Ideas - The making of an ‘authoritarian personality’

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

A groundbreaking study conducted in the wake of the Second World War by a group of scholars rocked the academic world when it was published in 1950 — but fell out of favour. Now a new generation of scholars is reviving the lessons of The Authoritarian Personality to understand who is drawn in by fascist propaganda.

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. We have one power in Germany, says Adolf Hitler. Now we must win the German people. Authoritarian leaders throughout history have tried to capture the hearts and minds of their people, especially when they want them to go to war, as Mussolini did in June 1940. Just listen to the crowd responding. Big cheering! Cheers! Cheers! What's behind the cheering?

Why exactly do authoritarian leaders appeal to people? Cheers! Cheers! Cheers! Cheers! Cheers! After the Second World War, a group of scholars, two of whom had escaped anti-Semitic persecution in Europe, wanted to understand why so many people were so drawn to dictatorships. Nobody who didn't live under a fascist dictatorship can imagine the whole system and the atmosphere of terror. Theodore Adorno had fled Nazi Germany before the war

and was intimate with life under authoritarian rule. He was the lead author of the book this group of scholars published in 1950, called The Authoritarian Personality. I think the big lessons of the authoritarian personality lie in the complexity with which Adorno and his co-authors handle the dark and scary side of human beings. One of the sobering lessons of this study, and indeed one of the sobering lessons of recent history, lessons of this study and indeed one of the sobering lessons of recent history is that democracy is an extraordinarily fragile political form. In this episode, Ideas producer Kristen Nelson explores the troubling relevance that the

authoritarian personality has even now. Take the first to Los Angeles, seen from one of its many hills. Southern California, the mid-1940s. Los Angeles turns out in force to scream a welcome to two of the war's outstanding heroes. And everywhere we see Stately Washington town. This is the unlikely birthplace

of the authoritarian personality. The actors, directors, composers, writers, producers... Theodore Adorno was living in Los Angeles County, not far from his colleague and fellow philosopher, Max Horkheimer. They were part of a community of European emigres in and around the toning neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades. the Tony neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades. You know their social life was incredible because there was what was called Weimar on the Pacific which was a sort of colony of German, mostly Jewish intellectuals but not entirely Jewish, who had fled the Nazis. You know there were people like Berchtolt Brecht, he was there, Thomas Mann was there, he was

writing during the war and after the war he was there. Thomas Mann was there, he was writing during the war and after the war he was writing. Stuart Jeffreys is a journalist and the author of The Grand Hotel Abyss, the lives of the Frankfurt School. Adorno was a founding member of that school of social theory and critical philosophy. I think now you can actually do Frankfurt School tours

of LA, you can, you know, there are people who take you on walking tours or driving tours around the parts of LA where Adorno lived, where Schoenberg lived, and where there were lots of people working who were German in the film industry and people like Fritz Lang, lots of composers who were German-Jewish were working there. So there's a huge exile community. During this period, Adorno and Horkheimer were writing dialectic of enlightenment, critiquing what they called the culture industry. And yet they also attended swanky Hollywood pool parties, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Charlie Chaplin. But the depravities that drove them from Germany were still top of mind. The question as to whether something like fascism could persist or reemerge was something

that concerned them deeply. Peter E. Gordon teaches modern European social theory at Harvard University. And that deeply felt concern guided this formidable academic study. Gordon wrote the introduction to a new edition of the authoritarian personality that was published in 2019 just ahead of the study's 70th anniversary. It's of great significance in terms of the history of the social sciences, but also in terms of its longevity for thinking about authoritarianism. Adorno left Frankfurt in 1934,

when Jews were no longer allowed to teach at universities. The question that guided the study was really the question, can it happen here? And I think what needs to keep in mind that Adorno and Brunswick in particular felt this as an existential threat. This was no idle or purely academic inquiry. It was also an inquiry into conditions that had affected them personally. Adorno's own father had been actually brutalized, but I think Gestapo lost the use of one of his eyes from that. Please sit back, I'd just like to move this table.

