A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".
As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.
All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".
[Study of Bush's psyche touches a nerve, The Guardian, Wednesday 13 August 2003]
As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.
All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".
[Study of Bush's psyche touches a nerve, The Guardian, Wednesday 13 August 2003]
Some specifics from the study mentioned in the Guardian article.
Relations between resistance to change and acceptance of inequality. Although we believe that the two core dimensions of political conservatism—resistance to change and acceptance of inequality—are often related to one another, they are obviously distinguishable. Vivid counterexamples come to mind in which the two dimensions are negatively related to one another. For instance, there is the “conservative paradox” of right-wing revolutionaries, such as Hitler or Mussolini or Pinochet, who seem to advocate social change in the direction of decreased egalitarianism. In at least some of these cases, what appears to be a desire for change is really “an imaginatively transfigured conception of the past with which to criticize the present” (Muller, 2001, p. 2625). There are also cases of left-wing ideologues who, once they are in power, steadfastly resist change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism, such as Stalin or Khrushchev or Castro (see J. Martin, Scully, & Levitt, 1990). It is reasonable to suggest that some of these historical figures may be considered politically conservative, at least in the context of the systems they defended.4
4 The clearest example seems to be Stalin, who secretly admired Hitler and identified with several right-wing causes (including anti-Semitism). In the Soviet context, Stalin was almost certainly to the right of his political rivals, most notably Trotsky. In terms of his psychological makeup as well, Stalin appears to have had much in common with right-wing extremists (see, e.g., Birt, 1993; Bullock, 1993; Robins & Post, 1997).
[Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, page 5]
Specifically, we argue that a number of different epistemic motives (dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity; cognitive complexity; closed-mindedness; uncertainty avoidance; needs for order, structure, and closure), existential motives (self-esteem, terror management, fear, threat, anger, and pessimism), and ideological motives (self-interest, group dominance, and system justification) are all related to the expression of political conservatism.
[Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, page 13]
By far the most convincing research on left–right differences pertains to epistemic motives associated with mental rigidity and closed-mindedness. The notion that political conservatives are less flexible in their thinking than others originated with work on authoritarianism (Adorno et al., 1950), intolerance of ambiguity (Frenkel-Brunswik, 1949), and dogmatism (Rokeach, 1960), and it also played a defining role in Wilson (1973c) and colleagues’ conception of conservatism as uncertainty avoidance.
[Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, page 14]
4 The clearest example seems to be Stalin, who secretly admired Hitler and identified with several right-wing causes (including anti-Semitism). In the Soviet context, Stalin was almost certainly to the right of his political rivals, most notably Trotsky. In terms of his psychological makeup as well, Stalin appears to have had much in common with right-wing extremists (see, e.g., Birt, 1993; Bullock, 1993; Robins & Post, 1997).
[Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, page 5]
Specifically, we argue that a number of different epistemic motives (dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity; cognitive complexity; closed-mindedness; uncertainty avoidance; needs for order, structure, and closure), existential motives (self-esteem, terror management, fear, threat, anger, and pessimism), and ideological motives (self-interest, group dominance, and system justification) are all related to the expression of political conservatism.
[Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, page 13]
By far the most convincing research on left–right differences pertains to epistemic motives associated with mental rigidity and closed-mindedness. The notion that political conservatives are less flexible in their thinking than others originated with work on authoritarianism (Adorno et al., 1950), intolerance of ambiguity (Frenkel-Brunswik, 1949), and dogmatism (Rokeach, 1960), and it also played a defining role in Wilson (1973c) and colleagues’ conception of conservatism as uncertainty avoidance.
[Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, page 14]
