Senator Margaret Chase Smith stands up to Senator Joe McCarthy

People make choices among alternatives, and they can’t know the future. So they can anticipate that each option they face usually presents risks, but they can’t always anticipate those risks. Certainly they can’t guarantee that by pushing this button the desired outcome will happen; rather, there are likely to be several outcomes, each with its own value and probability. Rational choice theory offers a general theory of decision-making under conditions of risk and uncertainty, and this theory of choice underlies much of microeconomics. The assumption is that decision-makers are rational in calculating the “expected value” of each of the options they face (the value of a particular outcome times the probability of that outcome), and that they then choose the option with the greatest expected utility.

Aristotle, on the other hand, had a more nuanced conception of “rational deliberation” in action, which involve consideration of multiple factors in a situation of choice. Practical reason is more than a question of estimating probabilities and utilities; it is an extensive reflection upon the circumstances, values, outcomes, and meanings of the choices that we make. (Here is an earlier post on rational deliberation about important choices in life; link.)

Here is a simple example. It’s a considered risk to go on winter vacation for two months with the heat turned off — “save a little money and count on the weather not getting down to the frozen-pipes level”. You care about the $800 you might save in heating bills, and you judge that a disastrous freeze ($12,000 damage) is too unlikely to worry about. But managing risk is something we can think about analytically. We can assign value to the possible outcomes and we can make an estimate of the likelihood of success and failure, and then we can choose the plan or action with the greatest expected value. In the winter vacation example, we’ve already specified the value of the good and bad outcomes, so we just need to make an estimate of the likelihood of each scenario. If we leave the heat turned off, we have a 100% likelihood of a saving of $800. The best winter forecast of the likelihood of a deep freeze event in my neighborhood is only 1%. This means the expected value of the frozen pipes is -$120 and the net expected gain/loss is $680. On these estimates it is prudent to leave the heat turned off. But if the likelihood of a deep freeze event is greater — say 8% — then the situation changes. Now the expected loss is -$960, and the net loss is -$160. It is no longer prudent to leave the heat off during the winter vacation. I’m better off leaving the heat on for the duration and being sure of avoiding the disastrous freeze.

So what are some of the blindspots of the theory of expected utility as a general model for decision-making? On the rational-choice approach, prudence (wisdom in handling risky situations) means a choice among options ranked by the expected gain/loss of each option. This is one common way of thinking about choice under circumstances of risk and uncertainty. This what economists mean by the advice, “maximize expected utility!”. It is the scheme that underlies cost-benefit analysis. And within its domain it is guaranteed to produce the greatest overall utility when applied consistently over time. But as a rule of choice aimed at guiding a person’s life choices, it is plainly a loser’s maxim. It is appropriate only for “rational fools”, as Amartya Sen put the point in an article of the same name (link). Here are several problems.

First, many life choices involve incommensurable outcomes. A person choosing between career options illustrates this. Alice has a choice: to become an expert on financial systems, because this choice has a 95% probability of generating lifetime wealth holdings of $10 million; or to become a climate activist, because this choice will give meaning to her life and will lead to social relationships with people she can respect and trust. There is no common denominator here, and Alice’s choice cannot be guided by the expected utility rule. Alice simply has to decide: which eventual outcome will be most important to her when all is said and done, a large stock portfolio or a lifetime of meaningful and satisfying work?

Second, many important life choices cannot be fitted out with objective or numerical probabilities. We may be able to assign subjective estimates to outcomes — “It is more likely that my home will burn down as a result of electrical shorts than because it is struck by a small private plane” — but we can’t make a pretense of assigning a specific probability to each possible event. And this is even more of an obstacle when it comes to less tangible events. Imagine if Caesar responded to the soothsayer’s warning “Beware the Ides of March” by jotting down probabilities about these possible hazards: the legions in Britain may mutiny (5%); Mt. Vesuvius may erupt (1%); my friends may murder me (10%); I may get bad news from Gaul that gives me a migraine (15%); … Pointless!

Third, many choices involve values and normative commitments in their doing as well as tangible benefits in their outcomes. This is a point that Sen emphasizes in “Rational Fools”. Another example will help here. William the Haberdasher recognizes that he can make a few extra dollars in profits by stocking Chinese knockoff “Mani” suits where his clientele is expecting Italian “Armani” suits. But William believes he has a duty of honesty to his customers, so he refrains. This is a considered and deliberative choice on William’s part that does not depend upon a cost-benefit analysis. It is not “rational”, if the only relevant consideration is the amount of profit of one business practice versus another; but for William, this is not the case.

It also seems that the expected utility rule is questionable when the unlikely negative outcome is very, very bad. (This seems particularly relevant in the case of a decision to implement highly dangerous technologies like first-generation fission reactors.) Suppose there is a choice between action A and B. A has an 80% probable benefit of $1000 and a 20% possible loss of $1,500. The expected utility is $500. B has a 99.9% likelihood of a return of $2000 and a 0.1% likelihood of a return of -$10,000, with a discounted loss of -$10. The expected return of option B is $1,990 — apparently a no-brainer from the point of view of the expected utility rule. But here the choice depends upon more than the dollars and cents (or rupees), because the unlikely outcome is also extremely bad. In the context of an agrarian society, for a poor landless tenant a debt of $10,000 means debt bondage for life. The landless tenant would surely be prudent to avoid that risk altogether and go with option A. The return on this option will be much less, but it rules out lifetime debt bondage completely. (Some development economists argue that the relatively slow adoption of Green Revolution technologies in rice farming followed from just such a risk-averse strategy. It was called the maximin strategy: choose that option with the least-bad worst outcome. This is the decision rule that John Raws recommends in arguing for the Difference Principle in his two principles of justice.)

And what if the pending choice is a one-off situation — you will never be faced with this choice again? Now the rationale for the expected utility rule disappears, because that rule depends on repeated similar choices. But for a unique choice you will never get the chance to make up for the unlikely roll of the dice. There is only the action and the outcome. The actor needs to ask: is there a best choice here and now, that I will not regret even if the dice rolls against me?

So Aristotle was right: wisdom in action within a risky world of choice cannot be reduced to simple arithmetic. Rather, reflection and deliberation about means and ends, moral and personal commitments, and the context of action and its consequences are needed in order to make genuinely wise decisions. “Self-interest” is only one part of wisdom; character and commitments are also part of the process of choice in important decisions. Phronesis rather than calculation is unavoidable in life’s more complicated and multifaceted situations of choice. (Here is a post on the topic of character that is relevant to decision-making; link.)

Selected materials removed from National Park sites at instructions from Trump administration (legal cases underway) (Gemini generated)

It is quite difficult to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country under the current conditions. The occasion has been hijacked by a president and a political party that have no dignity, no respect for the basic values of our country, no allegiance to our Constitution and the rule of law, and no benevolence for our people, and no respect for the international system and other nations that have been loyal partners throughout times of crisis in the past and present.

Like many Americans, I am ashamed of the lies told every day by our president, the cruelty and lack of compassion he and his administration show to the people of the United States and in other countries, the crassness of his constant efforts at self-promotion in attacking the great monuments of our capital city, and the corruption and massive conflicts of interest shown by the $1.2-$1.5 billion he has gained since taking office through industries he has promoted as president. Even the day of national celebration itself has been hijacked by his party’s Freedom 250 organization, converting the July 4h celebrations into a rally on the president’s behalf.

And yet this sense of shame about our nation’s current leader and his administration does not extend to a sense of disillusionment about our nation itself. My thoughts go first to Abraham Lincoln and the words of his Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863.

So many lines in this brief speech demonstrate a fundamental contrast to our current president. “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here” — can we imagine the current occupant in the White House making such a humble remark? And just a moment later, Lincoln expresses a fundamental aspiration for the nation — not for himself, not for his followers, not for his party, but for the nation: “That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Lincoln’s thoughts in 1863 were for the people of the United States, for the institutions through which their freedom and equality is secured, and for our unity as a democratic people. Have we ever heard the current president make a sincere effort to speak to and on behalf of the whole of the people of the United States, not simply his “base”?

