How the authoritarian dynamic shaped UK politics

Recently, on Twitter, the work of Karen Stenner generated some excellent debate. In her book, The Authoritarian Dynamic (2005), she builds a strong case that authoritarianism is a trait is always present within society. She predicts that roughly a third of any population will have the predisposition, the implications of which are far-reaching and profound. They were explored brilliantly in a thread by @dasvee (das_v, 2021). Crucial to the argument is that levels of threat are knowingly manipulated by politicians with the help of a complicit media. Understanding how authoritarianism can be triggered can help answer some of the most puzzling questions. Why, for example, does Tory support remain so consistently high? Why do people often vote against their own interests? Why is the strategy of division so effective?

Investigations into the authoritarian disposition derive from the catastrophes of the 20th Century. They acknowledge that for a nation state to become fascist, the people themselves must play some role. In 1950, Theodor W. Adorno wrote The Authoritarian Personality. It explored whether fascism might be something embedded within a personality. He devised the F-scale to assess the strength of this supposed tendency. While useful, his methodology was criticised for being tautological. It amounted to asking directly for the property being sought. “Are you a fascist?” In that case you must be a fascist.

Stenner, among others, questioned the idea that fascism could be an innate trait. She reasoned that something more basic was happening. She proposed that roughly a third of any population will harbour a strong yearning for oneness and sameness, which does not amount to the same thing as being fascist. Under conditions of threat, this tendency can manifest itself as an intense dislike for diversity. The disposition is not innately political.

The concept is powerful because it means that one third of a population will have predictable responses to certain threats. Stenner used child-rearing questions as an assessment measure because they avoid the tautological problems of the F-scale. In one US experiment, having screened a cohort of subjects, she sent interviewers to their homes in pairs. Some interviewers were black and some were white. Subjects with an authoritarian disposition often responded to black interviewers with a drop in cognitive ability equivalent to losing several school grades (roughly 9th grade to 4th grade). Without prompting, respondents often mentioned they had a gun in the house (Lewis, 2021).

The reason for this deeply embedded trait is almost certainly connected with evolution. It must have given members of small groups a survival advantage. It resonates with a branch of evolutionary theory known as Game Theory, which is used to evaluate survival strategies (Veritasium, 2015).

Clearly, ancient survival strategies are not likely to work well in our complex, multi-layered world. To an unscrupulous politician they offer a simple lever to pull. One third of voters are yours if you dare pull the lever. The change in thinking that occurs once the disposition is triggered, as evidenced in Stenner’s experiment, is too seductive a reward. Those disposed to authoritarianism revert to heuristics - mental shortcuts. They cease to reason in the normal way.

Stenner wrote:

Authoritarians prove to be relentlessly sociotropic boundary maintainers, norm enforcers and cheerleaders for authority whose classic defensive stances are activated by the experience or perception of threat to those boundaries, norms and authorities.

We can take Stenner’s ideas and apply them to our own political situation in the UK. The overriding political event has been Brexit. To pull the authoritarian lever, the EU was turned into a cartoon enemy by Vote Leave, who drew upon existing prejudices to build a normative threat level sufficient to activate authoritarianism. It worked by provoking fears that English values (our sameness) were under attack. The provocations were delivered by a relentless media that stood to gain financially (by selling more papers) and ideologically. Slogans, repeated endlessly, indicated the boundaries that were to be defended; slogans that helped raise threat levels to the point where heuristic thinking took over. The mantra of “seventeen point four million” became a rallying cry. It framed enemies of Vote Leave as anti-democratic, while simultaneously defining Vote Leave followers as the in-group. The identity of the in-group was bolstered by references to WW2, encouraging the group to seek oneness against a common foe. In providing an existential threat to our way of life, the Vote Leave campaign mobilised metaphors and symbols of an imaginary past. Once authoritarianism had been triggered, rational argument became useless. Remainers were denounced as unpatriotic and undemocratic. Being on the Remain side put you in the out-group, an enemy.

Source: Number Cruncher Politics, 2016.

Finally, the much-repeated slogan “take back control of our borders”, and the lie that Turkey would soon join the EU, were given increasing prominence in the closing stages. Racial difference is probably the strongest trigger for authoritarians. Vote Leave, guided by Dominic Cummings, was able to provoke an authoritarian uprising just long enough to win the referendum. The sudden dip in Brexit support and corresponding upturn in don't knows can be explained by the murder of Jo Cox.

