This new report from Democracy Corps, based on a series of focus group studies, divides the Republican Party into three camps: Tea Partiers, Evangelicals, and moderates. To show how political psychology can add depth to public opinion research, we thought it would be useful to map these three groups onto the dual-process motivational model of ideology. We’ll use the participants’ own words to link them to a specific set of psychological motivations, and then show how a psychological model tells you far more about what’s going on inside the Republican Party than you can learn by taking their attitudes at face value.
ideology as psychological motivation
Over the past fifteen years, political psychologists have come to the conclusion that ideological beliefs and behaviors have their origins in psychology. They have identified two schematic domains, or axes, which appear to be the pillars of ideology: right wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). People with high RWA perceive the social world as fundamentally dangerous; at the other end of the spectrum, people with low RWA perceive the social world as fundamentally safe. People with high SDO perceive the social world as fundamentally competitive; at the other end of the spectrum, people with low SDO perceive the world as fundamentally cooperative.
Is the world fundamentally dangerous, safe, competitive, or cooperative? We cannot say for sure, but what shapes a person’s ideology is which of these they perceive. Each of these four worldviews — which are as much psychological predispositions as they are organized systems of belief — come packaged with set of perceptual filters, cognitive and personality traits, and socio-political demands.
High RWAs, or repressives, see the world as fundamentally dangerous. They are fearful, anxious, and see potential threats everywhere they look. Seeing the world this way leads them to demand social conformity and submissive obedience to traditional authorities. It also leads them support punitive sanctions designed to enforce both. Prejudice, ethnocentrism, conventionalism, religiosity, conformity, intolerance of ambiguity, hostile aggression, need for order, and cognitive closure are all found in ample doses among repressives.
Low RWAs, or expressives, see the world as fundamentally safe, stable, and secure. These individualistic, even a bit self-absorbed types, are strongly motivated to pursue personal freedom and autonomy, prefer new truths over inherited traditions, and have a tendency to speak out against repressive authorities through acts of rebellion and free expression. Expressives are generally open to new experiences, display a greater need for accuracy, and prefer greater cognitive complexity. They are generally inclusive of deviant groups and out-groups and tend to prefer non-violent solutions.
High SDOs, or dominators, see the world in fundamentally competitive terms. They perceive the world as a competitive social jungle, requiring a ruthless Darwinian struggle for survival. These Machiavellian personalities are motivated to seek superiority over others, value winning above all else, and believe might equals right. Dominators have a strong preference for social, economic, and political inequality, as well as hierarchy and status. They value power, achievement, efficiency, toughness, maleness, and hedonism. They also tend to lack empathy, show an interest in manipulating others, express enormous cynicism, and believe the ends justify the means.
Low SDOs, or cooperators, see the world in fundamentally cooperative terms. These cooperative, confident individuals perceive a world of plenty that is too often corrupted by unfair privilege. Motivated to help others, they demand greater social, economic, and political equality, and generally prefer altruism and humanitarianism over exploitation and coercion. Their egalitarian spirit makes them highly agreeable, respectful, compassionate, and empathetic. They are the quintessential problem-solvers and team players, always looking for win-win solutions to life’s problems.
These four psychological temperaments are the building blocks of all ideology. Every individual person has within them both the RWA and SDO trait domains, and the potential to manifest the behaviors and traits all four end-poles. What determines their ideology is how the RWA and SDO domains interact with each other. For instance, a person with high RWA and low SDO (dangerous world / cooperative world) will perceive the world in very different terms than a person with high RWA and high SDO (dangerous world / competitive world), although their mutual high RWA means they will have some things in common.
But there’s a problem: even though everyone possesses both schematic domains (no matter where they may land on each one), the two domains are in some respects inherently incompatible. Consider as an example: the appropriate response to a dangerous situation is very different from the appropriate response to a competitive situation. Likewise, the tendency to individuate so commonly found in expressives is inherently in tension with the kind of psychological sublimation necessary for teamwork and demanded by cooperatives. So how does a person with both expressive and cooperative tendencies resolve the contradictions between them?
The tension between the two gives rise to motivational imperatives. In other words, people gravitate toward groups and situations, cling to worldviews and belief-systems, and make social and political demands that resolve the contradictions between the contrasting schematic postures pulling at them from within. This unconscious attempt to resolve the contradictions gives rise to nine basic motivational imperatives. The chart below illustrates the nine motivational imperatives that arise when high, average, and low social dominance orientation are plotted along the horizontal X-axis, while high, average, and low right wing authoritarianism are plotted along the vertical Y-axis.
Based on their own words, we believe that Tea Party Republicans are driven by libertine motivations, Evangelical Republicans are driven by reactionary motivations, and moderate Republicans straddle the border of conventionalist and elitist motivations.
tea party republicans: anti-government libertines
Libertine motivations arise out of a combination of high social dominance orientation and low right wing authoritarianism. The central contradiction behind the libertine motivational imperative pits the expressive’s desire to rebel at authority against the dominator’s desire to ascend to authority. The competitive instinct makes the libertine want to be on top. The expressive instinct makes the libertine lash want to lash out at anyone else who already is.
The result is an ideological temperament that perceives the individual self, and other manifestations of private power, as the highest forms of authority — while exhibiting deep hostility at public sources of authority. Libertines perceive public authority as being in direct competition with the rights and prerogatives of the individual. The relationship between the individual and the state is thus zero-sum. State authority comes at the direct and immediate expense of private authority, and the two are always in competition. The state, to them, is an object of contempt — always looking to foster dependencies, which they perceive as a form of enslavement.
