Three in ten legislators still endorsed an outdated McCarthyist Communist threat.

Evidence

Another thing surprised me. Item 30 on the survey these legislators answered reads, ‘""The biggest threat to our freedom comes from the Communists and their kind, who are out to destroy religion, ridicule patriotism, corrupt the youth, and in general undermine our whole way of life.” This McCarthyist perception of a powerful subversive Communist movement in America was soundly rejected by most of the lawmakers serving in this 1990 study. But 36 of them (30%) still agreed with this cancerous self-doubt in the American psyche. They tended to be High RWAs (.61) and Republicans (.45). The phrase “Communists and their kind” may have opened the door to non- McCarthyist fears. But I was still taken aback. The item was far too dated to THE FEBRUARY 1991 RWA AND ETHNOCENTRISM STUDY Toward the beginning of 1991, when state legislatures would usually have started the year’s session, J undertook two new investigations of lawmakers’ attitudes. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3507

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interests in how stale ideology persists among political elites and correlates with authoritarianism.