The F Scale, 2022
Last week, the Canadian Broadcasting Company updated a report from April on a study from 1950 about what kind of people get drawn to fascism. That book, Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, is being taken more seriously now than it was when it first came out after the defeat of fascism in World War II. There’s a new edition out now with an introduction by Harvard history professor Peter Gordon, who wrote "It's not a study of what causes fascism… it's a study of what they call the potentially fascist individual, by which they mean they want to figure out: what is it that makes someone susceptible to fascist propaganda?"
To answer that question they came up with questionnaires to determine where participants fell along four different scales: the antisemitism scale; the ethnocentrism scale; the political-economic conservatism scale; and the best-known, F-scale, to test for fascism.
The original F-scale questionnaire included 77 questions to test for a person's susceptibility to fascist propaganda. Participants were asked how much they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements. For example: "obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn" and "the businessman and the manufacturer are much more important to society than the artist and the professor."
A subset of the study participants also underwent in-depth interviews, informed by Freudian psychoanalysis and the belief that relationships between children on the one hand, and parents and authority figures on the other were key to the shaping of a person's personality.
…Donald Trump's entrance onto the political scene on June 16, 2015 was a turning point. That day he descended a golden escalator at Trump Towers in New York City and declared: "the American Dream is dead; I will bring it back" and announced he was running to be leader of the Republican party and president of the United States.
Matthew MacWilliams was shocked by what he saw.
"I watched Trump come down and then I listened to the speech and I said: that was an authoritarian speech," he said. "I've never heard anything like that in America."
MacWilliams wondered if Trump were "activating" authoritarians in his party. To find out, he conducted a poll of Republican primary voters and found that those with authoritarian leanings were much more likely to prefer Trump.
"Even when you put in education and other big, big variables that should soak up all of the predictability of the variable," said MacWilliams, "and it didn't for any other candidate. Ted Cruz, nope. Marco Rubio, nope. It was Donald Trump."
MacWilliams wrote an op-ed arguing that Trump appealed to people with authoritarian tendencies in the party. The article went viral. It also triggered a backlash and MacWilliams received threats.
"It sort of fits with that American exceptionalism that somehow we came across in our little boats and during that long voyage, we were washed of all authoritarianism. And the fact is, no, that didn't happen," said MacWilliams.
"The institutions and the politics aren't responding to the threat because they still think it can't happen here."
The poll MacWilliams conducted— and the questions he asked to test for authoritarian leanings— drew on the intellectual history and tradition that infused The Authoritarian Personality. Although work on authoritarianism fell out of fashion in academic circles, a small group of scholars kept working to address the original study's methodological shortcomings and biases.
Rather than the long list in the original F-scale questionnaire, researchers today are asking four to eight simple questions, none of them directly about politics. They're parenting questions, designed to get a sense of a person's relationship with authority. The original F-scale questionnaire included several questions about parenting that are quite similar to the questions being asked by researchers today.
These four questions have been asked around the world by MacWilliams and other scholars.
"The thing about the questions [is] they have nothing to do with politics or political behaviour," said MacWilliams. "And that's what makes them so powerful. Because it isn't like I ask: do you think we need a strong leader to ignore the Constitution and Parliament? Yes, I do! Oh, you might be an authoritarian!... But we know it's out there. We can observe it. These questions are our filter for observing it. They aren't perfect, but they're really good at what they're doing."
Of course, most parents value all eight attributes and encourage them in their children.
"What's interesting is what happens when you force people to make a choice to prioritize," said Jonathan Weiler, professor of global studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-author of Prius or Pick Up: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide.
"When people do prioritize, when they are forced to make a choice, the choices they make have an incredibly powerful relationship to their views about gay marriage, about race, about gender in society, about politics more broadly."
Scholars like Jonathan Weiler and Matthew MacWilliams have found that about 25 per cent of the American population are on the non-authoritarian end of the spectrum, 35 per cent are somewhere in the middle and 30-35 per cent are on the authoritarian end of the scale.
Born in 1911, Ronald Reagan came from a normal working class Illinois home. He was a labor union activist in the 1940s and the president of his union from 1947 until 1952 and again in 1959 but at some point in there he sold out to management and started secretly ratting out other actors to the FBI as "communist sympathizers." He remained a Democrat and even helped California Senator Helen Gahagan Douglas defend herself against the deranged attacks from a sleazy, fascist-oriented political newcomer, Richard Nixon. By then, though, he was dating Republican Nancy Drew and he started shifting his flimsy political beliefs rightward. Once General Electric, an overtly conservative firm, hired him as a TV host in 1954 he worked to please them by adopting their right-wing agenda, including a new anti-union stance. By 1962, he switched parties and became not just a Republican, but a far right Republican, even embracing racism. Opposing civil rights legislation, he said "if an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so" and he actively campaigned against Medicare.
