The McCain/Palin Ticket Perfectly Fits the Authoritarian Conservative Mold

John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican candidates, have shown themselves to be unapologetic and archetypical authoritarian conservatives. Indeed, their campaign has warmed the hearts of fellow authoritarians, who applaud them for their negativity, nastiness, and dishonest ploys and only criticize them for not offering more of the same.

The McCain/Palin campaign has assumed a typical authoritarian posture: The candidates provide no true, specific proposals to address America's needs. Rather, they simply ask voters to "trust us" and suggest that their opponents - Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden - are not "real Americans" like McCain, Palin, and the voters they are seeking to court. Accordingly, McCain and Plain have called Obama "a socialist," "a redistributionist," "a Marxist," and "a communist" - without a shred of evidence to support their name-calling, for these terms are pejorative, rather than in any manner descriptive. This is the way authoritarian leaders operate.

In my book Conservatives Without Conscience, I set forth the traits of authoritarian leaders and followers, which have been distilled from a half-century of empirical research, during which thousands of people have voluntarily been interviewed by social scientists. The touch points in these somewhat-overlapping lists of character traits provide a clear picture of the characters of both John McCain and Sarah Palin.

McCain, especially, fits perfectly as an authoritarian leader. Such leaders possess most, if not all, of these traits:


dominating
opposes equality
desirous of personal power
amoral
intimidating and bullying
faintly hedonistic
vengeful
pitiless
exploitive
manipulative
dishonest
cheats to win
highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic
mean-spirited
militant
nationalistic
tells others what they want to hear
takes advantage of "suckers"
specializes in creating false images to sell self
may or may not be religious
usually politically and economically conservative/Republican

Incidentally, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney also can be described by these well-defined and typical traits - which is why a McCain presidency is likely to be nearly identical to a Bush presidency.

Clearly, Sarah Palin also has some qualities typical of authoritarian leaders, not to mention almost all of the traits found among authoritarian followers. Specifically, such followers can be described as follows:


submissive to authority
aggressive on behalf of authority
highly conventional in their behavior
highly religious
possessing moderate to little education
trusting of untrustworthy authorities
prejudiced (particularly against homosexuals and followers of religions other than their own)
mean-spirited
narrow-minded
intolerant
bullying
zealous
dogmatic
uncritical toward chosen authority
hypocritical
inconsistent and contradictory
prone to panic easily
highly self-righteous
moralistic
strict disciplinarians
severely punitive
demanding loyalty and returning it
possessing little self-awareness
usually politically and economically conservative/Republican

The leading authority on right-wing authoritarianism, a man who devoted his career to developing hard empirical data about these people and their beliefs, is Robert Altemeyer. Altemeyer, a social scientist based in Canada, flushed out these typical character traits in decades of testing.

Altemeyer believes about 25 percent of the adult population in the United States is solidly authoritarian (with that group mostly composed of followers, and a small percentage of potential leaders). It is in these ranks of some 70 million that we find the core of the McCain/Palin supporters. They are people who are, in Altemeyer's words, are "so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds."


John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president

-- Modified on 11/3/2008 1:20:13 PM

-- Modified on 11/3/2008 1:21:44 PM