The A-Word
People can be authoritarian about anything. That includes liberals and freelance busting. This Q&A with Luke Conway explains why.
I recently had dinner with my aunt. She’s a retired nurse. We have the kind of bond that comes from liking, and disliking, all the same relatives. We seek out each other like shelter in a storm of crazy people.
Sometime around dessert, my aunt told me she hoped I would be voting for Kamala Harris. We women need to stick together, she said. We need to defeat Donald Trump.
She looked absolutely stricken when I replied that I could not support Harris, because I want to keep my freelance writing and editing business.
Note that I didn’t say I like Trump, or that I think he’s a good person, or even that I would vote for him instead of a third-party or write-in candidate. I only spoke about my top issue as a voter, which is economic.
Trump and Harris do have a clear policy difference on the issue of self-employment. It’s just a fact. Trump, when he was president, stood up for our right to remain independent contractors. Harris has been adamant, for years, that she believes in restricting or eliminating that right.
“Harris supports the freelance busting that I went to Congress last year to try and stop,” I told my aunt. “I could lose everything, my entire livelihood.”
“You can go work at McDonald’s,” she replied. “We have to do what’s best for society.”
She said it with conviction. She seemed certain that she was on the side of the good and the just, like some kind of a feminist badass, while supporting a candidate whose independent-contractor policies have been shown to hurt women.
To me, the conversation felt like a textbook example of the illiberal left, as Theodore Johnson described it last year in The Washington Post:
“In the far reaches of the left wing, illiberalism springs from an unwillingness to recognize and praise those aspects of the United States that should be conserved, preferring instead to portray a nation corrupt from the start, beyond repair and in need of a teardown. The illiberal left chills the speech of ideological opponents, hijacks legitimate protest movements to serve undemocratic ends and supports coercive means to achieve policy goals.”
I was thinking about all this when Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, tweeted about new research exploring the rise of authoritarianism, particularly on the left. Murray linked to an article by Luke Conway titled “The Left Has an Authoritarian Problem (but Doesn’t Know It).”
The article was excerpted from Conway’s new book, Liberal Bullies: What Psychology Teaches Us about the Left's Authoritarian Problem―and How to Fix It.
Conway writes:
“Authoritarians don’t merely enforce reasonable rules or obey those rules—they want a strong leader to crush and silence their opponents. They want that leader to hurt people for the benefit of their group.”
That, to me, sounded a lot like the most vehement voices in the freelance-busting brigade. For five years now, independent contractors like me have been fighting people who demean us as “scabs” and “Nazis” because we don’t want what they call “good union jobs.” They insist that the government must restrict or outlaw our ability to be self-employed, to achieve what they see as the greater good of rebuilding unions.
Conway, who is a professor of psychology at Grove City College, goes on to describe a national survey he conducted. His team gave more than 5,000 Americans a questionnaire about authoritarianism, and then afterward, asked them: “Do you view yourself as a dogmatic and authoritarian person?”
The result, he writes, was “one of the most astonishing things I’ve seen in all my years conducting research.”
When conservatives agree with authoritarian statements, they subsequently admit (accurately) that they are authoritarian.
But when liberals agree with the same statements, they (inaccurately) are more likely to say they are not authoritarian.
Conway writes:
“Why is this? It is because American liberals have a psychological dilemma about authoritarianism that conservatives don’t have. Liberals, unlike conservatives, believe their group’s norms are anti-authoritarian. Thus, they have a motivational blind spot for admitting they are authoritarian.”
This, to me, sounded exactly like my aunt, and like what we are experiencing from the political left in terms of our right to earn a living as independent contractors. The Democratic Party continues to support freelance busting, to the point of enshrining it in the official party platform. This is policymaking that takes away our right to earn a living in a manner that has been legal since the nation’s founding. This is policymaking that, when it has been implemented, has caused widespread harm to people’s income and careers.
