How to Identify Politicians in the Wild

As an exercise, watch some videos of someone like Tim Scott, a prominent Republican politician. Then compare him to Donald Trump, the present default leader of the GOP. They are both running as Republican candidates for president. Then compare them against major Democratic politicians, from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders, also having been recent presidential candidates. What distinguishes all of these in being dissimilar from one another? Without any technical knowledge, what about them feels different? And how can we understand them as representing separate phenomena? Or where they overlap? Who are they appealing to and with what kind of rhetoric of narrative and identity? What are they modeling and representing? And to what end?

As typical reactionaries, both Scott and Trump will use standard conservative and right-wing rhetoric, although interestingly neither, particularly not the latter, is a loyal partisan of the Republican Party. Trump may be the more ambitious and opportunistic of the two, but Scott has been more than willing to play the game to win. Trump used to donate to Democrats, including having had regularly schmoozed with DNC royalty like the Clintons, and Scott earlier in his political career sought to run as a Democrat, until the local DNC leadership told him he’d have to work his way up. They both became Republicans because it was easier to gain power going that route.

That aside, they obviously have divergent motivations. As everyone knows, Trump is a narcissist and so he is prone to Machiavellianism and likely psychopathy, the dark personality trifecta. He’ll say and do anything to gain attention, power, status, and wealth; or simply to cause trouble and get a response, as he has successfully done as of late. Though Scott also waffles, he does so no more than the typical career politician. Listening to the two, they have distinct personalities and styles. If nothing else, Scott doesn’t come off as a narcissist or an asshole, and he actually will speak coherently, if not always consistently over time. He’s probably not a psychopath either, although to get that far up the food chain in the GOP likely requires some Machiavellian talent, at the very least.

To offer context, Scott was one of Trump’s stronger critics in the past. He even called out his racism. That was a powerful message coming from a black Republican out of  South Carolina (Michael Kruse & Sydney Gold, 55 Things You Need to Know About Tim Scott). That is the Deepest South of Dixie, the old cultural and economic heart of the slaveholding aristocracy, where the Confederacy started the Civil War by attacking a Federal military base. Far from being a lightweight, Scott went further still in demanding police reform, while speaking of his own experience of being racially profiled by the police. He also supported the removal of the Confederate flag from the state Capitol grounds, which did happen.

Was he only posturing or was some of that genuine? One might suspect he occasionally means what he says, as he kept up that anti-racist commentary for quite a number of years. Yet during his political career, he’d also associate with Republican politicians infamous for their racism. Mixed background on political associations aside, he seemed able and willing to stand on principles or at least be willing to point out the obvious. For instance, he stated the January 6th insurrection was morally wrong and he denied that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. But oddly, he also more recently said he was grateful for Trump’s presidency and claimed there wasn’t much difference between them, and now running for president he seems to be walking back his previous critical stance. Is he pivoting to whatever he perceives as his audience in any given moment?

He has portrayed himself as a moderate, with even some of the ‘liberal’ corporate media getting on board with this portrayal, and admittedly almost everything seems reasonable and sane next to Trump and other reactionary extremists (Mehdi debunks the myth that Republican Tim Scott is a moderate). But he has now gotten on board with nearly all the main far right talking points, apparently denying his own former anti-racist commentary that was fairly extensive considering he is a Republican. And in the end, the policies he advocates are straight in line with that of the Trump administration, which might be unsurprising since Trump, with no political substance of his own, often just repeated GOP talking points and fell in line with the GOP platform.

If it’s not the narcissistic seeking of power for self-aggrandizement, attention for the sake of attention, then what drives Scott? He seems more like a garden variety right-wing authoritarian (RWA), along the lines of Mike Pence who was Trump’s second in command. These two, Scott and Pence, are social conservatives and religious right evangelicals (Nick Robins-Early, Tim Scott: 10 things to know about the Republican entering the 2024 race), ultimately willing to suck up to the dominant power and hierarchical authority of their perceived group. A major factor is the theopolitical obsession with purity (Molly Olmstead, Tim Scott’s Purity Culture), as a typical expression of the response to disgust, stress, and threat, and as leading to the typical dual mode of fear-mongering and scapegoating (Jason Pitzl-Waters, Who’s a Religious “Minority” in the United States?), such as framed by cultural displacement or ethno-racial replacement (e.g., persecution of whites, Christians, men, and red-blooded American patriots), and much else.

