Authoritarians’ ideological loyalties are arbitrary products of culture, not reason

Evidence

Yet High RWAs on both sides could easily have been in the front ranks on the other side, had they grown up to be the same kind of person in the other country. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1918

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: the authoritarian mindset is content-agnostic — the same psychological profile can serve any ideology, which is why ideological conversion stories in extremists are so common.
• FICTION: Could seed a story of enemies-on-opposite-sides who would have swapped roles had they been born elsewhere — a Cold War-era doubling story.
• XREF: connects to: Authoritarianism is not a single coherent psychological construct — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 525