The Authoritarian Mirror: Bob Altemeyer's Research and the Age of MAGA and Reform

In 2006, a quietly retiring psychology professor at the University of Manitoba published a free PDF on the internet and gave it away. Bob Altemeyer had spent four decades measuring, testing, and cataloguing a personality type he called the Right-Wing Authoritarian (RWA) follower — someone who submits excessively to authority, expresses aggression in that authority's name, and clings to social convention as though civilisation itself depends on it. He was not confident the book would find a large audience. He had already accepted that colleagues would rather schedule unnecessary dental procedures than ask him about his research at parties.

He was wrong about the audience. The book, The Authoritarians, became an underground classic of political psychology. John Dean — Richard Nixon's former counsel, the man who helped bring down a presidency — had already used Altemeyer's research in his own work, Conservatives Without Conscience. And when Donald Trump descended a golden escalator nine years later to announce a presidential campaign, readers of Altemeyer had the uncanny sensation of watching a textbook case animate itself in real time. Altemeyer himself came out of retirement to write updates, culminating in his 2020 piece, Updating an Authoritarian Nightmare, which explicitly addressed the Trump phenomenon.

Across the Atlantic, a parallel story unfolded with different accents but recognisable architecture. Nigel Farage — a man who had already reshaped British politics once through Brexit — rebuilt his Reform UK party into a genuine electoral force, drawing millions of votes in the 2024 general election and positioning himself as the standard-bearer for a British variant of the populist authoritarian surge. The structural similarities to MAGA are too numerous to be coincidental.

This essay argues that Altemeyer's framework — developed long before either movement existed in its current form — provides the most coherent and empirically grounded explanation for the rise, durability, and psychological texture of both MAGA and Reform UK. It does so not by reducing complex political movements to clinical diagnoses, but by identifying the underlying personality dynamics that demagogues and their followers enter into together, dynamics that are ancient, recurring, and, Altemeyer insists, ultimately more dangerous than they look.

Before applying Altemeyer's analysis to contemporary politics, it is worth being precise about what his research does and does not claim. Altemeyer developed the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale over decades of empirical testing with thousands of subjects. The scale identifies three core traits clustering together in the same individuals: authoritarian submission (a strong disposition to defer to established, legitimate authority figures, whether or not they are moral, ethical, or lawful), authoritarian aggression (a readiness to act aggressively toward those the authority designates as enemies or deviants), and conventionalism (a deep commitment to the social norms and values endorsed by society's traditional culture and authorities).

These traits are psychological, not political in a narrow partisan sense. Altemeyer is careful to note that in a society governed by a Communist Party, ardent party loyalists would score highly on his RWA scale even though they would conventionally be called left-wingers. The "right-wing" in Right-Wing Authoritarianism is etymological — from the Old English "riht," meaning lawful and proper — not a description of contemporary political alignment. That said, in North American and British contexts, Altemeyer found consistently that high RWA scorers tend toward political conservatism. The correlation is strong enough to be practically significant, even if it is not logically necessary. The reader can judge for herself as they read on why conservatism, riht, and authoritarianism seem to correlate but progressivism, riht, and authoritarianism do so far less.

The picture becomes much darker when Altemeyer distinguishes between authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders. Most of his research is about followers. Leaders are a separate category, measured by a different instrument: the Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scale, which captures the desire to dominate others and to maintain social hierarchies. High SDO individuals are not necessarily authoritarian followers — they do not submit to anyone. They want to be on top. What they share with high RWA individuals is aggression and conventionalism, but for entirely different reasons: high RWA people aggress to defend what their authorities tell them is sacred; high SDO people aggress because domination is pleasurable to them.