On the other hand, Trump would surely measure low on RWA, even as he fits the bill for a popular RWA leader. This is where it gets tricky in teasing out the distinctions. According to studies, Trump’s supporters and followers do, indeed, show high levels of RWA. But they also come up as having raised scores on social dominance orientation (SDO), what some call the other ‘authoritarianism’, both in terms of straight up domination (SDO-D) and hierarchical inequality (SDO-E), each representing a separate factor of status defense, that being the pivot of SDO (Niraj Chokshi, Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status, Not Economic Anxiety, Study Finds). Though not an RWA by any means, Trump would be strongly SDO across the board, if maybe more SDO-E than SDO-D in reducing everything to capitalism. That is what makes him less dangerous, in that the most successful far right leaders are often Double Highs (SDO + RWA; probably often favoring SDO-D). But what is dangerous is what Trump portends. He has set the example and precedent for a smarter, more devious Double High to come along. For certain, there are more Double Highs in the party because of him.

No matter about Double Highs and RWA, Trump has helped do several things or rather further entrench an ongoing trend. Since coming to power, more high SDOs, particularly SDO-Ds, have been drawn into the Republican Party; most of the Republicans who were low SDO either have been provoked into high SDO or left the party; and those high SDO-E but low SDO-D (capitalist realists, neoliberals, right-libertarians, etc) have been forced to question their SDO identities or else embrace SDO-D. But of course, this has been simultaneous with high RWAs, specifically the highest RWAs, having become ever more concentrated in and central to the GOP as well. It is fully a Double High party. Still, there is something about SDO in general and SDO-D in particular that brings with it a shameless and merciless viciousness.

Keep in mind that the Democratic Party has long been a safe home for moderate RWAs (disproportionately found among Southerners, minorities, lower classes, rural residents, and the under-educated; e.g., old school prejudicial labor unionists) and moderate SDO-Es (mainstream partisans and leaders supporting social liberalism but also neoliberalism, capitalist realism, and respectability politics; e.g., ‘liberal class’; think of tokenism that is status-based and hierarchy-defending, in that a few minority individuals are raised up while little is done for  most poor minorities who remain a permanent underclass). As a case in point, in 2016, Hillary Clinton actually had a slight lead over Trump in support from the white working class. Meanwhile, like other Republican candidates, Trump’s main support came from the white middle class, albeit lower middle class. The point being is that, for all the bull shit from MSM narratives, Democrats remain the working class party for both minorities and whites.

The DNC has only ever explicitly and entirely excluded the hardcore SDO-Ds that, since the Southern Strategy, have defined the modern GOP. And usually when people think of authoritarianism, specifically authoritarian leaders, what they have in mind most of all is SDO-D, with or without RWA proper, but not RWA alone and definitely not SDO-E alone. Then again, the fact that high SDO-E is characteristic of the top leadership in both main parties is highly problematic. SDO-E doesn’t have the outright bigoted and brutal quality of SDO-D nor the conformist groupthink of RWA, but it nonetheless is the beating heart of modern reactionary politics, the shared worldview underlying the bipartisanship of crony capitalism and plutocratic corporatism, soft fascism and inverted totalitarianism.

Such is the reason the ruling SDO-E Democrats just don’t have it in them to actually push back that hard against Republican SDO-Ds and Double Highs. In the end, SDO is SDO, motivated by a common animus against the egalitarian Left, though SDO-E has a softer edge. This is what can be misleading, despite great insight, in the scholarship of someone like Corey Robin who typically conflates all reactionary politics with the political right. He might be correct in a sense, if we more clearly understand what the ‘right’ means, but maybe what is overlooked is all SDO, not merely limited to SDO-D, is right-wing. The United States has two right-wing parties or, as some put it, two right wings of a one-party state; even though the general public is firmly on the left. But if Robin openly pointed out this non-partisan reactionary mind, in contradicting the mainstream partisan narrative, he’d no longer be one of the public intellectual darlings of corporate media, and with that fame would go his profitable book deals.

Yet distinctions remain relevant, as SDO-E by itself probably wouldn’t cause much harm. But combine SDO-E with SDO-D, RWA, and conservatism (social, economic, political); add in dark personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism); spice it up with the destabilization factor that we call the dark perception triad (disgust response, threat response, stress-sickness response) with actual rising rates of physical and mental illness; and vigorously shake it all together in a container of anxiety-inducing and polarizing high inequality. Then you have a doozy, the perfect storm of an ‘authoritarian’ takeover waiting to happen. This helps to explain why there is no such thing as left-wing ‘authoritarianism’. Technically, RWAs proper will conform to any dominant ideology, even low-SDO egalitarianism that is definitive of leftism. But that would only happen when RWAs, along with SDOs, are out of power or at least not centrally dominant. That is far from the case in this country or, for that matter, in any country where authoritarianism has fully come to rule.

