Me conservative, me stupid: or at least rigid and habit-bound, says 'the science'

National Review, Oct 8, 2007 by Jonah Goldberg

Back in the United States, the Left found its own uses for psychiatry, particularly after World War II, when the Holocaust finally ended the progressive fondness for eugenics. In 1950, Theodor Adorno, a Frankfurt School Marxist, released The Authoritarian Personality, which is today among the most discredited major works of social science of the 20th century. At the time of its release, though, it was taken as the final word on the interplay of politics and the brain. According to Adorno, conservatives were closet fascists because, among other reasons, they had been subjected to "strict toilet training." (Having recently labored in this field with a young child, I wonder if inculcating fascist sympathies might be a small price for success.) Adorno's methods were designed to guarantee the results he wanted. From the outset, he worked on the assumption that sympathy for Communism was a sign of open-mindedness and hostility to totalitarianism. Therefore, Communists could never be creeping authoritarians, while anti-Communists almost by definition had to be.

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The Authoritarian Personality gave oxygen to a host of similar "findings." Adorno's colleague Max Horkheimer traced society's evils back to the "authoritarian family." Lionel Trilling famously asserted that conservatives deal not in ideas but in "irritable mental gestures." Richard Hofstadter swallowed The Authoritarian Personality whole, putting all of American history on the Freudian couch. The political scientist Herbert McClosky claimed he had scientifically proven not only that conservative "personality types" were drawn from the ranks of "the uninformed, the poorly educated, and ... the less intelligent," but also that they were "inflexible and unyielding" and "intolerant." To boot, the conservative "fears change, dreads disorder, and is intolerant of nonconformity," and "derogates reason." In 1964, over a thousand mental-health professionals declared that Barry Goldwater was not "psychologically fit" to be president of the United States. Why? Because he was a conservative. The organizer of the petition took out an ad in the New York Times announcing this very scientific finding. Gold-water sued--and won.

Now, it seems indisputable that there are biological, neurological, and even genetic factors in political orientation. But this is a vast--and vastly complicated--subject, with nature and nurture knotted together. Indeed, what these studies leave out is that while small-"c" conservatism may have a strong "wiring" component, opposition to change can be found across the ideological spectrum. There are Marxists who haven't accounted for an inconvenient fact in decades. Liberal Democrats see Social Security as sacrosanct, immutable, and timeless; and Al Gore's biggest campaign promise in 2000 was to create a "lock box" and "stand up and fight" against conservative change. Then there are conservatives who'd like to privatize and deregulate pretty much everything. Indeed, if businessmen are so often politically conservative, how come they're so comfortable with the ever-changing landscape of the market?