On authoritarianism and the myth of self-interest.
I blinked and realized I’ve taken a hiatus from this newsletter. It was unintentional. Truthfully, the state of the country has been so bleak and overwhelming that I’ve dismissed every idea that floated into my head for being comparatively inconsequential. Trump weaponizes the military against civilians and I’m going to write about how it polls? That still matters, but I’m struggling to execute.
These last few months, but particularly these last few days, I’ve been pondering authoritarianism. Coverage of this topic has not been lacking, but it has largely centered on Donald Trump himself and his lawless, fascistic impulses. I want to talk more about authoritarianism in the mass public: what it means to subscribe to authoritarianism, how symbolic status threat links to voters’ self-interests, and what our discourse gets right, and wrong, about how these interconnect.
The bicycle metaphor
Social psychologists who pioneered the study of authoritarianism in the mid-20th century coined “the bicycle metaphor” to describe how these attitudes function. Picture a person on a bicycle, hunched forward while pedaling, simultaneously bowing to those above and kicking down at those below. People who subscribe to authoritarian beliefs display both tendencies: submission to (perceived) legitimate authorities or strong leaders (i.e., bowing toward power), and aggression toward groups that violate social norms, challenge hierarchy, or are seen as weak, deviant, inferior, or outsiders (i.e., kicking down).
This metaphor captures the central paradox of authoritarianism: people who subscribe to these beliefs don’t just endorse punishing or harming those they deem as "below" or "undeserving;” they’re also often willing to submit to harsh authority themselves. In this way, authoritarianism serves to maintain a social hierarchy in which they are not at the top but they still derive value from its existence because it keeps others in their rightful place: below.
Politically, this often manifests as voters of lower socioeconomic status expressing opposition to redistributive economic policies or equality-oriented movements. These policies and movements would benefit them, but they perceive that marginalized groups would benefit even more, thereby elevating those groups in the status hierarchy and threatening their own place within it. Research has found, for example, that white working class voters will oppose expansions of welfare programs that they stand to benefit from if they believe the program expansion would be even more beneficial to racial minorities or immigrants than to themselves.
It also manifests in voters supporting leaders who “punch down” by targeting marginalized groups, even if supporting those leaders requires tolerating policies that might not benefit them materially. We’re arguably witnessing that in real time, as MAGA devotees maintain fealty to Trump, despite his tariff policy driving up consumer prices, and despite his legislative agenda, which features tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy and deep cuts to essential social programs, including $600 billion in cuts to Medicaid and $230 billion in cuts to SNAP. Why? Perhaps because his fascistic, aggressive targeting of immigrant communities restores and safeguards their own place in the social order.
These examples have a common core: many people will accept their own disadvantage as long as outgroups are disproportionately punished and the social hierarchy remains intact. This is the central conceit behind the “voting against your own self-interests” accusation: the idea that voting for Republicans, who enact policies that don’t make those voters any safer, healthier, or wealthier, runs counter to what’s in the best interest of those voters. There are a few reasons why this accusation is off-base, but the one I’m focused on here is that voters’ judgment about what’s in their best interest doesn’t only revolve around material gains. Symbolic self-interest (dominance, relevance, cultural prototypicality and power) can outweigh those material considerations.
There is no shortage of (excellent) studies demonstrating that when we compare economic anxiety against cultural resentments as independent predictive factors of vote choice, the latter is a far more powerful predictor of Trump support. Many of us (myself included) have made the full-throated argument that it’s racism, rather than economic anxiety, that most powerfully predicts voting for Trump over Clinton, Biden, or Harris, when we put the two at odds with each other and assess which holds more explanatory power. But our focus on this dynamic — “which one is it?” — masks a broader reality that I think we also need to contend with.
Symbolic self-interest intersects with perceptions of material costs and benefits.
There’s considerable interplay between perceptions of economic well-being (whether your financial interests are being threatened) and symbolic beliefs (attitudes towards immigrants, racial minorities, and other minority groups). In my October poll last year with Change Research, for example, I found that white voters higher in racial resentment expressed more negative appraisals of their personal financial situation than white voters low in racial resentment. But a finding like this isn’t hugely informative on its own, since racial resentment correlates so strongly with partisanship, and partisanship is another symbolic predisposition that can filter voters’ perceptions of economic reality.
If you’re like me, you’re asking some “chicken or egg” questions at this point. Does experiencing real-world economic stress give rise to more racism and xenophobia as voters perceive more intergroup competition and/or go looking for scapegoats for their problems? Or can heightened cultural threat (my position in the social hierarchy is being jeopardized) give rise to distorted perceptions of one’s own personal economic wellbeing? Firstly, I don’t think this is actually an either/or; I think it can be both/and, depending on the circumstances. There’s (some) evidence for the first pathway under certain conditions. I’m not sure how deeply the second pathway has been explored, but I think it’s conceivable.
Stay tuned.
So what?
Symbolic self-interest can be just as potent as material self-interest, and the two are not always easily separated. I’d argue we should stop pitting one against the other when trying to understand why voters behave as they do. We can’t just credulously accept when people say the economy is their biggest concern without considering whether they are drawing on cultural threat to form conclusions about how the economy is doing writ large and why they, personally, aren’t doing better. It’s similarly unhelpful to dismiss all Trump voters as avowed white supremacist authoritarians who have no real economic problems. I’m hoping to explore the link between symbolic and material interests further with some new data in the near future; more to come.
In the meantime, I’ve been meaning to implement some feedback mechanism for this newsletter. What do you want to know? What topics are you hoping to hear about? What would be useful, at this moment in time?
This newsletter shares my personal views and lens on public opinion data.
Mind the Gap does not reflect any stances or positions of Change Research.