Читаем Conservatives Without Conscience полностью

Now it turns out that in North America persons who score highly on my measure of authoritarianism test tend to favor right-wing political parties and have “conservative” economic philosophies and religious sentiments. This is an empirical finding, not something that conceptually has to be, that was conceptually assumed or preordained. So my statement about authoritarians being political conservatives is a statement of what turns out to be true according to the studies that have been done. To put it in a nutshell: Authoritarianism was conceptualized to involve submission to established authorities, who could be anyone. But it turns out that people who have “conservative” leanings tend to be more authoritarian than anyone else. (Incidentally, I put all those tiresome quotation marks around “conservative” and “liberal” because I don’t want people to think I know what I’m talking about. Good definitions are very difficult here, especially from place to place and era to era.)

While there is no question that a satisfactory definition of conservatism is elusive, it is not surprising that right-wing authoritarians are conservatives under almost any current definition, based on the items found in the principal tool for measuring authoritarianism, the RWA (right-wing authoritarian) scale.[17] For example, in the RWA scale (see a full sample in Appendix B), the following questions would surely be answered in varying affirmatives (strongly agree or agree as opposed to disagree or strongly disagree) by social conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives: