AMERICA TRUMPED

SOCIAL DOMINANCE ORIENTATION

Elucidating right-wing authoritarianism

In his book, Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean of Watergate infamy—that chapter in American politics that saw the fall of President Nixon, due in good part to Dean’s testimony as former White House Counsel—describes cogently Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) embodied in Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). SDO is the brain child specific to Social Dominance Theory (SDT) first proposed by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto as a key measurable component of such orientation. The backbone of Mr. Dean’s exposition is research and writing by Robert “Bob” Altemeyer, Professor of Psychology, University of Manitoba retired.

"SDT begins with the empirical observation that surplus-producing social systems have a threefold group-based hierarchical structure: age-based, gender-based and ‘arbitrary set-based,’ which can include race, class, sexual orientation, caste, ethnicity, religious affiliation, etc. Age-based hierarchies invariably give more power to adults and middle-age people than children and younger adults, and gender-based hierarchies invariably grant more power to men than women, but arbitrary-set hierarchies—though quite resilient—are truly arbitrary.”

Dean holds the view that individuals who score high on both tests crafted to measure either RWA or SDO traits belong to a most dangerous special subclass called “Double High authoritarian.” The author intimates that such personalities can be, in the extreme, hard-wired for ruthlessly grabbing and holding power through more powerful persons; even suspending the morality prohibitions of their professed religious affiliation.

Double-High influences are clearly at play in Trump's autocratic presidency, and the Republican Party’s dissolve into the Party of Trump. For me, the Double High moniker coalesces all the word constructions marinating the daily news cycle into a graspable reason for Trumpism. The enabling and protecting of Trump’s nepotistic criminal enterprise by Congressional Republicans, Attorney General lackey, William Barr, and supporting political base — despite its clear and present danger to our country and democracy, demonstrates the depth of moral turpitude and hypocrisy infecting the far-right. They can’t be turned, they can’t be persuaded. What they can be, though, is impeached out of office and voted out of relevancy — if Democrats in Congress steel their spines, liberal-progressives shed their apathy, and get their backsides to the voting polls.

Instead of trying to out intellectualize each other in proposing how this pernicious contagion overtook us, and squabbling over which white guy’s got a better chance of unseating Trump (dynamic women running be damned), we could strike a blow for real change. Rather than playing it ‘safe,’ choosing patriarchal convention to remedy patriarchal villainy, we break its back and elect a worthy woman. Best not to 'feed the cold,' but 'starve the fever.’

Still, if understanding the epidemiology of White Nationalist/Supremacist infatuation with Donald Trump is keeping you up at night, you might turn to a quote appended in Rick Reilly's book, Commander in Cheat, ascribed to Dr. Lance Dodes, co-author of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: "He needs to be the best at everything. He can't stand not winning, not being the best. It had to start very early in his development. To him, not being the best is like fingernails on the blackboard to you. He can’t live with it … He exaggerates his golf scores and his handicap for the same reason he exaggerates everything. He has to. He exhibits all the traits of a narcissistic personality disorder. People with his disorder have no conscience about it. He has no sense of morality about things. He lacks empathy toward others. He’s a very ill man. He doesn’t get that other people have rights and feelings. Other people just don’t matter to him.”

The time has come to break the back of the age-old patriarchy that’s held human history in suspended animation of a fully-fledged enlightened society. We've gone to the moon, but not to the core of our being. It is getting there that is the province of an awakened society with eyes wide open to the crumbling of our democracy. It is not a war of righteousness we fight but of “sighted-ness”… before it's too late.

— Carl Hitchens

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