The Left Has an Authoritarian Problem (but Doesn’t Know It)
In the movie The Avengers, Loki—playing the part of the consummate authoritarian leader—orders a group of average Germans to kneel before him. It seems to work, as almost everyone complies. But one solitary man refuses, saying that he will “not [kneel] to men like you.” Loki arrogantly asserts, “There are no men like me.” Then the German man utters the great hidden truth of authoritarian psychology: “There are always men like you.”
Probably the most common misconception about authoritarianism is that it is largely about the authority figures in charge, the Loki types of the world. In fact, that is often the direction the conversation turns when I present evidence of left-wing authoritarianism. On The Rick Ungar Show, for example, one of the guests criticized our lab’s work because it didn’t clearly identify left-wing authoritarian leaders. An alarmingly high percentage of news stories about authoritarianism in the last seven years also referenced one particular right-wing leader: Donald Trump.
It is easy to see why there is a focus on authoritarian leadership. “Authoritarian” has “authority”—that is, the person in charge—built into the word. When people think “authoritarian” they often think of the leaders. So it’s only natural to think that the authoritarian problem is only a problem with leadership.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The hidden truth of authoritarian psychology is that there are always people like that. There are always people who will fill the power vacuum, who want to rule and order and dictate. Every movement has authoritarian leaders. Every movement has people who want to gain power and use it harshly. Every movement has leaders who wish to control, manipulate, and crush. So to spend time talking about authoritarianism as if what changes is in the leadership is futile. Nothing changes in the leadership. What changes is in the people they presume to lead.
Indeed, leaders are irrelevant if no one will obey them. It requires a lust in the masses for authoritarians to punish their enemies, to create and enforce norms for which dissent is not allowed, to promote intolerance and hatred. Authoritarian leaders are pathetic stooges if the masses are uninterested in them. So “Are there authoritarian leaders?” isn’t the primary question—the primary question is “Will the people submit?” It doesn’t matter if Congresswoman Maxine Waters tells protestors to “get more confrontational” if they don’t like a trial verdict; it only matters if everyone thinks that kind of authoritarian fear-mongering is okay. Will they submit? Do they want leaders to boss others about, to lead them to aggression?
This truth maps onto decades of authoritarianism research in my own field of social psychology. That research has largely been built around personality and attitude scales that measure authoritarianism. These scales are not built to measure authoritarian leaders; rather, they are built to measure authoritarian followers. They include items like this: “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.” That item doesn’t say “I want to lead my people to destroy my enemies.” It isn’t a measurement of the leader. It is a measurement of the follower.
Thus, most of what we know about authoritarianism—most of the actual data used in the primary questionnaires that have come to define what we think about authoritarianism—is about the people who follow, and not the people who lead.
Scientific work justifies the importance of studying followers. In one study, for example, our lab evaluated whether we could predict changes in authoritarian leadership from the psychological traits of the populace. Did changes in the average authoritarian tendencies of the populace predict future authoritarian governments, or did changes in authoritarian leadership predict changes in the followers? In other words, which come first—authoritarian followers or authoritarian leaders?
Our work over a thirty-year span suggests that changes in the authoritarian status of governments were predicted by the predisposal of the populace to authoritarian followership traits like collectivism; but authoritarian governmental changes had comparatively little effect on followers’ psychology. This work suggests that certain psychological features predispose followers to accept authoritarian dictatorships. This empirical fact is quite remarkable. So many things influence the rise of dictators that have nothing to do with the internal culture—military power, foreign politics, the status of a nation’s immediate neighbors—that it would seem like the cultural beliefs of the followers in the populace hardly matter. And yet not only do they matter, they matter primarily. They are central. An authoritarian dictator may take over a country, but if the people never wanted that to happen, it won’t last. A democracy may be installed from the outside, but if the people want authoritarian leadership, it won’t last.
