Check In on the Authoritarians in Your Life

If we don’t offer them a place to belong, someone else will.

(Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images.)

My uncle has never heard a conspiracy theory he didn’t like: the JFK assassination, “PizzaGate,” QAnon. I’d often wake up to his frantic messages imploring me to discover the “Truth.”

Uncle David is, by all other accounts, a good guy. He’s a God-fearing Christian, a World War II buff who’s been married to the same woman for 50 years. His worst run-in with the law was a speeding ticket in 1997. The only time he swears is at himself on the golf course.

He’s also an authoritarian.

Roughly one-third of us have a predisposition to authoritarianism. It is found on both the right and left. Authoritarians possess a handful of shared traits, like obedience to authority figures. Naturally, the right and the left bow to different “authorities.” For our purposes, I’ll focus on the right-wing variety of authoritarians, like my uncle, from here on out.

The question that drives most authoritarians is: How are we alike? Unfortunately, a perfect storm of environmental and cultural factors is making it harder than ever to find the answer to that question. We don’t share much in common these days—beliefs, values, norms, even realities.

In the past, churches, families, and schools would provide opportunities to discover similarities with one’s neighbors. With all three in various states of decline, David and those like him feel America is less united and more at odds than ever.

By several measures, the country also appears more chaotic—increased shoplifting, campus protests, assassination attempts, and the most frequent subject of David’s ire (still), “Biden’s open borders.”

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Reason To Believe

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It took me a while to admit that many of my uncle’s fears were not unfounded. For example, the Biden administration did let in more and turn away fewer “illegals” (as David calls them) than any president in recent memory. And it does suck that, thanks to anti-theft measures, I now need a CVS employee to grant me access to deodorant.

It’s tempting to dismiss the Uncle Davids of the world as xenophobes and racists. But to do so would be to misunderstand authoritarians and the increasingly important battle for their loyalty. “Malleable” is a better descriptor of this personality type, according to Dr. Karen Stenner, a political psychologist and behavioral economist. Surprisingly, research shows that authoritarians have no trouble living next to someone of a different race or religion, so long as they have some things in common. That might be an NFL team, a church, or a community group. In times gone by, it was a shared identity as an American.

Under these conditions, authoritarians make great neighbors. Because they’re very “other-oriented,” they’d likely be the first to help you change a tire or shovel your driveway—assuming they perceive you as “one of us.”

Unfortunately, the malleability of authoritarians is a double-edged sword.

Not long ago, something strange started to happen. Uncle David’s messages shifted from wacky conspiracies (Hillary Clinton’s pizza-shop-based child-sex-trafficking ring) to stories that were oddly pro-Russian. He shared a clip from the now-infamous Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin in which Carlson praises the Moscow metro, “There’s no graffiti, no filth, no foul smells. There are no bums, or drug addicts, or rapists, or people waiting to push you on the tracks… It’s perfectly clean and orderly.”

“Maybe New York could learn something,” David jabbed.

“…be more like Putin?” I snarked back.

David isn’t alone. A surprising number of Americans have cozied up to Russia’s leader. One popular podcast host, Joey Mannarino, spoke for many when he said that he’d “take Putin over Biden any day.”

For authoritarians, few things are as unsettling as the chaos and normlessness that Carlson described. And it seems they will listen to anyone who might stop it. A charitable interpretation of Mannarino’s words is, “I’ll take law and order over chaos any day”—a view shared by most authoritarians (and anyone who’s recently shopped at a CVS).

Russia, China, and all those supportive of what Eliot Cohen calls their “Coalition of the Malevolent” have gone to great lengths to link democracies to chaos and instability—authoritarians’ greatest fears. They point to examples of Western upheaval or decline and tell their citizens: “See, this is what happens when you get mixed up with those freedom-loving liberal democracies.”

These arguments are powerful for several reasons:

1. Environment and culture. Our rapidly changing country can make it harder to discover sameness, which is especially unnerving for authoritarians. This is made worse by progressives, whose failure to self-police illiberal, anti-American behavior has also pushed authoritarians away.

2. Chaos is easy. It’s much more difficult to maintain order than it is to create chaos, just as it only takes one car to disrupt traffic. This is called “entropy,” a truth of thermodynamics that is also democracy’s greatest challenge.

3. Authoritarians aren’t going anywhere. One of Dr. Stenner’s key findings is that the presence of the authoritarian personality type is consistent across space and time. Like introversion or extroversion, the trait is largely heritable, which means we’re unlikely to get rid of it.

All of this may seem dire, but Stenner’s message is ultimately one of hope. Under the wrong circumstances, America-loving patriots like Uncle David will become agents of chaos—the sort of people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Under the right circumstances, however, authoritarians can be the ideal neighbor. Their fierce loyalty and selflessness make them willing to fight—even die—to protect the group. It seems obvious to say, but these are desirable traits.

We can—and should—give people like David more chances to find and celebrate sameness, which will help prevent them from falling down that rabbit hole.

This will require us to learn to downplay our differences, and to recognize that doing so makes us more, not less, American. Indeed, “American” is the only identity to which we can all belong, provided you subscribe to a few binding beliefs—liberty, justice, and equality.

This was demonstrated by Captain Humayun Khan, a Muslim-American soldier who was killed in Iraq while protecting his unit from a suicide bomber. Khan’s father, who emigrated from Pakistan, glorified his son’s sacrifice at the 2016 Democratic National Convention while holding the Constitution in his hand. Khan’s story reveals the enduring power of the American experiment—and the pliability of identity. It’s a vision I’m certain authoritarians are receptive to. It’s up to us to articulate and promote it.

The question is not, “Authoritarians: good or bad?” It’s “Authoritarians: how can we bring out the best in them?” Whether they become America’s greatest asset or its Achilles heel is largely up to us.

One thing is certain: if we don’t give Uncle David and the authoritarians among us something to belong to, someone else will.

Mark Hasman writes the Apologetic Millennial blog and Substack newsletter.

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