To satisfy the contradiction between their desire for supreme power and their tendency to rebel against authority, libertines place themselves and their own wishes above the prerogatives of the state. When they perceive that the state has accumulated too much power or abused it, they will lash out using whatever means are at their disposal — regardless of the legality, morality, or consequences. In the most extreme cases, libertine motivations can devolve into something that looks like right wing anarchism. Those familiar with the history of modern terrorism will recognize libertine motivations in the treatises written by leaders of the anarchist terror cells that once plagued Europe (and to a lesser extent the United States) during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. But even when they don’t turn to violence, libertines typically adopt the rhetoric, style, intellectual and political posture of insurrection.
Because low RWA contributes to libertine motivations, prejudice is usually not a central motivation for their actions. But their high SDO means their demands, if carried out, will usually dramatically increase social, economic, and political inequities. In addition, their high SDO means they identify closely with private sources of power and wealth like millionaires and large corporations — whether or not they have achieved wealth, power, and social status. Their low RWA gives them a rebellious, even narcissistic quality, that is hard to overstate. Libertines don’t understand why the the world’s winners have it so hard — they just want to be left alone to enjoy life at the top. In their eyes, they’ve earned it — even if others take a different view.
To be clear, libertines are one of the three motivational groups — along with the much more familiar individualists and elitists — that typically contribute to libertarian thought. If libertines seem like a recent or obscure phenomenon in American politics, it’s because they themselves prefer to avoid politics as a general rule. Their contempt for public life and public authority — as well as their “sovereign” individualism — makes them uniquely difficult to organize politically. But when they do enter the political process, watch out! Libertines make up the bulk of the Tea Party movement, and they have made no secret of their contempt for redistributive programs that they believe foster dependency, for leaders in both parties who’ve betrayed them, and for the American government itself.
Let’s now turn to the Democracy Corps report to hear what libertine Tea Partiers sound like in their own words.
I think the government needs to stay out of our private lives. That’s my right to privacy and the issues that affect – that run this country like a business, that’s where they belong. But telling people on a personal level what they can or cannot do I do have a problem with that. (Tea Party woman, Roanoke)
For me you know our founders…we had to rise up and we had to defend ourselves and take over this country and who knows if that has to happen again sometime so I don’t want the government the government already has enough knowledge and stuff about what’s going on in my life so if they want to take away all of our rights, I mean I just feel like we’re Nazi Germany or something. (Tea Party woman, Roanoke)
The whole middle-class-up economy format is completely ridiculous. Because who’s going to give the middle class their money? The upper class. The middle class isn’t going to make money coming out of nowhere. They’ve got to get a job. And who gives the jobs? The rich people. So if you take all the rich people’s money, they’re not going to be able to give anybody a job. Just it’s so backwards. He keeps talking about a strong middle class. I don’t want a strong middle class. I want to make all the middle class rich people, because then you’ve got even more rich people who can give more jobs. It’s like a – it’s just ridiculous. (Tea Party man, Raleigh)
I don’t think the government has any say in it…I personally don’t agree with gay marriage, but I don’t think the government should say who can get married and who can’t. It’s not their business. (Tea Party man, Raleigh)
I think that our freedom is slowly being taken away from us, like with the gun control and I don’t know, just everything. I just fear for our freedom. I don’t want to be like the other countries and have to be told what to do and when to do it. (Tea Party woman, Roanoke)
I see a lot of lack of personal responsibility…People are constantly looking toward the government to get what they need. (Tea Party man, Raleigh)
Obama got elected because he kept saying, ‘I’ll keep giving you unemployment forever.’ That’s why he got elected. Now you can live in this country without a green card. Come on, we’ll give you insurance, we’ll give you money. That’s why he got elected. (Tea Party woman, Roanoke)
There’s so much of the electorate in those groups that Democrats are going to take every time because they’ve been on the rolls of the government their entire lives. They don’t know better. (Tea Party man, Raleigh)
It’s putting us at the mercy of the government again. (Tea Party woman, Roanoke)
The politicians and those people – celebrities. Most of them may or may not believe it, but it’s an opportunity for them to gain power, make money, push their agenda. They want to regulate everything…they want to control it, so this is a great excuse for them to gain that control. And if the world were covered in ice right now, they’d find another reason to gain control. (Tea Party man, Raleigh)
It is no secret that the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party is the chief culprit behind the government shutdown and the threats to default on the national debt. (It appears they have tacit support from others within the party.) Polls have repeatedly shown that this faction loathes health care reform, wants a radical reduction in the size of government, and rejects the very idea of legislative compromise. Tea Partiers sincerely believe radical steps must be taken to stop an increasingly out-of-their-control government they perceive as directly challenging their personal liberty. Their psychology demands nothing less.
evangelical republicans: socially-repressive reactionaries
Reactionary motives arise out of a combination of high right wing authoritarianism and average social dominance orientation. This motivational complex arises out of a repressive and meritocratic tendencies, with the former driving most of the attitudes and behaviors. The reactionary’s average SDO produces a need to perceive established social systems (no matter how unfair and inequitable) as fundamentally just, but high RWA creates a sense that this just and moral order it is constantly endangered from both within and without. The satisfaction and peace of mind that comes with the former is contradicted by fear and anxiety that comes with the latter. This leads reactionaries into a siege mentality, perceiving dangers lurking round every corner, and mere opponents as alien enemies. Politics, and life from their point of view, is a Manichean struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, order and chaos.
