The REAL Reason For The Opposition To Same-Sex Marriage?

Here in the Lone Star State, we have been afforded the opportunity to vote for/against an amendment to the State constitution that will limit the vicissitudes of matrimony to heterosexual couples. The authoritarian strain runs close to the surface in all of us. Dub (George W. Bush) is as authoritarian as he can be. If this is (fair & balanced) mass psychoanalysis, so be it.


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The Authoritarian Personality Revisited
By Alan Wolfe

When it first appeared in 1950, The Authoritarian Personality was primed for classic status. It ran to just under 1,000 pages. Its publisher, Harper & Brothers, had brought out Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma six years earlier and drew explicit parallels between the one book and the other. Its authors were, or would soon become, famous. Theodor Adorno, the senior author, was a member of the influential Frankfurt school of "critical theory," a Marxist-inspired effort to diagnose the cultural deformities of late capitalism. R. Nevitt Sanford was a distinguished psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley who, in the year the book was published, would be dismissed from his professorship for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. Else Frenkel-Brunswick had been trained at Freud's University of Vienna and was a practicing lay analyst in Northern California. Twenty-three years old at the time the study began, Daniel J. Levinson would become famous for his 1978 The Seasons of a Man's Life (Knopf), which popularized the notion of a "midlife crisis."

Then there was the subject matter. The Authoritarian Personality addressed itself to the question of whether the United States might harbor significant numbers of people with a "potentially fascistic" disposition. It did so with methods that claimed to represent the cutting edge in social science -- and that's where the book got in trouble with scholars of its day. But in today's political climate, it might be time to revisit its thesis.

Before anyone was talking about the radical right in America -- the John Birch Society, the most notorious of the new conservative groups to develop in the postwar period, wasn't founded until 1958 -- The Authoritarian Personality seemed to anticipate the fervent crusades against communism and the attacks on Chief Justice Earl Warren, the United Nations, and even fluoridation that would characterize postwar politics in the United States. The fact that the radical right has transformed itself from a marginal movement to an influential sector of the contemporary Republican Party makes the book's choice of subject matter all the more prescient.

Finally, the book was filled with data, including its famous "F scale." Based on how respondents answered a series of questions, the F scale identified nine key dimensions of a protofascist personality: conventionality, submissiveness, aggression, subjectivity, superstitiousness, toughness, cynicism, the tendency to project unconscious emotional responses onto the world, and heightened concerns about sex.

For example, subjects were asked how much they disagreed or agreed with such statements as:

"Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn." (Submissiveness.)

"Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished." (Aggression and sex.)

"No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished." (Toughness and aggression.)

"No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason." (Sex and cynicism.)

The F scale was only one of the research methods featured in The Authoritarian Personality. The authors also measured ethnocentrism; administered Thematic Appreciation Tests, presenting subjects with pictures and asking them to tell a story about them; and relied upon clinical interviews resembling psychoanalytic sessions. Rarely, if ever, have social scientists probed ordinary human beings in as much detail as did the book's authors.

Indeed, participating in this study was so demanding for subjects that the authors made no effort to engage in random sampling. They first tried their methods out on college students, the usual captive audience, before getting the cooperation of the leaders of various organizations to survey their groups -- unions, the merchant marine, employment-service veterans, prison inmates, psychology-clinic patients, and PTA's.

Unlike much postwar social science, The Authoritarian Personality did not present data showing the correlations between authoritarianism and a variety of variables such as social class, religion, or political affiliation. Instead the authors tried to draw a composite picture of people with authoritarian leanings: Perhaps their most interesting finding was that such people identify with the strong and are contemptuous of the weak. Extensive case studies of particular individuals were meant to convey the message that people who seemed exceptionally conventional on the outside could be harboring radically intolerant thoughts on the inside.


