Why MAGA Wants a Dictator

In this week’s video, I talked about Bob Altemeyer’s research on right-wing authoritarianism and how people who score high on his scale grew up in households that trained them to see the world as dangerous. The video covers the basics. This piece goes deeper into the research, because the science behind the authoritarian brain is one of the most well-documented findings in all of political psychology. And it explains nearly everything about what we are watching right now. **The researcher** In 1981, psychologist Bob Altemeyer at the University of Manitoba published *Right-Wing Authoritarianism*, a book that refined decades of earlier work on the authoritarian personality. The original research started back in the 1950s at UC Berkeley, where a team of researchers created what they called the F-scale (F for fascism) to try to measure the kind of personality that goes along with authoritarian movements. That scale had serious problems. It was unbalanced, poorly validated, and easy to game. Altemeyer spent over a decade fixing it. What he built in its place was the RWA scale. Right-Wing Authoritarianism. He tested it across thousands of participants over the course of his career, from college students to sitting legislators. And it worked. It predicted behavior, attitudes, and political alignment with a consistency that surprised even other researchers. A note on the name. “Right-wing” in this context doesn’t mean Republican or conservative in the American political sense. Altemeyer used “right-wing” to describe submission to established authority, as opposed to left-wing authoritarianism, which is submission to authorities trying to overthrow the establishment. In practice, though, the political conservatives in North America consistently scored higher on his scale. That finding held up for decades. **The three clusters** Altemeyer didn’t find one trait. He found three. And they always showed up together. He called them the three attitudinal clusters of right-wing authoritarianism. The first is authoritarian submission. This is a reflexive willingness to obey whatever authority figure a person sees as legitimate. Not thoughtful agreement. Not carefully evaluated trust. Uncritical, automatic compliance. The kind of obedience that doesn’t ask questions because questions themselves feel like betrayal. The second is authoritarian aggression. This is hostility directed at whoever the authority figure identifies as a target. It doesn’t come from personal experience with the target. It comes from the authority’s say-so. If the leader says immigrants are the problem, immigrants become the enemy. If the leader says it’s the media or the schools or the trans community, the aggression shifts instantly. The aggression isn’t principled. It’s outsourced. The third is conventionalism. This is a rigid attachment to traditional social norms and a belief that everyone else should be forced to follow them too. Not a personal preference for tradition. A demand that it be imposed. In parenting, high-RWA individuals value obedience, neatness, and good manners in children above curiosity, independence, or creativity. These three traits don’t just correlate with each other. They predict prejudice, intolerance, and support for anti-democratic policies. Altemeyer spent his career documenting exactly how. **The engine underneath** In his later research, Altemeyer identified three personality traits sitting underneath those three attitudinal clusters. They are the engine that makes the whole system run. The first is self-righteousness. High-RWA individuals believe they are morally superior to others. Not in a quiet, internal way. In a way that gives them permission to punish. They see themselves as the last decent people in a world that has gone to rot, and that belief is what licenses the aggression. The second is fear of a dangerous world. This is the one I focused on in the video, because it is the fuel supply. High-RWA scorers genuinely believe the world is a more dangerous place than it actually is. They walk through life with an elevated threat response. New people, new ideas, new norms all feel like incoming danger. Not because they’ve evaluated any of it. Because their baseline fear is already running so high that anything unfamiliar registers as a threat. The third is mean-spiritedness. This one is uncomfortable, but it showed up in the data over and over. People who score high on RWA are more willing to inflict harm on others when they believe authority approves of it. They are less empathetic toward out-group members. They report more willingness to punish people who violate norms, even when the punishment is clearly disproportionate. Self-righteousness gives them permission. Fear gives them a target. Mean-spiritedness gives them enthusiasm. **Fear is the strongest predictor** Altemeyer was not the only researcher who found the fear connection. In 1998, psychologist Mark Eigenberger studied 522 participants using both the RWA scale and a separate fear assessment tool. He found that people who scored high on the RWA scale also reported significantly higher levels of fear, particularly fears related to social exclusion and the behavior of people outside their group. The fear item with the single highest correlation to RWA scores was “people associated with a cult.” The irony there writes itself. A later study published in *Political Psychology* asked 463 participants to rate their feelings of fear, concern, and anxiety across 93 potential threats, broken down into personal and social categories. The researchers found that all fear categories correlated with RWA scores. But the strongest correlation was with threats to the in-group. Social fears predicted RWA scores more strongly than personal fears. These people aren’t afraid for themselves. They’re afraid of what might happen to their group. And “their group” is defined by whoever the authority says is in it. What makes the fear finding so important is what it tells us about how authoritarian movements recruit and retain followers. You don’t need to convince these people that a specific policy