What psychological characteristics do “leftists” like Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Ted Kennedy have in common: An enthusiasm for “change”? A commitment to coercive methods of conflict resolution? Narcissism? A propensity for mass murder?
Can you imagine a respectable association printing such a study? Can you imagine a group of academics juxtaposing the senior senator from Massachusetts and Mao? Can you imagine the scorn such a study would receive from America’s intellectual establishment? Would not the professors who posited such a linkage be professionally ruined?
Yet a quartet of political prima donnas from Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Maryland had the audacity to link together in one motivational analysis four so-called “conservatives”--Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. I doubt that the absurdity of this “meta-study,” published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin, will hurt its authors’ professional reputations.
According to these “psycho-analysts,” a National Socialist who concentrated absolute authority in his own hands and proclaimed contempt for democratic rights fits under the same motivational headings as two Republican Presidents who embrace entirely democratic means of governance. A ruthless dictator who sanctioned mass murder and repudiated the “weak” and “sickly” religion of Christ is the mental bedfellow of a politician who declares that Jesus is his favorite philosopher. A Fuhrer with a fatal attraction for Aryan supermen should be viewed as the mental twin of leaders who embrace, with moderate public fervor, the ethical precepts of the Christian tradition. An egotistical romantic who started out as a Marxist but saw ultra-nationalism as a more effective means to transform Italy into a glorious empire is accounted a soul mate of gentlemen whose ideals incline toward the limited-government philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. An avid advocate of killing the mentally disabled is presumed to put out similar brainwave patterns as politicians who are anxious to protect the sanctity of life.
That these four professors are morons when it comes to intellectual history should go without saying. Unfortunately, thanks to academia’s ideological insularity, such an observation doesn’t go without saying. Political discourse on campus has, to a great extent, been reduced to a “comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink.” That’s the phrase employed by the confrontational (but not conservative) Camille Paglia to characterize most Women’s Studies programs. But it also applies to “liberal” campuses that clearly exhibit by frequent suppression of conservative ideas the “need for cognitive closure” and “uncertainty avoidance” that are said in this study to be tell-tell traits of conservative cogitation.
What else but an environment of mindless conformity can explain the unscholarly employment of the word “conservative” in this almost-worthless study? The idea that Hitler or Mussolini “resisted change” (a primary characteristic of conservatism) is laughable. Both men saw themselves as radical agents of social transformation. In this and many other respects Hitler and Mussolini are closer to “leftists” like Lenin and Mao than to conservative Republicans. All four dictators embraced totalitarian visions of the future. Moreover, Hitler’s “Third Reich”, founded on Nietzschean principles, was to be a radical departure from its historical predecessors--the Holy Roman Empire and Bismarck’s Prussian state. Finally, complexity and the avoidance of narrow ideological straitjackets are hallmarks of the philosophy of Edmund Burke, the man most frequently recognized as the father of modern conservatism. .
It appears that our not-so-complex professors simply put a “conservative” label on leaders who are typically placed on the “right” side of the political spectrum. These rightists, however, have little in common--other than being recipients of our “non- judgmental” researchers’ minimally-disguised hostility. In actuality the term “right” is so elastic in application that it conveys no specific information about the political or psychological disposition of the persons so characterized. Yet our four “scholars” were content to employ this omnibus label to forge a presumed link between individuals that they shoehorn into the same “conservative” category.
Among the motivational factors identified as typically “conservative” in this study were “fear and aggression,” “dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity,” “uncertainty avoidance,” “need for cognitive closure,” and “terror management.” The researchers perused fifty years of research on the psychology of conservatives in order to produce these preordained conclusions. It isn’t difficult to guess why “the fair-minded four” included no positive categories in their list of psychic dispositions--or why they didn’t bother to deal seriously with the rabid dogmatism that characterizes much (perhaps most) political rhetoric emanating from the left. My guess involves phrases like “intolerance of ambiguity”, “uncertainty avoidance”, and “cognitive closure.”
Our “open-mined” psycho-sociologists would have produced a more balanced and complex analysis had they compared the venomous words of the leftist Lenin with those of Ronald Reagan. Here’s a famous paragraph drafted by the man first known as Vladimir Ulyanov: “Propaganda or agitation or participation in an organization or cooperation with organizations having the effect...of helping in the slightest way that part of the international bourgeoisie which does not recognize the equal rights of the Communist system coming to take the place of capitalism...is punishable by death or imprisonment.” (In Paul Johnson’s, Modern Times) Whether this statement falls under the banner of “aggression”, “terror management”, “uncertainty avoidance”, or “intolerance” is hard to say, but I am confident that no such paragraph appears in the papers of President Reagan. Additional evidence incongruent with the conclusions of this study would emerge from a personality profile contrasting the inflexible and friendless founder of the Soviet Union with the affable “Gipper.”