It should come as no surprise then that there are natural affinities between high RWA / average SDO psychology and many fundamentalist strains of religious belief. Actually, reactionary psychological motivations are responsible rise to both. Indeed, reactionaries have prudish and repressive attitudes towards sex, gender-roles, and homosexuality. Indeed, they are responsible for much of the demand for social conservatism. Out-groups and deviant groups of all kinds — from minorities to immigrants, and from criminals to whistleblowers — are perceived as dangerous threats that must be disciplined with harshly punitive measures, lest they undermine the moral fabric of society.
To protect what they see as their society from both internal and external threats, reactionaries will pour virtually limitless resources into the state’s military, law enforcement, intelligence, and surveillance capabilities. No amount of government intrusion is ever enough, so long as it keeps reactionaries feeling safe. After all, the world is a fundamentally dangerous place. While economic issues are not generally high on the agenda for reactionaries, they are likely to reject any policy that provides aid to deviant out-groups unless they come packages with strict, even punitive, demands. Reactionaries see poverty as a sign of personal sin — as a moral failing.
Much more can and will be said about people with reactionary motivations. But for now, let us listen to them in their own words:
Obama’s…just pure distilled Marxism. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)
Not a US citizen. Supports Terrorists. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)
I don’t believe he’s a Christian. He’s a tyrant. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)
He wants to fundamentally change the country. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)
He is going to try to turn this into a communist country. (Evangelical woman, Colorado Springs)
He supports everything that is against Christianity. (Evangelical woman, Colorado Springs)
Giving gay and lesbian citizens of the right to marry the person they love can seriously harm them, and seriously harm the children that they were raising. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)
They’ve taken what I consider a religious union between a man and a woman – pardon my French – and bastardized it. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)
Somebody’s got to say “the gay agenda.†That gets thrown around, a lot — that there’s this vast conspiracy of gays that are trying to push this. But — you know, to some extent, it almost seems like that, because these things are just moving so quickly along a certain trajectory. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)
Don’t come here and make me speak your language. Don’t fly your flag. You’re on American soil. You’re American. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)
You come to our country, you need to learn our language. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)
For reactionaries, it’s always us versus them. And “they” are nearly always defined in the most antagonistic terms available. Evangelicals share the Tea Party’s resentment of government handouts that create dependency, and see health care and immigration reform as politically motivated. While not leading the demand for government shutdowns and default on the debt, Evangelicals appear inspired by the Tea Party’s determination. But they are sharply at odds with the Tea Party and so-called “moderates” over social issues. For now, Evangelicals appear willing to follow the Tea Party’s lead.
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moderate republicans: alienated conventionalists
It is a combination of average right wing authoritarianism and average social dominance orientation that produces conventionalist motivations. When conventionalists look at the world, they perceive a world that is alternately safe AND dangerous, competitive AND cooperative, and feel pressured to reconcile these fundamentally incompatible perceptions. In a sense, conventionalists are like a child caught between warring parents, burdened with the unpleasant task of reconciling two (or more) sets of incompatible expectations. They adapt to this perceptual dilemma by learning to see the world as forever changing and challenging, while justifying established systems and clinging to the status quo to preserve their peace of mind.
Conventionalists are motivated primarily by self-interest, institutional loyalty, and the desire to justify established systems. All three of these motives serve a key psychological function, which is to help conventionalists emotionally distance themselves from the political demands made by others, and the need to respond to those demands. When they do choose sides, they do so in a way that minimizes disruption to established systems and players or to their personal ambitions, favoring small, incremental changes over larger, potentially disruptive ones. Conventionalists value institutions and generally go out of their way to avoid rocking the boat in order to get ahead. After all, you can’t climb to power if the ladder is tipping over and the rungs are falling off. As psychological centrists, conventionalists typically make a fetish out of bipartisanship, deficits, compromise, pragmatism, balance, and tough decisions. Their reluctance to take sides puts them at the epicenter of nearly every potential compromise, giving them extraordinary power and influence.
Conventionalists are not the same thing as conservatives because, unlike conservatives, they are just as likely to defend established liberal institutions as they are to defend conservative ones — and they can be found in both parties. Conventionalists are generally social and economic moderates, mirroring the contemporary attitudes of the society they live in. Generally, they can be counted upon to support progress that has already been made, but rarely will they be seen leading the charge toward greater equality or inclusion. Tepidly tolerant, they generally accept the inevitability of change. But their bias toward the status-quo keeps them from perceiving systemic inequities. They sincerely believe established systems are meritocratic, which is why they deeply resent favoritism toward the rich and the poor alike.
The moderate Republicans from the Democracy Corps survey sound just like conventionalists.