Recall as well the closing lines of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address in 1861:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Or recall Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech in the same place as the current “Great American State Fair” has been staged — to a crowd of some 250,000 men, women, and children from around the country on August 28, 1963. What a dignified and affirming set of aspirations were articulated on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on that day, and what a stunning contrast to the scene on the same location today. Here are a few of MLK’s words on that day:

I say to you today, my friends, though, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

Or go back to Susan B. Anthony’s words in 1873 affirming women’s equality and demanding the right to vote for women after her own arrest for the crime of voting in the 1872 U.S. presidential election:

Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any state to deny.

The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:

“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people – women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government – the ballot.

Think finally of a fearless defender of freedom and the rule of law in the U.S. Senate, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. She spoke up against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s unconscionable and cowardly attacks on the loyalty of other Americans in these words in June, 1950:

I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American.

The United States Senate has long enjoyed worldwide respect as the greatest deliberative body in the world. But recently that deliberative character has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity. …

I think that it is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution. I think that it is high time that we remembered that the Constitution, as amended, speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation.

Whether it be a criminal prosecution in court or a character prosecution in the Senate, there is little practical distinction when the life of a person has been ruined.

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism:

• The right to criticize;
• The right to hold unpopular beliefs;
• The right to protest;
• The right of independent thought.

The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us doesn’t? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own. Otherwise thought control would have set in.

Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Jr., Margaret Chase Smith — these were all Americans with a deep and enduring commitment to the values of equality, freedom, and the rule of law upon which our nation rests. And they all spoke in terms that recalled the language of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. They recognized very clearly the distance still to travel before those values are more adequately realized. In their various ways, they stood courageously in the face of threats, violence, and unsettled times. And they did not stand alone. Countless other leaders, citizens, officials, and ordinary citizens stood up in their own times and places to support equality, freedom, and dignity for all.

The values that we share as Americans are profound, their goals are incomplete, and they are under attack today. The rule of law, the responsibility of government to act justly and in support of the common good, and the political morality of mutual respect and dignity are all threatened by the current administration and its supporters in Congress and in the nation.

So, yes, let us celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation on this Fourth of July, 2026. Let us embrace with renewed understanding the core values of equality and freedom, dignity and mutual respect, that are fundamental to a democracy that embraces all its citizens. And let us each take the actions that we can to help to ensure that our democracy survives these many challenges.

Military coup, Poland, December 1981

Poland is an important example of the paths taken by the citizens of satellite states within the former Soviet Union. Soviet domination of the governments of Poland, Hungary, East Germany (GDR), Czechoslovakia, and other satellite states led to uprisings in several states, resulting in violent military interventions by the Soviet Union in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968), as well as threats of intervention and other forms of political pressure against others (Poland in 1956 and 1980-81).

The Polish pathway from Communist authoritarian rule to democracy included the rise of a large mass-based social movement, Solidarity. One telling of the story of the rise of the Solidarity movement is the pragmatic tactics and goals pursued by its leaders, including Lech Wałęsa. By carefully crafting goals and plans around labor union goals rather than an overtly “anti-communist” uprising, the Solidarity movement avoided a violent clash with the Polish military and General Jaruzelski. This is the line of interpretation offered by the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Research in its 2009 report on the movement (Maciej Bartkowski, link). According to Bartkowski, the movement illustrated an intelligent mobilization and marshaling of support from over ten million union members, and it avoided a violent showdown with the armed forces of the state. It was, in other words, a striking success for “people power” in the face of a vastly more powerful military and state apparatus. And it was an outcome worth celebrating by activists and organizations (like the CNCR) who advocate for the power of mass nonviolent action. Bartkowski writes:

With its self-limiting philosophy of nonviolent struggle and the support of the Catholic Church, Solidarity was in a position to consider the offer of negotiations and accept a pacted transition, even though that meant a preservation of the economic and social status of the ruling elites.

But this description uses a phrase that points to the limitations of the Solidarity movement as well, the idea of a “self-limiting” strategy of struggle. This phrase originated in the writings of the outstanding Polish sociologist Jadwiga Staniszkis, who was both an observer and a participant in the Solidarity movement and the political struggles it brought about. She was one of Poland’s leading academic sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s, and she was also asked to serve as a member of the Inter-Factory Strike Committee, a small group of advisers to the Solidarity union in Gdańsk about strategies for negotiations with the government. Her book, Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution, was written during and immediately following the rise of the workers’ movement and the imposition of martial law in 1981. It is notable for her objective and clear-eyed account of the movement. She does not romanticize the movement. She had brought an early draft of the book to the United States during an academic visit in 1980, and in 1981 it found a receptive reading at Princeton University Press. Jan Gross, another exceptional Polish sociologist who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1969, agreed to edit the manuscript and to add an historical section providing an account of the background events leading to the emergence of Solidarity, and the book was published by Princeton in 1984. In the editor’s preface to the book Jan Gross describes his reaction to the book as one of the initial readers for the press:

Staniszkis’s book is the best, most original, thought-provoking analysis of an East-Central European society and its politics that I have read in a long time. It goes beyond analyses derived from the totalitarian model approach and it is also more sophisticated than analyses using the interest group approach to study ‘socialist’ societies. The book is an attempt to describe and understand the authoritarian regime in Poland as a sort of corporatist society. As a sociologist of organizations the author succeeds in analyzing an intricate system of mechanisms that have been generated by a social system in order to compensate for irrationalities due to ideological restrictions placed upon it. She has been sensitive to the manifestations of symbolic manipulation in the process of social control and able to analyze such phenomena as simulation of interest group representation or ritualization of periodic crises of the regime. In these analyses she has demonstrated how the system succeeded in incorporating and, as it were, domesticating what would be seen by a less astute observer (or a traditionally thinking social scientist) as developments disrupting and threatening the system’s stability. (x)

Staniszkis describes the core concept of a “self-limiting revolution” in these terms:

Self-limiting revolution. The most striking characteristic of the initial period of the movement’s history was the painful process of cramming that radical wave of protest and class war into a ‘trade union” formula. Nearly all other features of the movement stemmed from this self-limitation of the Polish revolution. For instance, its symbolic politics (which took the form of attacks on local PUWP bosses and did not try to undermine the political institutions as such) provided a peculiar alibi for regional Solidarity leaders who had to pay with their own authority for the policy of moderating the movement, persuaded by its top authorities and experts from the intelligentsia. (17)

Staniszkis’s account differs substantially from that of Alain Touraine, discussed in earlier posts (link, link). Touraine emphasized (or perhaps over-emphasized) the substantial agency and purposiveness of the Solidarity movement, whereas Staniszkis emphasized the structural limitations to which its “pragmatic strategies” subjected it. There were clear limits to the scope of what could be demanded and achieved through the Solidarity social and political mobilization, according to Staniszkis, and this left the authoritarian capacity of the Polish state substantially unchanged. And Staniszkis’s view of the rank-and-file workers who made up the constituency of Solidarity is markedly different from Touraine’s. Touraine regarded Polish workers as having a high level of political consciousness and agency; whereas Staniszkis’s view is that workers were not especially ideological or militant in their support for the union. In her view, the interests motivating a substantial portion of the union members were primarily economic; and in fact, the union had very little concrete economic power (19 ff.). She writes: “Also almost all the victories won by Solidarity during this stage of the conflict were superficial, the ruling group made promises that it did not intend to keep, and hence Solidarity victories were pointless. The deadlock of the self-limiting revolution was also due to the narrow trade-union formula used to label the movement’s activity” (21).