Thus, when we come to the potential for left-wing authoritarianism, the primary question we should be asking is not “Are there authoritarian leaders on the left who will grab power and enforce dictates?” The real question is “Do lots of left-wing people want authoritarian leaders to crush their enemies?”
Obeying Authority Isn’t the Problem
Perhaps we move too fast. Let’s take a step back and ask a broader question: what are authoritarian followers like?
And the first thing to get straight is that, to a psychologist, “authoritarian” doesn’t just mean “obeying authority” or “ordering someone to do something.” Parents who punish their kids for being mean to their siblings aren’t authoritarian leaders. People who obey the speed limits aren’t authoritarian followers. Authoritarianism means something specifically nastier. Authoritarians don’t merely enforce reasonable rules or obey those rules—they want a strong leader to crush and silence their opponents. They want that leader to hurt people for the benefit of their group.
The authoritarian is thus vastly different than the person who merely complies with authority. In fact, merely obeying authority is largely a positive thing as far as it goes. If students in my classes refused to do what I ask of them, no one would ever learn. If they interrupted my lectures to discuss Taylor Swift, or yelled at their fellow students about line dancing, or wrote “Luke stinks” on top of the notes I was trying to write on the board, then there would be little point in my class. Their obedience accomplishes a positive goal. We teach children to respect their teachers because it is a positive thing to respect their teachers.
Similarly, we want people to obey the law. We want them to respect the authority that tells them “do not murder.” We’re glad when people obediently decide not to drink and drive, when they follow directives to evacuate burning buildings in an orderly manner, and when they refuse to vandalize our property. Obeying authority in this way isn’t authoritarianism, because we don’t want those things primarily to hurt or crush or silence anyone. We just want people to behave well.
Authoritarians also want people to obey—but they differ in several respects from those who merely obey. The classic definition of authoritarianism is that authoritarians want a strong authority figure to hurt others (called “authoritarian aggression”), to enforce radical group norms (called “authoritarian conventionalism”), and to require submission to those norms (called “authoritarian submission”). Authoritarians want to obey strong authority figures, but they are largely motivated by a desire to have their group dominate other groups.
In the words of the most famous authoritarianism researcher of all time, Bob Altemeyer, authoritarians
support unjust and illegal acts by governments. They support police who abuse their power. . . . After viewing a film about [psychologist Stanley] Milgram’s famous “obedience” experiments, they tended to blame the Teacher and the Learner for what happened more than most people do, but not the authority, the Experimenter. In turn, they themselves aggress in laboratory experiments involving electric shock, when authority sanctions it. They harbor many prejudices against many minorities, accepting stereotypes uncritically. In fact, most highly prejudiced persons turn out to be either social dominators or right-wing authoritarians [RWAs]. High RWAs strongly believe in punishment, and admit that they derive personal pleasure from administering it to “wrongdoers.”
This isn’t merely obedience—it is a particularly nasty and aggressive kind of obedience. Authoritarians aren’t especially interested in obeying the law—they are actually less likely to obey the law if their own authority commands them not to.
The distinction between good and bad authority can be seen in remarkable work on parenting by Cal Berkeley professor Diana Baumrind. This work suggests there are two primary dimensions of parenting: Responsiveness/Warmth and Authority/Control. How parents score on these two dimensions defines their parenting style. Parents who are low on both responsiveness and authority are Neglectful parents who basically don’t attend to their children at all. Parents who score high on responsiveness but low on authority are Indulgent parents who spoil their kids.
It is the contrast of the two high-authority parent types that is most relevant here. Parents who score high on authority but low on responsiveness are Authoritarian parents who are strict, dogmatic, and uncaring. However, parents who score high on authority but also score high on responsiveness are Authoritative. They expect obedience but they listen to their children and show warmth to them.
In my experience, it occasionally surprises some Americans that lots of research suggests kids have the best outcomes under Authoritative parents. Indulgent and Neglectful parents tend to raise unhappy and unsuccessful kids. So parents with no authority at all don’t do very well. Parents who have nothing but authority—cold authoritarians—also don’t do well. But parents with a combination of authority and responsiveness raise successful kids at very high rates.