is bad. You just need to make them afraid. The policy argument is irrelevant. The fear is the point. Manufacture a threat, point at a scapegoat, and the submission, aggression, and conventionalism activate on their own. The machine runs itself once you turn the fear on. **Where the fear comes from** Altemeyer’s original theory was that right-wing authoritarianism develops through social learning. Children raised in strict, punishment-based households where obedience was the highest value and the world was described as dangerous learned to adopt those attitudes. The parents modeled submission to authority. They punished questioning. They told the child the world was full of threats and that the only safety came from staying in line. The child learned that lesson not as a belief, but as a survival strategy. Research on the authoritarian personality going all the way back to Adorno and the original Berkeley team in the 1950s found similar patterns. People who scored high on authoritarianism reported being raised in strict, authoritarian households where fathers were distant and punitive. But the science didn’t stop there. A large twin study published in 1999 found that genetic factors account for approximately 50 percent of the variation in authoritarian attitudes, with unshared environmental factors making up about 35 percent. The childhood-rearing hypothesis didn’t hold up as the complete explanation. What this means is that some people are born with a temperament that makes them more fear-reactive, more submission-oriented, and more rigid. Upbringing matters. But it isn’t the whole story. Some of this is baked in. This is the part that makes the problem harder to solve. You can’t reason someone out of a fear response that’s partly neurological. You can’t fact-check someone into feeling safe. And you can’t debate someone out of an emotional architecture that was shaped before they could speak and reinforced by the genes they were born with. **The follower problem** Most of Altemeyer’s research focused on followers, not leaders. That’s a deliberate choice. Authoritarian leaders are a small number of people with dark personality traits who exploit the system. They’re important, but they’re not the system. The followers are the system. Without millions of people who score high on RWA, authoritarian leaders have no power base, no rallies, no votes, and no enforcers. Altemeyer made a critical distinction between followers and leaders. Followers score high on RWA. Leaders score high on what psychologists call Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), which measures the desire to maintain group hierarchies with your group on top. Followers submit. Leaders dominate. Together they form the authoritarian loop. The most dangerous individuals in Altemeyer’s framework are what he called “Double Highs.” People who score high on both RWA and SDO. They want to dominate others and they crave the approval of existing authority. They combine the submission of the follower with the aggression of the leader. They’re the ones who carry out the worst abuses in authoritarian systems, because they believe they have both the right and the duty to do it. **What this tells us** Altemeyer spent over 40 years studying these patterns. He won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research in 1986. He wrote books for academics and books for general audiences. Before he died in February 2024, he came out of retirement more than once to write about how his decades of research mapped directly onto what he was watching happen in American politics. His final co-authored book, *Authoritarian Nightmare*, written with former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, was specifically about the personality dynamics driving the movement we now call MAGA. Nothing about this movement is mysterious. The fear, the aggression, the blind obedience, the hostility toward anything new or different, the demand that everyone conform to a narrow set of traditional norms and the willingness to punish anyone who doesn’t. Every piece of it maps directly onto a personality type that has been measured, studied, replicated, and documented across dozens of countries and thousands of participants for over four decades. They don’t need better arguments. They don’t need more information. They are running the same fear program their parents installed or their genetics predisposed and the only solution they’ve ever known is to find the strongest authority in the room and do whatever that person says. That’s not politics. It’s psychology. And it’s been understood for a very long time. **Sources** Altemeyer, B. (1981). *Right-Wing Authoritarianism*. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Altemeyer, B. (1988). *Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism*. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Altemeyer, B. (1996). *The Authoritarian Specter*. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Altemeyer, B. (2006). *The Authoritarians*. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba. Altemeyer, B. & Dean, J. W. (2020). *Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers*. Brooklyn: Melville House. Eigenberger, M. E. (1998). Fear as a correlate of authoritarianism. *Psychological Reports*, 83, 1395-1409. Duckitt, J. & Sibley, C. G. (2007). Right wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation and the dimensions of generalized prejudice. *European Journal of Personality*, 21, 113-130. McCourt, K., Bouchard, T. J., Lykken, D. T., Tellegen, A., & Keyes, M. (1999). Authoritarianism revisited: Genetic and environmental influences examined in twins reared apart and together. *Personality and Individual Differences*, 27(5), 985-1014. Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). *The Authoritarian Personality*. New York: Harper and Row. Dunwoody, P. T. & Funke, F. (2016). The aggression-submission-conventionalism scale: Testing a new three factor measure of authoritarianism. *Journal of Social and Political Psychology*, 4(2), 571-600. This is a public episode. 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