The more that is discovered about Palin, the louder the RW base comes out in support of this woman.
Time for a primer about Right Wing Authoritarians, which helps to explain why we are experiencing such a disconnect.
Recall
Bob Altemeyer's - The Authoritarians. His was the extensive research on which James Dean based his book,
Conservatives Without Conscience.Here's an excerpt from Chapter Three,
How Authoritarian Followers Think
1. Illogical Thinking
Sitting in the jury room of the Port Angeles, Washington court house in 1989,
Mary Wegmann might have felt she had suddenly been transferred to a parallel
universe in some Twilight Zone story. For certain fellow-jury members seemed to
have attended a different trial than the one she had just witnessed. They could not
remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they
steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on.
Encountering my research as she was later developing her Ph.D. dissertation project,
she suspected the people who “got it wrong” had been mainly high RWAs. So she
recruited a sample of adults from the Clallam County jury list, and a group of students
from Peninsula College and gave them various memory and inference tests. For
example, they listened to a tape of two lawyers debating a school segregation case on
a McNeil/Lehrer News Hour program. Wegmann found High RWAs indeed had more
trouble remembering details of the material they’d encountered, and they made more
incorrect inferences on a reasoning test than others usually did. Overall, the
authoritarians had lots of trouble simply thinking straight.
Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large
samples of students at my university. In both studies high RWAs went down in flames
more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or
deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:
All fish live in the sea.
Sharks live in the sea..
Therefore, sharks are fish.
The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the
reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they
would likely tell you, “Because sharks are fish.” In other words, they thought the
reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is
right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way,
they don’t “get it” that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test.
This is not only “Illogical, Captain,” as Mr. Spock would say, it’s quite
dangerous, because it shows that if authoritarian followers like the conclusion, the
logic involved is pretty irrelevant. The reasoning should justify the conclusion, but for
a lot of high RWAs, the conclusion validates the reasoning. Such is the basis of many
a prejudice, and many a Big Lie that comes to be accepted. Now one can easily
overstate this finding. A lot of people have trouble with syllogistic reasoning, and high
RWAs are only slightly more likely to make such mistakes than low RWAs are. But
in general high RWAs seem to have more trouble than most people do realizing that
a conclusion is false.
~snip~
2. Highly Compartmentalized Minds
As I said earlier, authoritarians’ ideas are poorly integrated with one another.
It’s as if each idea is stored in a file that can be called up and used when the
authoritarian wishes, even though another of his ideas--stored in a different file--
basically contradicts it. We all have some inconsistencies in our thinking, but
authoritarians can stupify you with the inconsistency of their ideas. Thus they may say
they are proud to live in a country that guarantees freedom of speech, but another file
holds, “My country, love it or leave it.” The ideas were copied from trusted sources,
often as sayings, but the authoritarian has never “merged files” to see how well they
all fit together.
It’s easy to find authoritarians endorsing inconsistent ideas. Just present slogans
and appeals to homey values, and then present slogans and bromides that invoke
opposite values. The yea-saying authoritarian follower is likely to agree with all of
them. Thus I asked both students and their parents to respond to, “When it comes to
love, men and women with opposite points of view are attracted to each other.” Soon
afterwards, in the same booklet, I pitched “Birds of a feather flock together when it
comes to love.” High RWAs typically agreed with both statements, even though they
responded to the two items within a minute of each other.
But that’s the point: they don’t seem to scan for self-consistency as much as
most people do. Similarly they tended to agree with “A government should allow total
freedom of expression, even it if threatens law and order” and “A government should
only allow freedom of expression so long as it does not threaten law and order.” And
“Parents should first of all be gentle and tender with their children,” and “Parents
should first of all be firm and uncompromising with their children; spare the rod and
spoil the child.”
3. Double Standards
When your ideas live independent lives from one another it is pretty easy to use
double standards in your judgments. You simply call up the idea that will justify
(afterwards) what you’ve decided to do. High RWAs seem to get up in the morning
and gulp down a whole jar of “Rationalization Pills.” Here is a “Trials” case I have
used many times in my research, except only half of the sample gets this version.
~snip~
I have found many other instances in which authoritarian followers show a
double standard in their judgments of people’s behavior or the rightness of various
causes. For example they will punish a panhandler who starts a fight with an
accountant more than an accountant who (in the same situation) starts a fight with a
panhandler. They will punish a prisoner in jail who beats up another prisoner more
than they will punish a police officer who beats up that second prisoner. (Remember
when I said in chapter 1 that high RWAs will go easy on authorities, and on a person
who attacks someone the authoritarian wants to attack?) On the other hand I have
found it difficult to catch low RWAs using double standards. In all the cases above
they seem to operate by principles which they apply in even-handed ways.
4. Hypocrisy
You can also, unfortunately, find a considerable amount of hypocrisy in high
RWAs’ behavior. For example, the leaders of authoritarian movements sometimes
accuse their opponents of being anti-democratic and anti-free speech when the latter
protest against various books, movies, speakers, teachers and so on. They say leftists
impose restrictions for “political correctness.” I know some who would. So I
wondered if ardent liberals’ desire to censor ideas they disliked was as strong, or
stronger, than that of right-wing authoritarians. I asked two large samples of parents
of university students to give an opinion in the following twelve cases.