Still, RWAs make great followers and will follow anyone, indeed even a non-RWA and non-SDO, who wields a claim of compelling authority. The thing is there is no one who can lead RWAs in the way can SDOs and Double Highs, in bringing out the worst qualities in them, the full authoritarian profile. That is why the two parties are undeniably divergent, refuting false equivalence and giving some credibility to lesser evil voting. Even the minority of RWA followers in the Democratic Party are kept in check by the majority of non-RWAs and non-SDOs in the base and especially by the stronger egalitarian leftists in leadership like Bernie Sanders and AOC. Even so, it is problematic that the high SDO-Es (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, etc) do have too much control of the DNC party apparatus, making them often complicit in Republican power games, but these high SDO-E Democrats generally aren’t high SDO-Ds and that makes a massive difference.

The thing is that RWA and SDO, as indicators, aren’t as useful by themselves. Yes, on average, Democrats are lower on both. But as above explained, they’re a big tent party. Certain segments of the base are high in one or both, while many other Democrats are extremely low on both, with a large portion that is middling or mixed. This means Democrats easily shift with the winds, rather than leading the way (e.g., the majority of Americans supported same sex marriage years before many DNC elite stated support). The difference for Republicans is the entire base would be high RWA and high SDO, specifically high SDO-D but also high SDO-E, along with conservatism to give it strident force and mainstream respectability. At this point, a Republican voter low on all of these is very likely non-existent.

This is pushing a natural pattern to its extreme. Much research strongly indicates there is typically an immense overlap between various factors of RWA, SDO (D & E), conservatism (social, economic, & political). Though they can be measured separately and variably in individuals, and even though all three don’t always coincide under all conditions, they tend to co-occur at a population level. Where you find one, you’re likely to find the others; and the higher one is the higher the others will correspondingly rise. That is why we call the dark political triad, as a twin to the dark personality triad, and matched with the dark perception triad — this is the Triple Dark Triad*, a constellation of some of the worst traits of humanity. They are a sign of a society that is imbalanced, stressed out, sickly, and traumatized (see research on populations with high pathogen exposure, parasite load, etc).

What’s the difference between SDO and RWA? It’s simple, but the two easily get conflated because two types are drawn to one another, the two sides of the public perception of ‘authoritarianism’. Crudely and imperfectly, RWA is close to social conservatism and SDO is basically economic conservatism, but the commonality is that both overlap in political conservatism, albeit the points of connection aren’t a single factor. In at least one case, an argument was made for Tim Scott being an SDO, and the points made are reasonable (Billy Vaughn, Institutionalized Racism Versus Bad Apples Racism). We could concede that, if tested on the SDO scale, it’s likely he’d measure relatively higher than the average American, particularly on SDO-E, if no where near as high as Trump. But it’s likely he really is lower on SDO-D, genuinely not a full-on bigot and xenophobe. And we’d stick to our suspicion that, most of all, he’d stand out to a greater extent with his RWA score.

That is to say Scott is more of a garden variety authoritarian, making for a better follower than leader. He’ll do what the party needs and demands of him. At the moment, that might mean jumping off a cliff. But his motivation isn’t like Trump, to have power for himself or else destroy it all, like a child having a tantrum. “Mitt Romney, Tim Scott, and Liz Cheney probably best represent the Republicans who are willing to set aside bigotry, misogyny, and hate and just go back to shilling for the morbidly rich. Southerners Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Ted Cruz lead the hate and fear crowd” (Thom Hartmann, Will the GOP Embrace White Supremacy & Fascism, or Go Back to Being the Party of the Rich?). So, if not for the SDO derangement that has taken over the GOP, those like Scott would be more willing to play far less dangerous games of mere profiteering and religious moralizing or else RWA partisan team sports.