The most dangerous individuals in Altemeyer's taxonomy are those who score high on both RWA and SDO. He calls these "Double Highs" — people who both seek dominance and crave the validation of established norms and authorities. They are the ideal authoritarian leaders: they submit to no one, they use conventional religious and patriotic language as rhetorical tools rather than expressing genuine belief, and they possess a flexible, self-serving morality that allows them to do whatever advances their power while insulating themselves from guilt. Altemeyer's experimental studies found Double Highs to be the most dishonest participants, the most hypocritical, the most willing to engage in sham religious behaviour, and the most likely to claim special entitlement to break rules that they insist others must follow.

Several other findings are critical for understanding contemporary politics. First, Altemeyer found that authoritarian followers are not stupid — their cognitive failures are specific and consistent with their psychological needs. They compartmentalise contradictions with impressive efficiency, holding beliefs that contradict each other in adjacent mental compartments, never allowing them to collide. They believe in democratic values in the abstract while supporting deeply undemocratic measures in the concrete. They revere the sacrifice of those who died for freedom while supporting the erosion of that very freedom.

Second, high RWA individuals are uniquely susceptible to fear. Their worldview is structured around threat — the world is dangerous, sinful forces are undermining society, and only strong leadership can protect what is precious. This means that leaders who can amplify fear, manufacture enemies, and promise security through strength gain enormous leverage over authoritarian followers, regardless of whether the threats they invoke are real.

Third — and this would prove prescient — Altemeyer found that authoritarian followers are highly resistant to evidence. They do not update their beliefs in response to facts because their beliefs are not primarily cognitive. They are psychological. They serve emotional needs: the need for belonging, for certainty, for the comfort of hierarchy. Changing an authoritarian follower's mind is not primarily a matter of better argument. It requires addressing the underlying anxieties that make authoritarianism appealing in the first place.

The "Make America Great Again" movement that crystallised around Donald Trump from 2015 onwards reads, through Altemeyer's framework, almost as a case study designed to validate his research. Consider Trump himself. The question of whether Trump is a Double High — high on both RWA and SDO — is central to Altemeyer's updates. Altemeyer is careful, as a psychologist, not to clinically diagnose someone he has never examined. But he notes the observable behaviours that his research associates with Double High leaders: the insistence that rules others must follow do not apply to him; the deployment of religious and patriotic language in ways that seem performative rather than sincere; the combination of claims to victimhood with aggressive dominance behaviour; the extraordinary loyalty demands made of followers combined with a near-total absence of reciprocal loyalty; and the moralistic condemnation of others for behaviours Trump himself engages in (serial infidelity, financial fraud, contempt for the law).

The pattern Altemeyer identifies in Double High leaders is that they are not constrained by the conventional ethics they invoke. They are immune to the cognitive dissonance that would torment an ordinary person caught in such contradictions, not because they are unusually principled, but because they have an unusually flexible, self-serving morality. Altemeyer's experimental studies showed Double Highs performing well on tests designed to measure sycophantic behaviour, dishonesty, and the willingness to exploit trust — and doing so without apparent internal discomfort. The absence of guilt, the instant reframing of any wrongdoing as the fault of enemies, the projection of one's own vices onto opponents — these are not aberrations in Altemeyer's framework. They are features of a coherent psychological type.

The MAGA follower base is equally legible through Altemeyer's research. Consider the most persistent features of MAGA political behaviour. The willingness to believe demonstrably false claims — that the 2020 election was stolen, that Trump is the victim of politically motivated prosecutions, that immigrants are responsible for crime rates the data do not support — reflects not stupidity but the specific cognitive pattern Altemeyer documents: high RWA individuals process information through the lens of authority rather than evidence. If the authority they trust says something is true, it is true. Contrary evidence is, by definition, an attempt by enemies to deceive them.

The hostility toward "the establishment" among Trump's base coexists, paradoxically, with intense respect for authority — police, the military, traditional religion. This seeming contradiction resolves immediately in Altemeyer's framework: what authoritarian followers respect is their authorities, the ones who affirm their worldview and validate their place in the hierarchy. They are not anti-authority in any principled sense. They are anti-the-authorities-that-threaten-them. The FBI was heroic until it investigated Trump; it is now the "deep state." The Republican Party was the natural home of patriotic Americans until it failed to support Trump; now it is filled with RINOs. The same pattern of in-group/out-group sorting, always anchored to the leader's interests, runs consistently through the movement.

