August
1, 2003, 9:00 a.m. The
“Conservatives Are Crazy” Study: Paid For by Taxpayers
Congressional
investigators call for a new look at funding academic research.
n academic
study of conservatism that lumped together Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini,
Ronald Reagan, and Rush Limbaugh was funded by federal grants, according
to congressional investigators.
The study, "Political
Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," was written by John
T. Jost, a professor at Stanford University, Jack Glaser and Frank J.
Sulloway, professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and Arie
W. Kruglanski, a professor at the University of Maryland. It was published
in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.
Congressional
investigators have found that the study was financed by $1.2 million in
federal funds. According to the House
Republican Study Committee, Kruglanski received National Institute of
Mental Health grants totaling $976,762, Glaser received National Institute
of Mental Health grants totaling $48,464, and Jost and Kruglanski together
received an estimated $213,800 from the National Science Foundation.
The authors describe
their work as an examination of "the hypotheses that political conservatism
is significantly associated with (1) mental rigidity and closed-mindedness,
including (a) increased dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, (b) decreased
cognitive complexity, (c) decreased openness to experience, (d) uncertainty
avoidance, (e) personal needs for order and structure, and (f) need for
cognitive closure; (2) lowered self-esteem; (3) fear, anger, and aggression;
(4) pessimism, disgust, and contempt....We have argued that these motives
are in fact related to one another psychologically, and our motivated
social-cognitive perspective helps to integrate them."
One of the more controversial
assertions in the federally funded work is the authors' argument that
Hitler, Mussolini, Reagan, and Limbaugh share common traits as conservatives.
"One is justified in referring to Hitler, Mussolini, Reagan, and
Limbaugh as right-wing conservatives," the authors write in a published
adjunct to the study, "not because they share an opposition to 'big
government' or a mythical, romanticized view of Aryan purity — they
did not share these specific attitudes — but because they all preached
a return to an idealized past and favored or condoned inequality in some
form."
Among the sources
cited by the scholars in support of their conclusions are the works of
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. For example, the authors
write, "It has been observed that Republicans are far more single-mindedly
and unambiguously aggressive in pursuing Democratic scandals (e.g. Whitewater,
the Clinton-Lewinsky affair) than Democrats have been in pursuing Republican
scandals (e.g. Iran Contra, Bush-Harken Energy, Halliburton). In commenting
on the Republican 'scandal machine,' Krugman argued that, 'there is a
level of anger and hatred on the right that has at best a faint echo in
the anti-globalization left, and none at all in mainstream liberalism.
Indeed, all the liberals I know generally seem unwilling to face up to
the nastiness of contemporary politics.'"
On another occasion,
the authors cite Krugman on the legacy of Ronald Reagan. "[Reagan's]
chief accomplishment," they write, "in effect, was to roll back
both the New Deal era and the 1960s, which was also the goal of former
speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and many other
neo-conservatives often regarded as advocates of change. As Krugman observed
in the context of current debates concerning the privatization of social
security, 'hard-line conservatives are determined to build a bridge back
to the 1920s.'"
In an interview with
National Review Online, Florida Republican Rep. Tom Feeney, who looked
into the study and its funding, called the project "outrageous."
"Taxpayers shouldn't
be required to pay for these things," Feeney said. "If private
universities, privately funded, want to study ridiculous hypotheses for
political agendas, they have a right to do so, but when you are basically
confiscating money from taxpayers to fund left-wing rhetoric and dress
it up as scientific study, I think you have a real problem with credibility."
The full text of
the study can be found here.
The adjunct, in which the authors address some objections to the study,
can be found here.
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