Analysis of a social movement requires providing an account of the motivations and mental frameworks of the potential followers of the movement. Staniszkis considers the content and determinants of “working-class consciousness” in some detail:

Three thresholds must be mentioned when talking about the development of the consciousness of working class in Poland. The first is the barrier created by the limited semantic competence of the workers, which in the past has led to articulation of interests only in restricted, situation-specific, terms. In the first part of this chapter I will try to show how this limited semantic competence made the workers’ protest less efficient. This is a good example of a situation in which the structure of speech (rather than its content) plays an ideological role because it reinforces and stablizes the political system. However, this same limited competence sometimes served as an advantage by reducing the areas of possible communication during negotiations, as a result making the working class less vulnerable to manipulation and in a sense more radical. In this context, I will discuss radicalism as a problem of imagination as well as of attitude and the events of August 1980 as a type of cultural revolution. (113)

She refers also to the barrier of “reification” — the mental attitude according to which “power relations are perceived as painful but natural and without alternative” (113), and what she calls the “peculiar self-image of Solidarity activists” (113).

As suggested by the first barrier, Staniszkis takes a fairly negative view of the role of intellectuals and experts in the Solidarity struggle. She writes of the disconnect between the language and “semantic power” wielded by the intellectuals which rarely resonated with the political consciousness or goals of the rank-and-file union leaders and members. And she suggests that this semantic advantage sometimes worked to derail the more radical demands made by some activists and union leaders.

Most interesting in this chapter is her articulation of how she understands “ideological functions” in a social situation:

By ideological functions of forms of consciousness I mean:

• 1) their participation in measures to stabilize present social relations;
• 2) their influence on the opportunities of individuals, social groups, and classes in conflict situations;  
• 3) their impact on the ability to defend against the tensions generated by the system;
• 4) their role in the techniques of domination and manipulation applied by the ruling group. (115-116)

This is not a theory of the content of an ideology (as Marx attempts to do); rather, it is an effort at diagnosing the “functions” or “social effects” of a social ideology. So the book doesn’t give much attention to what Polish workers thought about the political structures within which they lived, and how they made sense of them. Instead, she places most of her attention on what she calls “semantic competence” — the concepts and vocabulary through which workers, leaders, unionists, farmers, and other members of Polish society expressed their thoughts about the political forces around them.

In fact, she seems to find the concept of “ideology” somewhat vacuous. Instead, she suggests the term “mentality” as a way of framing the “sense-making” thought processes of various segments of Polish society. (She cites Juan Linz’s use of these concepts in his analysis of authoritarianism.)

I use the term “mentality” as a synonym for a framework of cognitive forms actually operative in political life that is action-oriented and loaded with emotions. This term seems more useful in our case than the concept of ideology. (135)

In the end, Staniszkis’s assessment of the impact of the Solidarity movement in Polish political and social transformation is somewhat negative:

It may sound like heresy, but Polish political life and especially the flow of ideas after August 1980 and the creation of Solidarity has been impoverished as a result of the impact of the populist and solidarist perspective pressed upon society by Solidarity. This view contrasts with the segmented, often morally ambiguous but nevertheless less uniform and less aggregated course of society in the 1970s. (145)

And indeed, the military coup and martial law regime of December 1981 provided a striking parenthesis to the idea that Solidarity was a powerful social movement capable of transforming Polish society. She describes the final weeks in November and December leading up to the coup in these terms:

1) Solidarity leaders believed that the power vacuum (the ruling group’s inability to control the real processes in society and the economy) was synonymous with the ruling group’s inability to use repression. Interestingly, this assumption closely paralleled the position of the ruling group itself. Ironically, the latter has also mistaken the ability to repress for an ability to govern.
2) Leaders of Solidarity also assumed that, even if confrontation were to come, the ruling group would begin with mild and legal methods and that its options would be limited by the present form of the institutional regime, with its characteristic situation of stalemate. At worst a “state of emergency” would exist with the delegation of extraordinary powers to the government by Sejm, not a “state of war,” preceded by a military coup. (326)

These were grave mistakes. The Solidarity organization was outlawed and forced underground, its leaders were arrested and imprisoned, and the strategies of mass demonstration and protest were no longer feasible. So the repressive power of the state succeeded in blocking Solidarity as a political force for at least a few years. But Staniszkis argues that internal contradictions within the union itself presented another large obstacle to continued resistance:

Another mistake of Solidarity leaders was rooted in their underestimation of the problems within Solidarity itself. Recent surveys made by the sociological research center of Mazowsze Region” show among members of Solidarity not only a low willingness to strike (even if the right to strike were in danger), but also deep differences within the union, the ambiguous relationship between the rank-and-file members and their national leaders, and, above all, the increasing passivity of Solidarity members. The ruling group appears to have read this evidence much more carefully; especially the data showing the relatively high prestige of the army among Solidarity members as well as their ambivalence toward at least some proposals popular among Solidarity activists. (326-327).

The third mistake of the national leaders of Solidarity was in accelerating a “paper war’’ (an exchange of statements and resolutions) without any real preparation for the eventual consequences of such an escalation of claims. A feeling of strength based on its membership of nearly 10 million was one of the basic reasons for the ‘‘safe game” attitude of most of Solidarity’s leaders. They did not take into account how easily the union could be paralyzed by cutting off communications and arresting activists. (328)

For some reason Staniszkis’s account of this fairly short period of social conflict makes me think of Marx and Tocqueville in their treatment of the events leading up to the June Days in Paris, 1848. Here are Alexander Herzen’s recollections of the class warfare that occurred in the streets of Paris on those days:

I listened to the thunder and the tocsin and gazed avidly at this panorama of Paris; it was as though I was taking my leave of it. At that moment I loved Paris passionately. It was my last tribute to the great town; after the June days it grew hateful to me. On the other side of the river barricades were being raised in all the streets and alleys. I can still see the gloomy faces of the men dragging stones; women and children were helping them. A young student from the Polytechnic climbed up on to an apparently completed barricade, planted the banner and started singing the Marseillaise in a soft, sad, solemn voice; all the workers joined in and the chorus of this great song, resounding from behind the stones of the barricades, gripped one’s soul. . . . The tocsin was still tolling. Meanwhile, the artillery clattered across the bridge and General Bedeau standing there raised his field-glasses to inspect the enemy positions. . . . (From the Other Shore, After the Storm, 46)

The question of how the political values and attitudes of young people are formed has come up frequently in recent posts. This question is especially interesting in the case of the rise of far-right parties in Germany, including especially the AfD. What is of particular interest is that there seem to be several divisions at work in Germany when it comes to support for far-right politics and ideologies: region (east-west), gender, sector (urban-rural), and cohort (Gen Z versus millennials and boomers). Answering the question of the mechanisms and cultural/social circumstances that led to the growth of far-right attitudes among young people is urgent if we are to address the threat to democracy that this poses.

Rolf Frankenberger is a research expert at the Institute for Research on Right-Wing Extremism at the University of Tübingen, and his recent report in the Conversation (link) is very interesting. Most striking is the map he reproduces recording support for AfD by municipality in the 2024 European elections in Germany.

The geographical distribution of support for AfD is striking. It is concentrated in precisely the pre-unification states of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Here is a map of East and West Germany from 1980.

To many observers, the most significant change in life for German people in the past fifty years is the reunification of Germany that occurred in 1990. And the lives of young people in the east changed much more dramatically than their counterparts in the west.

Frankenberger wants to understand the mechanisms leading to risinig support for the far right. However, he emphasizes a different factor than the reunification issues: the divide between urban and rural social life.

A new division has emerged as a result between the urban and the rural. The two are more than just forms of settlements – they reflect ideals, values and lifestyles. Those who live in towns and cities lead almost entirely different lives to those who live in the countryside.

Frankenberger pinpoints a clash of cultures as a key to the rise of support for the far right. On his view, rural people are increasingly likely to be mobilized around what has been portrayed as “threats” to their traditional ways of life. Even solar-power windmills are hated, according to Frankenberger, because they disrupt the countryside for the benefit of “modern” urban dwellers. And on the other side of the coin, urban dwellers are better educated, more economically mobile, and less attracted to the ideologies of the far right.

Here is Frankenberger’s presentation of the variation in support for AfD in Baden-Württemberg. In general the region produces a lower level of support for AfD; but Frankenberger emphasizes the variation across the state. Rural areas have produced significantly higher levels of support for AfD than urban areas, even in this state that was part of West Germany in 1980.

And he emphasizes the cultural conservatism of the rural areas in this region.