RWAs are about social cohesion, conformity, and conventionalism. But SDOs are focused on social status, in defending exclusionary power hierarchies. This can often look the same in practice, but not always. For example, SDOs will oppose immigration under all conditions because foreigners threaten the established order, a place for everything and everything in its place. The threat is either their not fitting into the SDO-D racial order (‘illegal’ aliens) or not fitting into the SDO-E economic order (‘illegal’ immigrant workers). That is not necessarily so for RWAs who only fear and hate immigrants when they are perceived as not assimilating, but otherwise immigrants are deemed non-threats or even to be embraced. To grasp RWA, think of George W. Bush who was an evangelical pushing War On Terror as a religious crusade (i.e., shared identity of us vs them), and yet was the most immigrant-friendly president in recent decades. Compassionate conservatives are those who are much higher on RWA than they are on SDO; and, to the degree they show signs of SDO, likely higher on SDO-E (anti-egalitarianism; i.e., economic caste system) than SDO-D (dominance; i.e., social Darwinism).

Unlike Bush Jr. or Scott, Trump doesn’t have an RWA bone in his body, while glorying in SDO-style power-mongering, hate-mongering, and fear-mongering. That is why he attacks anyone of low status or outsider status, the two being the same difference in his mind. What he wants is to simply dominate, that it to say to seize status for himself while putting others in their place — imagine what he’d do if he had his own private goons or secret police or paramilitary group, or if he had the military directly under his control (Thom Hartmann, How Democracy Dies the First Month of the Next Trump or GOP Presidency). But it’s for that very reason that RWAs are so useful for his rise to power. They are the ones who, upon his suggestion, will throw their lives away in the January 6th insurrection. RWAs make useful followers for SDOs. That is why evangelicals were Trump’s biggest supporters, including his vice president Mike Pence who never spoke out against Trump when he was in office.

As such, a religious right-winger like Scott just wants to belong and fit in. He’ll do what’s expected of him, say the right talking points, and conform to whatever role is needed at the moment. He’ll be a good party hack. That is what makes him so milquetoast. He just doesn’t have the commanding personality of leadership, something that comes so natural to a narcissistic SDO. Scott is just not on the same level as Trump, no real competition. Now Ron DeSantis has serious potential of demagogic insanity. It’s likely that he is a Double High, that is to say both SDO and RWA. Many far right leaders are Double Highs. They take that true-believer fanaticism of the RWA and ramp it up with the ruthless power-seeking of SDO. But by itself, RWA is much more tame and that is what makes Scott seem so boring, unlikely to be a rising star heading into the presidency.

The true-believer aspect of RWA brings out a sincerity in how social roles are embraced in conformity. That sincerity, though, is more of a pretense because, as research shows, RWAs are simultaneously high in hypocrisy. It’s just that, even in hypocrisy, they have a total emotional commitment. This stands out from the SDO who doesn’t necessarily have any use for sincerity. The ultimate expression of SDO power and authority is to be able to blatantly lie to someone’s face, not even pretend to believe it, and get one’s followers or other inferiors to submit in not calling out their lies. That is the authoritarian big lie, and the bigger the lie the better. Just repeat the lie and the authoritarian followers will believe it. Humans, in general, have a tendency to believe what authorities assert and repeat.

Those like Trump and DeSantis are more than willing to take advantage of that, but Scott is probably less likely to do so. Though the jury is still out on Scott’s potential SDO proclivities. It’s important to understand these traits as both dispositional and situational. The SDO leaders are the kind of person who tends to be high in SDO under all conditions, but many other people will, when stressed out by inequality and inequity, express ever more SDO than they otherwise would. This is how whole societies can go mad and hence how authoritarianism takes over. High SDOs will not only seek power within high inequality but will, more importantly, seek to promote high inequality; and one suspects that high inequality likely in turn makes people vulnerable to the SDO mentality and SDO manipulations. It’s the dark political conditions, as part of the Triple Dark Triad, that we have to most worry about.

* * *

*This is the first time we’ve mentioned the Triple Dark Triad, the name of which we coined. That is because we only recently came up with what it represents, building off of earlier theory. In social sciences, there is what is called the dark triad or dark personality, what we’ve dubbed the dark personality triad to clarify it. For whatever reason, there is strong correlation between psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Sometimes sadism is added in, which then makes it the dark tetrad, but this is less commonly referred to because sadism doesn’t measure independently of the other three. That grouping has been thoroughly researched and supported.