Even worse, the Democrats have now rebranded this policymaking as giving us the “freedom to join a union.” They are making this attack on our freedom and livelihoods sound downright benevolent—as millions of people are cheering for them.
I reached out to Professor Conway to ask him more about his research, in the context of the independent-contractor policy issue and what we might learn to help us in our battle to protect the right to choose self-employment.
Here’s our conversation.
Q&A with Luke Conway
Your article felt spot on to me in the context of the independent-contractor policy situation. Those of us who are happily self-employed—the vast majority of independent contractors in America—are trying to keep our right to earn a living as independent contractors. Democratic Party lawmakers say they’re giving us the “freedom to join a union” as they push policies that would restrict or eliminate our right to be self-employed. When I say that their policymaking feels authoritarian, am I interpreting your work correctly?
Absolutely. The removal of individual freedom for the “greater good” is straight from the classic authoritarian playbook. In fact, you are fighting on the edge of the authoritarianism front line here. Your fight is everyone’s fight. We can of course debate the collective good argument in some domains. But if we allow the government to take away our right to run our own business, what right can’t they take away?
You also hit upon a key distinction. There is a difference between someone having personal authoritarian traits at an individual level versus someone promoting political (e.g., policy-oriented) authoritarianism. These two things overlap in practical reality, but they nonetheless often show very different outcomes, even in the same administration.
Take Trump. It is hard to judge from a distance, but I think at an individual level he shows evidence of authoritarian traits—he demands abject loyalty, behaves aggressively against people who criticize him, shows different standards for in-groups and out-groups, and so on. I really hate those things about him, and I wish he wasn’t like that. On the other hand, his policies often strike me as very anti-authoritarian. Your story is a case in point. Trump’s policies offered freedom from the very kind of bureaucratic restrictions that squash individual rights for one specific out-group.
My read of things right now is that Republican authoritarianism tends to coalesce around specific leaders, but Democrats are especially prone to policy-based authoritarianism that isn’t centered on any leader. That’s the case you seem to be facing.
This tendency follows from a psychological fact discussed in Liberal Bullies and that you referenced in your amazing article: Liberals don’t want to acknowledge their authoritarianism. In a way, hiding behind authoritarian policies designed to promote “freedom” really fits the prototype of the modern authoritarian liberal.
I have to admit—as a person who leans socially liberal myself—it was eye-opening to think about some of my best friends and closest relatives falling so easily in line with authoritarian thinking. That seems to be among your key insights, that the problem isn’t with authoritarian leaders. It’s with we, the people, supporting them, no matter whether they’re coming from the conservative or liberal sides.
Exactly. My field has spent over 70 years studying authoritarianism (mostly on the right), and we haven’t really developed a clear scientific taxonomy of authoritarian leaders. But we’ve developed no end of measurements of authoritarian followers.
And there’s a good reason for that. I think it’s especially important for the left. The problem with the left right now isn’t so much with the leadership as it is with the followership.
And about those followers, a lot of us liberals (or in my case, former liberals) have experienced something eye-opening along the lines of your own story. For ages, I described myself as a “liberal independent” and yet I increasingly found that I could not break from progressive orthodoxy very easily among my colleagues. It wasn’t like that when I started in academia. But more and more, I found that if I wanted serious political conversations, I’d probably better talk to some conservatives. “The solution to bad speech isn’t less speech but more speech” used to be a liberal thing; now, not so much.
It’s not all one-sided, of course, and there are still plenty of open-minded liberals and plenty of authoritarian conservatives. But there is no doubt in my mind that we are at a crisis point for liberal authoritarianism, and your case is right at the fulcrum.
It seems to me that the current tribalism of our politics has led to confusion about the independent-contractor policy issue. People think it’s a liberal vs. conservative issue because the policymaking is coming almost exclusively from the left, and especially from the far-left progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But what you’re writing about suggests that it’s actually an authoritarian vs. libertarian issue. You can be a liberal or a conservative who supports Americans’ right to unionize, but your beliefs become authoritarian when you think it’s OK for government to impose unionization on everyone, or to destroy the livelihoods of people who don’t wish to join unions. Is that correct?