No, you can sit back, that's fine. There are very few English recordings of Adorno. I hope my English isn't too bad. I'm a little out of habit to talk English now. This is one of them, courtesy of the Theodore W. Adorno archive in Frankfurt. It is very difficult to make a revolution without revolutionary people. And they had no revolutionary people behind them. This interview was recorded for Deutsche Welle on March 15, 1966, part of a documentary called

Men Against Hitler. Nobody who didn't live under a fascist dictatorship or under any kind of totalitarian dictatorship, can imagine to what extent the whole system and the atmosphere of terror that permeates every sphere of life prevents from any effective action. The research for this study happened right at the end of World War II. The data they collected was gathered in 1945 and 1946, which is to say right after fascism's defeat, at a time when the political trajectory of Europe and indeed America was rather uncertain, it

was directed by four individuals, Teodor Adorno, Elsa Frankel Brunsvik, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevit Sanford. And so these four individuals brought to their study a very deep concern about the future of democracy in Europe and also in America. Elsa Frankel Brunswick, a psychologist who fled Austria in 1938, psychology professor R. Nevit Sanford, an American trained at Harvard who would later become a target during the McCarthy era, and Daniel J. Levinson, who was researching the psychology of ethnocentrism.

Each scholar brought something critical to the study. It represents a very interesting confluence of European and American traditions, and a very interesting attempt to combine psychoanalysis with sociology. But Gordon warns that the authoritarian personality is often misunderstood. It's not a study of what causes fascism. And I think the most frequently repeated misunderstanding of this study is that it's in an account of

the psychogenesis of fascism, the origins of fascism in the human personality. It's not. It's a study of what they call the potentially fascist individual, by which they mean they want to figure out what is it that makes someone susceptible to fascist propaganda. To do that, the four scholars surveyed 2,000 people living in Southern California in 1945 and 1946. It doesn't treat fascism as some kind of historical anomaly. Kathy Kylo is an associate professor

at OCAD University in Toronto. In 2011, she co-founded the Association for Adorno Studies. It starts from the assumption that there were seeds of fascism already present and that social conditions, economic conditions just sort of hit the right spot for those seeds to grow. So they don't want to look at the causes of fascism. They want to figure out how do otherwise fairly normal individuals get drawn in to radical right authoritarian movements. The goal of the questionnaire was to determine where the participants fell

along four different scales. There's the anti-Semitism scale, the ethnocentrism scale or E-scale, there's the political economic conservatism scale, PEC, and then fourth, there's the famous F scale. F for fascism. It's a series of questions from which you can determine whether you are a fascist. And I'm sure your listeners would really love

to find that out about themselves. You know, you can do it online now, a little test, just to see if you've got the personality of a fascist or, by extension, somebody who would bow to an authoritarian, a charismatic authoritarian leader. This is form 78 from the F scale. You've got to come up with how much you agree or disagree. They all take the form of statements. I'll just read a couple of them just to give you a sense.

I mean, the first one is, if you agree with the following, obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn. The businessman and the manufacturer are much more important to society than the artist and the professor. An insult to our honor should always be punished. Most people don't realise how much our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places. Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way. What this country needs most, more than laws and political programmes, is a few courageous,

tireless, devoted leaders in whom the people can put their faith. Oh, here's a good one. Sex crimes such as rape and attacks on children deserve more than mere imprisonment. Such criminals ought to be publicly whipped or worse. I keep thinking about these QAnon conspiracies that circulate in the United States when I think about that one as well. He is indeed contemptible, who does not feel an undying love, gratitude, and respect for his parents. Any red-blooded American will fight to defend his property. What the youth needs most is strict discipline, rugged determination, and the will to work and

fight for family and country. How is it that these questions were helping to gauge susceptibility to fascist messaging? Okay, thank you. That's a great question. And here we come to the psychoanalytic lens that guides the whole study, which is that they really did think that styles of parenting, attitudes towards authority, attitudes toward conventionality and culture, all of these things can help us get at a potentially fascist personality. Each of the questions was designed to help the researchers determine how much the subjects of the study were influenced by a kind of deep psychological bias towards a world that is unchangeable. The idea that we need a kind of rigid order to keep animalistic instincts under control.

So in other words, you know, human beings are naturally violent and a good ordered society will keep that in check. The F scale questions were designed to test for nine variables. Conventionalism, which means rigid conformity to social norms. Submissiveness. Tending to have an uncritical and idealizing attitude toward the in-group and its authority. Aggression. There's another one here which is absolutely fascinating to me. Anti-introspection, which is the opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, and the tender-minded.

Tough-mindedness. A penchant for identifying with strong figures of authority who dominate the weak. Superstition and stereotypy, the belief in mystical determinants of the individual's face. Destructiveness, cynicism, projectivity. The tendency to see the world as fearsome and dangerous, and then, finally, an exaggerated and moralizing concerns with other people's sexual activity. Based on these nine variables, the 2,000 people in this study were ranked along the F scale. The scholars wanted to know if there was a relationship between their F scale scores and how they tested for things like antisemitism, ethnocentrism, and conservativism.

This in a nutshell was the quantitative part of the study. The qualitative part of the study involved in-depth interviews with a subset of the participants. Sustained personal discussion with them, probing them about their personal feelings, about childhood, how their parents treated them, and what they think about personal

life, the arts, culture, ways of living. The questions were informed by Freudian psychoanalysis and the belief that relationships between children, parents, and authority figures were key to shaping a person's personality. The way Freud saw it, the primitive instinctual id part of the mind with all of its sexual and aggressive drives was kept in check by the super ego, the moral compass of the mind, and all of this was mediated by the ego. The personality requires identification with an authoritarian figure. And essentially what it requires is for the ego to form in relation

to that authority to become an authority of its own to develop a kind of sense of its own autonomy. And in the society in which we live, that sense of autonomy and authority is denied us. And so that's sort of where the study is going here is the idea that we need to recognize that this reliance upon authority, it goes deep, it goes very, very deep. In a detailed interview with the high-scoring subject M11, we read the following about his father.

He said, well, in ways he isn't even tempered, he's as stubborn as an ox. He'd rather start a fight or an argument than do something he doesn't want to. And he can fly off the handle. I've gone for days without talking to him. Now, compare that to M16, for example, when he's asked, what was your father like? He responds, he was a very kind man, gentle, was always very good to us. And then M50, for example, says about his father, he champions my causes, told the other children

that I had more sense in my little finger than all the other children put together. He was always in my corner. And that contrast between M11 there and the other characters, M16 and M50, typifies what goes on in this study. The authoritarian personality does ask us to kind of consider people's whole forming as a multi-dimensional personality. My name is Molly Werthen. I'm an associate professor in the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I think the other powerful dimension

of the authoritarian personality is the author's emphasis on the appeal of power and the way in which some human beings are kind of set up by features of their life situation to feel a deep insecurity and a deep compulsion to identify with a strong man. Werthen is particularly intrigued by the character sketches in the authoritarian personality. In one chapter of the book, two men with the pseudonyms Larry and Mac are archetypes of people on opposite ends of the F scale. Larry is a typical low-scoring individual, Mac, high-scoring.

And they're both kind of college-age white men with vaguely similar Protestant leanings, and indeed they actually vote the same way. And I was struck in rereading chapter two in the author's reflections on the young man they call ethnocentric, the more kind of authoritarian subject of the two young men. And the authors are speculating on why it is that this young man whom they've given the pseudonym Mac could be so admiring of Joseph Stalin. I mean, how is it that

this young man who seems so opposed to other communities, other national communities, and so nationalistic in his attitude toward American identity, why does he like Stalin? And so they write, this apparent discrepancy may possibly be explained in terms of our subject's attitude toward power. His admiration for power is great enough so that he can accept and momentarily ally himself with a distant outgroup when that group is not seen as a direct threat to himself. When I read that I just did a double take because it so echoes for me Donald Trump's clear admiration for Putin. You know, I was with Putin a lot.

I spent a lot of time with him. I got along with him. I got along with President Xi. So Putin is now saying it's independent, a large section of Ukraine. I said, how smart is that? And he's going to go in and be a peacekeeper. In one infamous photograph from a 2018 Trump rally, two older white men are wearing t-shirts that read, I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat. So just a couple of pages later, continuing this analysis of this ethnocentric authoritarian

Mac, the authors emphasize that the power and lust for power is really essential. So they write, as is typical of people with persecution fantasies, Mac believes that he, his group, is essentially strong, but is at the same time in a weak position. He can solve this dilemma only by attributing evil, dishonesty, unfairness, and so on, and undeserved power to his opponent. And that passage also really struck me as insightful. When I think about some of the communities in the American context that I study who are deeply worried about, I think, their loss of cultural authority in the United States and in the West more broadly, I'm thinking particularly of conservative white evangelicals, and that analysis of the persecution fantasy in which your group is strong and yet under threat at the same time, it rings very true.