Despite its bulk, prestigious authors, and seeming relevance, however, The Authoritarian Personality never did achieve its status as a classic. Four years after its publication, it was subject to strong criticism in Studies in the Scope and Method of "The Authoritarian Personality" (Free Press, 1954), edited by the psychologists Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda. Two criticisms were especially devastating, one political, the other methodological.

How, the University of Chicago sociologist Edward A. Shils wanted to know, could one write about authoritarianism by focusing only on the political right? In line with other works of the 1950s, such as Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace, 1951), Shils pointed out that "Fascism and Bolshevism, only a few decades ago thought of as worlds apart, have now been recognized increasingly as sharing many very important features." The United States had its fair share of fellow travelers and Stalinists, Shils argued, and they too worshiped power and denigrated weakness. Any analysis that did not recognize that the extremes of left and right were similar in their authoritarianism was inherently flawed.

Herbert H. Hyman and Paul B. Sheatsley, survey-research specialists, scrutinized every aspect of The Authoritarian Personality's methodology and found each wanting. Sampling was all but nonexistent. The wording of the questionnaire was flawed. The long, open-ended interviews were coded too subjectively. No method existed for determining what caused what. Whatever the subjects said about themselves could not be verified. The F scale lacked coherence.

It is true that, social science being what it is, fault can be found with any methodology. But the critique by Hyman and Sheatsley in some ways became more famous than the study it analyzed; when I attended graduate school in the 1960s, The Authoritarian Personality was treated as a social-science version of the Edsel, a case study of how to do everything wrong.

Perhaps Adorno had all that coming. Along with Max Horkheimer, who played an instrumental role in the research that went into the book, Adorno had published Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) in Amsterdam in 1947. Among its other attacks on the technical rationality of advanced capitalism, that book dismissed "positivism," the effort to model the social sciences on the natural ones. The significant flaws of The Authoritarian Personality allowed quantitative social scientists to return the favor and dismiss critical theory.

Yet despite its flaws, The Authoritarian Personality deserves a re-evaluation. In many ways, it is more relevant now than it was in 1950.

Certainly the criticisms of Edward Shils seem misplaced 50 years on. Communism really did have some of the authoritarian characteristics of fascism, yet Communism is gone from the Soviet Union and without any influence in the United States. Many writers inspired by Shils, like Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who would become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, held that totalitarian regimes, unlike authoritarian ones, were not reformable from within. Yet the Soviet Union collapsed as a result of domestic upheaval. Totalitarianism still exists in a country like North Korea, but in the U.S.S.R. it never was quite as "total" in its control over most of its populations as many postwar scholars maintained. When it collapsed, so did many of the theories that once sought to explain it.

Even more significant than the collapse of left-wing authoritarianism has been the success of right-wing authoritarianism. Perhaps the authors of The Authoritarian Personality were on to something when they made questions about sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular, so central to diagnosing authoritarianism.

In the June 19, 2005, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the journalist Russell Shorto interviewed activists against gay marriage and concluded that they were motivated not by a defense of traditional marriage, but by hatred of homosexuality itself. "Their passion," Shorto wrote, "comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: It seeks to spread itself." It is not difficult to conclude where those people would have stood on the F scale.

Not all opponents of gay marriage, of course, are incipient fascists; the left, to its discredit, frequently dismisses the views of conservative opponents on, for example, abortion, church-state separation, or feminism as irrational bigotry, when the conclusions of most people who hold such views stem from deeply held, and morally reasoned, religious convictions. At the same time, many of the prominent politicians successful in today's conservative political environment adhere to a distinct style of politics that the authors of The Authoritarian Personality anticipated. Public figures, in fact, make good subjects for the kinds of analysis upon which the book relied; visible, talkative, passionate, they reveal their personalities to us, allowing us to evaluate them.

Consider the case of John R. Bolton, now our ambassador to the United Nations. While testifying about Bolton's often contentious personality, Carl Ford Jr., a former head of intelligence within the U.S. State Department, called him a "a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy." Surely, in one pithy sentence, that perfectly summarizes the characteristics of those who identify with strength and disparage weakness. Everything Americans have learned about Bolton -- his temper tantrums, intolerance of dissent, and black-and-white view of the world -- step right out of the clinical material assembled by the authors of The Authoritarian Personality.

