things that resemble each other share core traits … Because conspiracy theories articulate these heuristics, they may feel more intuitively compelling than other explanations, particularly to people in distress.”
The legal scholars Cass Sunstein and Adam Vermeule explored the spread and pervasiveness of conspiracism in a widely read study of the subject. They say the phenomenon is perhaps best understood if first we “examine how people acquire information.” They observe that there is an epistemic, real-world challenge for all of us in figuring out what is real information and what might be false or delusionary: “For most of what they believe that they know, human beings lack personal or direct information; they must rely on what other people think.” This is no minor issue: What we believe to be true shapes how we view the world, the behavior of others, and the meaning of events. We have to depend on other people—our parents, friends, teachers, the people who write the books and newspapers we read, the people who produce the television and movies we watch—to provide us with that array of information, facts, and opinion.
We all have built-in methods for sorting through the blizzard of information the world confronts us with. Most of these begin with trial and error—we pretty quickly discover that false, misleading, or distorted information can bring us to grief from life experience. Eventually we settle into patterns of gathering information that we become comfortable with as we learn to recognize reliable sources of facts. For most of us, this system of sorting through and figuring out the world usually revolves around established sources of reliable facts such as educators, experts, and journalists, as well as our personal acquaintances and family members.
In an era of high-speed communications and instant technology, this task of sorting through information has become more acutely personalized and haphazard than it was in the past. The arrival of the Internet as many people’s primary source of information has rendered much of the flow of our facts into 140-character tweets and video sound bites. As the Internet becomes cluttered with highly ideological propaganda mills and fake news sites, and as a flood of tweets and Facebook posts spread falsehoods alongside genuine information, it’s become exponentially more difficult to sort out just what information is accurate and what is not.
Most people alive in the twenty-first century have developed a healthy skepticism toward what they’re exposed to by a mainstream media landscape that is littered with biased “analysts” and representatives of corporate interests out to make a buck. But some people have elevated that skepticism to an unhealthy level, so that they view everything produced by the mainstream media or official government or academic sources with a typically self-reinforcing form of highly selective skepticism. They cannot believe any kind of official explanation for events, actions, or policies, but instead seek an alternative one. When this happens, their extreme skepticism flips into extreme gullibility, so that they become suckers for conspiracy theories that confirm the narrative they want to believe.
This shapes—or rather, distorts—their relationship to authority. Any kind of authority that exists outside of their universe, particularly sources with the taint of mainstream liberalism (embodied by Obama, Clinton, and the Democratic Party), is viewed as illegitimate and untrustworthy and is to be vehemently rejected and ardently opposed. In the meanwhile, any authority within the Alt-America universe, especially political figures, conspiracist pundits, and Patriot movement leaders, are revered as reliable authorities. Some of Donald Trump’s followers refer to him as Glorious Leader, or GL.
The personality trait common to most conspiracists and dwellers in Alt-America is authoritarianism. Most people think of authoritarianism as a political phenomenon in which whole nations are subjected to dictatorial rule, and it’s typically considered in light of the authoritarian leaders who lead such regimes. But it’s also a phenomenon studied in depth by psychologists, whose focus is on the masses whom they control, ordinary people who willingly sacrifice their personal freedoms in the name of an orderly society shaped to their personal beliefs and prejudices.
How could supposedly freedom-loving Americans subscribe to an authoritarian worldview? Psychologists have established that most people have some authoritarian tendencies, but these are balanced by such factors as personal empathy and critical thinking skills. In some personalities, however, a combination of factors such as strict upbringing, personal trauma, of a harsh rearing environment can produce people who are attracted to the idea of a world in which strong authorities produce order and stability, often through iron imposition of law and order.
The psychologist Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, one of the world’s leading experts in this personality research, has compiled a list of authoritarian personality traits that help explain the motivations of Donald Trump’s supporters. Not every authoritarian exhibits every trait, of course; conversely, everyone shares these traits, but not to the high degree of the authoritarian personality:
•Ethnocentric, strongly inclined to experience the world as a member of their in-group versus everyone else. Their strong commitment to their in-group makes them zealous in its cause.
•Fearful of a dangerous world. Their parents taught them, more than parents usually do, that the world is dangerous. They may also be genetically predisposed to experiencing stronger-than-average fear.
•Self-righteous. They believe they are the “good people”; this unlocks hostile impulses against those they consider bad.
•Aggressive. If an authority figures gives them the green light to attack someone, they lower the boom.
•Biased. Holding prejudices against racial and ethnic minorities, non-heterosexuals, and women.
•Contradictory beliefs. Opposite beliefs exist side by side in separate compartments in their minds. As a result, their thinking is full of double standards.
•Poor reasoning skills. If they like the conclusion of an argument, they don’t pay much attention to whether the evidence is valid or the argument is consistent.
•Dogmatic. Because they have gotten their beliefs mainly from the authorities in their lives, rather than thinking things out for themselves, they have no real defense when facts or events indicate they are wrong. So they just dig in their heels and refuse to change.
•Dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs. They think they are right because almost everyone they know, almost every news broadcast they see, almost every radio commentator they listen to, tells them they are. That is, they screen out the sources that will suggest that they are wrong.
•Limited in their exposure to contrary viewpoints. Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and ideas, they overestimate the level of agreement with their ideas. Conviction of being in the majority bolsters their attacks on the undesirable minorities they see in the country.
•Easily manipulated. People may pretend to espouse their causes and dupe them to gain their own advantage.
•Weak power of self-reflection. They have little insight into why they think and do what they do.
The authoritarian personality’s demand for leadership by powerful authority figures also helps explain their vehement rejection of the leadership of such liberal politicians as Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton. An authoritarian by nature wishes to follow the orders of the president, but cannot do so when someone viewed as an illegitimate usurper holds the position. Proving the fundamental illegitimacy of these figures—as a sexual pervert, a Muslim foreigner, and a lying crook, respectively—has been the driving preoccupation of their various campaigns to attack these politicians.
Authoritarianism as a worldview creates a certain kind of cognitive dissonance, a feeling of unreality, because it runs smack into the complex nature of the modern world and attempts to impose its simplified, black-and-white explanation
