This is worth a read, to understand conservative thinking:
members.shaw.ca
RWA = right wing authoritarians - from page 55
Authoritarian followers score highly on the Dangerous World scale, and it’s not
just because some of the items have a religious context. High RWAs are, in general,
more afraid than most people are. They got a “2 for 1 Special Deal” on fear somehow.
Maybe they’ve inherited genes that incline them to fret and tremble. Maybe not. But
we do know that they were raised by their parents to be afraid of others, because both
the parents and their children tell us so.
Sometimes it’s all rather predictable: authoritarians’ parents taught fear of
homosexuals, radicals, atheists and pornographers. But they also warned their
children, more than most parents did, about kidnappers, reckless drivers, bullies and
drunks--bad guys who would seem to threaten everyone’s children. So authoritarian
followers, when growing up, probably lived in a scarier world than most kids do, with
a lot more boogeymen hiding in dark places, and they’re still scared as adults. For
them, gay marriage is not just unthinkable on religious grounds, and unnerving
because it means making the “abnormal” acceptable. It’s yet one more sign that
perversion is corrupting society from the inside-out, leading to total chaos. Many
things, from stem cell research to right-to-die legislation, say to them, “This is the last
straw; soon we’ll be plunged into the abyss.” So probably did, in earlier times,
women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, sex education and Sunday shopping.
Thus it turns out in experiments that a person’s fear of a dangerous world
predicts various kinds of authoritarian aggression better than any other unpleasant
feeling I have looked at. As my mentor, Brewster Smith of the University of
California at Santa Cruz, said when I told him that fear set off authoritarian aggression
more than anything else, “We do have to fear fear itself.”
And of course fear rose in the United States after 9/11. As Dave Barry put it in a column in November 2004,
“Attorney General John Ashcroft has issued one of those vague, yet at the same time,unhelpful federal terrorism warnings that boil down to: ‘Be afraid! Be very afraid!’” Events like the attacks of 9/11 can drive large parts of a population to being as
frightened as authoritarian followers are day after day. In calm, peaceful times as well
as in genuinely dangerous ones, high RWAs feel threatened. They have agreed on the
RWA scale, year after year since the 1970s, that sinfulness has brought us to the point
of ruin. There’s always a national crisis looming ahead. All times are troubled times
that require drastic action. |