So what I think is very interesting is that this entire study asks us to say, look, we're dealing with mass political phenomena here, yes, but we're dealing with human conduct and human beings are extraordinarily complex and very deep and they bring to their politics a host of emotional concerns and needs and we're not going to understand something like fascism if we don't understand those needs and what needs are being gratified. When the study was published in 1950, a book of nearly 1,000 pages, it rocked the academic world. In 1954, a sociologist named Nathan Glazer wrote, no volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried out in the universities today. But that impact would not last.

From the period from about 1945 to 1975 at least, in North America, it seemed like fascism was a purely historical phenomenon. So this book became one of merely historical interest because the F scale was plotting something that people thought belonged purely to the past. I don't know, sort of fell out of favor in the Frankfurt School as well, fell out of fashion. The general sense at the time was that it was too dark and just out of step with the times. I learned that it was this overly Freudian, you know, psychoanalytical pathologizing study that didn't take conservatives seriously as humans with ideas that deserve study. And therefore, it was not something that I should bother reading.

And this strange conceit that fascism belongs purely to the past, that it's not with us, is something that seemed quite natural, given a period of liberal optimism and economic flourishing that we saw in North America after World War II. We didn't think it was irrelevant and I think that our interest in this work and the fact that we thought it was more relevant than others may have thought it was has unfortunately been vindicated by recent events and I wish it weren't so. been vindicated by recent events, and I wish it weren't so. We see so many variations of right-wing populism, of authoritarianism, of neo-fascism around the globe

that a book like this has gained, unfortunately, new relevance. Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca. You can also find ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you find your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Why is Gen Z so bad at adulting? What is using AI to write doing to our critical thinking skills and how much protein do you really need? We look at these kinds of big and small questions on The Current, our award-winning podcast that brings you stories and conversations to expand your worldview. My name is Matt Galloway and like you, I'm trying to wrap my head around these times that we are in. We look for solutions to wicked

problems. We listen to each other and we try to find delight in the everyday that exists in our world. You can find The Current wherever you get your podcasts, including on YouTube. We'll talk to you soon. The American dream is dead. I will bring it back. It may be possible to pinpoint the exact moment scholars began to reconsider the authoritarian personality. We will make America great again. June 16th, 2015. Great to be at Trump Tower. It's great to be in a wonderful city, New York. Reality TV star and real estate developer Donald Trump strode onto the political scene on a golden

escalator with a Neil Young song on the speakers and behind that clad in white Melania Trump down he floats. I am officially running for President of the United States. In recent years far-right movements and leaders have gained momentum in America, Germany, Brazil, Hungary, France and Canada. I got brothers and sisters coming from coast to coast, coming from the States. There's going to be a lot of drugs. With some calling for Canada's version of the January 6th insurrection.

I advocate civil war. We've got guns, we'll stand up and we'll bring them out. The authors of the authoritarian personality wouldn't be surprised by the emergence of these forces in democratic countries. They believe the seeds of authoritarianism were present in every population. Were you up at the Capitol? Yeah, we was there. Yeah?

Yeah. Didn't go in, didn't do none of that stuff. I don't think anybody should have went inside. But when you're worked up in that moment, it just happens. Are you worried that we could see more violence? Yeah. I honestly believe it's coming. Many scholars believe that the time to re-examine the lessons of that post-war study is now.

This documentary by producer Kristen Nelson is called The Authoritarian Personality. I watched Trump come down and then I listened to the speech and I said, that was an authoritarian speech. I have never heard anything like that in America. Matthew McWilliams had been studying authoritarianism as part of his PhD research for about a year and a half when Trump announced his candidacy. And listening to Trump said, you know, I have to put in a poll in the field. My theory is, you know, start with a hypothesis, is that Trump is activating authoritarians in his party. And the question is, is this true or not?

