Earlier I wrote a post about whether authoritarianism clustered to one side of the political spectrum. Leftist scholars had proposed that it did, but in order to do so posited that figures like Hillary Clinton were "conservative". This struck me as absurd, and I took the view that left and right authoritarian thinkers had a lot in common. It is a human problem, and not a problem from one side of the political spectrum.
Now comes this study which confirms what I was saying about authoritarians. While there are differences, left and right authoritarians have more similarities than differences.
The take-away quote from the article?"Authoritarians have a predisposition for liking sameness and opposing differences among people in their environment," Costello says. "They are submissive to people they perceive as authority figures, they are dominant and aggressive towards people they disagree with, and they are careful to obey what they consider the norms for their respective groups."
At its core, authoritarianism is likely about power, Costello adds.
"It's a mistake to think of authoritarianism as a right-wing concept, as some researchers have in the past," he says. "We found that ideology becomes secondary. Psychologically speaking, you're an authoritarian first, and an ideologue only as it serves the power structure that you support."
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