Many people seem to want an authoritarian and it drives me crazy.
That's what I was saying a while ago about the RWA (right wing authoritarian) psych test. Note here, that loyal Soviet citizens scored highly on the RWA tests. So the "R" here is about adherence to a strong social conservative government (enforced law and order, enforced morality: the old French meaning of "Right"), regardless of the rhetoric of the dominant ideology. So why no matching LWA scale for the left? Psychologists have tried to make one and failed, because Authoritarianism invariably has a right-wing bias (except for in ex-Soviet countries where it sort of works) no matter how they phrase it.
The RWA tests
sound like Poe's law in action, but the sad fact is quite a large number of people in every country do literally tick yes to most of the RWA test questions. The test questions are
extremely specific in the belief they're asking about. Some people on the forum thought that they were
too specific and that this was a weakness. But I'd cite it as a strength of the test. Why? because we can gauge how many people actually think like that (
a lot) and then do other tests to see how these beliefs affect them in other contexts.
There's another test call SDO (Social dominance orientation) and the interplay of this with the RWA test is interesting. In some multiplayer team wargame simulations, those who scored highly on RWA but not SDO always fell into line behind the high-SDO players, who invariably muscled their way into positions of power (either the leader, or the leader's chief henchman/head-kicker), then aggressively competed with other high-SDO players, usually ending in nuclear Armageddon. But when games were just RWAs (with high-SDO players deliberately excluded), there was massive military build up, but few wars. They recreated the Cold War basically. There was massive mistrust, isolationism and militarism, but low risk taking and aggression.
This fits with the idea that the RWA tests measure the "follow the glorious leader" trait, and mob psychology, but not necessarily the drive to take charge of a situation. Conversely, when the only players in the games were low-RWAs, it ended with free trade, international treaties and widespread humanitarian aid. Liberal globalism and the UN basically.