And one way to figure that out is to do a survey. He asked nearly 900 Republican primary voters, which candidate do you support, along with a series of other questions having nothing to do with politics to determine their predilection for authoritarian messages. I remember I was in Duluth, Minnesota doing focus groups and I got the data set back right after the focus groups, which ended around 10 o'clock. And I stayed up most of the night crunching the data. The results were stark.

And I was dumbstruck. Because you usually have a hypothesis, it doesn't work out. You go back, you try again. But this one, no matter what I put in the model, it was coming out strongly. The poll results indicated clearly that Republicans who preferred Trump scored much higher on

the scale for authoritarianism. The people on that scale who are more authoritarian were much more likely to vote for Donald Trump even when you put in education and other big big variables that should soak up all of the predictability of the variable. And it didn't for any other candidate. Ted Cruz, nope. Marco Rubio, nope. It was Donald Trump. He wrote about the poll results in an op-ed for Politico.

The headline read, The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You're a Trump Supporter. Because authoritarianism was considered this wild, weird trait. No, it was fundamental to what he was doing. The article provoked a backlash and McWilliams received threats.

It sort of fits with that American exceptionalism that somehow we came across in our little boats and during that long voyage, we were washed of all our authoritarianism. And the fact is, no, that didn't happen. The problem is that the institutions and the fact is no that didn't happen. The problem is that the institutions and the politics aren't responding to the threat because they still think it can't happen here. The poll and article that had struck such a nerve were grounded theoretically in the ideas of the

authoritarian personality which by then had fallen out of fashion. You know, I think the authoritarian personality is fascinating because it's really at the beginnings of social science using data to try to capture something going on in society and understand it. You know, it's flawed in so many different ways, but that's easy to say now. When they were doing it, it's flawed in so many different ways, but that's easy to say now. When they were doing it, it was revolutionary.

There were some scholars who kept the flame alive during the decades when the study of authoritarianism wasn't in vogue. One of them was at the University of Manitoba, psychology professor Bob Altmeier. Forty years ago, he was coming up with his own questionnaires to gauge authoritarianism and refining the theory. He's retired now, in his 80s and still writing about the subject, but wasn't available for an interview. A shout out to Altmeyer.

His work over decades of study on this in an academic environment where he was just dissed is pretty amazing. That's why we need academic freedom. As is often the case when you pick up something that has been overly simplified and reduced to, you know, a few bullet points and slogans, it turns out that it was a lot more complicated than I realized, and I found that it held up pretty well. I found that it was full of compelling insights about humans generally. A few years ago, Molly Worthen read the authoritarian personality for herself.

I found that it really spoke to our own political moment in the early 21st century. I think scholars in a range of disciplines are running up against the limits of our old tool kit. And they're looking for other tools. They're looking for something that explains the depth and the kind of intractability of political disagreement in our current time. And I've been struck how in recent years,

one social scientific study after another seems to come out confirming our reluctance to accept data that does not correspond with pre-existing precept positions and our confirmation bias and how humans have just an incredible inbuilt resistance to facts. And this is not a left or right thing, although one can make arguments in particular political moments. It's kind of exacerbated in some communities more than others. This seems to be a feature of human nature. And to me, it's a sign that the social scientists and the fancy polls are merely confirming what

the best theologians and philosophers have been telling us for millennia, and that is that humans are depraved, humans are bent. We're not perfectly rational floating brains, none of us. voting brains, none of us. We have to take very seriously that people in general are more motivated by their emotions and by social pressures, by things that they themselves only have limited awareness of, than most of us want to believe. I think the era of rationality is over. Jonathan Wyler is a professor of global studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And along with my co-author, Mark Heatherington,

I've written two books about the relationship between political psychology and polarization in the United States, the most recent of which is Prius or Pickup, how the answers to four simple questions explain America's great divide. The four simple questions in the title of Weiler's book are a simplified version of the F scale questions in the authoritarian personality. There's a preface that always says to people, people have different ideas about the ways

that children should be raised. We're gonna give you four pairs of attributes and you tell us which of each attribute you think is more important for kids to have. Is it more important for kids to be respectful of elders, well-mannered, obedient, and well-behaved? Or to be independent, curious, self-reliant, and considerate? The answers independence, curiosity, self-reliance, and being considerate. We and others identify as the non-authoritarian responses.