Altemeyer's research on fear is directly applicable to MAGA's content. The movement's dominant emotional register is anxiety: about demographic change, about cultural liberalisation, about economic insecurity, about the sense of lost status among working-class white Americans. Trump's specific genius — if that word can be applied to what is, at root, a demagogue's instinct — was to take diffuse anxieties with genuine material roots and give them a shape, a name, and an enemy. Immigrants. Elites. China. The "radical left." This is precisely the process Altemeyer describes when he discusses how authoritarian leaders exploit the pre-existing vulnerability of high-RWA followers. The followers are not brainwashed into their fears; their fears are real, or at least emotionally real to them. What the leader does is channel those fears into loyalty.

The events of January 6, 2021, deserve particular attention through Altemeyer's framework. He was not surprised by them. His simulation studies — game-theory style exercises in which participants play roles in hypothetical political scenarios — had shown repeatedly that authoritarian followers, when given permission by authority figures, would support the suspension of democratic norms with disturbing ease. The scenario in which an authoritarian leader manufactures a crisis, declares that normal rules no longer apply, and asks his followers to take extraordinary action to "save" the country was one Altemeyer had explored experimentally. His subjects cooperated. The January 6 insurrection was the real-world version of what his simulations had suggested was possible.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Altemeyer's analysis as applied to MAGA is his observation about persistence. He wrote presciently in 2006 that even if authoritarian leaders were defeated at the polls, their followers would not disappear. They would be energised by defeat, framing it as persecution. They would redouble their efforts. They would be waiting for the next opportunity. Trump's popularity after indictment, after impeachment twice, after the loss of the presidency, and ultimately his return to power in 2024, follows this trajectory precisely. Altemeyer did not predict Trump specifically; he described a recurring pattern of authoritarian mobilisation that Trump has exemplified.

The United Kingdom provides a fascinating parallel case, complicated by different institutional structures but exhibiting the same underlying psychology. The Reform UK party — and its predecessor incarnations as UKIP and the Brexit Party — represents the British expression of the same authoritarian populist dynamic Altemeyer maps.

Nigel Farage is, in terms of Altemeyer's taxonomy, a figure worth examining as carefully as Trump. He shares several of the Double High traits: the claim to be an outsider challenging the establishment while being a privately educated former City commodities trader; the deployment of plain-speaking, man-of-the-people rhetoric while enjoying relationships with wealthy donors and media proprietors; the willingness to use nativist and occasionally racist tropes while insisting he is merely speaking uncomfortable truths; the extraordinary media fluency that enables him to dominate news cycles; and the combination of apparent victimhood (always being misrepresented, always being persecuted by the liberal establishment) with actual power (having materially reshaped British politics multiple times). These behavioural patterns — the gap between the persona and the reality, the self-serving morality, the immunity to the contradictions that would unsettle a person with more integrated values — are consistent with Altemeyer's Double High profile.

Reform UK's voter base maps closely onto Altemeyer's high-RWA follower profile. The movement drew strongly from voters who feel that British culture and society have been undermined by liberal elites, mass immigration, and the erosion of traditional values. The demand for strong leadership to "take back control" — the most resonant slogan in recent British political history — is almost a direct vernacular translation of Altemeyer's observation that authoritarian followers crave what he calls a "mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us." The word "sinfulness" is American; the word "traditional" is British. The psychology is identical.

Brexit itself, which Farage drove as much as any single person, was the first major expression of this authoritarian populist energy in Britain. It combined several of Altemeyer's key elements: the identification of a threatening out-group (immigrants, particularly from Eastern Europe and the Muslim world); the designation of a corrupt authority (the EU, Brussels bureaucrats) that had displaced legitimate national authority; the promise of restoration (sovereignty, control, greatness); and the vilification of the "remain" coalition as liberal elites who looked down on ordinary people. The 52% who voted Leave were not all authoritarian — Leave had diverse motivations across the political spectrum — but the emotional core of the campaign, and the movement that consolidated around it afterwards, followed the authoritarian playbook with fidelity.