The Black Forest, the Swabian Forest, and Hohenlohe also have quite strong protestant and evangelical communities, which are strongholds of traditional family life, customs and traditions.

The impact of the university cities in the distribution of political attitudes across this map is visible and extensive. Each university city demonstrates less than 10% support for AfD, with the highest levels of support occurring in rural and forest areas exceeding 25%.

Frankenberger does not address the smoking gun in the first map above, however. This is the stark difference in patterns of support across the earlier political divide between the Federal Republic and the GDR. This divide seems to overshadow the urban-rural differences singled out here and to demand explanation. What accounts for the much higher level of support for far-right parties, including especially the AfD, by citizens from the former GDR? This question demands close attention. Was it deindustrialization? Was it abrupt “modernization” and erosion of traditional village and rural life? Was it an emerging trend in which women had different and better opportunities than men?

Another issue not addressed here is the gender gap in support for AfD in Germany. In recent elections a substantially higher percent of German men support AfD than women (26% against 11% in one recent poll). What explains this gap? Sabine Volk, another researcher at the Tübingen Institute, has addressed the role of antifeminism in the rise of the AfD and its particular intensity in the east in “The AfD and Antifeminism in Germany, 2014–2025: Family First, Trans Panic Second” (link). Again, this disparity between young men and young women in their political attitudes demands explanation.

Underlying all of these disparities is the urgent need to provide an account of the connection between events in the 1990s and the formation of political attitudes and values in German men and women who became adolescents and young adults after reunification.

And there is a second hanging question as well: why have other European countries (for example, Poland, Sweden, Russia, France, the Netherlands, or Italy) developed a cohort of young people in the same generation who seem to embrace very similar far-right political attitudes, even though their formative circumstances were quite different from those experienced in the former GDR region?

Here is a DW profile of one young far-right recruit (link). The video highlights a need for belonging experienced by young men, and offers a discussion of the roots of misogyny and the impact of social media and YouTube right-wing influencers.

There is a view in the United States that impactful racial discrimination has declined significantly over time. This view flies in the face of an afternoon’s walk through Detroit, the south side of Chicago, or the Bronx, where racial segregation in housing and the disadvantages that flow from that system are evident. But what is the social-scientific evidence concerning the current situation of race-based discrimination?

This is a question that rigorous quantitative sociologists have studied in the past several decades, and the results are dismal. Consider the research agenda of Lincoln Quillian and his collaborators over that period of time (link). Researchers have studied race-based discrimination in employment using field experiments to test the relative success of equally qualified applicants in thousands of job applications. The experiments take two forms: correspondence tests (where fictitious resumés are paired with equivalent credentials but differing in signals indicating the race of the candidate) and audit tests (where pairs of job applicants played by trained actors are presented for in-person applications or interviews). Here is how Lincoln Quillian describes the procedure for in-person audits:

For in-person audits, researchers send teams of trained actors to apply for the same job vacancies (e.g., Attström 2007; Pager et al. 2009). Each team includes at least one actor belonging to the native or dominant racial group and another from a racial minority group. Teams are assigned equivalent fictitious employment credentials like education, training and previous experience. The majority and minority actors undergo a period of training that involves practice calls to employers, mock interviews and standardizing candidate responses to interview questions (Bendick et al. 2010). Actors are matched based on physical appearance, age and demeanor. In-person audit studies usually rely on at least two signals about the applicant’s race: the applicant’s name in the resume and the applicant’s in-person and physical appearance. (Quillian et al 2020 link : 734)

The experimenter then records the number of candidates by race who are “called back” for a subsequent interview. In an entirely race-blind world we would expect the callback rate to be approximately the same for “white” and “black” candidates; but almost all field experiments with this design show the opposite result.

Quillian and his colleagues conducted a major meta-study of virtually all existing field experiments on employment discrimination. In addition, he and his colleagues assessed the level of discrimination that occurs at the next stage of employment, the step from callback to job offer. In “Evidence from Field Experiments in Hiring Shows Substantial Additional Racial Discrimination after the Callback” Quillian, Lee, and Oliver (link) find that the level of discrimination from callback to job offer is even greater than that between application and callback. “Our results indicate that substantial, additional racial discrimination occurs even after minority candidates make it to the interview stage. Because of this, studies that only use callbacks seriously underestimate the complete extent of discrimination in the hiring process” (734). Here is a summary of their findings:

We begin with a basic meta-analysis of the level of discrimination at different stages. Results of the meta-analysis for each stage are shown in Figure 2 and Table 2 Panels A and B. For our sample of twelve studies, the results indicate that majority applicants receive 53% more callbacks than equally qualified minority applicants on average (discrimination ratio of 1.534; 95% confidence interval of 1.33–1.78).

What happens after the callback? The discrimination ratio for job offers conditional on receiving a callback (i.e., only for applicants who made it to the interview stage) is 1.53418; this indicates that even when both candidates receive an interview, majority applicants still receive about 50% more job offers than comparable minority applicants. Looking at the overall level of discrimination in job offers, majority applicants receive about 145% more job offers than comparable minority applicants (discrimination ratio of 2.450, 95% confidence interval of 1.68–3.57). The difference between the callback discrimination ratio and the unconditional (or overall) job offer discrimination ratio is statistically significant at p < 0.05 (shown in Panel B of Table 2). These results indicate that there is a considerable degree of additional discrimination against racial minorities as they move from callback to job offer. The point estimates suggest that minority candidates experience an average more than twice as much discrimination overall in the job offer outcome as in the callback outcome. (747-748)

Here is a graph summarizing the findings of their meta-analysis of all studies that include callback-job offer data.

These are striking and apartheid-like conclusions. Here is the most salient point: “Looking at the overall level of discrimination in job offers, majority applicants receive about 145% more job offers than comparable minority applicants”. Out of 1000 white applicants and 1000 equally well-qualified black applicants, close to 2.5 times as many white applicants will receive job offers as black applicants. Assume there are 350 positions to be offered; this implies that 100 black applicants will receive an offer, compared to 250 white applicants — all equally qualified. By any measure, this is an enormous level of discrimination in employment.

What are the mechanisms that underlie these highly discriminatory results? Two observations in the article are suggestive:

Discrimination by employers does not appear to function in a categorical way, in which employers who know the race or ethnicity of an applicant pre-callback automatically rule out minority applicants in favor of equally qualified majority applicants. Instead, racial discrimination in hiring has a probabilistic character across stages of hiring, in which minority applicants are less likely to advance at each stage. (753)

So — no evidence of widespread “categorical” discrimination in these studies. But second, Quillian et al suggest that implicit bias is an important mechanism of discrimination by race, and they note that this factor may be even more important in face-to-face interactions:

The preferences underpinning taste-based discrimination can encompass many specific forms of racism and prejudice. For instance, employers may hold prejudices against racial and ethnic minorities rooted in suspicions of or hostility toward foreign cultural norms, values or attitudes (Pager and Shepherd 2008). On the other hand, biases that affect hiring may be unconscious, as demonstrated by studies of “implicit” racial attitudes. (735)

Many tests for implicit attitudes such as the Implicit Attitudes Test (IAT) use images of individuals from different racial and ethnic groups, which suggests that the general salience of race might be heightened in the context of face-to-face interactions. (736)

This is enormously important research in a time when the pressure on efforts to reduce and eliminate racism is even greater than the Jim Crow years, if that is possible. The field studies reported here, and the meta-analysis offered by Lincoln Quillian and his colleagues, are a wake-up call. The work is highly rigorous, and the results are unambiguous: racial discrimination in employment is substantial today, and it has not decreased over the past twenty-five years.

And what does this say to the young black man or woman leaving high school, community college, or university about their future? It provides a very bleak picture. The idea that the US economy embodies a “meritocracy” in which each individual reaches a level of achievement determined by experience, education, training, and discipline and nothing else is a self-pleasing fantasy for the majority, and a cruel and obvious lie for the minority.

(Here is a very good summary of the recent research methods and findings involved in Quillian’s research in the Harvard Business Review; link.)

