The Kids Are (Not?) Alt-Right
Understanding politics is difficult. Donald Trump, as I write this, is president of the United States of America. Somehow, we have become used to the idea that a blonde wig glued to the top of an orange head is the leader of the “free” world. In the past it was often the case that jokes were made at the expense of politicians. At the moment, however, politicians are in fact the joke. Political satire can literally involve just watching the news. Although I am broadly pessimistic of many aspects of politics, I have noticed a change in myself: I find politics to be interesting. This is a problem.
If I am finding it interesting then something has gone horribly wrong, as my interest in politics is usually one of morbid fascination. More to the point, this morbid fascination is currently being fed by an endless stream of absurdity both at home in South Africa, and abroad in the US.
How is that things have come to this? What went wrong? To be clear (and honest), I have very little idea of what is going on, but things are clearly not all right. There are people who believe reptiles control the US government, there are people who think that white people are the victims (in some grand historical sense), and there are people who believe that the Democrats are Communists in Disguise. Most of these examples are from the US, and all of them involve views often attributed to members of the Alt-Right, so it might be thought that these examples are not relevant to our general political landscape. This is true and false. In one sense, the results I am going to discuss and the people who were interviewed are all from the US, and so it is unclear how much we can generalise. However, it is often the case that US politics and attitudes come to influence (and perhaps even determine) many aspect of Western political discourse, and so investigating these attitudes does not always mean we must be heavily circumscribed in our usage of these results. Perhaps we can generalise, but we should of course do so very carefully.
Subsequently, what I would like to work through in this post is an intuition I have had for a while: there seems to be a connection between the far (“regressive”) left and the alternative right. I do not mean this in the genuine political sense of them having the same political goals or a shared understanding of human nature: it is clear that the goals and presuppositions of these two camps diverge significantly. Rather, my sense is that there are personality traits that are shared by both groups, to a larger degree than is commonly acknowledged (or at least publicly expressed). A recent paper by Jordan Moss and Peter O’Conner has provided some evidence that this might in fact be the case.
As the authors of the study note, it is quite uncontroversial to note that personality traits are associated with and can be used to predict a wide range of political attitudes and behaviours (at least in the US). Specifically, it has been shown that openness to experience is linked to left wing views while conscientiousness (the quality of wishing to do one’s work or duty well and thoroughly) has been linked to right wing views. This is not to say that all those on the right/left will necessarily have these attitudes, but rather that such traits are effective in predicting the political views of those who happen to hold them.
While these results are interesting, they do not tell us much about the personalities of those who hold political views that are not mainstream and/or on the political fringe. The personality traits above are relatively broad and shed light on behavioural qualities of large groups of people, both on the left and the right. Less attention, however, has been paid to the attitudes of those who hold fringe political positions, which would require a more fine-grained analysis. This blind spot is especially significant considering contemporary developments of both the fringe political left and right, known respectively as the “regressive left” or the “alternative right” (Alt-Right). This is the gap that Moss and O’Conner aim to fill. Specifically, based on their data, they suggest that the so-called Dark Triade traits (Machiavellianism, Narcissism and Psychopathy) plus the added trait of Entitlement can predict both authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes. Interesting bedfellows indeed.
In the study the authors focus on three kinds of “extreme” political views. Two of which are typical of the “regressive left”, Political Correctness Authoritarianism (PCA) and Political Correctness Liberalism (PCL), and one of which is typical of the Alt-Right: White Identitarianism (WI). Moss and O’Conner note that both forms of the PC attitudes introduced above are (apparently) motivated by compassionate aims (however this is more evident in the PCL view, as will become clear below). Those with attitudes related to PCL tend to be concerned with the removal of social and emotional barriers for disadvantaged groups, whereas those holding PCA views tend to focus more on (perceived) physical and psychological safety. Key to properly understanding PCA attitudes is their belief that aggression and force constitute justifiable means with which to achieve their political and social goals (a view not necessarily shared with PCL advocates). In order to make these judgements regarding participants’ attitudes a 36-item questionnaire was used. Questions were asked with the idea of eliciting a certain kind of response from participants that could then be used to put them in one of the three categories. For instance,
“An example PCL item is ‘There are no biologically based differences in personality, talent, and ability to reason, between racial groups.’ and an example PCA item is ‘When a charge of sexual assault is brought forth, the alleged perpetrator should have to prove his or her innocence’.”
WI, on the other hand, is distinguished by an emphasis on white identity, solidarity, and a belief in widespread white victimization. This conceptualization should not be confused with “white identity” (which is concerned with how strongly individuals identify as being “white”) nor with “right wing authoritarianism”, which is more concerned with attitudes towards authority and punishment. A further question one might have is whether the attitudes picked out above are really “attitudes” at all. I believe that they are, but in a specific sense: they can be construed as political attitudes because they can be understood as drivers of political activism. In all three cases, we find recurrent themes that have recently gained much public purchase, such as the “Unite the Right Rally” of 2017. Due to space constraints I cannot go into detail regarding the efficacy of these questionnaires. That is, whether they do in fact accurately measure the traits they aim to predict.
Now to the results described in the paper, the most interesting of which emerged with respect to PCA and WI. While one might intuitively expect these two groups to differ significantly in the associated personality traits, this was not the case. It emerged that for both groups, psychopathy (characterized as being “callous, grandiose, unreliable, dishonest, egocentric, as well as lacking empathy, regret, and remorse”) was a strong predictor for both categories. Machiavellianism (characterized by “interpersonal manipulation and associated with specific patterns of emotional and social cognition skills”) was the strongest unique predictor of WI, however those with PCA attitudes still had far higher levels of the trait compared with those who endorse PCL attitudes. Narcissism (characterised by a grandiose and inflated self-image) was equally prevalent in both WI and PCA, but when Entitlement was controlled for, Narcissism was found to have small significance.
What emerges from these results is that while PCA and WI are both reflective of opposing political views (right versus left), adherents at the fringes of both seem to share a similar “dark” profile. This suggests that these traits are in fact not predictive of political orientation at all (as they seem to be reliable predictors of both PCA and WI). What seems more likely is that these traits reflect the means by which people go about achieving their ideological goals. For both WI and PCA, therefore, adherents might make use of aggressive or violent means to achieve their ends, and the willingness to do this can be explained, for example, by them both scoring high in psychopathy. This is perhaps not a very radical notion, but it nonetheless raises interesting questions concerning the role of authoritarianism and its relationship to both the political left and right. While it is usually supposed that authoritarianism is a uniquely right wing phenomena, the results discussed here suggest that such a strong conclusion does not reflect the data. While authoritarianism may be more likely in individuals on the right, we should be careful to note that it might nonetheless exist on the left.
Awareness of this can help us better understand the fraught political landscape we find ourselves navigating, and can also perhaps explain why so much popular discourse is taken up with those who hold such fringe views: it seems that it is a coming together of individuals who are willing to use aggressive means to achieve their political ends, but who have different views of what those ends are. Significantly, this signals that we should pay attention to the role of authoritarianism as a left-wing phenomenon. A degree of explanatory power is gained with such a broadening of focus, as we might now be better positioned to understand the controversies surrounding de-platforming campaigns on the political left. This is not to take a specific stance on free speech, but rather to note that we can now better understand the possible psychological drivers behind such behaviour, and that, at least some of the time, such drivers may be authoritarian. This broadens the set of concepts we have at our disposal when attempting to understand modern politics.
