『MAGA is a Support Group for Weak People』のカバーアート

MAGA is a Support Group for Weak People

MAGA is a Support Group for Weak People

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There is a pattern that shows up in the research on authoritarianism that almost nobody talks about publicly. Not because it is hidden. Because it is uncomfortable.The people who fill megachurches on Sundays and the people who fill MAGA rallies on weeknights are, in disproportionate numbers, the same people. Not metaphorically. Psychometrically. They score the same on the same instruments, hold the same cluster of personality traits, and respond to the same structural incentives. Both institutions offer the same product, packaged differently but functionally identical: status and power distributed on the basis of loyalty, not competence.What Altemeyer Actually MeasuredBob Altemeyer was a social psychologist at the University of Manitoba who spent his entire career studying a single question: what kind of person submits to authoritarian leaders, and why?In 1981, he published Right-Wing Authoritarianism, introducing the RWA scale, a psychometric instrument that measures three interlocking traits. He called them the Big Three.The first is authoritarian submission. This is not ordinary respect for authority. It is a blanket willingness to defer to whoever the individual perceives as a legitimate authority, and to accept their claims without scrutiny, even when those claims conflict with observable reality. High scorers on this trait will tell you that people should obey authority in virtually all circumstances. When given moral dilemmas, they default to “the law is the law” regardless of the situation. They do not evaluate whether an authority figure is competent, honest, or acting in good faith. They evaluate whether that figure occupies a position they recognize as legitimate. If so, they comply.The second is authoritarian aggression. This is a willingness to punish, condemn, or attack people that the authority figure has identified as threats or deviants. The aggression is not indiscriminate. It is directed. High scorers do not attack people in general. They attack whoever the leader points at. And they do so with a sense of moral righteousness, because the leader has told them the target deserves it. Altemeyer noted that authoritarian followers prefer to aggress when the odds are heavily in their favor. They are not courageous. They attack in groups, when they have numbers, or when they have institutional backing. They avoid anything approaching a fair fight.The third is conventionalism. This is an intense attachment to traditional social norms and a hostility toward anyone perceived as violating them. High scorers want everyone to live the way they live. They view deviation from their norms not as difference but as moral failure. They see the world in categories of “normal” and “deviant,” and they want deviance punished.These three traits form a self-reinforcing loop. You submit to the authority. You attack whoever the authority tells you to attack. And you demand that everyone conform to the norms the authority endorses. Submission fuels aggression. Aggression enforces conventionalism. Conventionalism justifies submission.Altemeyer tested this cluster across thousands of subjects over four decades. His results were remarkably stable. The personality profile he identified in the early 1980s predicted the same behaviors in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. It predicted support for punitive policing, opposition to civil rights, endorsement of government surveillance, hostility toward immigrants, and consistent support for leaders who promised order through dominance.He published updated findings in 1988, 1996, and again in his free online book The Authoritarians in 2006. And then, with John Dean, in Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers in 2020, he applied his scale directly to the MAGA movement and found exactly what his data had been predicting for four decades.The Dominators and the FollowersAltemeyer’s framework has two halves, and most people only know the first.The authoritarian followers are the base. They are the submissive crowd. They want someone above them telling them what to do and someone below them to punish. They score high on the RWA scale.But Altemeyer also studied the leaders. He called them social dominators. These are the people who want to be submitted to. They score high on a different instrument, the Social Dominance Orientation scale, originally developed by Felicia Pratto and Jim Sidanius. Social dominators are characterized by a desire for personal power, a willingness to manipulate and deceive, low empathy, and opposition to equality. They see the world as a hierarchy and they want to be at the top.The two types need each other. Social dominators need a compliant base that will follow instructions without asking questions. Authoritarian followers need a leader who will tell them who to blame and who to punish. The relationship is parasitic but stable. The leader lies. The followers believe. The leader points. The followers attack. Neither side examines the...
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