Not discussed in the main text of this post, the opposing corollary is the light triad or the light personality: Kantianism (treating humans as ends, not means), Humanism (valuing dignity and worth of individuals), and Faith in Humanity (believing in fundamental goodness). The light personality triad would presumably correlate with liberalism and liberal-mindedness in personality research, as indicated with high rates of: openness, fluid intelligence, pattern recognition, aesthetic appreciation, perspective shifting, cognitive flexibility, cognitive complexity, ambiguity tolerance, etc.

This writing, in the main text above, barely alludes to the possibility of a light personality triad, by way of negation. If someone like Bernie Sanders (or further still, Ralph Nader) is low narcissism, low psychopathy, and low Machiavellianism, what does that make him? What kind of personality do they have instead? What would they measure high on? It seems safe to conclude that Sanders would likely fit the bill of the light personality with Kantianism, Humanism, and Faith in Humanity. But we’ve never done a specific analysis along those lines and we won’t attempt it at the moment.

These two personality triads, light and dark, placed in contrast is the closest social scientists get to speaking of good and evil. No writings in this blog have yet covered the light personality triad, and so there has been no exploration of what it might mean in relation to the dark personality triad. We will have to remedy this lack at some point. We are less familiar with the light personality and haven’t delved into that research at all. The first thought that comes to mind is, what exactly distinguishes the two? And what determines which way one’s psyche will swing? Or even what causes each triad to hang together, rather than individuals being a mix of light and dark traits?

With the dark personality triad having been on our mind for the past decade or so, we later on began developing a conception of a dark political triad. In surveying the social science and political science literature, irrespective of oft repeated claims that aren’t the same, there kept coming up links between and co-occurrence of socio-political conservatism (SCP), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and social dominance authoritarianism (SDO; SDO-D & SDO-E; the latter the primary correlate of economic conservatism). Fine, they aren’t identical phenomena, but one begins to suspect they are triplets born of the same mother, whether or not one suspects incestuous family origins.

Anyway, now giving it some thought, we surely could come up with a light political triad. Tentatively, to could consist of: liberalism (positive freedom, democracy, tolerance, acceptance, diversity, pluralism, cooperation, collaboration, consensus-building, pacifism, etc), libertarianism (negative freedom, anarchism, autonomy, independence, civil rights, humanism, feminism, anti-racism, etc), and leftism (egalitarianism, fairness, equitability, justice, solidarity, class or group consciousness, systems thinking, etc). That does capture the three broad political strands that have historically opposed the far right in Western society.

In bringing together the dark personality triad and the dark political triad, we noticed there was also a set of mechanisms by which much of this connected. So, we came up with the dark perception triad. to make it a balanced triad of triads. Looking at the same research as already mentioned, there is much similarity between what researchers call disgust response and threat response, along with what we call the stress-sickness response. As part of evolutionary psychology (and culture), it’s closely related to the behavioral immune system, the parasite-stress theory, pathogen avoidance psychology, and sickness behavior. Interestingly, some mental illnesses like depression exhibit sickness behavior, indicating it’s not a disease but the symptoms of disease; and indeed depression is commonly associated with serious diseases.

Once again, we surely could come up with a light perception triad, maybe something along the lines of: public health, low inequality, and culture of trust; or something like that. We’ll have to give this some more thought. Without a doubt, public health would have to be one of the main pillars. There has never been a successful liberal, leftist, progressive, and/or democratic government that didn’t prioritize public health. An example of this is the early 20th century municipal socialists (e.g., Milwaukee sewer socialists). Low inequality also seems a no-brainer, in how Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler, Keith Payne’s The Broken Ladder, and the work of Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson details the destabilizing and destructive force of high inequality.

But is culture of trust the equal of these other two? There has been sizeable research on it and it’s a popular topic, in being more accessible to public imagination and public debate (e.g., Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone). The only question is to what degree it represents cause or effect. The other two can be objectively measured, whereas culture of trust is more subjective and nebulous. Then again, that is the eternal challenge of human social scientists studying human nature. An argument could be made that trust very much is the opposing force of threat. So, we might speak of a trust response. Heck, we could speak of the rest in those terms, with a health response and an egalitarian response.

As with the rest, all of these have been studied independently and, as such, point to various processes, factors, and conditions. Even so, overall, the dark perception triad appears to be what specifically helps to trigger, at the population level, the dark personality triad and dark political triad, unifying it into a singular enmeshed pattern, the Triple Dark Triad. Ditto for the Triple Light Triad. To tie it all up, across thousands of studies, all of these various traits, dispositions, and factors show up again and again as linked. It’s not that each and every one of them is directly and causally linked to all of the others. It’s more like a web where numerous strands connect it together to make the whole not only greater but more powerful than the separate parts.

