Academic Fakers:
"Academic psychologists are overwhelmingly Leftist in their orientation. So it will be no surprise to hear that at least since the 1950's psychologists have been doing their best to find psychological maladjustment in conservatives. ...
"My findings did not produce the RIGHT CONCLUSIONS, you see. In fact my findings showed the theories concerned to be wrong in almost every respect.
So it was no surprise to me at all to read the latest effort in the long line of attempts by psychologists to discredit conservatives. ...
"Their claim that Stalin was Right-wing, for instance must be some high-point of twisting the evidence. If the most prominent Communist of the 20th century was Right-wing, who on earth would be Left-wing? Black might as well be white. Here is what Jost and his crew actually said:
"'There are also cases of left-wing ideologues who, once they are in power, steadfastly resist change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism, such as Stalin or Khrushchev or Castro (see J. Martin, Scully, & Levitt, 1990). It is reasonable to suggest that some of these historical figures may be considered politically conservative.'...
"The reason they get themselves into this awful muddle is that they have no idea what conservatism actually is. To define what it is, they consulted dictionaries and social science encyclopaedias and their fellow Leftist writers but they do not appear to have consulted a single conservative! And they have certainly studied no political history. They have fallen into the simplistic trap of equating conservatism with rejection of change....
"...conservatives have always resisted attempts to curtail their rights and liberties -- particularly from the incursions of tyrannical governments. THAT is what has often made them resist change -- as governments do have a habit of trying to curtail the rights and liberties of the individual. But to say that conservatives resist change for its own sake is something that only a Leftist would believe. Conservatives believe in liberty. Leftists believe in the State.
...
Two of the most popular scales that psychologists use in studying conservative politics are the 'F' scale -- put together in the late 1940s by the (Marxist) Adorno and his group ...
John J. Ray
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 27, 2003
THE OLD-FASHIONED PERSONALITY:
"...a high 'F' scorer is not a Fascist but rather someone who is still lost in the culture of the pre-war era. He or she tends to be
'old-fashioned'. Since Hitler's Nazism did strongly tend to romanticize the past and perhaps took some of its values from the past, some understanding of how the two variables got mixed up would seem possible. Adorno et al heard various expressions of attitude from various sources in California that sounded to them like what they had heard from Hitler. They mistakenly assumed that the old-fashioned people who uttered these statements must also be like Hitler.
"...it seems reasonable to say that Kline & Cooper showed that old-fashioned people at the present time are especially
'nice' to others (i.e. low scorers on the Eysenck "P" scale), forceful, conscientious, conservative and inclined to perfectionism with good self-control.
...
"An elaborate interpretation of this finding in terms of the psychodynamic processes described by Adorno et al is, of course, possible but a much more straightforward interpretation is that sexual prudery is old- fashioned. Given the great liberalization of sexual attitudes since
'the Pill', this too fits in well with what is already known.
"...high F scorers (old-fashioned people) dislike homosexuals is, of course, also similarly explained. Homosexuals were once so disfavoured that homosexuality was almost universally illegal. Now they are generally tolerated and may even be accepted. So it is old-fashioned nowadays to decry homosexuality....
"As the Afrikaners, with their strict Calvinistic Protestantism, are a notably old-fashioned group in all sorts of ways, their high F scores represent good confirmation for the present theory.
"...some high F scorers have been found to prefer conservative political candidates and that some neo-Nazis and John Birchers have been found to have high F scores but she ignores the fact mentioned above to the effect that many people in the general population have high F scores and that even people who vote for Leftist candidates often have high F scores ...
"Old-fashioned people in the general population (and even to some extent among students) simply have a variety of political orientations.
...
"It may be, of course, that having an
'old-fashioned orientation' is not the most ultimately accurate way of characterizing high F scale scorers. That they could also fairly reasonably be characterized by related descriptions such as
'cultural traditionalists' or 'cultural conservatives' is admitted./"
J.J. Ray
University of New South Wales, Australia
Human Relations 1990, 43, 997-1015.