John Dean is raising the profile of the F-Scale. The F-Scale is reputed to be a measure of authoritarian tendencies in people, developed after the Nazi era. A high F-Scale score is reputed to predict Republican Party affiliation. But the F-Scale promises to be controversial.

Expect to hear more of the term “F-Scale” in the future. Democrats who are concerned about our descent into authoritarianism might tend to push the F-Scale angle hard.

Click here to check out your own F-Scale score. I can’t vouch for the veracity of the linked website. If you see evidence that it’s a bogus site, please let me know. But I don’t know if the F-Scale is very reliable. Down below I present some criticism of the F-Scale. I’m anxious to learn more about it.

The interest in the F-Scale has been fanned by John Dean, of Watergate fame. Dean has written a book called Conservatives Without Conscience, in which Dean discusses the F-Scale at length and uses it to try to explain the rise of the Authoritarian Right.

Dean is concerned about the USA’s journey into authoritarianism. [I’m concerned too - see my Big-Brother and Police State category of articles.] I’ve seen Dean interviewed about his book. I heard Dean say that a form of the F-Scale has been in use for over 50 years now, since right after WWII, and that a high F-Scale score predicts Republican Party membership, in that as the F-Scale score increases the tendency to be Republican increases.

This article is not meant to be a critical piece about Dean’s book, because I haven’t read it. However, I heard Dean say that the book is in large part about how the Republicans have essentially abandoned their Goldwater-era true conservative roots, and have embraced the idea of big authoritarian government. Dean said he went on a quest for knowledge that might explain the shift in Republicans’ outlook toward government, and he found the F-Scale.

Look at the Republican Party’s most high-profile leaders: Rush, Sean, Ann, Bill —- all tough talking authoritarian types. They have the answers and they know what is good for us. And also Bush, who is a firm decider, who sees things in black and white terms, and who doesn’t nuance or ever change his mind. All are authoritarians.

Sean and Rush and Ann and Bill will dismiss Dean of course. They will say “911 explains the change in the Republican view of governmental power”. Or, maybe more likely, they will try to deny that any change in attitude toward governmental power has occurred among the Republican Party. But their denial would fly in the face of things they say regularly.

One of the common refrains I have heard each of them (Bill, Rush, Sean and Ann) say, in various ways, is that we must give up some freedom in exchange for more security. They always say such things in the context of defending Republican President George Bush’s actions.

Hints of a Cult of Personality surrounding “Dear Leader” George Bush

Dem snarkers refer to Bush as “Dear Leader” in homage to the authoritarian-type devotion bestowed upon Bush by his followers in the media and elsewhere - Bush can (almost) do no wrong, and everything is (almost) wonderful if you listen to Rush et al…. Pure Hero worship and kinda scary devotion.

The “Dear Leader” nickname for Bush evolved as a natural reaction to the infamous Clear Channel “Our Leader” Billboard of 2004. If that link no longer provides a photo of the “Our Leader” billboard, click here for the pic. “Our leader” became “Dear Leader” very quickly. The dictator of Korea is known as Dear Leader as part of the cult of personality, and Dems see a cult of personality surrounding Bush.

My personal take is that no cult of personality evolved into the mainstream about George Bush. I do think there are certain cells of hard core Bush lovers who nearly worship him. But the mainstream Republican doesn’t go that far.

A big reason that the mainstream Republican won’t get on board the cult is this: The real facts of Bush’s fallibility are too public. There’s enough non-Bush media out there to tell enough truth, so that the general public knows that Bush is too fallible and his policies too failed.

If all we heard were Rush, Sean, Ann, Bill, and Fox News, we’d have a cult of personality because we would not receive anything approaching a fair and balanced portrayal of the state of affairs. But thank God we have non-bootlicker media out there.

And due to the truth leaking out through non-bootlicker media, Rush and Sean, et al, are forced to talk about Bush’s challenges and sometimes his failures.