This work highlights an important point for our larger study of authoritarianism. The proper substitute for authoritarianism isn’t chaos. The proper substitute is good authority that is responsive to the populace. We need leaders. Authoritarianism is essentially a desire to put strong-but-bad leaders in power. The proper substitute for authoritarianism isn’t to put no leaders in power, but to put responsive and warm leaders in power. We shouldn’t want less leadership; we should want better leadership.
Authoritarianism to What?
That leads us to another common misconception about authoritarian followers. I think we tend to imagine authoritarians as the kind of folk who indiscriminately obey any authority figure who happens to walk by. After all, aren’t authoritarians obedient sheep who just do what they’re told? If an authoritarian is walking down the street and someone orders them to do something, wouldn’t they be more likely than non-authoritarians to do it?
But a moment’s reflection shows how wrong that view is. Imagine an authoritarian Donald Trump supporter walking down the street and subsequently being commanded by Joe Biden to support climate change research. Do you see? It matters very much to an authoritarian who is giving the command and what the command is about. Authoritarianism is highly domain-specific: authoritarians get very attached to particular leaders in particular domains, but they aren’t likely to obey just any old leader.
This means that people can be authoritarian about almost anything. If people really hate bats, they might form an authoritarian movement to kill bats. But if people think that bats are awesome, they might be just as likely to form an authoritarian movement to save bats. Authoritarians are more likely to seek out and obey authority figures, yes—but only authority figures who care about their preferred domain. And that domain can literally be anything. That means one of the questions we have to ask about authoritarians is: authoritarianism to what?
Consider the religion-versus-science dichotomy. We commonly associate authoritarianism with religion. And rightly so—religion is often one of the most pernicious purveyors of authoritarian evils. People less commonly associate science with authoritarianism; and yet an increasing amount of evidence shows that science isn’t a cure-all for authoritarian ills and, in fact, can actually serve as a conduit for them. For example, in one of my favorite studies, participants were told to do something they believed would seriously harm a fish. (Don’t worry, fish-lovers, the fish was actually a very lifelike robot—but participants didn’t know that.) Beforehand, the researchers put some of these people in a “scientific mindset” by having them write about science, while other control participants were not. Did approaching the situation with a scientific approach make participants less likely to obey the authoritarian command to harm a presumably innocent fish? Not at all. In fact, the opposite occurred: putting people in a scientific mindset made them more likely to obey scientific authority to inject toxic chemicals into a fish.
This example illustrates the complex and domain-specific nature of authoritarian behavior. Putting people in a science-loving mindset can make them more authoritarian if the authority figure in question is a scientist asking them to do immoral things. This is important because, psychologically speaking, there is no reason that liberals can’t be just as authoritarian as conservatives, if the situational domain meets the right set of authority figures for the right kind of people.
So that brings us to the question: Is that convergence of situations, leaders, and people currently happening on the left? Do we currently have a left-wing authoritarian problem? The answer to this question is scientifically indisputable:
Without a doubt.
The Left-Wing Authoritarian Blind Spot
Social psychologists have long denied that authoritarianism on the left was a topic worthy of study. Indeed, as recently as 2020, the very existence of any left-wing authoritarians was called “largely mythical, like the Loch Ness Monster.”
It often surprises outsiders to my field when I tell them that many social psychologists deny the existence of a meaningful number of left-wing authoritarians. Those outsiders immediately gravitate to obvious examples of left-wing authoritarians either in their own lives (that one mean uncle who keeps going on about Marxism) or in the political landscape (clear leftist authoritarian regimes such as Communist China or Cuba). This gap between academic psychologists and the public was apparent when we collected national samples to examine how many left-wing authoritarians normal Americans can identify in their own lives. Before we looked at the data, I and one of my social psychology colleagues made guesses about the average number of liberal authoritarians in people’s lives. I guessed one; my colleague guessed two. On a lark, I also asked a non-academic outside of our bubble to estimate how many left-wing authoritarians the average American knew. She said fifteen. I laughed and said: “That can’t be right!” But she was very nearly right. The actual number was not quite fifteen, but well over ten, and nowhere near the guesses that two social psychologists—two social psychologists who have championed the idea of left-wing authoritarianism, mind you—made. It was clear that I and my social psychology colleagues had no clue what was happening in the real world.