[On gay marriage] I mean they’re together anyway. You know? The world is going to change anyway. And it is changing anyway every way. (Moderate woman, Raleigh)
From a legal standpoint I don’t understand why it’s a debate because I think that gay people should actually be allowed to get married because they should have, well first of all every argument I’ve heard against it has been based on religion and if our government is truly separate from religion in our government should be able to make laws based on religious beliefs. Secondly I think if gay people want to get married and then they want to get divorced they should have to pay for divorce just like I did. (Moderate woman, Raleigh)
I mean it’s a huge struggle to get here illegally so I think if they are here illegally…they are not leaving. And that means they are going to be putting a toll on our roads…taking up space in classrooms…so it would be nice if they were legal and they actually could be contributing to that tax circle…I just think getting them a path to that would be great. (Moderate woman, Raleigh)
I need more customers. I need more people to sell things to. I need more people to do business with. And I can see that these people are potential customers. And the jobs they did… we won’t do… We just flat won’t do it…We don’t have some of the worth ethic they have…I want it to all be legal… I don’t mind that they’re customers. They can pay taxes. (Moderate man, Colorado)
I just think of our whole Bill of Rights, a lot of places where people still immigrate here. I mean everything from voting to I mean property, just all of them come to mind. (Moderate woman, Raleigh)
How they’ve progressed through the years. Women, people of color. We have a lot to be thankful for. (Moderate woman, Raleigh)
It’s like you have to be on one side or the other about race. And you have to be on one side or the other about healthcare. And you, like all these other things and I mean it really, it seems like maybe there’s some middle ground that it never seems to be that we get to that, as a country it doesn’t ever seem like we really get to that kind of middle ground. (Moderate woman, Raleigh)
I feel like everybody, especially in politics, like a magnet. There’s both sides and we can’t get to that middle ground…which accomplishes anything. I feel like there’s a whole lot of talk and not a whole lot of action that just keeps tying everybody up and just this constant circle of just kind of anger and you can’t get through it. (Moderate woman, Raleigh)
It goes back to also the government’s fighting, it’s like we have a…Democratic legislature and they all get voted out and replaced by Republicans who will undo everything the Democrats did but then the next time then it will be Democrat again and they’ll undo everything and put in new stuff and then it will go back and the undo everything and things that used to be so simple like a transportation bill can’t get past anymore because they say I’m not voting for it because it’s Republican or vice versa. So that’s my concern, the leaders can’t get together. (Moderate woman, Raleigh)
When I think about just what I’m concerned about healthcare is one of the things. I’m just uncertain about what the changes would mean for me… So that scares me for my own future. (Moderate woman, Raleigh)
We’ve gone through drought cycles in the ‘80s. And we’re in a little bit of a drought cycle now, but it balances out left and right. And it’s not because we’re driving more Prius’s, you know. It’s just the way that mother earth runs itself. (Moderate man, Colorado)
Moderate Republicans are on the same page as most Tea Partiers and Evangelicals when it comes to economic and policies, suggesting that this group of conventionalists may have above average (but not high) social dominance orientation. Buy they sharply disagree with Evangelicals on social issues and with Tea Partiers on tactics. In typical conventionalist fashion, moderate Republicans are paralyzed by indecision when it comes to their status within the party. They’re reluctant to abandon the GOP entirely, but remain unprepared to stand up to the more extreme factions within their party. Indeed, so-called “moderates” Congress have done nothing but enable the Tea Party since the beginning of the most recent shutdown/default crisis.
coalitions of the motivated
In a sense, all ideologies are coalitions of the motivated. The ideologies that most people know and recognize (liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, socialism) are NOT a set of beliefs and principles fixed for all time, but rather an elastic set of commitments, values, and rationalizations aimed at uniting as many differently-motivated people as possible under a single banner. The meaning of any broad-based ideology is nearly always contested, even if those contests are temporarily suspended or kept hidden from public view. This is why ideological attitudes and behaviors change over time and may differ in their specifics from person to person and from group to group.
Indeed, ideological strains like social conservatism, economic conservatism, and neoconservatism usually draw most of their supporters from one or two of the motivational groups depicted in the chart (above). The specific demands and priorities differ from strain to strain because they reflect different perceptions about the nature of the world, which have their origins in the RWA/SDO matrix. Broad-based ideologies like conservatism typically draw most of their support from one side or one corner of the chart, due to a phenomenon we call schematic compatibility.
In other words, people may not see everything the same way, but they have to see many things the same way in order to coalesce into an ideological movement. People on the far left and the far right may at times agree on a specific policy demand, but their motivations are usually quite different. Too many incompatible perceptions and contested meanings keep “strange bedfellows” coalitions — which do form from time to time on specific issues — from developing into sustainable ideological movements.
As the Democracy Corps report and our analysis hopefully made clear, libertines, reactionaries, and conventionalists see the world differently and are motivated by different things — but they will nonetheless have certain perceptions and demands in common. For example, they all clearly have a revulsion towards Obamacare though they have different motivations for feeling this way. The ideologically-laden language of “big government” and “dependency” resonates with all three psychologies, thereby uniting them around a common goal.
But where their interests, motives, and perceptions diverge, as with social issues or immigration reform, all three groups claim the mantle of true conservatism and “what’s best” for the party. Which of them represents the one true conservatism? Both and neither. There is no one true conservatism. Conservatism is the sum of all rationalizations that hold them together. Lest anyone come away thinking this is meant as an attack on conservatism, the same is also true of liberalism, libertarianism, and other broad-based ideologies.
Even though they are elastic, most ideologies and ideological strains have a recognizable center of gravity in the RWA/SDO matrix. As we have argued before, conservatism has historically drawn most of its support from the bottom right corner of the chart (above). In other words, ideological conservatism lies at the intersection of above-average to high SDO and above-average to high RWA; people with one or the other or both consistently express conservative beliefs and back conservative interests.
The Democracy Corps report notably left out two key psychological constituencies that make up today’s conservative movement: elitists and depots. Without going into a detailed description of their motivations, the report left out the Wall Street types and plutocrats, the war-mongers, torture enthusiasts, and gun nuts. What these groups lack in numbers, they make up for in money and political influence. We do know from recent reporting that psychological elitists (the Wall Street / Chamber of Commerce types) are strongly opposed to defaulting on the debt, but seem to have mixed feelings about the government shutdown contingent upon their immediate interests. As for the despotic types, we suspect that they are largely on the same page as the Tea Party but for very different motivational reasons.
While reactionaries, elitists, and despots make up the core of ideological conservatism, over the past half-century many American conservative leaders and thinkers have purposefully constructed their ideology in a way that conventionalists, libertines, and individualists find appealing. Indeed, the Republican Party of the mid-to-late 20th century contained a large and influential crop of conventionalists — just as the Democratic Party does today.