No Kings Protest

A central theme in Rethinking Analytical Sociology is my concern that the founders of analytical sociology presented the field as a general and universally applicable approach to sociological research. Associated with this claim is what I called “ABM fundamentalism” — the view that computational models could and should be applied to all sociological research problems. Against these views, I argued in Rethinking Analytical Sociology that analytical sociologists should take a more pluralistic and collaborative approach to other research methods in sociology, including institutional and organizational sociology and comparative historical sociology.

In March I presented some of these ideas online at the Institute for Analytic Sociology in Sweden, and in April I had the chance to make several specific arguments on this subject to small groups of students and faculty in Como and Torino, with lively discussions following. In Como I focused on the need for a much more nuanced and “thick” theory of the actor, using the example of the US civil rights movement and the current surge of right-wing extremism in many liberal democracies. In Torino I focused on organizations as “meso-level” social entities with dynamic and relatively autonomous causal properties. This is a view rejected by the founders of analytic sociology, who champion a generativist view of the social world that leaves no place for relatively autonomous meso-level social entities. Attributions of apparent causal properties to meso-level structure should ideally be replaced with the individual-level mechanisms that constitute these properties. I argued that this position makes it impossible to explain the sociology of episodes like the Montgomery bus boycott, where dynamic organizations played a crucial role in bringing about the course of events. Doug McAdam’s detailed historical sociology of the period does a great job of uncovering the multi-level dynamics involved over the thirteen months of the ultimately successful boycott, whereas no “generativist” account leading from grievances to a sustained social movement has come close.

The comments I received from analytical sociologists at the Torino talk suggested that I’ve overstated both the commitment to methodological individualism and the rejection of social structures at the heart of analytical sociology. The commentators suggested that practitioners are more open-minded about research methods than I suggest, less committed to generativism, and very open to collaboration with sociologists who proceed from different premises. And agent-based modeling is just a tool, not a way of treating every sociological puzzle.

I don’t think I’ve overstated the core ideas of the “manifesto” of analytical sociology, as put forward by Hedström, Demeulenaere, and Manzo. And Joshua Epstein’s dogmatism about generativist social science stands unparalleled. But I’m very glad to hear that the discussants from the Gen Z generation of sociologists in this tradition are more open to pluralism in methods and approaches. I suggested to them that the time is right for a new manifesto, one which is explicitly open to a range of research approaches. This would mean at least three things: recognizing the need for thicker descriptions of actors, recognizing the causal importance of mid-level social entities like organizations, and abandoning the commitment to generativism as the sole legitimate model of explanation. And most importantly, it would emphasize the synergy that results from collaboration with other research approaches within sociology when treating a complex and extended social process.

As for computational tools like agent-based modeling — perhaps the most an updated manifesto should say about the relevance of agent-based simulation techniques is that they are valuable but limited tools for exploring some of the dynamics of the assumptions we make about inter-agent influence in the setting of mobilization and activization around a set of grievances and demands.

What does this leave from the original premises of AS? It leaves a commitment to empirical rigor, a preference for “theories of the middle range”, an insistence on the importance of discovering causal mechanisms, and a special interest in computational models of simple agent-based processes. This no longer looks like a declaration of a new and general approach to all sociological research — a claim invoked in the earlier manifestos for analytical sociology — but it looks like a much less constraining set of prescriptions than the guiding precepts of the earlier formulations. It is more receptive to a pluralistic approach to sociological research. And it therefore serves better as a guiding framework within which talented researchers can pursue productive research agendas.

Another point was made during the discussion in Torino that deserves comment. A listener suggested that this kind of discussion of “methodology and ontology” has taken up way too much space in the social sciences, and that we would be better off if sociologists just went ahead with their empirical work without worrying too much about the meta-issues. But this seems incorrect to me. Scientific research requires some antecedent ideas about how the world works and how to fruitfully investigate its properties. These ideas are of course provisional. But the history of science shows us that bad “framework” assumptions often lead to bad science. I think here of the harmful effects that radical behaviorism had on psychology in the first half of the twentieth century. So it is important to be as insightful as we can manage as we design research programs in the sciences. And this means that debating the assumptions involved in the analytical sociology research tradition is not wasted effort.

A focus for discussion and comment in the Como presentation was the need for a much deeper understanding of the development of the attitudes and values of young people. How can we explain the rapid rise of extremist right-wing ideologies and values among young people in the United States and many European countries, including Italy? One or two of the people in the Como lecture room were faculty with their own early-teenage children, and they expressed bewilderment about what was driving the surge of support for neo-fascist groups like CasaPound in Italy among young people. Students of contentious politics have not paid enough attention to the mechanisms and pathways through which political attitudes and values gain traction with young people; and yet answering this question is crucial for understanding the success of recruitment and mobilization of followers for organizations and parties like CasaPound. Here is a brief description and history of the neo-fascist CasaPound movement (link).

Ethnic cleansing, Srebrenica, July 1995

Milan Obaidi is a prolific Danish social psychologist who has worked extensively on right-wing extremism. His scientific publications provide greater detail on his emerging views of the psychology of extremism. A useful document for the ongoing discussion of the mechanisms of right-wing extremism here is a well-documented 2020 summary of findings in the field of the social psychology of right-wing extremism here. The title is descriptive: “What are the psychological characteristics of people holding far-right beliefs?”. In this summary research report Obaidi singles out a handful of psychological characteristics that are associated with receptiveness to extremist beliefs and actions.

• Avoidance of uncertainty or ambiguity
• Rigid mindset
• “Significance quest theory” (SQT)
• Psychological distress and perceived deprivation
• Need for cognitive closure

There is a substantial amount of overlap between these characteristics and the BUC(k)ET theory offered by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor (link), and it connects to Arie Kruglanski’s 3N theory of the psychology of hate-based extremism as well (Needs, Narratives, Networks). The quest for meaning, the desire for certainty (cognitive closure), and the emotional discomfort with uncertainty and ambiguity all align with Fiske and Taylor’s framework. And like the researchers who have developed the theory of Social Dominance Orientation (link), Obaidi’s account emphasizes a desire for maintaining an “in-group, out-group” division of society in which the extremist individual is in the dominant group. This corresponds to a perverse quest for “belonging” in the sense described by Fiske and Taylor.

[Kruglanski, Arie W., Jocelyn J. Bélanger, and Rohan Gunaratna. 2019. The three pillars of radicalization : needs, narratives, and networks. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.]

Obaidi and his research collaborators have offered an ambitious attempt to unify several lines of thought in social psychology about right-wing extremism.

[Obaidi, Milan; Robin Bergh; Simon Ozer; and Cornelia Sindermann, 2025, “Toward an Integrated Psychological Model of Violent Extremism,” European Review of Social Psychology: 1-50. ]

Here is the abstract of their paper:

ABSTRACT The global threat of violent extremism (VE) has intensified in recent years, evidenced by a significant increase in violent incidents. Despite numerous theoretical and empirical explanations across disciplines, a lack of cross-fertilisation between these research domains has hindered the development of a comprehensive understanding of VE. To bridge this gap, this review integrates diverse lines of research into a comprehensive psychological model of VE, synthesising objective situations, subjective appraisals, and key individual psychological factors contributing to VE inclinations. We aim to develop a framework that more precisely demonstrates how these variables fit together, highlighting the added value of integration over piecemeal investigations. We specifically advocate for a multilevel approach that incorporates predictors from various levels of analysis to provide detailed mechanisms for how these variables relate to and complement one another. We further illuminate a multitude of mediation and moderation effects, some already tested empirically, while others await future research.

As the abstract emphasizes, their goal is to integrate “objective situations, subjective appraisals, and key individual psychological factors contributing to VE inclinations”, which they believe have been largely distinct research topics in past studies of violent extremism. They emphasize that they offer a multi-level analysis of the emergence of violent extremism, which includes information about surrounding social and economic conditions, prevalent ideologies, and individual psychological differences.