And in our most recent book, we referred to those people as fluid. And those, the second answer is respect for elders, good manners, obedience, well-behaved. People describe as the authoritarian responses and we described as fixed. Of course most parents value all these traits in children. You know when our daughter was young we wanted her of course to be curious but when we took her out to eat we did not want her to be a disgusting slob. We wanted her to display good manners so both attributes are relevant. What's interesting is what happens when you force people to make a choice to prioritize. And when people do prioritize, when they are forced to make

a choice, the choices they make have an incredibly powerful relationship to their views about gay marriage, about race, about gender in society, about politics more broadly. And that's what makes these questions so powerful. Recall the parenting questions in the authoritarian personality F scale questionnaire, invented over seven decades ago by Adorno and his co-authors. Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn. He is, indeed, contemptible, who does not feel an undying love, gratitude, and respect

for his parents. What the youth needs most is strict discipline, rugged determination, and the will to work and fight for family and country. The thing about the questions I use and lots of other people use now, they have nothing to do with politics or political behavior or what I think about George Bush or Donald Trump. They have nothing. They're child rearing questions.

So they're divorced from the behavior we're trying to describe. And if they are divorced from the behavior we're trying to describe and if they are predictive of that behavior, they're really powerful because it isn't like I asked, you know, do you think we need a strong leader to ignore the Constitution and Parliament? Yes, I do. Oh, you might be an authoritarian, but we know it's out there. You know, we can observe it. These questions are our filter for observing it.

They aren't perfect, but they're really good at what they're doing. Scholars like Jonathan Wyler and Matthew McWilliams have found that about 25% of the American population are on the non-authoritarian end of the spectrum. About 35% of people are somewhere in between, and on the authoritarian end of the spectrum. About 35% of people are somewhere in between and on the authoritarian end of the scale 30 to 35%. Everywhere you go you find at least so far you find authoritarians. In 2017 Matthew McWilliams

was doing focus groups in Berlin just before an election. We wanted to talk to authoritarians because people who I was doing the focus groups for were pretty convinced that there were no authoritarians in Germany or Berlin for sure. And my data, my polling said yes there were. Using the four questions to gauge authoritarian rankings, they pulled together a series of focus groups. There are a lot of people watching. They thought I was just making it all up. They thought this was ridiculous. In fact, I was accused of being racist, ethnocentric, a whole bunch of other things. I said, we just asked four questions, let's see. So the first group is ten women, they're sitting around the table.

And the first question is, you know, what's your name? What do you like to do? Do you have any kids? First woman goes out, gets her name, says she has some kids. Here's what she likes to do, could be hiking. Next woman, basically the same thing. The third one comes out, my name is X. And here's what I'd like to do and here's how I feel about Germany right now. All these dirty Muslims are destroying our country. Everyone in the room, except for our moderator, started shaking their heads yes. And at that point the Band-Aid was ripped off and the bile started to flow. We had found the authoritarians and you could not believe what the women were saying, let alone the men. Oh my God, the men were worse. It got so bad that our simultaneous

translator took off her headphones and said, I can't, I can't translate this any longer. I can't. She was in tears. It doesn't take deep, intense knowledge of politics for people to nevertheless feel strongly about politics, or at least identify with a group of people who does feel strongly about politics. Some people simply see the world as a more threatening place than others. Weiler points to a survey question that was asked in the U.S. before the 2016 presidential election. Which view of the world comes closer to your own? And one choice was the world is a big beautiful place full of interesting people

and it's really most important to go out and explore and embrace that. And the other one was the world is full of dangerous people and it's most important to essentially, you know, hunker down and protect yourself and your own. 80% of those voting for Hillary Clinton preferred the big beautiful world answer. Donald Trump voters were the reverse. 80% saw the world as a dangerous place. 80% saw the world as a dangerous place. This emotional partisan divide is a new thing, according to Weiler, and Americans' answers to these four simple parenting questions have evolved a great deal over the last three decades. When these questions were first being asked in 1992, there was a pretty even split among

Democrats between those who answered these questions in an authoritarian direction and there was a pretty even split among Democrats between those who answered these questions in an authoritarian direction and those who answered them in a non-authoritarian direction and the same for Republicans. And by 2020, there were overwhelming differences that people who identified as Democrat were far more likely to answer these parenting questions

in a non-authoritarian way and people who identified as Republican We're far more likely to answer these questions in an authoritarian way. So they are both Politics used to be more about the role of the state and the size of government now. It's about feelings this deeper well of emotions that everybody has. An individual's position on a range of political questions, everything from taxing the rich to levels of immigration, has become much more about the gut and the heart than the head.