While we’re at it, let’s put a particular spin on the theory of the Triple Dark Triad. The key to understanding is the dark perception triad. That is telling us what motivates it all, in terms of the conditions that make it possible in individuals and particularly across an entire population. This is why we emphasize public health, as the hinge of liberal democracy and social democracy or else democratic socialism in what is called municipal socialism (e.g., Milwaukee sewer socialists). There is a reason leftists intuitively understand the importance of public health and a reason the political right correctly understands that public funding of public health is a threat to right-wing mentality and hence right-wing power.

Most people underappreciate and underestimate public health. In the biased mentality and culture of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), what some refer to as MYOPICS (Materialist, Young, Self-obsessed, Pleasure-seeking, Isolated, Consumerist, Sedentary), there is the tendency to perceive a mind-body duality and act accordingly. That is how politics gets separated from material conditions, as if ideology exists as abstract ideas, beliefs, and principles. But what some of these other theories, such as the behavioral immune system, is that ideology might be more of a result than a cause. And here we are suggesting that much of ideological behavior on the political right is specifically disease behavior, that is to say the symptoms of disease.

This sounds dismissive, but it makes perfect sense from the perspective of evolution. The Triple Dark Triad cognitive and social behaviors do increase, as research shows, with sickly conditions and with actual disease (e.g., parasite load). Still, they aren’t mere symptoms but a protective response. One could take it a step further. They also are an expression of the body’s attempt at healing. That is the explanation for why under stress, be it flu infection or depression, people seek seclusion and sleep. The body is reserving energy to redirect it toward healing. Paul Levy makes this argument about what he calls Wetiko. It is both a mind virus and an attempt of healing soul sickness.

The challenge is that the conditions that the human species evolved under is entirely different than that of modern civilization. Prior to agriculture, most environmental and social stressors were temporary and brief, and they often were easily resolved or escaped. If hunter-gatherers had inter-tribal conflict or food shortage, they could just move on. But once humans permanently settled down, such easily solutions were no longer an option. To make matters worse, agriculture caused mass health decline, from both malnutrition and pathogen exposure. That has been our situation ever since. We find ourselves trapped in chronic stress, and chronic stress is traumatizing. What we call the reactionary mind is stress-induced trauma, the natural biological response that is being suppressed and stunted.

Yet it remains what always was. It’s built into us to help us survive and to remain healthy. It’s a genuine moral impulse, even when deranged and distorted. No matter how sick we are and our society becomes, it will never be the normal state of humanity. For most of human existence, health has been the evolutionary norm. Sickness is a passing state. It’s not meant to become entrenched as an ideological identity. No one actually wants to live in the condition of chronic stress and sickliness. It’s not a happy place. But for so many people, they’ve never known anything else and so can’t imagine it. That becomes the challenge for the political left. How do we bring society back to health?

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Winthrop Poll September 2016
from Winthrop University

Scholars from Winthrop University’s Departments of Psychology and Political Science have taken a deeper dive into results from the September 2016 Winthrop Poll.

They find that those with more authoritarian personalities, as well as those who show greater preference for beliefs rooted in “social dominance,” are more likely to be supporters of Republican Presidential Nominee Donald Trump.

Winthrop Poll Director Dr. Scott Huffmon said: “Beyond understanding which demographic groups are lending support to which candidate, this research delves more deeply into what personality traits drive support toward one candidate or the other.”

The original data release noted that Trump supporters scored higher on the Authoritarian Scale than supporters of Hillary Clinton. However, this new research points out the more significant relationships between candidate preference and Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation.

Huffmon worked with faculty members Dr. Matt Hayes and Dr. Jeff Sinn from the Winthrop Department of Psychology to untangle this complex relationship.

In explaining Authoritarianism, Sinn says, “Those with more Authoritarian personalities seek order, stability, and security and are wary of non-conforming groups that may undermine group cohesiveness”

Social dominance orientation is a bit different. First, it contains two parts, attitudes described as “Pro-Dominance” and attitudes described as “Anti-egalitarian.”

Hayes explains the dominance facet as “the belief that in an ideal society some groups are on the top and should dominate groups on the bottom.” The anti-egalitarian facet “resists efforts to redistribute resources in order to achieve equality.”

