Altemeyer on Trumps Supporters by JOHN DEAN
'When writing my book Conservatives Without Conscience (Penguin, 2007) about the authoritarianism that was gaining influence in the Republican Party in the early 2000s, I read most everything that social scientists had to say about folks with such dispositions. Particularly helpful was psychology professor Bob Altemeyer’s book for Harvard University Press, The Authoritarian Specter (1996). No one has done more ground-breaking work in testing the nature of these people than this professor, who was then at the University of Manitoba in Canada. A native of St. Louis who had done his graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Bob is also a keen student of American politics. Indeed, his son is in the business in Canada, and a member of the Manitoba Legislature.
I thought it would be helpful to many Americans to be exposed to Bob’s scholarly studies, and convinced him to write them up in a book for the general reader. He did, and placed it online for anyone to read for free. See The Authoritarians. (Last time I checked, over 670,000 people had visited the book, and hopefully read it!)
Bob Altemeyer saw Donald Trump coming. More accurately, he saw the kinds of men and women who would vote for a Donald Trump-type candidate for high office. These are people he described in earlier works as Right Wing Authoritarians, and Enemies of Freedom. Without going too deep into the weeds, let me note a few of these people score high on testing that shows they not only can be devoted followers of authoritarian leaders, the so-called social dominators like Trump who want to be in charge, but they also test high as social dominators themselves. These seemingly incongruous testing results—testing high as both followers and leaders—have been explained as the social dominators envisioning the type of follower they want as leaders, or their willingness to be good followers until they get their chance to become leaders. I labeled these “double high” people as conservatives without conscience, because it is a perfect description of those who top both scales in this testing. . .
With that information in mind, from someone who may understand Trump supporters better than Trump does, it is clear that to prevail in 2018 and 2020, Democrats must focus on getting sympathetic non-voters to the polls, and bring back into the fold the anti-Hillary folks, who suffered from Clinton exhaustion—voters who are clearly not right-wing authoritarians.'
https://verdict.justia.com/2017/07/07/altemeyer-trumps-supporters