The Republican Party remains dominated by conservatives, but the conventionalists have been marginalized, and replaced with a growing number of libertine radicals (the Tea Party). Even as Tea Partiers claim the mantle of true conservatism, their perceptions, motivations, and demands are actually more closely aligned with the libertarian tradition. Conservatism and libertarianism have high social dominance orientation in common. In other words, they both perceive the world in competitive terms and share the dominator trait-package. But conservatism and libertarianism differ markedly in their level of right wing authoritarianism: how much or how little fear, repression, and demand for authority they bring to the table.
One of the things that unites reactionaries, despots, elitists, and conventionalists — but not libertines — is that they all want to use the power of the state to achieve their goals. To put a fine point on it, conservatism is a fundamentally statist ideology…and conservatives are psychologically driven to wield power over others (at least as much as anybody else). When conservatives say they want smaller government, they don’t actually want to eliminate government. Their contempt for the parts of government they don’t like is sincere — but conservatives are eager to wield power and expand the parts of government they do like. Their anti-government rhetoric is bait-and-switch, used by Republicans since Ronald Reagan to win votes from people who really are motivated to take down the government. Thirty years later, the party that once celebrated institutions now looks like it belongs in an institution.
We can argue forever about whether the Tea Party — and libertine psychology — is conservative or not, but that misses the point. The fact is that Tea Partiers are claiming the mantle of conservatism and are organizing themselves within a conservative party. Not only do these anti-statists see the government itself and Democrats as their enemies, but they also see much of the Republican Party as their enemies as well. More to the point, they are aggressively using the primary process to elect representatives who are prepared — and even eager — to blow it all up: the Republican Party, the federal government, and the global financial system. They aren’t interested in governing: they’re interested in wrecking. This radical, insurrectionist, and destructive agenda has a natural appeal to Evangelical reactionaries who harbor apocalyptic fantasies to begin with, but it is problematic for many elitists who have specific financial, business, and other private interests that government protects, and absolutely terrifying to moderates who are fixated on well-being of institutions.
the new republican coalition
As Hetherington and Weiler have documented, starting the 1960s the GOP began to shift in the high-RWA (dangerous-world) direction, as Republicans welcomed former segregationists, religious voters, and other assorted xenophobes into their party. But since the 1980s, the GOP has also started shifting in the high-SDO (competitive-world) direction as well. This process accelerated in recent years with the emergence of the Tea Party, followed by a class of right wing mega-donors who have become active in Republican politics thanks to the the Citizens United decision. While libertines may have been present within the Republican coalition during the Bush years, they were politically dormant. When they asserted themselves in 2009, they altered the psychological and ideological character of the Republican Party.
The Tea Party’s emergence as a force-to-be-reckoned-with in the GOP and in American politics did two things simultaneously. 1) It committed the Republican Party to the high-end of the SDO spectrum. 2) It stretched the Republican coalition across the entire RWA spectrum…with reactionaries and despots at the high end, elitists and conventionalists in the middle, and libertines at the low end. Let’s address them one at a time, because they are both hugely consequential.
During the Bush presidency, the GOP was unquestionably a double-high party. Dominating the Republican Party and it’s agenda were religious conservatives (reactionaries), economic conservatives (elitists and conventionalists), and neoconservaties (despots). Managing the tensions between and competing demands of these groups requires an almost classically authoritarian governing strategy (adapted to the realities of American politics). And that’s exactly what we got. David Neiwert’s The Elminationists did a fine job documenting the parallels between conservatism under Bush and authoritarian rule.
If the the GOP of the 2000s was a double-high party, then the GOP of the 2010s has become a high-SDO party thanks to greater libertine (Tea Party) influence displacing conventional (moderate) influence. And what would we expect of a high-SDO political party? We would expect a party that, in the aggregate, looks distinctly more plutocratic than authoritarian. We would expect a party motivated less by fear and more by the competitive instinct. Preserving and expanding social and economic inequality — rather than authoritarian-like repression — would be the glue that holds the party together. This party would imagine itself as the representatives of society’s winners, the makers of wealth and jobs, and the victims of takers and parasites who leech off the hard work of others. In other words, we would expect a party dominated by dominator psychology. And that is exactly what we got.
When Republicans elected Mitt Romney — a psychological elitist to his core — as their 2012 presidential nominee, they were picking a candidate who genuinely represented the new ideological center of their party. This new Republican Party is slightly lower in RWA than it was during the Bush years, but markedly higher in SDO. The views Romney expressed during the 2012 campaign, including his infamous 47% remarks, spoke directly to the psychological ties that bind the party together. But by itself, heightened SDO does not explain the dramatic events unfolding in Washington during the fall of 2013, nor does it explain the civil war raging within the Republican Party. For that, we must turn to the second major effect of the Tea Party.
The conflict raging with the Republican Party is about how much or how little right wing authoritarianism will continue to define the party and the conservative movement. The GOP may be committed to high-SDO, but it is deeply divided on the RWA spectrum. Here’s another way to grasp the differences between high RWA, average RWA, and low RWA Republicans. Conservatives are torn between their theocratic, plutocratic, and anti-statist strains. In each region, state, and locality throughout the country, usually one or two of these strains of conservative thought prevail — the result of cultural, historical, and demographic factors. For instance, Republicans in the upper midwest have pursued a largely plutocratic agenda: attacking labor, dismantling regulations, and redistributing wealth to the richest. While those in the plains states are more closely tied to a theocratic and exclusionary agenda. In addition, most individual leaders have clear ties to at least one of these ideological camps. At the national level, all of these strains are vying for supremacy.
shutdown dynamics
When it comes to the shutdown and debt ceiling specifically, you can divide the party into three factions that mirror these divisions: the interventionists, the extortionists, and the enablers. The disagreements between them are not merely tactical, as many psychologically-illiterate commentators have suggested, but in fact represent a fundamental conflict over core ideological principles and psychological demands: will the Republican Party embody destructive opposition or outright insurrection?
