More stupid anti-conservative psychology

The recent book by John Dean (of Watergate fame), called Conservatives Without Conscience has been a great hit on the Leftist blogs. There is for instance a huge and hugely self-satisfied comment string about it here. The comments there that amused me most were the ones by Leftists saying that they had not actually read the book but still thought it was great. Very Leftist. They KNOW what is right: Evidence is irrelevant.

The book says of course that conservatives are psychologically disturbed and “authoritarian” —an ongoing leftist theme that goes all the way back to a 1950 book which had as its leading author the Marxist theoretican Theodor Wiesengrund (aka Adorno). The Adorno book was written at a time when most Leftists alive could remember themselves espousing doctrines similar to Hitler’s (the prewar American Left was heavily into racism, antisemitism, eugenics, nationalism, homophobia etc.) so, nonsensical though it was, the book was eagerly seized on by the Left of the day as a way of attaching Nazism to conservatives rather than to themselves.

The book has long since been discredited (See e.g. here and here) and one of the most comprehensive demolitions of it was by a curious Canadian psychology professor known as “Bob” Altemeyer. Altemeyer (1981) pointed out in great and convincing detail that the research methods and research results available did not support the claims of the book but he still thought that the theory behind the book was pretty right. So he set out on his own large program of research to find support for at least some parts of the theory.

The central pillar of his research was a new inventory of attitudes —attitudes which he claimed reflected “Right-wing authoritarianism” (RWA). In a quite hilarious piece of bathos, however, he concluded in one of his later books that: “Right wing authoritarians show little preference in general for any political party” (p. 239 of Enemies of Freedom). In other words, the people Altemeyer’s questionnaire identified as “Right-wing authoritarians” were in fact as likely to vote for the Canadian Liberals or the U.S. Democrats as they were likely to vote for Conservatives or Republicans! His “Rightists” were, in other words, often Leftists!

Such a stupid body of work as Altemeyer’s claims about conservatism would of course long ago have been consigned to the dustbin of history if reason and logic were what motivated the Left but in fact Altemeyer’s work is wildly popular among Leftist social scientists and social commentators—and the John Dean book relies heavily on it. So if you ever do get around to looking at the Dean book, just remember that everything he says is just as likely to be true of Democrat supporters as GOP voters!

For those interested in a more comprehensive demolition of the Dean book, Peter Thomas has written one. See Liberals Without Logic.

References

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.

Altemeyer, R. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Altemeyer, R. (1988) Enemies of freedom: Understanding Right-wing authoritarianism. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, August 28, 2006 at 10:11 PM in
Comments (11) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Paul Weiltz on August 29, 2006, 02:29 AM | #

John Dean was a political hack. A lot of those guys in the Nixon were old-style liberal conservatives, who hated consevatives anyway.

Posted by John S Bolton on August 29, 2006, 02:47 AM | #

The antidiscrimination social regime is supposed to importantly include respect for everyone’s opinions.
Then it happens that opinions which such a regime would like to diagnose as racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism etc. are too widespread to be tolerated without disruption of the power of the antidiscrimination social regime.
Disaffinities for the uncivilized, both as individuals and in their
definitive groupings, and the ethos which would have less freedom for aggression, are not capable of refutation by reason.
Therefore, the antidiscrimination power structure has to use unreason, such as the ad hominem faux diagnosis of those who disagree.

Posted by John S Bolton on August 29, 2006, 02:56 AM | #

Their pretense is that they are healthy and everyone else is somehow sick.
Intellectual means are decidedly not preferred, when they wish to promote their antidiscrimination outrages as somehow healthy.
On the contrary, what is used is facial gestures, intonations and sly implications.
One set of these nonverbally conveys that something is healthy, comestible and not poisonous, when it is highly toxic.
Another conveys moral indignation, again nonverbally, the better that no one should notice that the indignation is against discrimination, especially that which involves moral discrimination.

Posted by On Holliday on August 29, 2006, 04:54 AM | #

“Very Leftist. They KNOW what is right: Evidence is irrelevant.”

Is John Jay Ray describing himself here?

Posted by john ray on August 29, 2006, 10:10 AM | #

I am glad the holiday man has not decamped, as threatened. I enjoy educating him.

Posted by On Holliday on August 29, 2006, 12:37 PM | #

“I am glad the holiday man has not decamped, as threatened. I enjoy educating him.”

I am not blogging here, nor do I intend to. A comment every now and again may be called for.