The focus on violent extremism requires some comment, since it is likely enough that the large majority of right-wing extremist young people in the US and other democracies draw the line at violence against others. The violent extremists in the United States (like the Michigan Wolverine militia group accused of planning to kidnap Michigan’s governor, or members of the Base, a clandestine terrorist group) are a minority of the right-wing movement (or so one would hope). So how much of the research described here can be applied to the broader group of young people who are “all in” for racist language, discrimination, taunting, and other harmful acts, without crossing the threshold of attacking a church, synagogue, or supermarket? Are non-violent right-wing extremists pretty much the same as violent right-wing extremists, except the latter group has a lower threshold for committing acts of violence? At various points Obaidi and his co-authors make it clear that their ultimate interest is in explaining the factors leading to the violent incidents, not the routine hate-based activism contributing to episodes like the “Young Republican chat channel” scandal of 2025, and this suggests the possibility that there may be important differences between the actively violent members of the far right and the ideological adherents.

Another valuable contribution made by Obaidi and his collaborators is a major empirical research project on the effects of Great Replacement Theory.

[Milan Obaidi, Jonas Kunst, Simon Ozer, and Sasha Y. Kimel, “The ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy: How the perceived ousting of Whites can evoke violent extremism and Islamophobia” (Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 2022, 25(7) 1675­ –1695).]

This research treats the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory as an incendiary issue currently being used to bring adherents and violent activists into antagonism and violence against other racial groups in the US and Europe, and these investigators attempt to provide empirical evidence concerning the population effects of this conspiracy theory. Here is the abstract for the article:

ABSTRACT Increased immigration and demographic changes have not only resulted in political pushback, but also in violent attacks against immigrants. Several recent terrorist attacks committed by White supremacists invoke rhetoric around a deliberate attempt to make Whites extinct and replace them with non-Western immigrants. Yet, while it is widely acknowledged among extremism researchers that this perception of orchestrated extinction or replacement has tremendous potential to lead to violent extremism, its consequences have not yet been directly examined. Using the Scandinavian context (e.g., Denmark and Norway), in two correlational studies and one experiment, we provide evidence that this perception is associated with the persecution of Muslims, violent intentions, and Islamophobia. Further, we demonstrate that these associations are mediated by symbolic threats. Conspiracy beliefs that one’s group is being replaced seem to drive hostile intergroup attitudes. We discuss the societal implications of this finding (i.e., generating fear, polarization, and hostile public opinion towards immigrants).

An important part of their analysis is their view that this conspiracy theory of “White extinction” is a deliberate strategic effort to show that some “enemy” intends to harm the white Christian population of the United States, and to use the spreading myth as a call to action by far-right leaders and activists. In particular, they call out Stephen Miller’s use of “Great Replacement Theory” to create support for his extremist strategies of expulsion for large numbers of the US immigrant community:

For example, recently leaked emails show the former White House senior advisor Stephen Miller promoting far-right extremist, White nationalist ideas, and anti-immigrant rhetoric through the conservative website Breitbart. Importantly too, he appeared fixated on the prospect of a “White genocide” (i.e., a conspiracy theory associated with White supremacists propagating the idea that the White race is dying due to growing non-White populations; Bellware, 2019). (1676)

Key to their interpretation of this conspiracy theory is the idea that the demographic shifts the US is experiencing are the result of deliberate efforts and actions by nefarious agents to bring about the decline of the white Christian population. The authors note that the same themes are being used in populist and right-wing extremist organizations and networks to stimulate fear and antagonism between “native” Europeans and immigrant people, often Muslim.

In recent years, the “Great Replacement” conspiracy has not only gained prominence among right-wing extremists but has also found a foothold among right-wing populist political parties in Europe. For example, while evoking anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment, such ideas have been espoused by the former leader of the Danish People’s Party Pia Kjærsgaard, the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán, the Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, and the leader of the far-right movement Rassemblement National Marine Le Pen (Alduy, 2017; Kingsley, 2019; Kjærsgaard, 2020). Various conservative intellectuals and far-right organizations have also utilized language that stokes fear about the decline of the “White race” and “White identity.” (1677)

Obaidi et al connect this use of the Great Replacement myth to the 3N theory of radicalization offered by David Webber and Arie Kruglanski. This is a theory of social mobilization based on three large factors — Needs, Narratives, and Networks, with a strong emphasis on the “quest for significance” on the part of potential followers.

[Webber, David and Arie W. Kruglanski. 2017. “Psychological Factors in Radicalization: A ‘3N’ Approach,” Handbook of the Criminology of Terrorism, eds. Gary LaFree and Joshua Freilich, Wiley Blackwell, 33-46.]

Here again it is worth noticing the convergence of this line of thought with that of Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in developing their BUC(k)ET model of cognitive and moral development discussed in an earlier post (link). The Great Replacement myth contributes to all of the core needs discussed by Fiske and Taylor: belonging, understanding, controlling, enhancing self, and trusting in-group.

What about the methodology used in these studies? Like Lior Zmigrod and her co-authors discussed in a previous post (link), Obaidi’s research methods are largely quantitative and statistical based on interview and survey data for about 100 subjects. The research goal is to provide a strong empirical basis for making claims about the causal relationships among variables. Here is a summary of some of the findings offered in the Great Replacement paper:

The graph represents correlations and associations among the identified variables, leading ultimately to behavioral outcomes (violent intentions, Islamophobia, Muslim persecution).

Do these findings have important implications for the future of inter-group violence in liberal democracies? Obaidi and his co-authors believe they do:

It has been suggested that immigration-related conspiracy theories trafficked by right-wing groups may nurture hate and violence against immigrants and asylum seekers in the West. Moreover, recent FBI documents predict that right-wing, conspiracy-driven extremism will increase in the next few years (Steinbuch, 2019). Indeed, new reports indicate that far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced other forms of terrorism (Jones et al., 2020). More specifically, right-wing terrorist incidents in the West have increased by 320% over the past 5 years (Institute for Economics & Peace, 2019). One of the most potent conspiracy theories evoked by right-wing extremists, politicians, and commentators is the “Great Replacement”—the conspiracy arguing that there is an attempt to replace the White autochthonous population with non-Western immigrants. (1687)

These are highly suggestive conclusions, and the research is very interesting. However, it would be useful to have a more extensive theoretical basis for linking the empirical results to a theory of the underlying psychological processes that generate them. Obaidi’s reference in the earlier paper to “objective situations, subjective appraisals, and key individual psychological factors contributing to VE inclinations” remains fairly vague. (This is perhaps predictable in a research program that is focused almost exclusively on identifying discrete operationalized variables that can be separately measured.) So once again, we are faced with the question: what processes and internal factors create attitudes of racist extremism among young people?

(The Southern Poverty Law Center 2024 report on White Nationalist organizations and activism in the US is detailed and alarming, and is very relevant to the findings discussed here; link.)

Our current political scene presents an unresolved and important question: why have the ideologies of hate, fear, nationalism, antagonism, and violence had such appeal to a segment of young men across many countries in the past thirty years? How does it happen that many fairly typical twelve-year-old boys somehow become captivated by the extremist right-wing political ideas of racism, sexism, and nationalism? Previous posts have considered major generational events and pervasive social influencers as causes of the rise of extremist attitudes among young people. But this leaves the psychological question unanswered: why do these particular divisive attitudes and ideas find such a receptive audience among some young people? And why do messages of inclusion, democracy, and tolerance not have a similar appeal?