And Bolton is by no means alone. Sen. John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, last spring said that violent attacks on judges, who cannot be held accountable, were understandable. He might well have scored highly on his response to this item from the F scale: "There are some activities so flagrantly un-American that, when responsible officials won't take the proper steps, the wide-awake citizen should take the law into his own hands." House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is in difficulty for his close ties to lobbyists like Jack Abramoff. Would those men agree with the statement, "When you come right down to it, it's human nature never to do anything without an eye to one's own profit"?

One item on the F scale, in particular, seems to capture in just a few words the way that many Christian-right politicians view the world in an age of terror: "Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life."

If one could find contemporary "authoritarians of the left" to match those on the right, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality could rightly be criticized for their exclusive focus on fascism. Yet there are few, if any, such examples; while Republicans have been moving toward the right, Democrats are shifting to the center. No liberal close to the leaders of the Democratic Party has called for the assassination of a foreign head of state; only a true authoritarian like Pat Robertson, who has helped the Republicans achieve power, has done that.

The authors of The Authoritarian Personality hoped that a clinical account of the tendency would enable democracy to protect itself better against political extremism. That could not be done, they concluded, by changing the personality structure of incipient authoritarians, since their beliefs were too ingrained to be altered and the techniques of psychology, in any case, were too weak to alter them. Authoritarian tendencies, they concluded, "are products of the total organization of society and are to be changed only as that society is changed."

The United States did change in the years after their book was published, but those changes revealed what might have been the biggest mistake the authors made: They looked for subjects among students and union members when they should have been looking in the corridors of power.

Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and professor of political science at Boston College. He is writing a book on whether democracy in America still works.

Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

No More Forrest Gump! Make Room For Lynne Adrian!

My favorite scene in "Forrest Gump" is when Tom Hanks marches across the stage in Tuscaloosa and receives his bachelor's degree. However, an American Studies prof at Bama writes nothing but sense and washes away the Forrest Gump nonsense. If this is (fair & balanced) insight, so be it.

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Disasters and What They Show Us About America's Values
By Lynne M. Adrian

There has always been a contradiction at the heart of America -- even before it became the United States. Two sets of warring principles have always pulled at our psyche. These contradictory impulses cross all the other lines -- rich and poor, female and male, left and right, and all the different permutations of politics, class, color, and culture that have been present in this large place for these 500 years. Maybe this argument is present in other countries, but I know that the division between these two sets of beliefs cleaves the country as surely as the Mississippi divides the continent, and that our best and worst showed all too well in the streets of New Orleans.

On one side are the two principles that show the best in us. I will state the first bluntly: No one is expendable. Everyone is worthwhile, and there are no disposable human beings. This belief comes out both in an insistence that we protect the children and elderly, and in the Marine injunction to leave no comrade behind -- alive or dead. It is an essential element of democracy -- each vote counts because each person counts.

The second of these positive principles is that what happens to you could as easily happen to me. We are all interdependent because there is no inherent reason for our outcomes to be different in life. Hurricane, terrorist attack, battle -- what determines outcome is fate, chance, the hand of God, however you choose to define it, but not our own worth. It is the part of us that understands that the question "Why me?" when something awful happens could as easily be phrased as "Why not me?"

I am particularly aware of that principle as I watch the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. My daughter graduated from Tulane University Law School last year. As a graduation gift we rented a French Quarter condo for her and her roommates during graduation week. On Friday, September 2, CNN ran a story on a group of tourists stuck in a New Orleans condo, with seven people down to the last half gallon of water and no help yet in sight. Two young lawyers at opposite ends of the country saw the story and suddenly realized they had celebrated in that same building. What was different between the groups? Fundamentally -- nothing. The tourists had wanted to leave but couldn't, in part because the airline industry declined a government request before the hurricane for empty planes to help with evacuation as "economically infeasible." Even with money and somewhere to go, there was no way to leave.

