Politicians routinely amplify and misdirect voters’ anger and resentment to win their support. Why do these tactics work? First published in 1996 (as The Politics of Denial), Raised to Rage offers a compelling and novel explanation for political anger and the roots of authoritarian political attitudes. This timely book was recently reprinted with a new introduction that updates the empirical evidence and connects it to the current presidential campaign. In this post, authors Michael Milburn and Sheree Conrad discuss the relationship between childhood punishment and support for authoritarianism and what it means for this political moment.
Based on your research, what have you found to be the relationship between childhood punishment and support for punitive political initiatives and authoritarianism?
In our research, we have found that individuals who report having been physically punished frequently in childhood are significantly higher in authoritarianism and in support for punitive public policies like the death penalty and the use of military force. Our model is “affect displacement,” that emotion from one source, in this case, childhood, can be carried into adulthood and displaced onto adult political attitudes. Political attitudes are complex and have many different influences, including education, income, and the attitudes of one’s parents. In our study published in 2014 in the journal Political Psychology, we controlled for background demographic variables that have been found to influence authoritarianism, and we examined the relationship of childhood experience to authoritarianism, controlling for the political ideology of their parents. The significant impact of childhood punishment remained significant, such that individuals whose parents were liberal, but who also used physical punishment, were significantly higher in authoritarianism than those individuals whose parents were liberal and did not use physical punishment.
It has been twenty years since your book was first published. How is the book relevant today? In what ways have you revised or revisited your original thesis?
In the last twenty years, major economic and political events at home and abroad have fueled anger among American voters. The attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, the economic crash of 2008-9, terror attacks by ISIL: all have created a world that is much more frightening than the world we lived in 20 years ago. Such threats only heighten the call for extreme authoritarian and punitive measures from a segment of the American voting population. Events such as these confirm the feeling among individuals who were raised by authoritarian, punitive parents that the world is dangerous, and that the rage they feel is an appropriate response to current reality, rather than a displacement of the rage they felt (and still feel) for their parents. The displacement of rage from the family to politics becomes more invisible to them and to the population in general in such a climate of fear and realistic anger. What’s more, the very real threats facing us allow demagogic politicians to activate fear and anger stemming from childhood in order to convince voters to go along with simplistic, authoritarian prescriptions for a host of social and political problems.
In our research since the original publication of the book, we have only found more support for the affect displacement theory and more evidence of the dangers of affect displacement for American politics. For example, in a 2014 study published in the journal Political Psychology, we found that individuals who reported higher levels of physical punishment in childhood were not only significantly angrier but were also more likely to succumb to hostile attribution bias, the tendency to assume that neutral or ambiguous actions and events are actually motivated by hostility. In addition, our recent research has shown clearly that there is a causal relationship between childhood physical punishment and individuals’ support in adulthood for punitive public policies, regardless of the political vie