Many people point out that Reagan wasn't as extreme as Republicans are today. They're incorrect. His actual beliefs may have been shallow but his intent was always to go hard right. He would be as much a crackpot today as Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, or Marjorie TraitorGreene. He'd fit right in. You may find a liberal saying something respectful about him but you'll never find a liberal claiming Reagan was ever anything else than what he was: a right-winger.
In their 2013 book, Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford investigate what makes one person a conservative and someone else a progressive. Their premise is that people experience and process different world. "We taste and smell the same things differently," they wrote. "We cognitively and subjectively interpret the same paintings or stories or jokes differently. We have different personalities, moral foundations, and personal values-- and we have different politics… Openness means openness to experience and information and refers to people who are curious, creative and arty, those who enjoy and seek out novel experiences and are more likely to adopt unconventional beliefs… People who score high on openness, for example, tend to like envelope-pushing music and abstract art… Those open to new experiences are not just hanging Jackson Pollock prints in unorganized bedrooms while listening to techo-pop reinterpretations of Bach by experimental jazz bands. They are also more likely to identify themselves as liberals."
Social scientists have suspected for the better part of a century that political orientations are tied to personality. In fact, in some instances the controversy has been less about whether personality traits influence ideology than whether ideology is a personality trait. Personality can be thought of as the particular patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that make an individual unique.
…Liberals and conservatives might differ on such eclectic non-political tastes as literature and salads for the same reason people with particular personality traits have different tastes and preferences. Maybe “liberal” and “conservative” are just handy terms for describing people who happen to have distinct bundles of traits driving their thoughts, feelings and actions. The big trick, of course, is figuring out the specific traits that consistently distinguish liberals from conservatives… This research, to put it mildly, has been controversial. It began with reflections on the traits that make for a good Nazi.
Erich Jaensch was a psychologist in pre-World War II Germany who was best known for his work on eidetic imagery (an eidetic image is an image that is perceived as real but is not). He began classifying people on their eidetic capabilities and then, ominously, began attaching cultural significance to these capabilities. Somewhere in the process this agenda morphed into providing scholarly cover for some of the more odious racial elements underpinning Nazi ideology. Jaensch’s argument that eidetic individuals are more likely than non-eidetic individuals to possess certain traits does not seem particularly freighted with political importance. Yet from this basis he started to develop a classification scheme for two personality types that accrued major political ramifications.
The “J” type personality was athletic, practical, and decisive. The “S” type was individualistic, egocentric, and liberal. J-types were likely to be upstanding Nazis; S-types, according to Jaensch, were more likely to be Jews and perhaps Frenchmen. He saw these personality types as biologically (read racially) rooted and connected to, not just different views of the world but maybe even different forms of humanity that would take predictably different sides in any cultural conflict. There is no prize for guessing who Jaensch viewed as the good guys in such conflict.
After the J-types jackbooted themselves and everyone else into a bloody, global conflict and lost, they were viewed less as practical and decisive than as existential threats to humanity.
During and immediately following World War II a number of social scientists investigated the inner workings of J-types. No one really believed in Jaensch’s chain of inference-- the conclusions were not only morally repugnant but empirically unsupported-- but the concept of an authoritarian personality type had been floating around in academic circles for quite a while. Maybe humanity was not divided into J- and S-types biologically fated to clash in a global struggle for cultural dominance but maybe there was something to the notion of certain personality traits being more acceptant of authoritarian social structures. This possibility was a very big deal in the middle of the 20th Century, when authoritarian ideological systems aggressively sought to replicate themselves through persuasion or force.
The big ideological “isms” that threatened democracy-- fascism on the right and communism on the left-- were clearly aided not just by the acceptance but in many cases the enthusiastic support of large numbers of seemingly ordinary people. This support came despite the indisputable fact that these regimes often fostered scientific ideas that were specious: Jaensch’s extrapolation from eidetic capabilities to justifications of Nazi racial purity or Trofim Lysenko’s rejection of Mendelian genetics for a new form of “anti-bourgeois” agronomy.
Moreover, the moral consequences of the policies being justified were difficult to miss: Gas chambers and gulags, wars and genocide, man-made famines and a generally cavalier approach to human rights and dignity. What was truly puzzling to social scientists was that these policies were not only accepted and implemented by the ideological true believers but by the average tovarisch and burgher. To be sure, many people just acquiesced in order to protect family and others actively resisted at extreme costs to themselves. Yet, authoritarian regimes needed many average citizens to get with the program. And lots of them did. Why?