~snip~
5. Blindness To Themselves
If you ask people how much integrity they personally have, guess who pat
themselves most on the back by claiming they have more than anyone else. This one
is easy if you remember the findings on self-righteousness from the last chapter: high
RWAs think they had lots more integrity than others do. Similarly when I asked
students to write down, anonymously, their biggest faults, right-wing authoritarians
wrote down fewer than others did, mainly because a lot of them said they had no big
faults. When I asked students if there was anything they were reluctant to admit about
themselves to themselves, high RWAs led everyone else in saying, no, they were
completely honest with themselves.
Now people who abound in integrity, who have no faults, and who are
completely honest with themselves would seem ready for canonization. But we can
wonder if it is really true in the case of authoritarian followers, given what else we
know about them. So I have done a simple little experiment in my classes on several
occasions in which I give some students higher marks on an objective test--supposedly
through a clerical error--than they know they earned. High RWAs, for all their
posturing about being better than others, are just as likely to take the grade and run as
everyone else. But I ‘spect they forget such misdeeds pretty quickly. Selfrighteousness
comes easily if you can tuck your failings away in boxes and put them
at the back of the shelf.
In fact, despite their own belief that they are quite honest with themselves,
authoritarians tend to be highly defensive, and run away from unpleasant truths about
themselves more than most people do. ...
High RWAs show little self-awareness when making these comparisons.
Sometimes they glimpse themselves through a glass, darkly. For example they agree
more than most people do with, “I like to associate with people who have the same
beliefs and opinions I do.” But they have no idea how much they differ from others
in that way. And most of the time they get it quite wrong, thinking they are not
different from others, and even that they are different in the opposite way from how
they actually are. For example they are sure they are less self-righteous than most
people are--which of course is what self-righteous people would think, isn’t it? And
when I give feedback lectures to classes about my studies and describe right-wing
authoritarians, it turns out the high RWAs in the room almost always think I am
talking about someone else.
6. A Profound Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism means dividing the world up into in-groups and out-groups, and
it’s something people do quite automatically. You can see this by how easily we
identify with the point of view of a storyteller. If we’re watching a cavalry & Indians
movie, told from the point of view of the cavalry, that’s whom we cheer on. If we’re
watching the same kind of movie, only from the aboriginal point of view, as in Little
Big Man or Dances with Wolves, we root for the Indians, don’t we?
As natural as this is, authoritarians see the world more sharply in terms of their
in-groups and their out-groups than most people do. They are so ethnocentric that you
find them making statements such as, “If you’re not with us, then you’re against us.”
There’s no neutral in the highly ethnocentric mind. This dizzying “Us versus
Everyone Else” outlook usually develops from traveling in those “tight circles” we
talked about in the last chapter, and whirling round in those circles reinforces the
ethnocentrism as the authoritarian follower uses his friends to validate his opinions.
Most of us associate with people who agree with us on many issues. Birds of
a feather do, empirically, tend to flock together. But this is especially important to
authoritarians, who have not usually thought things out, explored possibilities,
considered alternate points of view, and so on, but acquired their beliefs from the
authorities in their lives. They then maintain their beliefs against new threats by
seeking out those authorities, and by rubbing elbows as much as possible with people
who have the same beliefs.
As a path to truth, this amounts to skipping on quicksand. It essentially boils
down to, “I know I’m right because the people who agree with me say I am.” But that
works for authoritarians. And it has lots of consequences. For example, this selective
exposure is probably one of the reasons high RWAs do not realize how prejudiced
they are “compared with most people.”If you spend a lot of time around rather
prejudiced people, you can easily think your own prejudices are normal.
~snip~
Authoritarian followers want to belong, and being part of their in-group means
a lot to them. Loyalty to that group ranks among the highest virtues, and members of
the group who question its leaders or beliefs can quickly be seen as traitors. Can you
also sense from these items the energy, the commitment, the submission, and the zeal
that authoritarian followers are ready to give to their in-groups, and the satisfaction
they would get from being a part of a vast, powerful movement in which everyone
thought the same way? The common metaphor for authoritarian followers is a herd of
sheep, but it may be more accurate to think of them as a column of army ants on the
march.
~snip~
7. Dogmatism: The Authoritarian’s Last Ditch Defense
But the leaders don’t have to worry, because their followers are also quite
dogmatic. By dogmatism I mean relatively unchangeable, unjustified certainty. And
I’m certain that is right, beyond a doubt. So that establishes how dogmatic I am. If you
want a hint as to how dogmatic you are, simply answer the items below--completely
ignoring the fact that if you strongly agree with them it means you are a rigid,
dogmatic, and totally bad, bad, bad person--and you get no dessert.
~snip~
http://members.shaw.ca/perchaluk/drbob/chapter3.pdfedit grammar
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