Posted by DM on August 29, 2006, 07:53 PM | #

Hello all,

“The comments there that amused me most were the ones by Leftists saying that they had not actually read the book but still thought it was great”

I love this blog but I think some of our own commentators were guilty of a similar offence regarding Alon Ziv’s book on interracial breeding (I believe the author of the post had not read the book). I’m not saying that the arguments made against miscegnenation weren’t valid, in fact I agreed with them, but from my experience with my old university blog there is nothing more frustrating than dealing with the ‘other side’ when they do things like this.

For example, Andrew Fraser’s “Rethinking the White Australia Policy” was summarily and predictably dismissed in the uni blogs as racist - no look at his arguments required. I didn’t find one person who had actually read the paper.

And while the Ziv post was quite solid I thought I should point out that, in my view, it was open to the same, somewhat rudimentary criticism.

Also, while I’m at it, regarding the statistical analysis about the percentage of Jews in America and their level of outbreeding (basically that being such a small proportion of the population, their out-breeding figures, while higher than white gentiles, still show a strong resistance against it), I have also seen this kind of argument trying to legitimise the level of black-on-white crime in America. I wish I knew where I saw it but it essentially said that because black people make up a smaller percentage of the population in America compared to whites, one would expect the black on white crime to be higher than vice versa - ie it’s not because of any reason that could be deemed racist.

What do you think about the about argument about blacks and how do you reconcile it with the one made about Jews in the Ziv post?

Respectfully,
D.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on August 29, 2006, 11:21 PM | #

DM, it will be interesting to eventually compare the criticism to the book and see how many straw men shake out. One of the great things about race-realism is that it has predictive power.

Posted by ben tillman on August 30, 2006, 12:12 AM | #

“Intellectual means are decidedly not preferred, when they wish to promote their antidiscrimination outrages as somehow healthy.”

Exactly, John. Remember that discrimination is the central activity of the immune system.

Posted by ben tillman on August 30, 2006, 12:33 AM | #

“I have also seen this kind of argument trying to legitimise the level of black-on-white crime in America. I wish I knew where I saw it but it essentially said that because black people make up a smaller percentage of the population in America compared to whites, one would expect the black on white crime to be higher than vice versa - ie it’s not because of any reason that could be deemed racist.”

That’s an innumerate argument. It’s wrong.

If crime is random (as to perpetrator and victim), the percentages of two, three, or more groups in a population are completely irrelevant. Each group will be expected to commit exactly as many crimes against another as that other group commits against it. In our real-life scenario, blacks have a large pool of potential white victims, but there aren’t that many blacks. Those two things cancel out mathematically.

Let’s start with the easy case. Assume a population that is 100% white. There will be 0 w-on-b and 0 b-on-w crimes.

Assume a population that is 50-50. (And of course we’re assuming that all persons and groups are equally likely to commit crimes and that victims are selected randomly from the population as a whole.) Let’s assume there are 100 persons in the population and each person commits one crime. The 50 white crimes would (randomly) have half (25) white and half (25) black victims. Same would hold true for black crimes, so we would have 25 w-on-b and 25 b-on-w crimes (plus 25 w-on-w and 25 b-on-b).

At 90-10, it works like this, assuming there are 100 persons in the population and each person commits one crime. 90 white crimes have 90% (81) white victims and 10% (9) black victims. 10 black crimes have 90% (9) white victims and 10% (1) black victim. That’s 9 w-on-b and 9 b-on-w.

It always works out this way—if crime is random.

Obviously, it’s not.

Posted by On Holliday on August 30, 2006, 05:04 AM | #

DM, with respect to the percentages, see both Ben’s answer as well as Jared Taylor’s updated “Color of Crine”, which deals with the issue.

With respect to Ziv’s book: true we have not yet read it, although J Richards indicated a willingness to do so; therefore, there may be a future update on the subject.

However, despite this, we have the right to comment on the adaptiveness of inter-racial mating even without first reading the book. We have demonstrated, quite clearly, that it is *impossible* in a practical sense, and possibly impossible in a theoretical sense, for inter-racial mating to be adaptive.

Thus, just like a book about how “the Earth is flat” can be refuted outright by studying the facts, the facts about miscgenation can be used to show that promotion of miscgenation is, and has to be, wrong.

Furthermore, analysis of the book’s cover model required only observation of said picture, which is publicly available.

Further, both on his website and on this blog, Ziv made comments in support of his thesis, and those comments were critically analyzed and refuted.

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