7 Very unauthoritarian people can also be dogmatic on the same issue—although not as dogmatic as high RWAs. Bruce Hunsberger and I asked a sample of active American atheists the same question, only it was along the lines, “Is there anything conceivable that could happen that would make you believe in the traditional God?” Fifty-one percent of them said no—which is a lot, but not nearly the 91% of the high RWAs in a large sample of Manitoba parents surveyed in 2005 who said nothing conceivable could make them not believe in the traditional God. Most (64%) of our active atheists also said they would be uninfluenced by the discovery of a “Roman file on Jesus” that confirmed much of the Gospels, including the resurrection—but 76% of those aforementioned high RWA Manitoba parents said the discovery of the “Attis” scrolls would not lower their belief in the divinity of Jesus. See Atheists, by B. Hunsberger and B. Altemeyer, 2006: Prometheus Press, Chapter 4.
Are you surprised that I described a study in which people who are probably quite low RWAs looked bad? I try to develop testing situations that will let both high and low authoritarians show their virtues or their warts, and sometimes the low RWAs look bad too. I always report those findings. But so far they’re pretty rare, especially compared with the high authoritarians’.
8 See Damon Linker’s, “The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege,” by Doubleday, 2006.
9 The United States government called off further searches for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq on January 12, 2005, conceding none had been found. A Harris Poll taken the following month found that 36% of the American public believed such weapons had been found—a drop of only 2 percent from a pre-concession poll taken in November 2004. By December 2005 the figure had fallen to 26 percent, but that’s still a quarter of the American people.
10 Dunwoody, Plane, Rice and Rothrock thus found that as late as August 2005 and January 2006 high RWA Pennsylvania college students were likely to have inaccurate perceptions of the war in Iraq in all the areas tested. They believed Iraq had used chemical or biological weapons against American troops, that Iraq’s government was highly connected with al-Qaida, that Americans had found evidence in Iraq that Saddam was working closely with al-Qaida, that most people in the world favored the United States’ going to war in Iraq, and so did most people in Europe. They also believed that the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but this was only statistically significant at the .09 level. In general the students were better informed than the American public as a whole, but the authoritarian followers among them still carried a lot of demonstrably erroneous beliefs around in their heads.
McWilliams and Keil’s nationwide poll of 1000 Americans in 2005 found a correlation of .51 between RWA scores and being satisfied with “the job President Bush and his administration are doing.”
11 An NBC News/Wall St. Journal poll released on December 12, 2006 found only 23% of Americans still approved of President Bush’s policy on Iraq. Support on this issue is boiling down to the bed rock of hard-core right-wing authoritarians, who seem to make up roughly 20-25% of the American public. The same poll, and several others at the same time, found 34% still gave Bush’s overall performance positive marks. A month later, on the eve of Bush’s address to the nation pushing for a “surge” in troop strength in Iraq, a Gallup poll found his overall approval rating had dropped to 26%. A CBS News Poll on January 22, 2007 put the figure at 28%.
At the end of 2006 an Ipsos Poll of the American public for AP/AOL News found the president was spontaneously named the baddest “bad guy” on the planet more often (25%) than anyone else. But he was also named by others the best “good guy” more (13%) than anyone else. GWB was also spontaneously named the “most admired man”in the annual Gallup Poll at the end of the year—again by 13% of the respondents, more than anyone else.
12 When bad news spills out about things that high RWAs support, they want to be told it isn’t true. So some governments have gotten used to issuing “non-denial denials” and flimsy counter-arguments, because that’s all it takes and it’s so effortless. If a well-researched paper by a prestigious scientific body concludes that human activity is seriously increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, culprit governments will say “the evidence is incomplete” and they will find someone, somewhere, with some sort of credentials, who will dismiss a great number of studies with a wave of the hand and give them the sound-bite they want.
When someone responds to evidence with “a wave of the hand” or a bland dismissal like “It’s just nonsense,” they’re usually revealing they can’t say anything more specific because they’re whupped. But the government’s supporters will be reassured. For them, one sound bite cancels the other, and there really is no difference between a widely-confirmed fact and a speculation, between fifty studies and one.
To take a non-political example of walking extra miles for authorities, when people first began to reveal they had been sexually assaulted as children by priests and ministers, bishops often issued statements saying they had thoroughly investigated the charge and found it had no merit. That was good enough for the authoritarian followers. If the evidence nevertheless grew against Father X, church authorities asked the public, “Whom are you going to believe, this obviously disturbed person who claims to have been assaulted, or the Church?” That too was an easy one for the high RWAs.
If it eventually became known that the bishops’ own inquiries had discovered that Father X was indeed a pedophile, but the bishops still denied he was and sometimes even quietly transferred Father X to another parish, where he sexually assaulted still more children, do you think the high RWAs learned anything from this? How many “disconnects” do you think they have at hand to avoid realizing they allowed themselves to be deceived?
I fear you will wait a long time before authoritarian followers wise up to their chosen leaders, and to themselves—and their leaders know it. When the Watergate revelations were sinking his ratings in the polls, Richard Nixon pointed out to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldemann, “I think there’s still a hell of a lot of people out there…[who] want to believe. That’s the point, isn’t it?” “Why sure,” Haldemann replied. “Want to and do.” (Conversation of April 25, 1973 recorded on the “Watergate tapes,” reported by the New York Times on November 22, 1974, p. 20.)
Chapter 4.
Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism [1]
Care to try your hand at another scale? Answer the one below, responding to each item with anything from a -4 to a +4.
____ 1. God has given humanity a complete, unfailing guide to happiness and salvation, which must be totally followed.