Kathleen Blee has devoted her career to understanding the minds of racist activists in the United States, and she emphasizes the importance of the developmental process involved in becoming racist. In Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement (2002) she writes:

Intense, activist racism typically does not arise on its own; it is learned in racist groups. These groups promote ideas radically different from the racist attitudes held by many whites. They teach a complex and contradictory mix of hatred for enemies, belief in conspiracies, and allegiance to an imaginary unified race of “Aryans.” (Blee 2002:3)

A new generation of social psychologists have attempted to theorize about the emotional and cognitive systems of children and young people that might help to answer these questions. They have focused on the underlying “needs” that children and young people have, to which various ideologies and belief systems are appealing to a greater or lesser extent. Especially influential is work by Susan Fiske and her collaborators, including especially Social Beings (Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, 4th edition, 2021). Fiske and Taylor offer a compact theory of social motives, which they summarize as the “BUC(k)ET” scheme:

Social cognition is animated by social motives traceable to belonging, including understanding, controlling, enhancing self, and trusting others. This framework fits the history of motivations in psychology (S. T. Fiske, 2008) as well as current work in social psychology generally (S. T. Fiske, 2010) and social cognition in particular (S. T. Fiske, 2002). Although other frameworks are possible, this highlights some motives that determine when and how people operate in more automatic or more controlled modes. (Fiske and Taylor 94)

This is a proto-theory of what an adolescent is looking for as he or she approaches adulthood as a grounding of his emotional and social landscape. Fiske’s model places a quest to gain a sense of belonging at the center of this set of needs, as well as a thought framework that helps to “make sense” of the world the young person is beginning to experience (through personal experience, media, social media, clubs, and other social associations). The young person wants to find ways of feeling that he or she is able to control some aspects of the social environment he confronts; to find a basis for developing a positive view of himself; and perhaps most importantly, find ways of forming relationships of trust with some other people. Notice how closely this corresponds to some of the themes of extremist messaging and activism.

Consider these passages from Michael Kimmel’s description of some of the young men and boys attracted to the neo-Nazi movement in Sweden. (See this previous post on Kathleen Blee’s excellent special volume on ethnographies of the far-right (link).) Here Kimmel describes a twelve-year-old boy Edward and his inner life:

Insecure and lonely at twelve years old, Edward started hanging out with skinheads because he “moved to a new town, knew nobody, and needed friends.” Equally lonely and utterly alienated from his distant father, Pelle met an older skinhead who took him under his wing and became a sort of mentor. Pelle was a “street hooligan” hanging out in street gangs, brawling and drinking with other gangs. “My group actually looked down on the neo-Nazis,” he says, because “they weren’t real fighters.” “All the guys had an insecure role as a man,” says Robert. “They were all asking ‘who am I?’” …

Already feeling marginalized and often targeted, the boys and men described themselves as “searchers” or “seekers,” kids looking for a group with which to identify and where they would feel they belonged. “When you enter puberty, it’s like you have to choose a branch,” said one ex-Nazi. “You have to choose between being a Nazi, anti-Nazi, punk or hip- hopper—in today’s society, you just can’t choose to be neutral” (cited in Wahlstrom 2001, 13-14). …

For others, it was a sense of alienation from family and especially the desire to rebel against their fathers. “Grown-ups often forget an important component of Swedish racism, the emotional conviction,” says Jonas Hallen (2000). “If you have been beaten, threatened, and stolen from, you won’t listen to facts and numbers.” (209-210)

Belonging is the recurring theme here. And experts on far-right mobilization suggest that the “influencers” who craft messages of hate, antagonism, and racism are just as aware of these underlying cravings of young people as marketers of sports shoes and cell phones: they find persuasive messages and narratives that play into the need for meaning, direction, belonging, and influence that Fiske describes. The impulses of “belonging” and “narratives of meaning” are powerful, according to Fiske, and these deep psychological needs help to explain the appeal of right-wing extremism and “us-them” antagonism. Fiske’s guiding idea here is that political ideas, attitudes, and ideologies are adopted by the young person as ways of forming a link between a group and the individual’s own course in life. Racism is one way of defining one’s primary group for “belonging”: by defining other groups as separate, threatening, and inferior, the individual simultaneously creates an identity group for himself. And this construction of one’s social identity is fertile ground for aggression, hostility, and prejudice towards other groups.

Lior Zmigrod and co-authors have attempted to discover correlations between cognitive traits and ideological propensities (Zmigrod, Leor, Ian W. Eisenberg, Patrick G. Bissett, Trevor W. Robbins, and Russell A. Poldrack. 2021, “The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376 (1822)). Their research is relevant to the theories of social cognition offered by Susan Fiske (though they do not mention her work). Here is a relevant description from their abstract:

Even less is known about how cognitive dispositions—individual differences in how information is perceived and processed— sculpt individuals’ ideological worldviews, proclivities for extremist beliefs and resistance (or receptivity) to evidence…. We uncovered the specific psychological signatures of political, nationalistic, religious and dogmatic beliefs. Cognitive and personality assessments consistently outperformed demographic predictors in accounting for individual differences in ideological preferences by 4 to 15-fold. (Abstract)

The methodology pursued here is statistical, based on surveys of a moderate number of subjects. (In fact, the authors are critical of the social-psychology approach that begins with an analysis of psychic needs.) Two kinds of survey instruments are used: one to evaluate the individual’s level on several cognitive measures; and the second to evaluate the individual’s level with regard to a set of political attitudes. The two sets of variables are illustrated on the following table. As the table indicates, “Strategic Information Processing” (a cognitive trait) is strongly negatively associated with each ideological feature except “Social Dominance”. “Caution”, another cognitive feature, is positively associated with each ideological feature across the board.

What were those “psychological signatures” (bundles of psychological attributes strongly associated with features of ideological susceptibility) that Zmigrod and her colleagues discovered? Here is their description of the “religion” signature:

The psychological signature of religiosity consisted of heightened caution and reduced strategic information processing in the cognitive domain (similarly to conservatism), and enhanced agreeableness, risk perception and aversion to social risk-taking, in the personality domain (figure 4 and electronic supplementary material, figure S6). The finding that religious participants exhibited elevated caution and risk perception is particularly informative to researchers investigating the theory that threat, risk and disgust sensitivity are linked to moral and religious convictions [92–97], and that these cognitive and emotional biases may have played a role in the cultural origins of large-scale organized religions [98,99]. (11)

This empirical study is interesting and suggestive, and it has some similarity to research surrounding the Right Wing Authoritarianism scale discussed in earlier posts (link). However, it does not illuminate what seems to be a key question: how are these cognitive attitudes formed, and how does a given set of cognitive attitudes bring about a high (or low) level of receptiveness to racist ideology and extremist political attitudes? We might even ask whether the causal influence might flow in the opposite direction: the person indoctrinated into religious dogmatism is thereby led to develop a low affinity for the cognitive skill of strategic information processing. These are the questions that Fiske’s work seems to provide a basis for answering.

Human beings have attitudes, behaviors, habits, stereotypes, and values. And somehow these mental attributes are developed or acquired in the course of normal human social life. But how, when, and with what results does this process work? And how persistent are a set of attitudes and values once established in the individual?

The topic here is a deeply interesting question — what forms us as the adult human beings with values and a moral framework that we eventually become? For the past fifty years political scientists and social psychologists have discussed a theory of the formation of political attitudes and values that emphasizes the “impressionable years”. This theory holds that children are fairly fluid in their values and political affinities, and that young people are most open to new values and ideas in the years between 17 and 25 — essentially the years of a traditional university education. And there seems to be survey evidence supporting the idea that the formative events of that period in a given person’s life become bedrock to their political identities, with relatively little change in later years.