Trump supporters tended to have higher scores on the Authoritarian Scale as well as the Pro-Dominance and Anti-Egalitarian scale that measure Social Dominance Orientation. “Likely Trump voters appear more authoritarian, favoring respect for authority over independence and obedience over self-reliance,” said Sinn. Hayes added that, “They are also more likely to endorse group-based dominance, seeing some groups as superior to others and, therefore, entitled to a larger share of resources, as well as oppose efforts to achieve equality between groups, rejecting the ideal of equalizing opportunity across groups.”

Whitelash: Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box
by Terry Smith

A candidate with as casual a relationship to the truth as Donald Trumpwould obviously benefit from misinformed voters, and focus groups of Trump’s supporters indicated that many of them fit this mode.34 Yet partisan differences in respect for facts and expert knowledge predate Trump’s ascendency. The polarization that marks contemporary American politics has been long in the making and developed asymmetrically—that is, Republicans have moved further to the right from the political center than Democrats have moved to the left. Thus, political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein conclude in their bestseller It’s Even Worse Than It Looks that Republicans have become “an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”35

Political psychology research reveals that conservatives exhibit a greater propensity to believe information concerning threats than information concerning benefits.36 The opposite is true of progressives. This propensity helps to explain the embrace of implausible conspiracy theories among conservatives, such as the 2015 canard that a military exercise during the Obama administration was intended to occupy and impose martial law on Texas. In response to reports in the right-wing blogosphere, the governor of Texas ordered the state’s National Guard to track the military exercise.37

Perceived threats, of course, come in different forms. A proliferating body of scholarship on the 2016 election rejects the economic explanation for Trump’s margin of victory among white voters and instead points to “status threat” as pivotal. University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz, for instance, conducted a panel study consisting of the same voters from the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. While finding little correlation between voters’ individual economic circumstances and their likelihood of voting for Trump, Mutz found a significant relationship between voters’ social dominance orientation (SDO) and support for Trump.38 SDO is measured through questions intended to ascertain animus toward outgroups—that is, minorities—and a preference for hierarchy over equality. SDO increases within a dominant group when its members feel threatened.39SDO increased significantly from2012, and, ironically, the presidency of Barack Obama partially accounts for this increase. That is because black success breeds white insecurity, which in turn accelerates SDO.40

Other post-election studies have identified this apprehension among white voters as a fear of “cultural displacement.” A 2017 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey of nearly 3,000 participants concluded that in addition to partisanship, the strongest predictors of support for Trump among the white working class, who constitute a plurality of the adult public (33 percent), were fears concerning immigration and cultural displacement.41 Cultural displacement was measured in three ways: (1) 65 percent of white working-class respondents believed that the American way of life had deteriorated since the 1950s (even though de jure segregation existed in much of the country then); (2) 68 percent of this demographic believed that the American way of life must be protected from foreign influence; and (3) nearly half of the white working class said that the pace of cultural change made them feel like strangers in their own country. Those respondents exhibiting fear of cultural displacement were three and a half times more likely to vote for Trump than those who did not.42 Heightened SDO and fear of cultural displacement do not necessarily correlate with economic insecurity. Despite their preference for Trump, a CNN/Kaiser poll taken prior to the 2016 election found that almost 63 percent of the white working class were actually satisfied with their own personal financial circumstances.43 Moreover, the PRRI study concluded that working-class whites in worse economic conditions were, in fact, some-what more likely to support Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump.44

Trump’s campaign brilliantly played to white voters’ fears. One day the boogeyman was Mexicans, the next Muslims. Blacks had their turn when Trump fabricated FBI statistics about black-on-white murders and villainized the Black Lives Matter movement. There was China and its theft of American jobs. There was Barack Obama, the “foreign-born” president who was so incompetent that when he left office he handed Trump a rebounding economy with the lowest unemployment rate in nine years. Notice a pattern here? So much of Trump’s fearmongering was done on the backs of people of color—too much to be coincidental. Trump’s ability to exploit misinformed voters was matched by his penchant for stoking their worst racial instincts. […]

Persons with a high social dominance orientation (SDO, introduced inChapter3) tend to favor ideologies and public policy that perpetuate hierarchical societal arrangements and thus inequality itself.31 SDO is highly correlated with political–economic conservatism.32That is, the more conservative a person’s political ideology, the greater the person’s SDO tends to be. The correlation between conservatism and SDO, in turn, may explain why conservatism is correlated with racism: persons with high SDO also tend to harbor anti-black predispositions.33