In the 1940s and 1950s, psychologists began to hypothesize that people with certain preferences-- a desire for social order and clear, universally followed rules and regulations-- were more likely to provide that support to authoritarian regimes. They began to wonder whether these preferences were deeply psychologically embedded; in other words, whether they constituted a distinct and identifiable set of traits that could be isolated as a personality type. Thus was born the notion of the authoritarian personality. Investigators accept at least parts of Jaensch’s conception of a J-type but often view such personality types as threats to rather than foundations of society. A number of names are associated with the academic work foundational to developing and testing the concept of the authoritarian personality. The most prominent, though, is Theodor Adorno, a German academic whose experience with authoritarianism was all too practical. He was a man of broad interests-- he is still remembered as a music and cultural critic-- who studied philosophy, psychology and sociology, receiving his PhD in 1924. A rising star in more than one academic field, Adorno fled Hitler’s regime after losing his right to teach. Adorno’s father was a Jew who had converted to Protestantism, a dangerous genealogy to have in Nazi Germany.
Adorno ended up at the University of California Berkeley studying, among other things, the sociology and psychology of prejudice. There he began a series of collaborative research projects with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, an Austrian-born psychologist and fellow refugee of the anti-Semitic pogroms of the Hitler regime, and Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford, two psychologists who studied ethnocentrism. These projects resulted in The Authoritarian Personality. Theories about authoritarianism had been making the rounds in respectable academic circles for a decade or more before this book was published in 1950, but this was likely the first-- and certainly best known-- systematic empirical investigation into whether there was such a thing as a personality rooted in politics. As the authors put it, their major hypothesis was “that the political, economic, and social convictions of an individual often form a broad and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a ‘mentality’ or ‘spirit’ and that this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality.” Specifically, what they were interested in were “potential” fascists-- not overt and committed ideologues, but those predisposed to accept or support fascism should it become a mainstream social movement. [The equivalent of today’s MAGAts.]
They ended up developing the F-scale-- the “F” stood for fascist. The F-scale focused on nine traits, which for the most part ignored specific policy issues like preferences on hiring quotas and focused on “central trends in the person.” These traits included conventionalism (a rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values), superstition and stereotypy (a belief in mystical determinants of individual fate coupled with a predisposition to think in rigid categories), and anti-intraception (an opposition to the subjective or the imaginative). A number of the questions they used to try and get at these traits were prescient in that they reflected the sorts of non-political items now known to discriminate between liberals and conservatives. For example, one of the anti-intraception questions was: “Novels or stories that tell about what people think and feel are more interesting than those which contain mainly action, romance and adventure.” One of the conventionalism questions asked whether it was more important for a person to be artistic and sensuous or neat and well-mannered.
…In The Psychology of Politics, published just a few years after The Authoritarian Personality (1954), Hans Eysenck argued that personality was projected onto social attitudes. In this book, Eyesenck suggested that ideology was a product of two core underlying dimensions. One of these dimensions amounted to a basic left-right take on political and social issues. The other was “tendermindedness” or “toughmindedness.” The idea was that ideology depended not just on issue preferences but also on underlying personality. Authoritarians, be they on the left or right, were more likely to be toughminded. Eyesenck put both communists and fascists in this category since both groups were willing to pursue their political beliefs with little regard for the preferences and interests of others.
…[I]n the 1960s Glenn Wilson and colleagues in England, New Zealand, and Australia, took the basic concept of conservatism as reflecting a dimension of personality characterized by resistance to change and adherence to tradition. The result was the C-scale (“C” for conservatism) also broadly known as the Wilson- Patterson index-- versions of which we use in our own research. They measured conservatism with questions probing attitudes on everything from school uniforms to the death penalty and found it to correlate not just with the political orientations you would expect but also with tastes and preferences more broadly.
A more recent extension of the authoritarian personality research program is right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). It was developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer, who wondered whether there was a set of people “so generally submissive to established authority that it is scientifically useful to speak of ‘authoritarian people’.” Altemeyer’s answer was a decisive yes. He spent decades refining what amounted to an RWA personality test. Through various iterations this test included questions that had clear political implications, but he also experimented with questions that dealt with child rearing, music and films, and personal hygiene. RWA had much stronger psychometric properties than its F-scale predecessor and Altemeyer consistently reported that people scoring high on RWA tests were more likely to support controls on personal freedom, support harsh forms of punishment, be hostile to perceived out groups (e.g. homosexuals, feminists), and be more likely to support government persecution of these groups.