David Sears is one of the early founders of this approach. He presented some of his ideas as early as 1975, and in 1983 he describes the “impressionable years” hypothesis in these terms:

A third view could be termed the impressionable years viewpoint, which suggests that any dispositions are unusually vulnerable in late adolescence and early adulthood, given strong enough pressure to change. In other stages of life, people are resistant to change, and of course, even in the most vulnerable life stage, they would not change in the absence of substantial pressure to change. At all ages, the content of the disposition is irrelevant. A specific and particularly interesting instance of the impressionable years hypothesis is the generational effect. This occurs when a sizable number of those in the supposedly impressionable life stage (late adolescence and earlly adulthood) are subjected to a common massive pressure to change on some particular issue, for example, when the nation is engaged in an unpopular war. It presumably yields interactions of birth cohort and dispositional content. The final viewpoint is persistence, which suggests that the residues of early (preadult) socialization are relatively immune to change in later years. This asserts a simple main effect of age, with dispositions acquired primarily in the preadult years. (“The Persistence of Early Political Predispositions: The Roles of Attitude Object and Life Stage”, Wheeler and Shaver, Review of Personality and Social Psychology, 1983: 81-82)

This theory suggests that the ambient political and cultural environment of one’s “impressionable years” (18-25) represents a powerful influence upon his or her lifetime political attitudes and values. The theory has been subjected to some rigorous quantitative efforts at empirical evaluation, with some evidence supporting its accuracy. Especially interesting is Krosnick and Alwin, “Aging and Susceptibility to Attitude Change” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [1989] 57: 3 : 416-425). They found a reasonable level of support for the impressionable-years hypothesis. Here is their abstract:

Two hypotheses about the relation between age and susceptibility to attitude change were tested. The impressionable years hypothesis proposes that individuals are highly susceptible to attitude change during late adolescence and early adulthood and that susceptibility drops precipitously immediately thereafter and remains low throughout the rest of the life cycle. The increasing persistence hypothesis proposes that people become gradually more resistant to change throughout their lives. Structural equation models were applied to data from the 1956-1960,1972-1976, and 1980 National Election Panel Studies in order to estimate the stability of political attitudes and unreliability in measures of them. The results support the impressionable years hypothesis and disconfirm the increasing persistence hypothesis. A decrease in the over-time consistency of attitude reports among 66- to 83-year-olds was found to be due to increased random measurement error in their reports, not to increased attitude change.

Another valuable resource is Osborne, Sears, and Valentino’s “The End of the Solidly Democratic South: The Impressionable-Years Hypothesis” (Political Psychology 32:1, 2011). Here the authors attempt to tease out the factors involved in the relatively rapid shift in political values and allegiances in the South in the 1960s. And they consider whether the “impressionable years” hypothesis sheds light on this transformation. Here is how they set up the problem:

The apparent ubiquity of stable party identifications at the individual level—both within the United States and in multiparty political systems—would seem on its face to be incompatible with such large-scale aggregate changes in partisanship as evidenced in the partisan realignment of the White South. The “impressionable-years” hypothesis is one potential way of reconciling these two phenomena. At the individual level, this hypothesis suggests that late adolescents and young adults are particularly open to changing their early acquired political attitudes (Alwin, Cohen, & Newcomb, 1991; Converse, 1969; Hatemi et al., 2009; Mannheim, 1928/1952; S. D. Miller & Sears, 1986; Sears, 1983; Sears & Levy, 2003). Following this critical period of openness, however, strong predispositions such as party identification may become stronger with age, and thus be less open to change (Jennings & Markus, 1984; Lewis-Beck et al., 2008; Sears, 1981; Stoker & Jennings, 2008; Visser & Krosnick, 1998). That reduced openness to change would typically be reflected in greater stability over time.

What are the conditions for attitude change in the impressionable-years? A clue is perhaps given by research on the initial acquisition of party identification. Highly visible public events provide the ideal context for its acquisition. Sears and Valentino (1997) demonstrated that late adolescents’ partisan attitudes became increasingly crystallized during a presidential election year. These gains in crystallization were limited to attitudes about the most visible aspects of the presidential campaign—specifically, party identification and evaluations of the candidates. Political attitudes that were less central to the campaign failed to show an increase in crystallization. The key role of highly visible events was further indicated by two additional findings: (a) exposure to the campaign moderated adolescents’ attitude crystallization (Valentino & Sears, 1998) and (b) no further gains in crystallization occurred during the politically quiescent year following the campaign (Sears & Valentino, 1997). Finally, adolescents’ parents did not show an increase in the crystallization of their party identification either during or after the campaign. Thus, exposure to highly salient political events during the impressionable years can socialize partisan attitudes that are unique to that period and to that cohort. Late adolescents are more responsive to such events than are fully mature adults. (86-87)

For the Boomer generation (or the middle part of it anyway), the impressionable years were 1966-1974 or thereabouts. Major events during the period? Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Major unrest along racial lines occurred in dozens of cities in the US, including Chicago, Newark, and Los Angeles. The Kerner Commission report on urban unrest was released in 1968. The war in Vietnam became more and more divisive for American young people. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had been enacted in 1964 and 1965. Large demonstrations took place in Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic Convention. The first Moon landing took place in 1969. The feminist movement became a powerful national voice for equality in 1970 or so. The Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s resignation took place in 1972 and 1974. Tumult, large social protest movements, corrupt politicians, a seemingly “no-exit” war in Vietnam — the impressionable years for men and women born around 1950 were very different from those of people born fifteen years earlier or fifteen years later. With only one or two exceptions, these events helped to create habits of mind that counseled resistance, the power of public opposition to injustice, and the particular evils of American racism.

How does the impressionable-years theory contribute to the question of the rise of far-right attitudes and values (racism, xenophobia, receptivity to an authoritarian leader, male supremacy) among some young American and European men in the 2010s and forward? Were there features of life for young men and preadults in the period of roughly 1995-2010 that would explain the eruption of racist and authoritarian attitudes in the cohort coming of age during those years?

Two large factors are often mentioned. First is the prominence of racist and extremist social media influencers who have captured sizable audience of young men to subscribe to their hateful conspiracy theories. Nick Fuentes is just one example. But this isn’t entirely helpful; aren’t these right-wing entrepreneurs responding to the demand for hate created by an emerging generation rather than creating it? And second is the drumbeat of “anti-woke” impulses, trolling and “owning the libs”, and deliberately flouting norms like “don’t admire the Nazis”, “don’t deny the Holocaust”, or “don’t use the language of vile racism” in political discourse. (This is reflected in the recent scandals of encrypted chats by young GOP activists revealed in fall 2025.) Some of this extends back to the reckless language of conservative activists like Pat Buchanan and the John Birch Society (link), whose ranting took place before many of these young men were born. These “anti-woke” thrusts seen to resonate with this segment of young conservative men. Offending people is the goal, not the unfortunate side effect. And the “manosphere” is where it percolates in social media posts, game chats, Youtube videos, and encrypted Telegram chat rooms. But here again — did the John Birch Society and the Tea Party lay the ground for the radical far-right attitudes of one segment of Gen Z, or do we need to look for other causes that more directly impacted the lives of these young people?

The rise of the political attitudes of far-right extremism among young people is quite dangerous for our democracy, and dangerous for the groups who wind up being the objects of the vitriol. The language and demonstration of racist and neo-nazi social-political attitudes reflected in the “Unite the Right” riots in Charlottesville in 2017 speaks for itself: this is a movement based on white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and nostalgia for “strong leaders” who can fight for these values. And Trump, his closest allies, and his MAGA movement seem to encourage this hate-based ideological world. Stephen Miller is a true believer and Donald Trump has a long history of racist statements and ridicule.

There is another complication as well: the far-right extremist faction of this age group is virulent and uninhibited; but it is a minority of its own generation. There are other “political attitude groups” in the same generation whose values are quite different — egalitarian, anti-racist, and affirmative of the value of an inclusive multicultural democracy. And, of course, there is the large group of young people who are disaffected from existing political institutions in the United States, frustrated by diminished opportunities for themselves and others, but inclined to turn away from any kind of political activism at all. They are “disaffected and disinvolved”. So the “impressionable years” hypothesis has a bit of a problem here as well: how is it that the experience world of the United States for young people in the period 1995-2010 gave rise to such different families of political attitudes among its young people? Part of the answer probably lies with the fact that the experiences of daily life differ widely across social and economic classes in the United States, across regions of the country, and across racial lines. So we might hypothesize that young white men in Hamtramck, Michigan whose childhood reflected persistent deprivation; who did not find opportunities in high school that led either to better-paying job opportunities or to higher education; and who developed a rising level of resentment when they visited Somerset Mall in Oakland County for the standard of living that would never be theirs might develop political attitudes that highlighted resentment, disassociation from political loyalties, and an openness to antagonism to other ethnic and racial groups.

This topic relates to the questions raised by Desante and Smith in Racial Stasis (link), who focus on whether there has been substantial generational change on the topic of racial attitudes and prejudice since the 1960s.