Reform's 2024 general election performance — over four million votes, making it the third-largest party by vote share even as the first-past-the-post system rendered its parliamentary representation disproportionately small — demonstrated that this constituency is substantial and durable. It is not a fringe. Altemeyer's research helps explain why: the conditions that generate high RWA scores are structural, not contingent. Economic insecurity, status anxiety, rapid cultural change, perceived elite contempt, and the sense that legitimate grievances are being ignored by mainstream politics — these create a large and relatively stable reservoir of potential authoritarian followers. They do not disappear between elections. They wait.

What makes the British case particularly interesting is the connection between Reform and MAGA. The two movements are not merely parallel — they are genuinely networked. Farage has been a prominent presence at Trump rallies. Steve Bannon, the ideological architect of MAGA's hard-right turn, was in regular contact with British nationalist organisers during the Brexit campaign. The "populist international" — Bannon's somewhat grandiose term for the network of nationalist movements across the Western world — is a real phenomenon, even if it is less coordinated than he implies. Altemeyer's framework helps explain why these movements cohere: they are drawing on the same psychological reservoir, speaking to the same anxieties, deploying the same techniques.

The role of religion deserves attention in the British context. Altemeyer devotes an entire chapter to the relationship between religious fundamentalism and high RWA scores, finding robust correlations. In the American context, evangelical Christianity is closely tied to MAGA's cultural politics. The British context is more secular, but an analogous function is performed by cultural Christianity — the sense that Britain is or should be a Christian country, that secular liberalism has displaced legitimate traditional values, that "our culture" is under threat. Farage has been explicit about this framing. The specific theology matters less than the structural role it plays: providing an authoritative, traditional value system against which the perceived deviations of liberal modernity can be measured and condemned.

When viewed through Altemeyer's lens, MAGA and Reform UK are variations on a common theme. Several structural features appear in both movements with such consistency that they demand explanation.

The cult of authenticity. Both Trump and Farage present themselves as uniquely honest truth-tellers in a world of corrupt and evasive elites. This is central to their appeal to authoritarian followers, who, Altemeyer found, are intensely suspicious of intellectual sophistication and readily interpret verbal nuance as dishonesty. The deliberate crudeness of Trump's speech — the sentence fragments, the repetition, the personal insults — and Farage's faux-ordinary-bloke persona (the pint, the cigarette, the laughter in the face of liberal outrage) are not accidental. They signal authenticity to followers for whom careful, qualified speech has become associated with betrayal and condescension.

The victimhood/dominance oscillation. Both movements simultaneously portray their leaders and supporters as victims of persecution and as the true, strong, authentic people who will ultimately prevail. Trump is persecuted by the deep state and will crush it. Farage is silenced by the BBC and will overcome the establishment. This oscillation, which looks incoherent from the outside, makes perfect psychological sense in Altemeyer's framework: authoritarian followers need both the solidarity of shared victimhood (the out-group is attacking us) and the promise of authoritative strength (our leader will destroy them). The leader must be both martyr and strongman.

The manufactured enemy. Altemeyer's research consistently shows that authoritarian aggression needs an object — a threatening out-group that can be blamed for civilisational decline. In the MAGA context, this role has been played at various times by Mexican immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, antifa, LGBTQ+ advocates, and an amorphous "globalist" elite. In Reform UK, the enemy is more specifically immigrants (legal and illegal), "woke" ideology and its institutional carriers, mainstream media, and a liberal political class. The specific content of the enemy varies; its psychological function — providing an object of fear and aggression that bonds followers to each other and to the leader — is constant.