It isn’t just our lab that has woken up to this growing left-wing authoritarianism threat. There is an emerging revolution of academic data revealing a large body of evidence that left-wing authoritarians in the United States and elsewhere are extremely authoritarian. This includes work in the United States published in major research outlets that says, among other things, liberals more broadly are often just as prone as conservatives to possess traits considered hallmarks of authoritarianism. Yet, you may wonder how it is possible for academics to have completely missed such an obvious truth, and the answer is important in helping us understand the nature of modern left-wing authoritarianism in the United States—and why it is especially difficult to eradicate. The answer is that liberals are highly motivated not to see left-wing authoritarianism. And the more left-wing authoritarian they are, quite ironically, the less they want to believe in authoritarianism on the left. They have a kind of curious self-ignorance of their own authoritarian motives. Put another way, liberal authoritarians have a blind spot.
Most of the traits of left-wing authoritarians more or less apply to all kinds of authoritarians. Authoritarians of every ilk tend to be intellectually apathetic, show an obsession with misinformation, trade in principles for groups, and exhibit cognitive simplicity. The specific domains attached to those traits do change, of course—for example, liberal authoritarians are especially simple about race, conservative authoritarians less so—and there are always exceptions we could make to those rules. But in general one would expect authoritarians everywhere to demonstrate traits such as resistance to change, cognitive rigidity in attitude formation, opinion certainty, sweeping biases, and racism.
However, the authoritarian motivational blind spot is something that is unique to left-wing authoritarians. And this blind spot makes liberal authoritarianism uniquely dangerous.
As an academic psychologist who has taught prejudice for over twenty years, I’ve often said in my classes that one of the most dangerous people in society is the person who thinks they aren’t racist. Why? Because everyone has the potential for racism, and the person who denies that potential will never address their own problems and thus will spend their life engaging in racist actions. By parallel, a political party is particularly dangerous when it claims the loudest that it is not authoritarian. Why? Because that party has potential authoritarians. Every party has potential authoritarians—but a party that denies the problem also won’t address the problem.
Right now that party is the Democratic Party. We’ve tacitly raised a generation of liberals who think that it’s normal for Disney to fire actress Gina Carano for having a political opinion that some people don’t like, and yet also think they aren’t authoritarian for doing so.
Psychologically speaking, such apparent contradictions are actually quite commonplace. For example, as anyone who has objectively observed a Nike commercial can tell you, it is well known that Americans are quite collectivistic about their individualism; and it is certainly the case that conservatives hold seemingly contradictory beliefs in multiple domains. The kind of psychological hypocrisy involved in today’s left-wing authoritarian is thus an instance of a common phenomenon: just as it is psychologically quite possible to limit freedoms in the name of freedom or to exhibit collectivism in the name of individualism, it is possible to exhibit authoritarianism in the name of anti-authoritarian ideology.
How? When strongly held group norms go against individual motivational goals, you can get what appears to be a psychological contradiction. Conservatives have norms that suggest their group desires freedom; and yet sometimes they are individually motivated to set aside those beliefs. To resolve the tension, conservatives may engage in the forbidden freedom-restricting behaviors but recast them as freedom-loving. They have a motivational blind spot for acknowledging that any of their behaviors could go against freedom.
Liberals have that same problem with the idea of authoritarianism. Liberals have norms that tell them their group should oppose authoritarianism. But often their individual members have motives toward authoritarianism—and the net result is that liberals have a motivational blind spot for believing that their own authoritarian behaviors are authoritarian. They simply don’t want to believe it.