Let’s begin by defining out terms. Constructive opposition is the posture that Congressional Democrats usually adopt when in the minority: “We disagree with your policies, but we’re willing to contribute our ideas and our votes in order to make them better.” Loyal opposition adds a bit more resistance with non-cooperation: “We think you’re wrong and we aren’t going to help you, but we respect your right to govern.” Destructive opposition is the posture Republicans have adopted since day one of the Obama administration: “You’re wrong, and we’re going to do everything in our power to stop you, sabotage your ability to govern, and extort concessions from you.” Insurrection is what many Republicans now seem to be contemplating: “Government is the enemy, and we’re going to tear down the institutions of state.” In effect, Republicans are now straddling the line between destructive opposition and insurrection…while using deliberate ambiguity to mask their true intentions.
In the past five years, Republicans have taken destructive opposition to absurd extremes. They’ve rejected policies they once vociferously demanded, turned against their very own ideas as soon as President Obama embraced them, gone to extraordinary lengths to sabotage Democratic policies, taken hostages like the debt ceiling in order to extort concessions, challenged Obama’s citizenship, obstructed routine government business simply for the sake of obstructing, gone to extraordinary lengths to sabotage the economic recovery, and dispensed with the norms and laws of representative governance in order to pass their agenda, stay in power, and inoculate themselves from the damaging political consequences that would ordinarily befall any party engaged in these actions. Not even Walt Disney himself could conjure up such cartoonish villainy.
Yet even as polls show the country at large finds this iteration of the Republican Party repellent, millions of base Republicans expect nothing less…and millions more see these actions as tepid appeasement, even a betrayal of the cause. Though they may appear crazy to outsiders, their demands have been remarkably consistent and comprehensible — but only if you understand their psychology. Tea Party supporters, as we have argued, are psychological libertines: they perceive state power as a direct and immediate threat to their personal liberty. Obamacare may have been the casus belli that united the various factions of the GOP around a course of action, but it is no more the cause for the shutdown than weapons of mass destruction were the cause for the Iraq War. (There were none.) It is a politically convenient rationalization, whose ultimate substance is ultimately immaterial. If Obamacare had never, Tea Partiers would have been provoked by a different trigger.
This is why the ransom for restarting the government has continually shifted from Obamacare to taxes to debt to entitlements to abortion to the sequester, and will probably shift several more times before the current crisis abates. At least for the libertine Tea Partiers, this isn’t about any of those things. Tea Partiers want to destroy government. They don’t care how it happens. Policy concessions from the White House, the government shutdown, and a default on the debt are all equally acceptable means of getting what they want — which is to dismantle government. If they can’t do it one way, they’ll gladly do it a different way. In their eyes, Obama is the one in control here. He actions — his willingness or unwillingness to compromise with their demands — will determine how the state gets dismantled.
More to the point, Tea Partiers are genuinely unafraid of the consequences of default and have made no secret of this in recent days. After all, the global financial system is just another instrument of state power: a corrupt system of crippling debt and largesse to the undeserving that props up the increasingly “socialist” government, Wall Street, and tens of millions of lazy, unproductive, leeches in a cycle of dependency that must be broken. If their actions help crash this system, they’re doing us a favor. Of course it will be painful for other people who’ve become dependent on the state; breaking any addiction usually is. But it won’t be painful for them. And besides, isn’t the Republican Party is supposed to be about self-reliance, reducing government, and freedom? In their view, compromise with Obama represents a self-deluding betrayal of these fundamental principles — like an alcoholic saying “I’ll just have one drink.” Government is the drug. The Tea Party intends to dump it in the Boston Harbor.
During this crisis, Tea Partiers have been labeled “kamikazees,” “the suicide caucus,” “the hell no caucus,” and “default deniers.” But seen through their own eyes, Tea Partiers look more like a parent staging a drug intervention on their teenage daughter. From their point of view, Obamacare looks like an escalation from severe Adderall and alcohol abuse to something far more dangerous and addictive like crystal meth. The government shutdown is the equivalent of a drug intervention. Default would be the equivalent forced hospitalization and rehab — something nobody wants, but may be necessary if the daughter won’t at least agree to surrender her new supply of meth and commit to some form of treatment. Of course it’s going to be painful for everyone, but what choice do they have as responsible parents? The analogy isn’t perfect (no analogy ever is), but it’s a reasonable approximation of how the Tea Party perceives the current situation.
When you look at the Tea Party’s actions through the prism of a drug intervention, you can see why compromise is impossible and why they absolutely intend to default on the addictive, dependency-inducing debt without major concessions from the White House. What’s more, they have no intention of giving up the ability to stage another intervention or force hospitalization in the future. If you understand the White House’s position (no concessions whatsoever until the shutdown and default threats are off the table), it is clear there is no arrangement or agreement that can possibly satisfy both the Democratic Party’s demands and the Tea Party’s demands at the same time. These two sets of demands are wholly incompatible and mutually exclusive. There is no way to thread this needle, nor would either side of the dispute wish to thread the needle even if they could.
