Scale (Revolutionary Elements in Bold)

1. Communism has its flaws, but the basic idea of overthrowing the right-wing Establishment and giving its wealth to the poor is still a very good one.

2. Socialism will never work, so people should treat left-wing revolutionaries as the dangerous troublemakers they are.

3. People should do whatever a left-wing revolutionary movement against the Establishment decides.

4. The last thing our country needs is a revolutionary movement demanding total submission to its leaders, conformity among its members, and attack upon the Establishment.

5. The conservative, right-wing Establishment will never give up its power peacefully, so a revolutionary movement is justified in using violence to crush it.

6. There is a dangerous tendency for left-wing, anti-Establishment, revolutionary movements to demand too much conformity and blind obedience from their members.

7. Anyone who truly wants to help our country should support left-wing revolutionary leaders stomp out the Establishment, and then devote themselves to the new way of life ahead.

8. Socialist revolutions require great leadership. When a strong, determined rebel leads the attack on the Establishment, that person deserves our complete faith and support.

9. When a leftist, anti-Establishment movement begins dictating to its members whom they can associate with, where they can shop, and what they can eat, it’s time to leave it.

10. The conservative Establishment has so much power and is so unfair, we have to submit to the leaders and rules of a revolutionary movement in order to destroy them.

11. Our present society has its problems, but it would be a great mistake to think any leftist leader who wants to overthrow the Establishment has ‘the answers’.

12. The members of the Establishment deserve to be dealt with harshly, without mercy, when they are finally overthrown.

13. It would be a dreadful mistake for people in our country to unite behind leftist leaders, submit to their authority, and launch attacks upon the Establishment.

14. Even a revolutionary left-wing movement dedicated to overthrowing the present, totally unjust right-wing system does NOT have the right to tell its members how to act, dress, think, etc.

15. A leftist revolutionary movement is quite justified in attacking the Establishment, and in demanding obedience and conformity from its members.

16. It would be wrong to try to solve our problems by acts of violence against the conservative Establishment.

17. We should devotedly follow determined leaders who will fight the Establishment.

18. If certain people refuse to accept the historic restructuring of society that will come when the Establishment is overthrown, they will have to be removed and smashed.

19. If people who want to overthrow the Establishment let revolutionary leaders become important authorities in their lives, they are just exchanging one set of masters for another.

20. Even though the Establishment groups who control our country are quite repressive and unfair, society should only be reformed through NON-violent means.

21. If the ‘Have-Nots’ in our country are ever going to overthrow the ‘Haves,’ and give them the harsh treatment they fully deserve, the ‘Have-Nots’ must follow the rules and leaders of the revolutionary movement.

22. One of the worst things people could do in America now would to be to support the left-wing, revolutionary forces trying to overthrow the Establishment.

In fact, whereas Altemeyer’s RWA scale reads like a measure of general authoritarianism, Altemeyer’s LWA scale reads like a screening instrument for joining a terrorist group. As a result, the fact that few people scored high on Altemeyer’s LWA scale tells us little about left-wing authoritarianism. Rather, it simply tells us the obvious fact that, whether left-wing or right-wing, few people want to endorse, let alone join, a violent military movement designed to attack and overthrow something else. However, historically, much of academia’s dismissal of LWA was based on this clearly flawed evidence from Altemeyer.

And thus academics largely ignored left-wing authoritarians for two decades.

Why We’re Bad at Solving the Glass-Shards Problem

How might we go about solving the glass-shards problem?