Conflict about the F-Scale —- maybe it doesn’t measure what it’s reputed to measure - authoritarianism

I’m linking to a couple of articles that criticize the F-Scale as a measure of authoritarianism. These critiques agree that the F-Scale measures something significant, and that it has some predictive power. But they disagree about the labels to use in describing just exactly what is being predicted.

They seem to be saying that the evidence is lacking that the F-Scale predicts “authoritarianism” as in a willingness to use government power to oppress people or do evil things.

One critique makes the following point: Maybe the term “Authoritarianism” is not the best term to describe the traits measured by the F-Scale in all its forms. Maybe a better, and certainly more socially acceptable term, is “Old Fashioned Orientation”. See The Old Fashioned Personality — “A great deal of data has been surveyed and the inevitable complexities have arisen but throughout it all, it has been obvious that a view of the ‘F’ scale as primarily a measure of old-fashioned orientation has considerable explanatory force.”

Whereas Republicans might bristle at being called Authoritarians, they’d probably embrace “Old Fashioned”.

Let’s go further along this line for a moment. Consider the following critique, regarding the F-Scale version known as the California F-Scale, and the limits on the types of authoritarianism it might predict:

F scale validity considered against peer nomination criteria

Widespread use of the F scale as a measure of authoritarianism continues despite uncertainty concerning the facet of authoritarianism it measures. This research examined the relationship between peer perception of authoritarian behaviors and F-scale scores. Only a minimal relationship was found. No relationship was found between the number of authoritarian behaviors on which a person was consistently rated high and his F-scale score. It was concluded that it is unlikely that the F scale measures validly authoritarian behavior as it is usually conceived, though it seemed sensitive to some form of authoritarian submission.

Any consideration of the validity of the California F scale must specify the manner in which the writer views authoritarianism. Hollander (1954) has noted that “authoritarianism” may be conceived of in three primary ways: ( a ) as an ideology, ( b ) as a set of behaviors, or ( c ) as an institutional form. Since each of these forms connotes something different from the others, one cannot assume that if the F scale validly measures one form of authoritarianism, it will necessarily measure validly the other two …

And so, you can see that the F-Scale is gonna be a controversial subject.

I think we laymen could expect that an “old fashioned” outlook might be strongly correlated with membership in a political party that professes to adhere to “old fashioned” values, in other words, the Republican Party. Hence, I’d expect the F-Scale probably predicts membership in the Republican Party in the USA, but might not be a good general predictor of any type of extreme authoritarian attitude.

Check your own F-Scale score, with one of the F-Scale versions floating around

Click here to check out your own F-Scale score. I can’t vouch for the veracity of the linked website. If you see evidence that it’s a bogus site, please let me know.

My own personal F-Scale score was 2.8666666, which got me labelled “a liberal airhead”. I guess I’m not much of a rigid absolutist traditionalist. I’d have been in the mainstream if I’d have scored a 3.0, so I just missed being “normal.”

Here are the traits being measured in the above version of the F-Scale, and the numbers of the questions that address those traits:

• Conventionalism: Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values. 1, 2, 3, 4
• Authoritarian Submission: Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the ingroup. 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
• Authoritarian Aggression: Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values. 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
• Anti-intraception: Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded. 3, 4, 17, 18
• Superstition and Stereotypy: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories. 5, 6, 19, 20, 21, 22
• Power and “Toughness”: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness. 8, 11, 12, 20, 23, 24, 25, 30
• Destructiveness and Cynicism: Generalized hostility, vilification of the human. 26, 27
• Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses. 18, 22, 25, 28, 29
• Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual “goings-on.” 13, 16, 29

Misc links

For more about the Authoritarian personality generally, see Authoritarianism - wikipedia.

Inspiration: Over at DailyKos, a diarist has written a piece on the F-Scale and Dean, called John Dean, The F-scale, and The Wingnut Mind.