If Congressional Republicans back a deal that does not satisfy Tea Party demands, the Tea Party will lash out with extreme prejudice at the Republican leadership and at any Republicans who support it. Commentators who have argued that House Republicans need to cut the Tea Party loose are correct that this may be the only way to resolve the current crisis, but they also severely underestimate the difficulty of doing this. If Speaker Boehner abandons the infamous Hastert Rule, he will face an immediate revolt within his party. Tea Partiers will be calling for his head. There will be primaries from the right next year, and more than a few incumbent Republicans will lose.
To make matters worse, House Republicans could face a situation similar to the one Senate Republicans faced in 2010 and 2012, in which the Tea Party picked candidates for the general election who were so extreme and so flagrant in their radicalism that even districts gerrymandered to be bright red could end up voting for team blue. There are serious political risks that come with saying no to the Tea Party, and no one should underestimate how much pressure non-Tea Party Republicans are under. “Just say no” to the Tea Party isn’t a politically viable solution to this crisis.
Libertine (Tea Party) interventionists plus their reactionary and despotic sympathizers together make up a little less than two thirds of Republican base voters. The use of strategic and rhetorical ambiguity to evade accountability makes it difficult to count their numbers in Congress. Estimates of their numbers range from as few as 12 to as high as 80 out of 232 Republicans inside the House of Representatives, one third of their caucus or less. The rest of the caucus may have different motivations for supporting the shutdown, but the fact remains that they have supported it unanimously.
There may be a handful of moderate Republicans in both chambers of Congress who would privately prefer constructive or loyal opposition — or even just to restart the government — but if so, they never had a prayer of influencing the party’s agenda. If the impeachment of President Clinton made one thing clear, it was that Republicans were committed to undermining both the democratic legitimacy and the substantive policy initiatives of any future Democratic president. Their goal wasn’t just to oppose Democratic presidents, but to destroy them. It wasn’t until 2009 that this hypothesis was tested, but it was crystal clear to many informed observers that Washington Republicans were shifting into a fundamentally destructive posture towards Democrats.
The 15 – 25 Republicans who have spoken up in favor of a “clean” continuing resolution (CR), know full well that they won’t ever have to cast any votes to back up their tweets. Any Republican seen cooperating with President Obama or Congressional Democrats would be at serious risk of losing in a primary from the far right. In the past, those who tried to cooperate did lose or left politics in frustration. They have to indulge the more extreme members of their party in order to survive politically.
Conventionalist moderate Republicans make up a quarter of the Republican base according to the Democracy Corps report, and they would probably be enthusiastic if the party adopted the posture of a constructive or loyal opposition. But their influence in the Republican Party is all but gone. Their champions in Congress must act as committed enablers if they want to stay in Congress — taking what little credit they can for moderation by whispering sweet nothings to the press. Moderates in name only (MINOs) will not save us from this crisis.
Finally, there are psychological elitists. Elitists are about as close as you can get to a perfect distillation of high SDO psychology. One of the universal truths about human social organization is that elitists are nearly always present in far greater numbers within elite institutions than they are in the general population — even (paradoxically) when those institutions purport to be representative. That’s because high SDO / average RWA personalities gravitate toward elite institutions and seek power within them as a basic fact of their psychology. Psychological elitists have a psychological need to be at the top — no matter their interests or expertise — and they will fight relentlessly to get there.
As already noted, the Republican Party in the past few years has become the ideal incubator for high SDO personalities with a taste for political power. And while psychological elitists make up at most 15% of the Republican Party’s voting base, they make up a majority of its elected Members of Congress. High SDO / average RWA personalities are the consummate conservative politicians because they tend to be highly manipulative, ambitious, and ruthless. Reactionaries (high RWA, average SDO) actually crave this style of leadership — and that is why so many authoritarian movements and states throughout history have been spearheaded by leaders with psychologies in the elitist-to-despotic spectrum.
Elitists, who make up the majority of Congressional Republicans, are playing a game of leveraged extortion vis-a-vis the President — and they are quite conscious of it. Like poker players who may or may not be bluffing, elitists are going to extraordinary lengths to disguise their true intentions regarding the shutdown and the possibility of default, relying on the radicalism of the Tea Party as leverage to achieve their goals. What are their true intentions? To extort as many policy concessions from the President as possible and to retain leverage for future demands. The favored policy demands will vary from member to member depending on their constituents and their prior political commitments. But as a general rule, elitists are more interested in the political magnitude (the size) of the concessions than they are in the specifics.
Indeed, this is why so many non-Tea Party Republicans actually preferred a confrontation with the President centered around the more economically damaging debt ceiling instead of one centered around an unpleasant, but ultimately manageable government shutdown. The former gives them far more leverage to extract concessions from the White House and Congressional Democrats than the latter. Even as they rage against the Tea Party, elitists very much want to exploit the leverage they have now and retain it for future use; they will not surrender it easily. Nor will their hyper-competitive instincts allow them to simply back down and admit the failure of this strategy. Losing isn’t just losing to high SDOs: it is also deeply humiliating and an affront to the core of their identity. And this is part of the reason high SDO types so often double-down on failure and break the rules to get ahead. Defeat is the worst thing that could happen to them.
Both inside and outside of Congress, elitists are motivated by power, wealth, and status. This is why elite-driven interest groups in the Republican coalition have tacitly supported the government shutdown, but are starting to sweat at the possibility of default. These groups aren’t immediately affected by (and in some cases benefit from) a shutdown, but their donors and supporters have private interests that are already directly imperiled by the mere threat of default — to say nothing about what would happen if the nation actually defaulted. Elite-dominated interest groups are now panicking and mobilizing to stop a default that would do more damage to them, their donors, and their supporters than even the Wall Street crash of 2008.