 Clearly, this approach depended on fomenting division. It shares some similarities with sadopopulism (Snyder, 2017), which holds that power can be obtained by turning sections of the people against other sections. For the purposes of this essay, we can say that Brexit was a one-off event that formed two new sections in society, Vote Leave and Remain. The Vote Leave campaign corralled authoritarians from across political boundaries into a single, united group that had a strong identity (oneness). Understanding what happened to that group can help explain the puzzle of the polls.

Recall that the Conservative Party shifted vehemently to a Vote Leave position, to assimilate the Brexit Party. It jettisoned Remain MPs such as Dominic Grieve, and it won the 2019 General Election on a promise of “get Brexit done”. Whereas previous Conservative administrations had associated themselves with things like prudent economic management, this one had focused almost entirely on Brexit. It had decided that with the help of the media, First Past the Post, and the popularity of Johnson, it could incorporate the Vote Leave authoritarians into its ranks. So, not only did the Conservative Party concentrate its own authoritarian stock, but it also co-opted an authoritarian support base.

Consequently, the government was no longer interested in serving the public interest. As Phil Syrpis (2021) has argued so well, the politics of self-interest took over. The government was only concerned with managing its authoritarian base, either by appeasement or by manipulating threat levels. From Stenner’s research, we know that authoritarians are likely to be averse to complexity. They tend to have low cognitive capacity. And they will become “cheerleaders for authority” if their group values are attacked. Unfortunately, this makes them impervious to the kinds of news that would normally shift the polls. Allegiance to the in-group will always prevail. As the following graph suggests (Griffiths and Larner, 2021), the perception that the government performed well with regard to Covid-19 was not shifted by any other factor than having voted for Brexit.

Courting the authoritarian is a strategy fraught with danger. The craving for oneness and sameness, once triggered, can unleash extreme intolerance for out-groups. As we have seen with the storming of the Capitol, violence can erupt, and democracy come under threat.

The UK government is now poised to trigger Article 16, a clause in the Northern Ireland Protocol. As Raphael Behr (2021) has argued, this could lock the government into a downward spiral. With the help of the media, the government can easily portray the EU as the enemy once again. The government could then be trapped into a cycle of ever more belligerent rounds of escalation, or risk losing its core vote if it backed down. In short, the Vote Leave campaign has ended led us into a very dangerous one-way street.

References

Behr, R. (2021) ‘Boris Johnson has condemned Britain to replay Brexit on a loop’, The Guardian, 2nd November [Online]. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/02/boris-johnson-britain-brexit-northern-ireland-protocol-fishing-sovereignty (Accessed 6 November 2021).

das_v (2021) ‘1/ Thread on understanding the authoritarian disposition. @dasvee, Tweet [Online]. Available at https://twitter.com/dasvee/status/1450404018258391046 (Accessed 6 November 2021).

Griffiths, James, and Jac Larner. 2021. “Democratic Accountability in a Crisis: Analysing Evaluations of Government Response to COVID-19 in a Multi-Nation State.” APSA Preprints. doi: 10.33774/apsa-2021-p1dpl. This content is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.

Lewis, H. (2021) The Spark - Karen Stenner and the authoritarian predisposition - BBC Sounds [Online]. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000y7sq (Accessed 6 November 2021).

Number Cruncher Politics (2016) Number Cruncher Politics EU referendum [Online]. Available at https://www.ncpolitics.uk/uk-eu-referendum/ (Accessed 6 November 2021).

Snyder (2017) Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 4: Sadopopulism [Online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOjJtEkKMX4 (Accessed 6 November 2021).

Stenner, K. (2005) The authoritarian dynamic, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Syrpis (2021) ‘I have been reading and listening to a lot of analyses of the reshuffle. Pretty much all of them seem to me to be wide of the mark. THREAD 1/14’, @syrpis, Tweet [Online]. Available at https://twitter.com/syrpis/status/1438422799094329347 (Accessed 6 November 2021).

Veritasium (2015) Evolutionarily Stable Strategies ft. Richard Dawkins [Online]. Available at https://youtu.be/mUxt--mMjwA (Accessed 6 November 2021).