Instead, “the feckless four” would have us believe that the millions of Russians and Chinese who were murdered in the name of a socialist utopia were unfortunate victims of a statistical anomaly. Most leftists, they assume, are gentle and tolerant creatures--just like themselves. Unfortunately, these characteristics aren’t typical of the psychological profile I’ve observed over the last three decades. Indeed, the committed leftists I know seem compulsively inclined to vilify opponents as “sexists, racists, fascists, and homophobes” if any of the ideas their political enemies disseminate create for them the slightest degree of cognitive dissonance.
Oppose quotas and they call you a racist. Support a young baby’s right-to-life and you’ll hear about abortion-clinic bombings by the “Religious Right”. Embrace the Judeo- Christian view of marriage and feel the hatred directed at you and your “homophobic” religion. Advocate strict construction of the Constitution and prepare to be “Borked”. Be a black, conservative jurist and brace yourself for a “high-tech lynching”.
A couple of years ago the leftist journalist Julianne Malveaux publicly expressed her wish on a PBS talk show that Justice Clarence Thomas should eat a lot of fatty foods and die! Are we to believe that she and her similarly-minded colleagues at People for the American Way are also statistical anomalies? Are we to believe that Black Panthers are less aggressive than Young Republicans--or that Henry Hyde is more intolerant than Alec Baldwin or New Jersey’s former poet-laureate, the Jew-hating Amiri Baraka?
Robert Bellah, a prominent sociologist, once described his own field as “an intrinsically debunking discipline that should be congenial to nihilists, cynics, and other fit subjects for police surveillance.” He realized that much, if not most of what passes for “social science”, amounts to a garbage-in, garbage-out manipulation of facts. Such is the case with this recent work of political pop-psychology. By employing a tendentious selection process, the professors lumped all their opponents under a single rubric and then classified them with traits they find objectionable. The professors made a pretense of objectivity by tossing a few concessions toward “conservatives.” Sometimes it is helpful, they said, for thought processes to be unnuanced--like in the midst of an enemy attack. But this posturing amounts to a scholarly fig-leaf. Overwhelmingly the study assumes the entrenched dogma of liberal academics: People who believe in absolute moral values and oppose the left’s political agenda are simpleminded dimwits who tend to harass blameless foreigners. That’s the clear subtext.
Anyone who wants to observe “the leftist mind” in action should read David Horowitz’s autobiographical book, Radical Son. Horowitz’s portrait of his early years shows how political dogma became for him a surrogate religion whose creedal affirm- ations were nearly impervious to revision. Only the murder of a female friend by his Black Panther comrades succeeded in shattering the rigid world-view that was the all-pervasive organizing principle of his life.
Few committed leftists exhibit the psychic flexibility that is needed to assess fairly the evidence that runs counter to group dogma. They largely ignore, just as this study does, examples of Leninist and Stalinist terror--preferring to focus all eyes on Hitler’s “right-wing” atrocities. Indeed, in this study Stalin’s mass murders are rational- ized as “conservative” regime-protecting acts. Such ad hoc manipulation mirrors the way a leftist teacher I know dealt with the Soviet Union after the Berlin Wall was dismantled and the evil empire’s enormous crimes became, at least for her, undeniable. She simply reclassified Communism as a “rightist” philosophy.
Historically, the pact between Stalin and Hitler that resulted in the brutal dismemberment of Poland wasn’t enough to undermine the blind faith of true believers in a godless Soviet paradise where poetry, fishing, and a few voluntary hours at the factory would be typical of an unhurried day. Examples of such secular faith permeate Whittaker Chambers’ classic work, Witness. Time and again the talented writer and former Communist spy describes bright individuals who should exhibit (by the lights of our four professors) flexible, complex, and nondogmatic psychic constitutions. Instead, they repeatedly rationalize and repress the murderous facts that stare them straight in the face.
Such is the case in this pitiful study. Far from providing convincing evidence concerning the psychological characteristics of “conservatives,” the study actually provides an example of the way inflexible preconceptions function to shape a researcher’s analysis--and thus to predetermine the outcome. Put simply, one can’t get answers in terms other than those contained in the questions posed: Have you stopped beating your wife? What was the character of the formless void out of which all things evolved? How many grams do you weigh? Just how intolerant and aggressive are “conservatives”? How completely are you projecting your own psychological motivations upon your political opponents? The political paradigm one brings to the data, which includes one’s unexamined political prejudices, limits and shapes the data’s organization.
Here’s an amusing question for a possible follow-up project: How many leftist professors does it take to screw up a study on politics and psychological motivation?
The answer is “four”.
Richard Kirk Poway, CA. 92064
Good first post :-)
They were all picked in school and have dedicated their lives to find a way to get even with the cool kids. AKA "I'll show you all!" Disorder.
...a very cogent analysis of the left. Welcome to FreeRepublic. Bookmarked and BTTT.