vant 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 views of such individuals’ parents.
Are we indeed seeing more emotion and vitriol in the 2016 presidential elections than ever before, as the media have suggested, or is there historical precedent to the current campaign?
Elections have always generated highly emotional responses. That’s why your mom told you not to talk about sex, politics, or religion at cocktail parties—because people can get so emotional about these topics. However, as is well documented in our original work, dozens of studies show that authoritarianism in a society increases in times of economic or social unrest. The economic crisis that began in 2007 undermined the economic security that many Americans had felt. This crisis, combined with the election of a black President in 2008 whom many white individuals regarded as “other,” and thus illegitimate, helped fuel such an increase of emotion among individuals. Our recently published study in the journal Political Psychology found that higher authoritarianism is associated with negative emotion, such as higher levels of what psychologists call “trait-anger” (measured by agreement with statements like, e.g., “I slam doors when I am angry”), and higher levels of a hostile attribution bias (agreeing with statements like, “I have often felt that strangers were looking at me critically,” and “I often wonder what hidden reason another person may have for doing something nice for me.”), seeing the world as a more dangerous and fearful place.
We would expect higher levels of emotion, particularly among individuals pre-disposed to support Trump by their childhood backgrounds. As we have shown in our research, childhood experiences of harsh punishment, when unacknowledged, can provide additional emotional energy that amplifies support for punitive public policies and scapegoating of different groups. Trump’s claim in the first debate with Hillary Clinton that gangs of illegal immigrants terrorizing the populace plague inner cities in the U.S. is a clear example of this.
What can we learn about the underlyi