The question now is whether elitist leaders in Congress are listening or even care. They may be so absorbed by the logic of hostage-taking and extortion and so preoccupied by the threat of a Tea Party primary that they no longer even hear the voices warning them of the political and economic dangers just ahead. No doubt, they sincerely believe they can always pull back from the brink at the last second if no concessions are made — or pass a short term debt ceiling extension to prolong the crisis. But their arrogant confidence in their ability to prevent catastrophe at the last minute may not be justified. President Obama appears determined to end legislating-by-extortion once and for all, and is refusing to accept any short-term deals that merely postpone the resolution to the crisis for a few weeks.
Elitist-motivated Republicans in the Senate appear far more mindful of the dangers of default than their counterparts in the House, and appear far more interested in avoiding blame for the catastrophe that would follow a debt-ceiling breach. Whether or not the Senate can reach an agreement, elitists in the House do not appear to even comprehend the Democratic position or the legitimate reasons behind it. Whether they are pressured by the Tea Party or trapped in the logic of high-stakes brinkmanship or both, elitist-motivated Republicans in the House appear ready to take America to the brink of default, and maybe beyond.
The extortionists and enablers in the Republican Party are clearly angry at the interventionists in their midst, but have not differentiated themselves from the Tea Party in the way they have voted. The anger at the Tea Party coming from within the Congressional GOP is psychological projection at its worst. Right now, all Congressional Republicans share blame for shutting down the government and threatening America with default. As a practical matter, their different demands and motivations are entirely irrelevant except insofar as they help illuminate the psycho-dynamics inside the Republican Party and point to a final resolution.
conflicts and resolutions
The fundamental conflict between Democrats and Republicans in this crisis is over whether shutting down the government and threatening to default are legitimate bargaining tools. For a variety of compelling reasons, the White House wants to break the Congressional Republican Party of their habit of turning to legislative extortion. Not only would concessions fundamentally change the nature of the relationship between the executive and legislative branches, but they would serve legitimize a bargaining tactic that is wildly anti-democratic and potentially ruinous to the republic. Republicans want to retain the leverage that comes these threats in order to extort concessions both now and in the future. Democrats want to remove these sources of leverage once and for all. Thus, the Democratic and Republican positions are wholly incompatible and mutually exclusive. There is no compromise imaginable that can reconcile them.
Though their motivations are different, both Tea Party and non-Tea Party Republicans are loathe end the current crisis without any concessions and fundamentally opposed to surrendering their twin hostages (shutdown and default). So instead of demanding their outright surrender, Democrats have now turned to a strategy they believe will at least discourage — but not prohibit or end — their use. The plan currently under discussion in the Senate would restart the government and postpone the possibility of a further shutdown and default until winter or next spring, while setting up a political fight over the sequester spending cuts. The delay is intended to give both parties time to work out a more comprehensive deal, but is premised on the idea that the government shutdown and threat of default have been so damaging to Republicans at the polls that their party will not risk doing it again closer to the 2014 election — when those poll numbers would have real consequences at the ballot box. Proximity to an election, in this view, will make Congressional Republicans less likely attempt another round of extortion.
This view is both deeply misguided and reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what is driving Republican behavior. Proximity to an election makes Republicans MORE likely to take hostages and demand concessions. For starters, a default crisis any time in the first half of 2014 would occur much closer to Republican primary season — precisely the time when Republicans will feel most pressured to respond to the radical demands of their base. As long as Republicans have the kind of leverage that shutdown and default threats confer, they will use them as often as possible to extract concessions.
The reason Republicans took a break from extortion in 2012 is that they got the spending cuts they wanted through the sequester AND because they sincerely believed they would win the 2012 presidential election — and be able to get the rest of what they wanted during the once and future Romney administration. This is the context for Congressman Paul Ryan’s recent “post-democracy” remarks: “The reason this debt limit fight is different is, we don’t have an election around the corner where we feel we are going to win and fix it ourselves. We are stuck with this government another three years.”
The threat of losing, or loss-aversion as psychologists call it, actually motivates Republicans to turn to extortion. The worse they do at the polls and the closer the election gets, the more incentive they have to engage in extortion. Because after all, delay just means they’ll be in a weaker position with less leverage down the road. Pushing the debt ceiling closer to an election Republicans believe they will lose, counter-intuitively, increases the risk of another crisis.
Some Republicans may be troubled by the damage the shutdown has done to the GOP brand — but after a solid week of devastating polls, they still don’t appear troubled enough to change their behavior. Indeed, libertine and reactionary interventionists are still busy “unskewing” polls and relying on their own private intuitions to gage public opinion. Meanwhile the elitist-motivated establishment types in the House keep recycling the same set of demands they should by now know Democrats cannot and will not accept without equally significant concessions from Republicans. If a deal does emerge in the Senate, the only way House Republicans will accept it is if the extortionists and enablers in their caucus (and Speaker Boehner) have been bluffing all along.
The House GOP’s incompetence — which we have written about before in the context of generational theory — may be their undoing. In the end, Speaker Boenher’s inability to unite and manage his caucus as we approach the October 17th deadline could be the thing that unravels the Republican extortion strategy. House Republicans may be left with a simple choice: pass the Senate plan or default. We cannot say for certain how this crisis will resolve, or if it will before economic calamity befalls the Untied States. But we would remind our readers: it is not over until President Obama signs a bill into law.
If Republicans do back down, it will represent a major political defeat and a massive psychological blow for all corners of the party.
Categorized in: Partisanship, Political Analysis, Political Psychology