Lest someone believe this means human nature is becoming considerably more tolerant…

… the true believers and the superpatriots will always be with us. Do we have a particular hangup as a society that we can’t stop flogging the dead horse of the culture wars? There are a wealth of experimental findings indicating that “authoritarian personality traits” are a distinct and prevalent factor behind the rally to conservative and religious causes, and these traits are highly responsive to the specific language and values of those causes. Hardly all conservatives or religiously faithful are authoritarian, but enough are to make a mess of political discourse. And their perennial antagonists are apparently a significant constituency too: knee-jerk “anti-authoritarians.”

This is not George Lakoff’s premise that Dems can simply adopt a wholesome “nucular family values frame” and make off like bandits in the next election. Instead, this is a finding that substantiates why, in tolerant political environments, stubborn antagonisms are so vexingly easily to stir up. Furthermore, that plague of the modern political sphere, negative advertising, has tapped this issue consciously. (See Tali Mendelberg’s now-famous study.) There are spectacular spikes in expressed authoritarian / anti-authoritarian values when psychologists prime people with “perceived threats.” The triggering threat can be as insubstantial as voicing a stance considered unpatriotic on an abstract value. Studies show the spike in authoritarian opinions shows up even at the mere rhetorical suggestion of “disagreement” among social camps … on the most insignificant public issues. (One experiment used the debate over declassifying UFO studies, and got a huge spike in expressed authoritarianism merely by making it clear there was mildly heated debate on this flimsy issue.)

That’s worth repeating: Authoritarian perceptions arise to some extent out of a strong perception that mere dissensus is a threat. So language like “country first” isn’t redneck lingo. It has a habituated appeal that runs far deeper than mere sentiment. Racial prejudice (the issue of intolerance we’re most concerned with) is probably just icing on the cake — skin color is a patently obvious social fissure that, just by its appearance in conjunction with social debates, has always gotten a good percentage of people explicitly or unconsciously riled.

Like everyone, I’m wary of reifying any of this research as the clearest understanding of what leads on to what. Note, though, that all of this is quite unrecognizable within the great tradition in political science that says that all voter decisions rest on ignorance (Lippmann, Converse, Downs). For more on how these perceived threat dynamics impact our political impasses, good material to consult is Gibson, Stenner, Mendelberg and even Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom). And (shudder) there’s always Stanley Milgram.

As Matt likes to say, it’s important to follow demographics and polling responses, but results hinge so much on how questions are pitched (framed / primed).

How questions are framed is ultimately in the hands of the parties, who discipline and amplify different rhetorical tropes.

Just ’cause the Republican party is facing a tough fight now, it don’t mean they lost their mojo.

The next Karl Rove or Lee Attwater (or Dick Morris) is going to have no trouble tapping the same underlying threat perceptions through the non-issues du jour. It will always be a challenge to overcome that polarizing process.

(Matt, I’ve been pestering you about PACs because I still have no sense for what tips the playing field in terms of campaign money and business’ regulatory and taxation fears. Usually, corporations don’t just follow their gut, right? But PACs do have power to polarize rhetoric.)

In this read of democratic reality, there are days that dawn a little brighter. Some evidence shows that even among authoritarians, ethnic differences can be made to lose their salience. More important, the way it can happen looks exactly like the moment we are living through now: An ethnic minority isn’t just beating expectations, he has come to power and been universally annointed to take up the role legitimate “supreme authority” to settle our social disputes. (Gibson, among others, did great work on South Africa that reveals some of this in regard to Mandela’s time in office.) The wingnuts won’t evaporate, who cling to an alternate, conspiratorial narrative, but they will be the exception to a more broadly peaceful trend. Economic downturn and a future uptick in urban violence could blunt the effect somewhat, but not completely.