"Making the trains run on time" has long been a kind of excuse for supporting the neatness of authoritarian rule. There were-- until Pearl Harbor-- lots of Americans who enthusiastically and openly supported fascism. In 1933 a Nazi from organization, Friends of New Germany, was active in New York and Chicago, spreading fascist propaganda. Two years later it morphed into the German American Bund, led by Fritz Julius Kuhn, a nationalized American-- like Trump's grandfather. It was most active in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It is most famous for a giant rally that filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 where FDR was referred to as "Frank D. Rosenfeld" and the New Deal was called the Jew Deal. It was very appealing to Republicans of German descent. My father was an FBI agent at the time and the Bund was his beat-- especially after it dissolved when the U.S. and Germany went to war and fascists were rounded up and jailed.
When I was in elementary school a decade after the war, I used to ask my father about what kind of Americans would be-- could possibly be-- Nazis. That's when I first heard about trains running on time (as well as about anti-Semitism). And about Republicans. We didn't really have any in our Brooklyn neighborhood-- no Nazis, no anti-Semites, no Republicans. [I'm mortified that my old neighborhood-- filled with Russian Jewish immigrants today-- was New York's biggest bastion of Trump support outside of Staten Island in 2016 and again in 2020. I guess that answers the age-old question of whether or not there were Jews in the 1930s who voted for Hitler... before being carted off to be made into soap and lampshades. My dad told me about something he called the authoritarian personality type-- characterized by an ability to find comfort in unquestioned obedience and even submission to authority.
I recall a few years later being in Berlin. It was after midnight and there were no cars in the street at all. I came to a corner with a red light. It was crowded with people, mostly college-aged like myself, many drunk. But all waiting for the light to turn green. This seemed odd to me. I crossed the street. The crowd was mortified... angry. They didn't turn violent... but almost. Lucky the didn't know I was a Jew or gay. People who revel in their own submission to authority often delight in oppressing "the other."
In college I had learned about Erich Fromm's work on the oppressive authoritarian personality-- a strict superego controlling a weak ego unable to deal with the strong impulses of the id. These are the most conventional of people-- conservatives... Republicans, Blue Dogs, New Dems, Trumpists. They are rigid and judgmental and extremely anti-intellectual. They hate people and have a psychological need to weld power over others-- and have power yielded over themselves. How lucky was my father that he got to hunt them down and throw them in prison-- but only the ones from Germany, like the Trumps.
A couple years ago, writing for Psychology Today, Dr. Timothy Pytell noted that he vividly recalled when he "first realized that fascism has a genuine populist base. As a beginning graduate student at NYU in 1987 I had located an old school barber shop that cut hair for $5. The shop was located between City Hall and West Broadway, and was popular for young Wall Streeters working in the so-called white collar sweat shops. The barbers were universally Italians out of Brooklyn and for about a year ‘George’ regularly cut my hair. I always left with a high and tight military cut which fit my job as a fitness trainer for executives, but left me on the outside with NYU’s bohemian history graduate students. When I asked George how he learned to cut hair he described how as a very young man he had been brought to Nazi Germany on a work train. Since he could cut hair he was assigned as a barber for the SS. He described how he shaved them with a straight razor while a machine gun was trained on him. I immediately realized the origins of the high and tight haircut! As we talked about the past I queried him about growing up in fascist Italy, but he always demurred. I could tell he wasn’t comfortable speaking on the subject surrounded by his Italian friends. I pestered him though and finally one day he leaned in and whispered in my ear “Mussolini?, Mussolini was a great man-- it was just that pact with Hitler that ruined everything.” Stunned by the realization of unrepentant fascist was cutting my hair, I have never overcome how uneasy it made me feel... I am slowly succumbing to the disturbing conclusion there is a fascist lurking in all of us. It seems to me the politics of fascism are endemic to democracy and in times of social crisis (prevalent in capitalism!) emerge in the political arena as ‘Neither Left nor Right’ according to the historian Zeev Sternhell’s diagnosis of Italian fascism... In the end, Fascist impulses appear not to be something of the past and explained by the social crisis of the inter war period-- but endemic to western democracies that originated with the advent of participatory politics after 1789. Modernity as it is conceived has unleashed untold human energies that are deeply liberating for the individual; however, in times of social crisis, third path movements of nationalism and socialism or will and responsibility mobilize democratic political cultures in authoritarian/fascist direction."