You’ve hit squarely on the key point. It is quite possible to be authoritarian in either direction here.
The authoritarian approach to unions makes everyone fit a particular mold. It basically says (mirroring an item on typical authoritarianism scales) “shut up and accept your place.” The non-authoritarian approach offers some grounds for people to unionize if they want, but doesn’t force-feed a single solution on everyone.
But you can just as easily be authoritarian by trying to squash unions through strong-armed bullying as you can by supporting them through strong-armed bullying. The issue is in the restrictions you want to place on the other side—the people who want to do something different from you.
I confess that part of my problem with modern unions is more subjective. They just don’t feel right. Even when I used to vote for Democrats, my wife (who has historically been more conservative than me) would tease me about trying to get me to ask my favored Democratic candidates’ representatives about unions. That’s because my own experience with academic unions has always been negative, and she knew that was one of the primary ways at that time that I was more “conservative.” I didn’t like being forced to pay for what I viewed as a political end with money against my will. And that was at a local level where my own faculty had voted to unionize—but the spirit of the thing was all wrong. How much worse if the government forces it on everyone!
Then there is the political asymmetry. One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is rules that lean only in one political direction. I suspect I would have been a huge supporter of the original unions—in theory, I think unions can serve a good purpose. But today, they are almost entirely a left-wing boondoggle. They take money from people against their will and give it to left-wing causes, only to increase their power to take more money against people’s will. I have a strong personal distaste for that kind of thing on either side.
There was once a vote at my old university to take students’ money as a mandatory fee and give it to some environmental organization that leaned liberal. At that time, I supported a lot of the environmental causes, but the idea of taking conservative students’ money and giving it to liberal causes at a public university was appalling to me. It is because of the authoritarian asymmetry. The amazing intellectual giant Phil Tetlock said we should always do the turnabout test. How would liberals like it if conservative students were allowed to take their money against their will and give it to conservative causes on the public dime?
The same is true here. If you can’t pass a turnabout test, you are in danger of authoritarianism. Would the leftists promoting this ideology be equally fine if conservatives were allowed to force people into conservative-approved unions that supported conservative ideology? I think we both know the answer to that question.
About libertarianism, though, I would add that there is a danger of viewing libertarianism as the cure for authoritarianism. Your angling of it as an authoritarianism-libertarianism dimension is sensible, but it isn’t quite the way I would have framed it. That’s because just as it is possible to be a liberal authoritarian, it is possible to be a libertarian authoritarian. A former graduate student of mine and I once pondered writing a scale to capture that exact thing. We never did it, but I’m sure we could have found evidence along those lines.
Part of the problem is an issue addressed in the book, which is that we actually need reasonable authority. “Libertarianism” as simply “no authority” is nonsense. We really do need collective laws and restrictions of some kind. No one wants to live in a society where murdering people for fun is legal. I don’t know of any libertarians who believe in “no laws,” and I am quite libertarian myself (I prefer as few laws as seem necessary, which is generally the libertarian point), but nonetheless stopping authoritarianism is a different kind of battle entirely. It actually requires a discussion about which laws we want and assurances that they will be equally applied across all citizens.
Is it possible that people who choose to be our own bosses might have more of a natural aversion to authoritarianism? Especially when compared to people who’ve been employees taking orders from other people their entire lives, entrepreneurial people feel strongly about being able to carve our own paths. Did your research touch on people’s career choices in relation to authoritarianism?
We haven’t looked at that specifically in our research, but I’ll offer a couple of thoughts congruent with what we do know.
Research does suggest more broadly that the surrounding context matters to the likelihood of someone becoming authoritarian. And further, research suggests part of what makes an authoritarian person are genetically influenced personality tendencies. This combination reveals that some personalities are likely more prone to authoritarianism overall, and some people are put in situations (e.g., raised by authoritarian parents, immersed in a collectivist culture) that influence their authoritarian likelihood.
