2 - Kindred Spirits, Common Spark: The Theory of the Authoritarian Dynamic

Summary

If we hope to make real progress in understanding predispositions to intolerance of difference, then it is no longer sufficient simply to admire the empirical regularities – the variance “accounted for” – and to persist in our lazy conviction that whatever authoritarianism is, whatever its origins and essential nature, it is somehow fundamentally implicated in this cluster of intolerant attitudes and behaviors. I develop in this chapter my own argument regarding what I have labeled the authoritarian dynamic (Stenner 1997). This posits a dynamic process in which an enduring individual predisposition interacts with changing environmental conditions – specifically, conditions of “normative threat” – to produce manifest expressions of intolerance. I will show that this hypothesized dynamic can resolve the persistent empirical puzzles that I have described, and reconcile theoretical perspectives alternately emphasizing the individual psychology or environmental conditions conducive to intolerance.

The first step forward is to distinguish among the sources of authoritarianism, the predisposition itself, and the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of authoritarianism: racial, political, and moral intolerance. Once we unpack these pieces of the puzzle, we can strip authoritarianism down to an elemental predisposition that is not tautological with the dependent variables it purports to “explain”; allow for manifold sources, including both psychological factors and social learning; and admit that the relationship between the predisposition and its manifest products depends upon the environment, that is, that societal conditions affect the extent to which those predispositions are expressed in racist and intolerant attitudes and behaviors.