In his classic 1950 work, The Authoritarian Personality, T. W. Adorno and his team of researchers establish a link between repressed sexuality and Right-wing politics. "If the anti-democratic individual is disposed to see in the outer world impulses which are suppressed in himself," Adorno writes, "and we wish to know what these impulses are, then something may be learned by noting what attributes he most readily, but unrealistically, ascribes to the world around him . . . it seemed that the greater a subject's preoccupation with 'evil forces' in the world, as shown by his readiness to think about and to believe in the existence of such phenomena as wild erotic excesses, plots and conspiracies, and danger from natural catastrophes, the stronger would be his own unconscious urges of both sexuality and destructiveness."
Subjects of Adorno's study with strong authoritarian tendencies tended to agree with statements such as the following: "Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished"; "No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason"; "The sexual orgies of the old Greeks and Romans are nursery school stuff compared to some of the goings-on in this country today, even in circles where people might least expect it"; and "Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped."
"A strong inclination to punish violators of sex mores (homosexuals, sex offenders) may be an expression of a general punitive attitude based on identification with in group authorities," Adorno comments, "but it also suggests that the subject's own sexual desires are suppressed and in danger of getting out of hand. A readiness to believe in 'sex orgies' may be an indication of a general tendency to distort reality through projection, but sexual content would hardly be projected unless the subject had impulses of this same kind that were unconscious and strongly active." Adorno and his colleagues also associate this "moralistic and punitive attitude toward the supposed sexuality of others" with a "sexual inhibition and backwardness" they found in many of their authoritarian-inclined subjects.
A study conducted by Henry E. Adams, Lester W. Wright, Jr., and Bethany A. Lohr that they describe in a 1996 issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology under the title "Is Homophobia Associated With Homosexual Arousal" might also be relevant here. The abstract of the article reads: "The authors investigated the role of homosexual arousal in exclusively heterosexual men who admitted negative affect toward homosexual individuals. Participants consisted of a group of homophobic men (n=35) . . . they were assigned to groups on the basis of their scores on the Index of Homophobia (W.W. Hudson and W.A. Ricketts, 1980). The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes . . . Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli...Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies."
Adorno describes what he calls the "pseudo-conservative." The pseudo conservative, he writes, shows "'conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness' in his conscious thinking," but "violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere...The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition." In others words, the psychologically repressed authoritarians he calls pseudo-conservatives may not only be sexually problematic but may also constitute a political danger to the community.
Adorno's work (which has come in for a certain amount of methodological criticism since its publication) has recently been revised and extended by contemporary social scientists, most notably social psychologist Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba. As Altemeyer explained to Watergate veteran John Dean, author of the book Conservatives Without Conscience (who happened upon Altemeyer's work while trying to "comprehend the personalities now dominating the conservative movement and Republican Party"), the biggest recent discovery in the field has been that there are two distinct authoritarian personalities. The first authoritarian type is the one identified by Adorno, which Altemeyer labels "right wing authoritarians" (RWAs). The second type is the authoritarian person with "social dominance orientation" (SDOs). The basic distinction is between those who follow Right-wing authoritarian movements and those who lead them.
The SDO scale measures the penchant not only for social dominance but also for economic conservatism and for a strong belief in the benefits of inequality. A personality with social dominance orientation is one "characterized by...traits of being hard, tough, ruthless, and unfeeling toward others," according to The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology. Altemeyer found in his research that SDOs tend to respond in the affirmative to statements such as "Do you enjoy having the power to hurt people when they anger or disappoint you?" and "If you have power in a situation, you should use it however you have to, to get your way," and "There really is no such thing as 'right' and 'wrong'; it all boils down to what you can get away with."
You Don't
However, as Dean puts it, "A striking revelation found within these studies is the fact that both right-wing authoritarians and social dominators can be accurately described as conservatives without conscience." He goes on: "It might be expected that right-wing authoritarians who are extremely religious evangelicals would have strong consciences directed by moral precepts or ethical restraints. That, however, does not appear to be the case." How to account for this seeming paradox?
Altemeyer explains that Right-wing authoritarians utilize "a number of psychological tricks and defenses that enable them to act fairly beastly," all the while believing that they are "good people." To start with, they have very little self-understanding (notice how well this fits with Adorno's finding of strong psychological repression in authoritarians). Furthermore, authoritarians have very compartmentalized minds, and so "they can just pull off a Scarlett O'Hara ("I'm not going to think about it!") whenever they want." And, they are able to "shed their guilt very efficiently when they do something wrong." Altemeyer writes in The Authoritarian Specter: "We end up with the irony that the people who think they are so very good end up doing so very much evil, and, more remarkably, they are probably the last people in the world who will ever realize the connection between the two."
Comments Dean: "There is no better explanation for the behavior of many Christian conservatives, for it accounts for their license to do ill, Christian beliefs notwithstanding."