While I don’t know of any work specifically looking at jobs, I would guess that yes, people who work independently are almost certainly less prone to authoritarianism—either because anti-authoritarian personalities self-select into the role, or because people thrust into the role see the value of anti-authoritarianism.
But I wouldn’t get too cocky, because it is possible to be authoritarian to anything. People can be authoritarian about rocky road ice cream, so they can definitely be authoritarian in their defense of independent contractors too.
Our work shows how easily this happens, as does your own experience with progressives. Take liberal authoritarianism as a parallel. On the surface, liberal authoritarianism is almost a logical contradiction. “Liberal” psychologically leans “anti-authoritarian” in much the same way that “independent contractor” leans “anti-authoritarian.” But that won’t stop a group of liberals from pushing a liberal agenda with an authoritarian mindset. And it won’t necessarily stop independent contractors from using authoritarian means to get what they want, either.
You’re not using those means, of course, so this isn’t a criticism—just a gentle warning to your group more broadly. There often come key moments when we want to give in to our authoritarian instincts, even in the name of “freedom.” There is a reason authoritarianism is so widespread—it is seductive.
We have to be vigilant. When your livelihood is threatened, it is easier than you’d think to turn to the authoritarian dark side.
You wrote about how there are negative and positive consequences to left-wing authoritarians having a blind spot about their own authoritarianism. On the negative side, you said, it makes it especially difficult for liberals to admit obvious examples of authoritarianism in themselves and in other liberals. But, on the positive side, you said that if we can tap into that aversion, it could make it easier to defeat authoritarian tendencies on the left. How do we do that? Is there an example of that working on some other policy issue, something that those of us in the Fight for Freelancers could learn from?
I’m tempted to reply with Captain Kirk’s answer to Saavik when she asked him how to deal with imminent defeat by Klingons: “Prayer, Mister Saavik. The Klingons don't take prisoners.”
But more seriously: There are likely some folks that no argument can reach. Among the rest, in my book I talk about six principles people can use to fight left-wing authoritarianism. All of those principles involve a combination of traits psychologically necessary to win over any authoritarian: a willingness to stand up to them combined with reasoned and grace-filled arguments.
As you likely know well, if all you do is sing Kumbaya, you might as well quit. But if all you do is bludgeon, even if you win, you lose. The real trick is to keep fighting but also keep listening. That’s because authoritarianism responds to threat, and one of the ways you can disarm it is to show respect.
My guess is that if we could get behind every changed authoritarian, we’d be surprised how often that change started with someone making a firm persuasive argument with some measure of kindness and understanding. Don’t underestimate the long-term seed you plant when you take a bold stand, but do so without demonizing your opponents. Very little has ever changed the world for the better than that.
Now, I realize that doesn’t answer your question very specifically, because it is difficult to get left-wingers in general to see the problem. I haven’t run any studies on this specific issue myself. But I have run studies that show the trade-off between a short-term strategy and a long-term strategy. And those studies suggest that the real danger for building a long-term victory is to fall prey to seductive short-term strategies.
For example, you can actually win more battles with people in the short term by bullying them. Get power and use that power to force feed your position on them. But as a long-term strategy, that will backfire. It makes it harder to actually persuade them because it makes them quietly mad (what psychologists call “reactance”) and it undermines your trust in a lasting consensus (“informational contamination”).
That’s why I’m a big believer in respectful-but-bold persuasive argumentation. I think we underestimate its long-term power. Instead, we tend to use short-term strategies that build artificial victories that ultimately collapse.
And yes, evidence suggests these are winnable fights. It wasn’t that long ago that even discussing the GRE [standardized graduate-school admissions test] on a Society for Personality and Social Psychology listserv was called racist with much authoritarian bullying. Now, many major universities are re-adopting it because of evidence and argumentation. Those universities are bastions of left-wing authoritarianism, and yet evidence still can win the day.
Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to gain power. This isn’t about avoiding power; it’s about what you do with the power.
For example, there are simply no substitutes for laws. Consider that the primary reason our country has avoided authoritarianism isn’t democracy. Democracy is just the rule of the majority, and we have already seen that the majority sometimes want authoritarians to crush their enemies. The primary reason our country has avoided authoritarianism is the Constitution. We have a legal system in place that makes it hard for the winning side to bludgeon the other side. We have equal application of the law built into our government—and our psyche.
So what does this mean? It means it is good to work to get the right policies and laws in place, convince the right people who can actually change things to pass laws. I personally think we need more anti-authoritarian legislation rather than just executive orders, which can be easily changed. But realize that even if you do that, even if you get a Constitutional amendment, your long-term gain depends as much on what happens after a policy win than what happened before. Policies can change back just as easily as they changed forward (see: Prohibition).
To have a more permanent victory, you need some of the people you beat to change their minds. The best way to do that is to win a policy battle, and after you win, continue respectful, reasoned argument. That’s why one of the biggest principles in Liberal Bullies is something like this: Punch hard, but win gracefully.
What else can your research teach those of us who are trying to stop freelance busting? How can we get the left to understand that restricting or outlawing our chosen careers as independent contractors is the opposite of giving us freedom?
We tend to oversimplify political groups, but the reality is more complicated.
If you go solely after the 8% of liberals who are extreme left-wing authoritarians (as both my own and some other recent research in New Zealand suggests as one marker of typical percentages), you might not have much luck.
But there are a lot of people in the other 92% that are far more reachable. For example, a surprising number of right-wingers have fallen in line with left-wing authoritarian bureaucracy. We have a research package under review right now that looks at “conservative left-wing authoritarians” (yes, you read that right). I think those people are partially sleepwalking into an authoritarian apocalypse, but they are probably easier to wake up than your die-hard liberal left-wing authoritarians.
Montana has one of the largest groups of libertarians in the country and also a strong pro-union vibe. We don’t think of those things going together, but it is important to remember that a lot of those who might oppose you vaguely actually just don’t know your arguments. Montanans are pro-union, but they are also extremely pro-freedom. Sometimes you have to just wake up the pro-freedom side of the pro-freedom union supporter.
I think many people are merely unaware of how destructive to freedom these policies are. Here in Pennsylvania, I took a cab ride with an independent business owner who shared how authoritarian bureaucracy was making it impossible to run a small business. I think many liberals, independents and conservatives are just unaware of these things. Most people actually don’t know a lot of politics. I study this kind of thing for a living, and even I was shocked by parts of your story. (If I had known about it, I would have put it in the book!)
The book only touches on this next point, but we’re about to launch a research project to more fully evaluate it: Namely, I think a lot of what is currently happening is defined by people in the middle who are not so much authoritarian as authoritarian tolerant.
I’d guess many of the people who score moderately high (but not super high) on our Left-Wing Authoritarian scales are persuadable. They aren’t really super mean-spirited; they just tolerate authoritarianism.
Sometimes they tolerate it because it is the path of least resistance (e.g., the union worker who doesn’t really like the union but needs a job). Sometimes they tolerate it because it isn’t their fight and they are just trying to feed their family. Sometimes they tolerate it because even though they don’t actively seek out someone sticking it to their opponents, they’ll look the other way while someone else does it because it is vaguely satisfying.
These authoritarian tolerant folks very likely represent a growing number of people in our country—and many of those people could eventually turn into full-blown authoritarians (on both sides) unless we do something about it.
So I’d recommend (a) realizing that many of the people you are fighting likely fall into that category and (b) not giving up even when it seems like you aren’t making headway in the attitude-change department. My guess is that you are making more headway than you think; and even if I’m wrong, it’s the best chance we’ve got.
Research on minority influence in psychology suggests that minority positions can have great influence if the persons supporting those positions are consistently persuasive. Do not underestimate the long-term power of consistent, thoughtful argument!