This example, far from the worst suffering on the Gulf Coast, leads me to the two principles that what became America has had to struggle against since at least 1492. They are the evil underside of our national psyche; much of the suffering on the Gulf Coast can be traced to the ascendancy of these beliefs for the past quarter-century.

The first mistaken American notion is that "I can do it myself, so you don't matter." A more frequently heard slang version is "I've got mine, so screw you, Jack." At root is the idea that if I become strong enough, rich enough, or mean enough (or all three), I can control what happens to me and those I love. In this view, the problem of those tourists in the French Quarter was that they weren't rich or powerful enough to get out of town. A direct result of this belief is that anything that takes from me and my ability to accumulate wealth and power is bad and endangers me. Why pave the potholes when you can afford shock absorbers? The bumps are someone else's problem.

Individualism is not, of course, inherently a bad thing. Many of the stories emerging from the Gulf Coast are positive examples of individualism. Neighbors helped rescue neighbors rather than wait for help; medical personnel volunteered; even the most poor and vulnerable at the convention center created a toilet by cutting a hole in a chair and placing a bucket under it in an attempt to keep their space bearable. But such individualism has traditionally been tempered by a communal sense that some things made more sense not to do individually. Individual initiative constructing a toilet is good, but a sewer system is better. Barn raisings, wagon trains, and mutual help and burial associations all worked on the principle that giving time, money, or effort to the group produced greater personal return than individual accumulation or effort could. Why the change?

Over the past 25 years many Americans have been persuaded by some very effective marketing campaigns that not only can government never do anything right, it is also too expensive. The cost of government, particularly the federal government, has become more expensive for individuals and families because the cost of financing the government has been systematically transferred to individual taxpayers, with corporate taxes shrinking at a remarkable rate. Legally, corporations in the United States are constituted as "persons" under the law. In the 1950s, when corporations were at their most productive, they paid 39 percent of the tax revenue collected by the federal government. By 2004 corporations paid only 11.4 percent of the taxes collected. Even that may be an overestimate. Common Dreams, a Web site for the "progressive community," noted: "In 2003, corporate revenues represented only 7.4 percent of federal tax receipts, the second-lowest level on record, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Sixty years ago, corporations paid half of the U.S. tax bill." Eighty-two of the Fortune 500 companies paid no income tax at all in one of the past three years. At the same time the functional tax rate for citizens has risen. We have allowed, even encouraged, our corporate "citizens" to become tax evaders on a grand scale.


The second of our weaknesses also explains too much about the tragedy we see in New Orleans and surrounding areas. I can best phrase it as "Only those like me count as fully human." This belief has stalked the continent since the first explorers captured native peoples to take back to Europe as trophies, through a civil war, to a mine owner saying of striking immigrant miners, "They don't suffer, they can't suffer, they don't even speak English," to a refusal to allow a ship full of Jewish refugees from Hitler's murderous intents to land, and down to the present day. The people of New Orleans are predominantly African-American, and nearly one-third live below the poverty line.

For all too many Americans they are the "other," unlike us. When CNN interviews a young black man in baggy pants and a do-rag, most Americans expect a gangbanger, not a hero who escorted 18 children under 10 out of a flooding housing project when their mothers could not fit on the boat. It is a false sense of division that makes it all too easy for Americans to erupt into violence or threats of violence -- whether it is people firing at rescue helicopters or Lt. Gen. Russel Honore having to order National Guard troops not to point loaded M-16s at the unarmed civilians they are there to help.

That same politics of race extends into the daily life of most Americans, often at their workplaces. One of the most frequently leveled criticisms of affirmative action is that it will keep the most qualified individual from being hired, which will cause financial loss or danger. It is often posed as the opposite of American values of expertise and professionalism, in which individuals are valued both for what they know and for their commitment to a set of practices such as those held by doctors, lawyers, and engineers. In our increasingly specialized world, those professional categories expand to include an ever-greater number of things -- including disaster response. As they should.

Anyone who has ever opposed affirmative action needs to look long and hard at the case of Michael D. Brown's appointment as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Before moving into a senior command rank in 2003, he had only one very brief experience in a flood in Oklahoma. His previous position was running an Arabian horse association, and he left that under a cloud of recriminations. So how did he get the job? He was hired as FEMA's general counsel by his old college friend, Joe Allbaugh, the agency's head; he became director of FEMA when Allbaugh left to set up a consulting firm on getting government contracts. And what had Allbaugh done before FEMA? He had been in charge of George Bush's 2000 election campaign. I defy any critic of affirmative action to demonstrate that nowhere in the United States was there a female or minority candidate with more objectively valid professional qualifications to run FEMA than Michael D. Brown.

I understand the frustration of white male Americans who have felt that their economic chances have decreased in the past 25 years. They have. But it has not been because of affirmative action -- that notion has been a tremendously effective wedge used to drive Americans apart. In the last three decades virtually every man I have spoken with in higher education who inquired why he did not get a particular job has been told it was because the department was under pressure to increase diversity because of affirmative action. If all those stories were true, the current faculties of our colleges and universities would look like the faculties of big-city elementary schools -- overwhelmingly female and minority. Clearly that is not the case. The real victors in the campaign against affirmative action are not women or minorities; they are well-connected men like Brown, who can use who they know to trump what they ought to know to do their jobs well. And again, people paid with their lives for a wrongheaded commitment to the comfort of "people who are like me."


The current tragedy reveals an additional problem -- a reluctance to face and fix the hard issues. As early as 1998 Louisiana scientists and politicians created a plan called Coastal 2050 for preserving the wetland environment, strengthening the levees, and avoiding much of the result we see today. But the moment of consensus was allowed to slip away; there was "no money," and none of the plan was financed. In the drill last year for the fictitious "Hurricane Pam," FEMA officials became well aware of more than 100,000 people who did not own or have access to cars and who could not evacuate without government-provided transportation, but again the problem was considered "too hard" to solve. Both problems could have been avoided -- but we lacked the will to do the work. These are not "traditional American values," but their opposite.

One of the most noted creations of American thinkers is pragmatism, a school of thought that arose in the 1890s that insisted on judging ideas by the effect of following them. In other words, if a distinction between two ideas doesn't make any difference it is useless to talk about it. If an idea does not work, it should fade away. Hurricane Katrina has tragically demonstrated that the underfinancing of government, particularly by allowing corporations to receive subsidies while avoiding tax responsibilities, is quite literally and directly a recipe for disaster, as is a desire to focus only on those "like me." These are ideas that need to fade away for us to move forward. The philosopher William James talked about the "marketplace of ideas" -- extreme individuality, a focus on those "like me," and underfinanced infrastructure are ideas that need to be remaindered, not purchased.

Both the positive and negative sets of beliefs are equally part of America. Neither one is un-American in the sense of being an outside imposition. The "Greatest Generation" was great because its members saw themselves as in it together. In the 1960s both the antiwar movement and the GI's in Vietnam operated in part from a deeply felt sense about death and destruction that "it could have been me, but instead it was you." If many voices sounded negative, that was because it was as necessary to fight error as it was to stand for values.

Those we now call Americans have spent the last 500 years demonstrating that we are both the best and the worst that human beings can be. Certainly the news from New Orleans has shown some of the best -- whether in the form of military rescue units, medical personnel, or just ordinary civilians who did the right thing because they could not see others suffer. But the scale and magnitude of suffering could, and I believe would, have been much smaller if we reasserted those positive values -- no one is expendable, and it could have been me -- and rein in our worse selves. Those truly are traditional American values.

Lynne M. Adrian is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.

Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education