Reality and its Discontents
Reality and its Discontents
They Hate Complexity. We Can Hack That.
Do you feel helpless?
Today’s far-right populism is a reaction to qualities— alienation, lack of trust, insecurity, the inability to have confidence in our collective future — that it actually creates, rather than resolves. Tribalism increases polarization, alienation increases distrust, and we enter a self-defeating, downward spiral. Authoritarians want their own particular identity, meaning, and belonging, and in the process are destroying our collective identity, meaning, and belonging.
The truly profound difference is how we respond to this. Liberals embrace difference as reality, a form of strength. But the right-wing populists hate complexity, and are overwhelmed by it, shrinking their world until there is no room for others. At bottom, “Authoritarians are simple-minded avoiders of complexity.”
That’s a quote from an article by Karen Stenner, a leading political scientist on authoritarian politics. I’ve mentioned her before, as the heir to pioneer researcher Theodore Adorno. Recently I’ve been digging into her research, with its modern, statistical, double-blind control group methods. Stenner, born in Australia and formerly of Princeton, has calculated that about one third of people, world wide, in all societies, have an authoritarian personality.
I describe authoritarianism by its effects. The authoritarian personality sees only black and white, demands violent punishment, and desires to crush non-conformists and give preference to loyal members of an in-group.
Stenner gives a colder definition of authoritarianism, as a question of the proper balance between group and individual, conformity and difference. Liberals who desire individual freedom must accept pluralism in politics, ethics, and society. By contrast, those who yearn for conformity need the authorities to enforce it. Authoritarians are those who want “oneness and sameness.”
Sadly, Stenner asserts a truth that few of us want to admit: we are born and then raised to inhabit a “relatively immovable” position on that spectrum. Studies of twins show that the authoritarian personality is largely (more than 50%) inborn. “We come into the world a particular kind of person,” she says, “and nothing changes that too much.” This is an unconscious, primitive (her word) need, deeply rooted in our pre-cognitive natures. She calls this a fixed “dimension of human psychology,” not a political choice.
Stenner chooses the awkward term “diference-ism” to describe this hatred of complexity. The authoritarian reacts obsessively to difference across all levels of life, from racial to linguistic, religious to sexual. The authoritarian wants—no, needs—to be part of a single, unified group. They don’t feel safe if there are differences around them, and submerge themselves in that closed, conformist identity.
Alas, every “us” needs a “them” to define it, and policing that border becomes the political task of authoritarian leaders. They use national myths, ancient legends, fantasies of persecution and demands to control other people’s behavior as the way to unite their collective against outsiders. In the academic jargon, they are “boundary maintainers.”
There are more complex, nuanced, and liberating ways to define “us.” To be a modern liberal is to believe in equal citizenship, subject to uniform laws, under leaders we agree to respect because of the position they hold, not the party they come from. We embrace the complexity of our fellow humans. That’s an expansive definition of “us,” full of the broad cacophony that authoritarians hate.
Stenner’s solution is a cold bucket of water on liberal dreams: we have simply gone too far for most citizens to handle. She says that across Western Europe, North America, and in societies as diverse as Australia and parts of Asia, “liberal democracy has exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate it.”
That’s why the authoritarian prefers a simple politics, where strong leaders rule by force, unchallenged, unquestioned. Politics, for them, should not exist. Decisions are best made without noisy debate, brutal arguments, and contested elections, by patriarchal leaders who force citizens to obey convention and stay in their place. There should be no feeling of threat.
So how do you deal with someone else’s feeling of threat?
Stenner’s rather crushing answer is, stop threatening them.
The predisposition to authoritarian attitudes is largely fixed, but what we can control is the activation of feeling threatened. Fear triggers their expression of intolerance, often suddenly. In a society like America, with a persistent belief in free will and individual agency, we are constantly surprised by this reappearing racism. In fact it was was here all along, and then something activated it.
Stenner points out that there is a negative relationship between laissez faire conservatives and authoritarianism; they don’t want government intervention in the economy, while authoritarians do. Authoritarians also want massive social change, enforced on others, and might even storm the Capitol and impulsively overthrow the republic if they feel threatened! That’s not a position many traditionalist conservatives embrace.
This leads to Stenner’s distasteful, yet credible, thesis:
…true conservatives can be a liberal democracy’s strongest bulwark against the dangers posed by intolerant social movements…The contemporary “left” would be well advised to recognize these crucial distinctions and stop alienating potential allies.
Yup, go hug your Republican neighbor. Invite your Trump-supporting relatives over for a barbecue. Stop threatening them, boycotting them, or shaming them—it doesn’t work and closes off the very people you need to reach. She argues that “left” and “right” are temporary political positions, while Authoritarian and Liberal are permanent. People who test high on authoritarian tendencies are only slightly more likely to call themselves right wing than left wing—“just barely,” in Stenner’s statistical analysis. This is why so many Bernie Bros voted for Trump, and so many Trump supporters actually support Democratic policies. They want government to give, take, and enforce; policy doesn’t matter much.
This is authoritarianism’s critical weakness. The authoritarian will pivot easily to new leaders, because his worldview is not ideological, but psychological. That’s why Joe Biden’s calm campaigning, and glass-of-warm-milk style, were effective. He welcomed all voters and offered protection from the “threat” of Trump’s chaos.
So the key to winning them back is, surprise, to give them what they want. That’s a sense of solidarity, and the group membership they crave so deeply. This is why shaming them is not effective. Their core value is “groupiness,” in Stenner’s phrase, and so we need to give them a way to join our big group.
Stenner’s solution is unpalatable to me, and many liberals I know. She suggests that we stop talking so much about diversity and difference, multiculturalism, and the complex gender and racial policies that we actually support. We should assimilate immigrants, especially in terms of learning English.
This feels like abandoning the victims, to side with their oppressors. But I’m writing on the day that the Senate defeated a national voting rights bill, one more failure for progressive values and democracy. Winning that Senate vote would have done more for diversity and difference than shaming and excluding opponents, or purging our own ranks of imperfect allies.
We should express our goals, Stenner argues, in the terms of strength, respect, dignity, and honor, the emotional language spoken by our opponents. An example of that would include uniting around hospital workers, many of them immigrants, who are defending us against a deadly threat. Using military and scientific leaders to reassure people also works, generally. And we should focus on income equality, because it increases the sense of oneness across the population.
Stenner actually argues for building a superficial, symbolic appearance of unity, and then moving on, without trying to genuinely unite people. The surface is enough: “We must stop trying to save people’s ‘souls” in politics and convert everyone to our own ‘faith.’ I cannot emphasis this enough.”
Until we acknowledge the immutable needs of those people, the fact that they are not evil but ignorant and deeply threatened by complexity, we are shouting into the void. Our tolerance of race and gender differences, of religious and social variation, should be expanded to include the very people who don’t believe in those things.
It’s called citizenship—where we really are, all of us, part of the same overreaching nation, no matter what our beliefs.
See her article:
Karen Stenner, Hope Not Hate.