Scientific Data on Authoritarian Self-Ignorance
This isn’t mere speculation. Our scientific data demonstrate this very clearly. In a national survey of over five thousand Americans, we gave people a standard authoritarianism questionnaire and then afterwards asked them a simple question: “Do you view yourself as a dogmatic and authoritarian person?”
Conservative Americans who scored high on the authoritarianism questionnaire had no problem saying “Yes, I am authoritarian.” But liberals were a different thing entirely. Not only were liberal authoritarians less likely than conservatives to accurately identify themselves as authoritarians (when they were, in fact, authoritarian), but there was actually a negative correlation between left-wing authoritarianism (the reality) and liberals’ willingness to identify as authoritarian (their own perception). That means that the more authoritarian liberals are, the less they believe they are authoritarian!
The results of this survey were one of the most astonishing things I’ve seen in all my years conducting research. It is important to keep in mind that liberals who score high on the authoritarianism scale agree that (italicized words are direct quotes from the scale) our country needs a mighty leader; that the leader should destroy opponents; that people should trust the judgment of the proper authorities, avoid listening to noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubts in people’s minds, put some tough leaders in power who oppose those values and silence the troublemakers, and smash the beliefs of opponents; that what our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush the evil; that society should strongly punish those they disagree with. They also deny that an opponent has a right to be wherever he or she wants to be, and support the statement that the country would be better off if certain groups would just shut up and accept their group’s proper place in society. These items hit all of the hallmarks of the consensus conceptualization of the authoritarian person. When conservatives agree with those items, they subsequently admit (accurately) that they are authoritarian. When liberals agree with those items, they actually are more likely to say they are not authoritarian.
Why is this? It is because American liberals have a psychological dilemma about authoritarianism that conservatives don’t have. Liberals, unlike conservatives, believe their group’s norms are anti-authoritarian. Thus, they have a motivational blind spot for admitting they are authoritarian. And the more they actually are authoritarian, the more they are motivated to adhere to their group’s anti-authoritarian norms, and thus the more motivated they are to deny their own authoritarian nature. Our data show this very clearly. The negative relationship between liberals’ actual authoritarianism and their self-identification as authoritarian is reduced to essentially zero when we account for their perception of their own group’s norms. In non-statistical terms, this means that a large part of the reason that liberal authoritarians disavow their true authoritarian nature is that liberals believe that their group officially opposes authoritarianism.
It’s worth noting that this strong emphasis on their group being complex and anti-authoritarian has both negative and positive consequences. On the negative side, it makes it especially difficult for liberals to admit obvious examples of authoritarianism in themselves and in other liberals. But, on the positive side, this means that liberals in the United States do still have a built-in aversion to authoritarianism. If one can tap into that aversion, it could make it easier to defeat authoritarian tendencies on the left side of the aisle. That’s probably why a lot of long-time progressives and liberals have clearly turned on American Democrats—the reckoning is harsh once the blind spot is removed. When comedian and long-time Democrat Sarah Silverman said she no longer wanted to be associated with the Democratic Party, this is what she said: “It’s the absolutist-ness of the party I am in that is such a turnoff to me. It’s so f****** elitist.” This provides reasons for hope in overcoming left-wing authoritarianism. It may be harder to get leftists to see the problem than we’d like—but if we can get them to see the problem, they are naturally inclined to really want to solve it.
This essay is excerpted from Liberal Bullies: What Psychology Teaches Us about the Left's Authoritarian Problem―and How to Fix It, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Luke Conway, PhD, is a Full Professor of Psychology at Grove City College. His lab is at the forefront of research related to authoritarianism more broadly—and left-wing authoritarianism specifically. He is the author of over ninety academic articles and book chapters, and is a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. His research has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and others, as well as on the BBC and NPR. He lives in Western Pennsylvania.