And then on a social level what's happening is that when politics become so charged in the way they are, for example, in the United States now, everybody, including a lot of those people in the middle who feel more ambivalent and agree with one side about one thing and the other side about the other thing, on some level for most of them, they feel like, you know what, I have to take a side. Tonight, the protest arrives on Parliament Hill.

This is for Canada. This is for our kids. This is for freedom. I'm just here to support our truckers. They need to listen to the small fringe minority of us. I just want basically the people to take charge of the country again. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! We're seeing similar stuff going on in Canada, but in Canada what we're seeing is the centre is hollowed and what we're seeing is increasingly a more fragmented political landscape

where if you're a right-wing authoritarian, here's your home. Frank Graves is a pollster in Ottawa, the president and founder of EECOS Research Associates. You know I don't only be smug and go I told you so, but when we argued that this was a critical and perhaps the most important new force shaping Canadian political landscape, a lot of people just said no that's not right. Graves is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology at Carleton University. So it's a very complex and very important societal feature that I look at in Canada

is really, really poorly understood. He's been doing polls asking the four parenting questions and says they're an incredibly useful tool. When we use this little index, it asks things about child rearing. We found that it incredibly nailed the conservative vote. I couldn't have found a better predictor. It didn't used to be the case that conservatives exhibited dramatically different attitudes to science, to outgroups. There were differences. Conservative voters in, say, 2012, about 40% said there's too many visible minorities

coming to the country. Well, liberals at that time were 30%. So yeah, there was a highly significant difference. But at the conclusion of the 2019 election, that had moved to 70% in the conservatives and 10% in the liberals. Many people, both inside and outside political circles, don't believe that a Trump-like figure could ever win a federal election in Canada. But Frank Graves says that an authoritarian leader could find a

route to power. And I think the sense in Canada, which is not unique to Canada, is the typical establishment response to the theory that this is happening, authoritarian populism, is somewhere between a continuum of sneering and denial. We are living in a volatile political environment. You think about Hillary Clinton's dismissal of these types of people. You could put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. That actually isn't particularly helpful.

Frank Graves attributes this growing political force to the collapse of the middle class and a growing sense of economic despair. They don't see that our jobs were affected back home. Hell, I'm 33, I live at home with my parents. That is just a susceptible to the society where I make $100,000 a year and can't fucking afford my own place.

A house five years ago would go for a nice house, half a million dollars. Now that same house is going for 200,000 over asking. There's too many people taking too many cuts off top. How many times did they vote for their races in parliament? Twice during the pandemic. It's them versus us. I believe it's very much linked to these factors. It's also my basic sense of my status and identity as the breadwinner. All righty, what's your name? Jared. And so what brought you down here today?

In February 2022, I was covering the Ottawa occupation for CBC Radio. How would you describe your politics? I put the four questions to protesters I met there. Do you prefer kids who are independent or respectful of their elders? Independent. I think respectful of elders. What about self-reliant or obedient? Self-reliant. Definitely self-reliant. Curious or good mannered? Curious.

Curious. Considerate or well-behaved? Considerate. Considerate. When you're too well-behaved, you're too much of a follower. Of course this is just a small sample and the more hardcore members of the convoy, people calling for an overthrow of the government, weren't really up for doing interviews. But as you can hear, the protesters don't all fit neatly into the theory. Frank Graves has an explanation for that. We've actually found that just as the virus has been mutating, it seems that under a variety of pressures, this ordered populist outlook is also mutating.

So normally, under the traditional model, the people that question authority were the open. The people who emphasize obedience or lack of skepticism were the more authoritarian or ordered. We found recently that that particular element of the model did not fit the People's Party. In fact, they say, I'm questioning authority. That's what I'm all about. And I think they're right. So we've actually modified the index to have a new indicator which says,

no, do you think when you're raising a child it's important to instill trust in science and experts or to encourage skepticism of elites and experts. And that model now actually improves the fit. QR codes and bar codes, digital IDs, tattoo, track and trace. The individual in this group exhibit almost zero trust for government, science, media. I don't really trust you, to be honest. Trudeau already had the vaccines purchased for the next five years and there is a lot of vaccines to be pushed for the next five years. They all think, for example, that the vaccine is ineffective,

that it's been exaggerated by governments, that the vaccine may alter my DNA. It's all about control. There is no difference between the QR code and what the Nazis did to the Jews. This is the start of the end. Frank Graves says disinformation is a game changer here. And those with more ordered, fixed,

or authoritarian outlooks? They're not listening. Literally, the incidents of trust in government or trust in doctors, trust in public health in these groups is zero. The contrast with those who fall somewhere else along the scale is profound. Those who are well informed, which is most Canadians, the acceptance of the vaccine is literally 100%. Support for vaccine passports is 99%. When I moved to the disinformed group,

who shared this ordered outlook, the opposite, 100% opposition to mandates, very low rates of vaccination, zero levels of trust in government, an almost nihilistic belief in the future. Most of them think things are never gonna recover, the economy is in a state of depression, but they're not listening. We have different fact bases. And the problem is with Facebook, especially, the algorithms out there favor clickbait,

they favor hate, They favor fear. Democracy has in mind an ideal of public and rational deliberation. And most human beings are not always ready to do that. And this is a very sobering thing. Democracies are fragile in this respect. And I think, in my opinion, what we're seeing today is that the ideal of reasonable public deliberation looks more and more counterfactual. for thoughtful discussion is being hollowed out by social media forums that reward the loudest voice and the most extreme attitude. Peter Gordon says lessons from the original study,

the authoritarian personality, are more relevant than they've been in decades. The deep warning of the book, I think, is that the rise of mass society seems to be producing a type of individual who thinks in terms of convention or stereotype, a person who can be produced according to the algorithm. All individuals have that potential to become stereotypical and to respond to the world in a stereotyped or rigid fashion. And the ultimate warning of the book is that's what's going to destroy democracy. I think it's very important that those of us who are struggling to understand what's happening in the world don't succumb to a kind of facile cynicism. I think it's far too easy to read the authoritarian personality as pathologizing those who are

attracted to fascism. And I would really warn people against reading it that way. I think the lesson of the book is given the proper circumstances, personal and social, any human being is susceptible to authoritarianism and to intolerance. You know, the question is, what do we do? Because they're in our society, they have a right to vote, they have a right to be here, so do we. How do we reach compromise to move forward as a society?

I really believe the answers lie in rebuilding an economy which produces shared prosperity. You had the rise of the middle class went on in North America for a period of 50 years, average GDP growth over that period was 78% and everybody went ahead equally. That's just shattered. We need to think about why they're activated, how they're activated, and how we prevent them from being activated. And fear drives them. So we need to put the hopeful side of the world

out there. Inequality, economic inequality, can turn on that fear. They're hyper vigilant. They're always scanning for threat. How can we lessen the threat environment for them? Hmm, that's a big question. I'll say this. We as 21st century humans feel in this kind of superficial way deeply empowered, you know, independent free agents, you know, isn't social media great, we're so liberated, but it's a completely false liberation. It's a liberation that, you know,

really, as we are increasingly learning, you know, turns us into the servants of, you know, a small number of companies who found ways to make money off of this illusion of freedom. And we are, I think as humans, we're desperate for communities and traditions and rules to submit to. We want to submit. We don't like being totally free. Freedom doesn't have much meaning without any boundaries. And I think we're flailing about all in our own ways because of the erosion of the authority of institutions, whether you're talking about churches or governments or even things as local as Rotary Club or Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. I think we're all by ourselves on our phones and getting the next dopamine hit

from refreshing our social media feed. And it's brought us to the precipice of something very dark. You were listening to Kristin Nelson's documentary, The Authoritarian Personality. You can go to our website cbc.ca slash ideas to read more about the study and its legacy. Technical Production, Danielle Duval, thanks also to Gary Francis. Web Producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior Producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the Executive Producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.