Contempt for institutions. Both movements have targeted the epistemic institutions — universities, mainstream media, scientific bodies, electoral commissions — that represent alternative sources of authority to the leader. Altemeyer documents that high RWA individuals have a complex relationship with authority: they defer to their authorities and attack others. But authoritarian leaders systematically work to discredit institutions that might check their power or contradict their narratives. Trump's "fake news" offensive and Farage's war on the BBC and the "metropolitan elite" serve the same function: undermining the credibility of information sources that followers might otherwise trust over the leader's word.

The democratic paradox. Perhaps the most chilling structural feature of both movements, identified with particular clarity by Altemeyer, is what he calls the "democratic paradox": the willingness of people who sincerely believe in democracy as an ideal to support deeply undemocratic measures when they are framed as protecting democracy from its enemies. Altemeyer found in his simulation studies that authoritarian followers could be led to support the suspension of elections, the imprisonment of political opponents, and the use of extra-legal violence — provided that these measures were justified by sufficiently terrifying enemies. January 6 was the American expression of this paradox. The attack on the Capitol was, in the minds of its participants, an act of democratic salvation. The threat to British democratic norms posed by Reform is, as yet, less acute — but the architecture is in place.

Any application of Altemeyer's framework to contemporary politics must grapple honestly with its limitations. The most important is the charge of asymmetric application. Altemeyer himself acknowledges that left-wing authoritarianism is theoretically possible, and that he found examples of it in the 1970s in Marxist student movements. Critics on the right argue that Altemeyer's scale implicitly codes conservative values as authoritarian while treating progressive values as normal, thereby pathologising political conservatism. This is a serious charge. The RWA scale items do seem to have more purchase on recognisable conservative positions than on progressive ones. If a comparable scale were developed for left-wing authoritarianism — the willingness to suppress speech, impose ideological conformity, and demonise out-groups in the name of progressive authorities — some of those findings might be uncomfortable for the left.

This critique has merit, but it does not invalidate Altemeyer's central findings - the upholders of a society's core authority, its historic or revolutionary values will always be in conflict with those who struggle to break free of those strictures, whether the upholders are those conserving tradition or those asserting the return of value to the masses under communism. The dynamic is the same irrespective of left and right labels - the entrenchers will see the freedom seekers are corrupting their deeply held feelings about what is right. The measurable behaviours Altemeyer documents — compartmentalised thinking, resistance to evidence, aggression toward designated out-groups, submission to in-group authority — appear to cluster on the right in contemporary Western democracies with sufficient consistency to demand explanation. The question of why is itself interesting: it may be that the specific content of right-wing politics in this historical moment (nationalism, traditional hierarchy, ethnocultural anxiety) is more congenial to the authoritarian personality than left-wing politics, without that telling us anything definitive about what would be true in other times and places.

A second limitation concerns class and material conditions. Both MAGA and Reform UK have significant working-class constituencies whose support cannot be explained purely in terms of authoritarian psychology. Deindustrialisation, wage stagnation, the collapse of community institutions, and the felt sense of abandonment by mainstream parties that once spoke for working people are real, materially grounded grievances. Explaining these voters primarily through the lens of authoritarian personality risks the exact kind of liberal condescension — "deplorables," "low information voters" — that feeds the movements it claims to explain. Altemeyer himself is careful about this; he is studying a personality type that exists across the class spectrum, and his research does not claim that economic grievance is merely psychological displacement.

A third complication is the question of leaders. Altemeyer's Double High framework is a psychological construct, not a precise instrument for assessing specific politicians. Calling Trump or Farage Double Highs from the outside, without clinical examination, risks the same misuse that Altemeyer warns against in his discussion of individual RWA scores. What the framework provides is not diagnosis but pattern recognition: a set of behavioural signatures that, when they appear consistently across multiple contexts, are consistent with the Double High profile. The analysis is persuasive in both cases, but it should be held with appropriate epistemic humility.

Altemeyer's most alarming finding, and the one most relevant to 2025, is not about any individual leader or movement. It is about the structural conditions under which liberal democracy becomes vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.

