What is Authoritarian Submission?
Some people go way beyond the norm and submit to authority even when it is dishonest, corrupt, unfair and evil.
According to Altemeyer, for the purpose of his RWA scale, Authoritarian submission is when a person submits “to corrupt authorities in their lives: to believe them when there is little reason to do so, to trust them when huge grounds for suspicion exist, and to hold them blameless when they do something wrong.”
Authoritarians have been raised knowing which authorities to follow, but not why they are authorities or what makes them worth following. They often do not have the critical faculties to engage with the facts of the matter, so they cling on long after it is untenable. To use one of Altemeyer’s examples, Authoritarian individuals believed that Nixon was innocent in the Watergate scandal even after he accepted a pardon for his crimes.
Today, while some individuals are finally waking up to the fact that Trump is a liar, a felon, and an adjudicated rapist, Authoritarians – who would normally find all of these things anathema – continue to cling to Trump, making increasingly absurd claims as to why (and why he’s the greatest president ever). I tend to broadly agree with Stephen Hassan’s book ‘The Cult of Trump’ about the use of brainwashing techniques in the Trump campaign (and, further, throughout Republican media infrastructure for decades), but that, I suspect, explains mostly the non-Authoritarian followers. Authoritarians were there at the start and they’ll likely still be there at the end, and even beyond.
The thing about Authoritarian followers, however, is that some are also leaders, that is until they encounter a leader who is more of a leader than them. We’ve all seen Trump fan-boying over Putin and wished we hadn’t. Additionally, Authoritarians care more about hierarchy than most, so when someone is higher up the pecking order, Authoritarian followers kow-tow as a matter of course. Altemeyer was writing his book during George W Bush’s second term in office, and characterized Bush, Jr., as the most authoritarian president in his lifetime (an assessment he did update with Trump). He also provided an example of Authoritarian submission by a follower who had attained high office, but bowed and scraped for the leader in even higher office:
“…you won’t find a better example of authoritarian submission in government than that displayed by Steven Bradbury, the Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, on July 11, 2006. At the end of June the Supreme Court ruled that the Pentagon’s use of special military commissions to try suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay violated the Geneva Conventions and the United States Uniform Code of Military Justice. Bradbury appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain what the administration was therefore going to do instead. Pressed by Senator Leahy of Vermont to say whether President Bush was right in his assessment of the situation, Bradbury replied, “The president is always right.” Is Bradbury wildly atypical? Investigations into the December, 2006 firing of the eight U.S. attorneys suggests that George W. Bush has placed hundreds of “true believers” in the highest levels of his administration, many of them products of Pat Robertson’s Regency University, who put loyalty to the president above all other concerns.”
Let us not forget that George W Bush appointed 327 Article III Federal Judges, including the current Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts. So, whilst the Supreme Court certainly gained its 6:3 “conservative” majority under Trump, the groundwork was being laid two decades ago.
The courts are not the only hierarchical structure in which Authoritarian followers might succeed, only to submit when the right leader comes along. There are also such followers in the police and military, which is a problem when you consider the next trait of Authoritarian followers – high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities – which we’ll dip into next time.