Last week, British researchers released the results of a study suggesting intriguing differences in brain structure between liberals and conservatives. The study found that the anterior cingulate, the part of the brain dealing with complexity and uncertainty was larger in liberals than it was in conservatives. Conversely, the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with fear and raw emotion was larger in conservatives. One can't draw definitive conclusions from one study, of course. A slow trickle of evidence over the past few years appears to show brain-related differences between liberals and conservatives, but this kind of research is clearly in its infancy.
Nevertheless, these findings do track quite well with the book that Marc Hetherington and I wrote in 2009. In Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, we adduced substantial evidence that the American political system has been increasingly sorting itself out along a basic personality dimension - the authoritarian personality. We argued that less authoritarian-minded individuals have been gravitating toward the Democratic Party and more authoritarian-minded ones toward the Republican Party and that this sorting process was having profound consequences for the nature of political conflict in the United States.
This doesn't mean, of course, that all Democrats are non-authoritarian, or that all Republicans are authoritarian (like independents, both major parties comprise individuals from across the authoritarianism scale). It certainly doesn't mean that only one side has a monopoly on either partisanship or a tendency to defend actions of its own leaders that, were the other party's leader to engage in, those same people would find abhorrent. Nor does it true that all public policy battles are fought neatly along these lines. And certainly, public preferences do not determine all policy outcomes in a political system heavily influenced by elite interests.
But since we wrote the book, evidence has mounted that this personality-based is only deepening. And data from a large recent survey, the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), provides further confirmation that Americans are becoming more polarized according to basic personality differences.
One party, the GOP, has attracted, at its base, a large subset of individuals with a greater tendency to see the world in black and white terms, rather than in shades of gray, colored by greater suspicion of people who look and sound different and grounded in the conviction that hand-wringing and hesitating in the face of clear, categorical threats to well-being is a recipe for disaster. The other party, the Democratic Party, though much less coherent at its base (partly because non-authoritarians are a much smaller segment of the population than are authoritarians), sees the world in very different terms. In that worldview, threats to our well-being are complex, multi-faceted and need to be addressed by inclusive rather than exclusive approaches to problem-solving. Furthermore, through this lens, the gravest threats come from reducing the world to simplistic good-versus-evil terms.
The 2010 CCES data show that the relationship between party identification and an individual's level of authoritarianism is as strong as it's ever been. To give a sense of what this looks like, those scoring at the low end of the authoritarianism are more than three times more likely to be Democrats than they are to be Republicans. Conversely, those scoring highest in authoritarianism are nearly three times more likely to be Republicans than they are to be Democrats. In terms of Tea Party support, less than fifteen percent who score at the authoritarianism minimum profess support for the movement. More than forty percent of those scoring at the maximum do.
This doesn't mean that Tea Party support is uni-dimensional. But it appears that personality explains a substantial portion of support or lack thereof for this new and significant current in Republican politics.
In the book, we argued that a changing issue agenda over the past forty years - the emergence of issues like race, women's rights, sexuality and the war on terror - played an important role in driving what we described as a worldview divide. Authoritarians and non-authoritarians, we argued, responded very differently to the parties' increasingly distinctive images on so-called cultural and security issues.
But especially noteworthy about the deepening of this personality-based chasm is that it is now rooting itself firmly at the heart of a broad range of issue debates, from climate change, to the size of government, health care reform and so on.
So, it's no surprise that, according to the 2010 sample, 85% of low authoritarians supported repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, whereas only 34% of high authoritarians did. Or that only 29% of non-authoritarians supported warrantless wire-tapping, while 90% of high authoritarians did. But also of interest is that nearly 80% of low authoritarians supported health care reform, whereas only 30% of high authoritarians did. And also striking is that 74% of low authoritarians supported the stimulus package, whereas only 43% of high authoritarians did. These are all enormous, striking differences.
The British study categorized people as liberal or conservative. Historically, these ideological labels have had a less clear-cut relationship to an identifiable personality dimension, like authoritarianism, than they do now. That the American party system is increasingly sorting itself out along such starkly opposed lines suggests that Americans on one side of the fault line are going to have growing difficulty fathoming how those on the other side understand the world as they do.
I am clearly on one side of that fence. So, I scratch my head in amazement (if not surprise) that Donald Trump's birtherism appears to have vaulted him (for the moment anyway) to the top of the GOP presidential field (and the other leader in the field, Mike Huckabee, has himself dabbled in birtherism).
But the bigger picture point is that many factors are conspiring to reinforce and intensify a fundamental rift in Americans' political self-identification based on deep-seated personality characteristics. In turn, our politics are likely to feel evermore acrimonious and irreconcilable, at least for the foreseeable future.
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I'm sure we'll be hearing about these scientific results in Al Gore's next film, though.
I think there's a bit of an interpretation problem here, though. If conservatives have bigger fear areas in their brains than liberals, why is it the left-wingers who are so afraid of having children, de-funding NPR, paying for their own medical care, allowing people to own guns, or balancing the federal budget?
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.46
http://www.politicalcompass.org/test
Thus you can have those in the party of non-authoritarians rationalizing and justifying the support of a health care "reform" that bloats the private profits of every private corporation in the sickcare industry by forcing almost everyone to buy products from those private corporations--even when rational self-interest would dictate that people keep as far away from those corporations as possible.
Thus you can have those same people rationalizing voluntary wars when given the convenient ever-ready excuse that "we're bombing them with depleted uranium for their own good".
And thus you can have those same individuals justifying the massive expansion of the national security police state (if it's under, say, a Democrat for example) because it's for "safety".
So, tell us more about you? If I find an authoritarianism scale on the web I'll post it here and you and can tell us where you fall on it?
http://www.codewiki.net/rwa
I took it and scored 25. The lowest you can score is 20 and the highest is 180. I am extremely low on authoritarianism, which explains why I don't seem to have much loyalty toward Obama, I guess.
Excellent point Mr. Weiler and I wish more people responding to your blog would keep that in mind. I am both a Republican and a Catholic. Yet, I supported ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I am against the Patriot Act and I think we should never have gone into Iraq. Which I think would make me pretty un-authoritarian.
There’s no question that there are some conservatives who are authoritarian and I’m not crazy about them either. Matter of fact, speaking as a Republican, I’m a little tired of the far far right. But, I’m also tired of the mind numbing political correctness of the far far left which I also see as authoritarian.
But we seem hell bent on getting ourselves back under the
yoke.
Or rather, there is a segment of society which wants to
convince us to place it ever tighter about our own neck, one
scare at a time.
I am certain that in your life and mine, we have had co workers,classmates,or even family members,that are on "the other side".While we don't think of our coworker John,or our Aunt Sue as ev...il,it is easy to see the group they belong to as ev..il.
We will only progress when we see ourselves and everyone else,as just part of the group of "human".
As a result, children were forced to obey blindly, suffer silently and repress their own experiences in order to survive into adulthood. And once -- if -- they reached adulthood, they identified with their abusers as all-knowing, all-loving nurturers ... and thus the cycle of cruelty was able to continue.
This resulted in a generation of emotionally-damaged, memory-repressed adults who truly believed that cruelty towards the less-powerful was valuable: for themselves as proof of their 'goodness' (since they identified with their abusers), for others as just punishment (since abusers project their own 'badness' onto others); and for society as a whole to realize the promise of their authority-figures' acceptance and success.
What has been taught over so many centuries, then, is nothing short of the cruelest abuse ... the adults who seem to welcome this abuse by praising those who injure them may suffer from trauma. And trauma has physiological effects on the brain, especially when experienced during the most important years of human development.
My issue with the older generations (because that is who is typically in power within government and corporate America) is how often simple solutions are used (usually with disastrous results) to attempt to solve complex problems. Instead of trying to jump on the bandwagon of a bumper sticker solution, why can't we be honest sometimes and realize you will not solve a problem that took years to create in a fraction of the time.
I think they're the only group who irritate me more than Republicans. Every now and then I can find a Republican who I can agree with on a lot of issues (probably because of my former inclinations as a Republican). I pretty much NEVER agree with libertarians. Of course, the couple of libertarians I have known are the people who use the most government services and tell others how to "cheat" the system....Heh. Go figure.
Liberals govern in mind only for the welfare of all.
The problem is in Washington DC is that their are too many Conservatives their. Eisenhower, Goldwater, and Nixon wouldn't be conservative enough for these people. Heck, they would probably burn Lincoln at the stake.
These people are dangerous. They are in direct alliance with businesses that skirt financial regulations and ship jobs overseas.
They print money with the Federal Reserve to prop up debt and to pay off government contractors.
They are directly responsible for the selling of America to foreign interests. There are enough true progressives in the United States Congress to be counted on two hands.
The US government doesn't have a spending problem, it has a conservative problem.