His simulation studies showed that democratic institutions are far more fragile than they appear. Participants placed in political role-playing scenarios supported the erosion of democratic norms with surprising speed when authoritarian leaders created sufficient fear and provided sufficient ideological cover. The institutions held — barely — in the actual crises Altemeyer observed in his career. But he consistently warned that "barely" was not the same as robustly, and that the authoritarian followers would keep trying.

Both MAGA and Reform UK represent the institutionalisation of this threat. MAGA has transformed one of the two major parties of the world's most powerful democracy into a vehicle for a leader who openly expresses admiration for authoritarian governments, who has promised to deploy the state against political opponents, and who has already demonstrated that his followers can be mobilised to attack the physical seat of democratic government. Reform UK is not, at present, in a comparable position — it is a young party with a fraction of MAGA's institutional power. But the British constitutional order, with its unwritten constitution and parliamentary sovereignty, offers fewer structural protections against the accumulation of executive power than its American counterpart. The conditions Altemeyer identified — large reservoir of high-RWA followers, charismatic Double High leader, manufactured crises — are present.

What is to be done? Altemeyer does not leave his readers without hope, though his hope is qualified. He argues that authoritarian followers can be reached, not primarily through argument but through exposure. His research found that people with diverse, sustained personal relationships across group lines — who actually know members of the out-groups they have been taught to fear — score lower on RWA scales. The isolation and homophily of authoritarian subcultures (the closed information ecosystems of MAGA social media, the self-reinforcing communities of Reform supporters) are not accidents; they are features that serve the leader's interests by preventing the kind of humanising contact that reduces fear and aggression.

He also argues that the quality of democratic institutions depends ultimately on the quality of democratic citizens — and that civic education, genuine not performative, is a structural counter to authoritarian mobilisation. This is not a particularly exciting prescription. It is the kind of answer that seems inadequate to the scale of the crisis. But Altemeyer's point is that the crisis is not primarily military or legal; it is psychological and civic. The demagogue's power rests entirely on the follower's submission. Remove the submission, and the demagogue is, as Altemeyer memorably puts it, just a comical figure on a soapbox.

Bob Altemeyer did not predict MAGA or Reform UK. He did something more impressive: he described the psychological raw material from which such movements are always constructed. The authoritarian follower — submissive toward authority, aggressive toward out-groups, anchored to conventional values, responsive to fear, resistant to evidence — was not invented in 2016 or in the aftermath of Brexit. He or she has been present in every society that social scientists have studied. What changes is whether the conditions exist for these individuals to be mobilised at scale by a leader skilled in the exploitation of their specific vulnerabilities.

Those conditions — economic dislocation, cultural anxiety, declining trust in institutions, perceived elite contempt for ordinary people, rapid demographic change — are present in both the United States and the United Kingdom to a degree not seen since the interwar period that originally generated the research tradition Altemeyer inherited and extended. The movements that have emerged from these conditions are not identical; they operate in different constitutional environments, draw on different cultural traditions, and have reached different stages of institutional power. But they are recognisably the same phenomenon, describable in the same psychological vocabulary, posing the same fundamental challenge to liberal democratic governance.

Altemeyer's great contribution was to take this phenomenon out of the realm of moralistic condemnation and into the realm of empirical psychology — to ask not why authoritarians are evil but why they are the way they are, and what, precisely, makes them dangerous. His answer remains the most rigorous available. The authoritarian follower is not a monster. The authoritarian leader may be. And the relationship between them — the symbiosis of submission and dominance, of fear and promised security, of manufactured enemies and the solidarity they generate — is the oldest and most persistent threat to free societies.

That threat is not going away. As Altemeyer wrote in 2006, and as subsequent events have amply confirmed: they will still be there, anger ready primed to explode. The question is what the rest of us do about it.

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Sources: Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians (2006); Bob Altemeyer, Updating an Authoritarian Nightmare (2024); Electoral Commission UK; FEC data; academic literature on Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation.