Our national survey found the Deep South and Left Coast are polar opposites when it comes to right-wing authoritarian mindsets, but that Yankeedom and Greater Appalachia have nuanced pictures
By Colin Woodard
At Nationhood Lab, a lot of work is focused on the authoritarian threat to American democracy and how it manifests across the United States’s component cultural regions. It’s clear that support for authoritarianism is stronger in some regions than in others and has been since the federation’s creation. From the oligarchic and autocratic regimes of the Antebellum and Jim Crow eras to the Tea Party and Trumpist movements of the early 21st century, authoritarians have been most successful in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and the New France enclave in southern Louisiana, had a much harder go of it in Yankeedom, the Midlands, El Norte and the Far West, and had almost no success in New Netherland and Left Coast.
History obviously plays a huge role, with the institutions and assumptions of a race-based slave and caste system enforced by official law and informal death squads on one hand, and those of utopian founding religious movements (Quakers in the Midlands, Puritans in Yankeedom and their descendants in the urban Left Coast) on the other. But are individual people more likely to have an authoritarian mind set in these same regions?
To probe that question, we fielded a national survey this past April that asked 1700 registered voters a series of questions from a well-established academic test of right-wing authoritarian attitudes. The question panel, the Authoritarianism-Conservatism-Traditionalism (ACT) model developed by political psychologists John Duckitt of the University of Auckland, Boris Bizumic of Australian National University and their co-authors – argues that right-wing authoritarian attitudes flow from three distinct, though related, ideological attitudes.
Those with high Authoritarian Aggressiveness favor “strict, tough, harsh, punitive, coercive social control” and dislike “leniency, indulgence, permissiveness, softness” toward those who violate “social rules and laws.” Duckitt and Bizumic argued that adherent’s motivational goal likely stems “from direct, real, physical threats to societal security, safety, and well being.” In this context, Aggressiveness – sometimes also called, confusingly, “Authoritarianism” in the academic literature – is about the harsh enforcement of The Rules.
Those with high Conservatism favor “uncritical, respectful, obedient, submissive support for existing societal or group authorities and institutions” and dislike “critical, questioning, rebellious, oppositional attitudes to them.” The sociologists said adherent’s motivational goal is to maintain “social order, harmony, cohesion, and consensus in society or the collective.” In the ACT model context, Conservatism is about unquestioning submission to authority. “Conservatism captured what we labeled the ‘anti-democratic impulse’ as it predicted political intolerance and obedience regardless of whether the authority figure or movement was on the left or right,” Jarret Crawford, a professor of psychology at The College of New Jersey who has conducted experiments in the U.S. with this model, told me. “Conservatism predicted intolerance of people’s rights to protest, regardless of whether those protesters were left or right wing.”
And those with high Traditionalism favor “traditional, old fashioned social norms, values, and morality” and dislike “modern, liberal, secular, bohemian, ‘alternative’ values, norms, and morality.” Such people’s motivational goal, Duckitt and Bizumic wrote, was to maintain those traditional norms. Traditionalism is about defending received conventions. Crawford said this facet captured U.S. left-right differences relating to prejudice, political intolerance, and obedience to authorities.
Here’s what our polling found for these three “ACT” mindsets:
By way of explanation, our pollsters at Embold Research categorized the percent of people in each segment who had High, Middle, and Low scores in each of the ACT categories. For each “nation” and the U.S. at large we subtracted the Low percent from the High percent to give a “Net High percent.” We then compared this figure to the total U.S. net High percent to show the relative levels of A, C, and T for each nation (and to do so in a way that allowed side-by-side comparisons of the three factors.) We didn’t have enough respondents to confidently assess the low U.S. population enclave “nations” – New France, First Nation, Spanish Caribbean and Greater Polynesia – so they are not included in this analysis.
The first clear result is that the Deep South is a massive outlier, with net 23-points more high Authoritarianism respondents than the U.S. average, 21 points more high Conservatism respondents, and 11 points more high Traditionalism respondents. These were also by far the highest Aggressiveness and Traditionalism scores of any region and a very close second for Traditionalism. When it comes to right-wing authoritarian attitudes, the Deep South is in a class all by itself, a finding consistent with its highly illiberal and anti-democratic history.
The Left Coast is a massive outlier in the other direction, with the lowest scores of any “nation” in all three categories: net -16 percent for Traditionalism, -21 percent for Aggressiveness, and a staggering -26 percent for Conservatism, 11 points lower than its closest competitor. We indeed have found the Left Coast at the “liberal” pole of almost every issue we parse, but its still remarkable just how much more “left” the region’s collective mindset really is.
Surprising, to me at least, is that El Norte is clearly the second least right-wing authoritarian region in the country. It’s also the only other region besides Left Coast to be below the U.S. average across all three “A-C-T” factors. It is tied for second for having the smallest net share of respondents with high Aggressiveness scores (-20 percent) and the fourth lowest net Conservatism and Traditionalism scores (both -9 percent). For a region that started with a patron-peon socioeconomic system and spent much of the 19th and 20th centuries under an externally-imposed Jim Crow-style caste system this is a remarkable testament to the tolerance and openness of the region’s people. Less surprising is the further evidence here of the transformation of Tidewater from the Deep South’s junior partner in racial apartheid and slavery to one of the most liberal parts of the federation, with the second lowest net Traditionalism (-15 percent) and tied with El Norte for the same honors in regards to Aggressiveness (-20.) It is slightly above the U.S. average — +2 percent – in net Conservatism, perhaps the residual effect of having spent its first quarter millennium under the rule of a landed aristocracy.
Despite being regarded as a “red” region, authoritarian politics haven’t done all that well in the Far West, where the Tea Party agenda fizzled and Donald Trump was held to single digit margins of victory in both 2016 and 2020. Our polling shows one reason why: it’s one of only three regions to be under the U.S. average across all three A-C-T mindsets. At -10 percent, its net Conservatism score – submission to authority – is the third lowest among the regions. This is not a great environment for a would-be dictator. Nor is New Netherland, which has low net Authoritarian Aggressiveness (-6) and very low net Traditionalism (-13), though curiously it’s a hair more keen on Conservatism (+1) than the national average. (Remember, that’s about submissiveness in this context.)
The Midlands, true to form, is very close to the national average across all three factors, with a net +3 in Aggressiveness and Conservatism and a net zero in Traditionalism. Overall this means its only slightly more susceptible to a right-wing authoritarian takeover than the U.S. as a whole, which matches what we’ve seen since 2010.
I’ve saved the two most intriguing results for last. The first is that, nearly four centuries after the Puritans showed up, Yankeedom still has the second highest net Aggressiveness score at +5 percent. Yankees still want transgressors roundly punished. It’s also only slightly below the U.S. average in Conservatism and Traditionalism, at -1 and -3 percent respectively. Not surprising, therefore, that some Yankee states became battlegrounds in the 2010s, even if the authoritarians were ultimately vanquished. I’ve argued before that while Yankeedom is well inoculated against libertarianism, its historical experience and cultural attributes don’t provide it with as many antibodies for the fight against ethnonationalism.
Greater Appalachia offers the most fascinating results of all. Readers of American Nations will not be the least surprised to see it has the second lowest net Conservatism score of all the regions (-12), reflecting its people’s historic refusal to submit to authority. But it also scores slightly below the U.S. average on Authoritarian Aggressiveness – the desire to harshly punish rulebreakers – which may tie into that distrust of established authority, apparently to include law enforcement and the courts. This is the region that most enthusiastically embraced Trumpism, giving Trump himself his highest margins of any region in 2016 and 2020, and yet in psychological terms this can only be explained by its very high net Traditionalism score. At net plus twelve percent, Greater Appalachia has the highest Traditionalism levels in the country, meaning it is the region most committed to stopping social and cultural change.
Trump promises to punish his enemies and rule with an iron fist, but this ACT analysis suggests that it’s his implicit promise to keep white Christians in charge that better explains his outsized support in Greater Appalachia. That aspect of Trumpism is summed up in the Great Replacement Theory, which holds there is a liberal conspiracy to replace white people with non-white immigrants who share their political views. A 2022 Yahoo News/YouGov poll found a shocking 61 percent of Donald Trump’s supporters subscribed to this theory and only 24 percent disagreed with it. This June, the Pew Research Center found four in ten Trump supporters hold to a central tenant of this theory, that the decline of the proportion of people who are white is bad for society, compared to just one in ten supporting his then-adversary, Joe Biden. Furthermore, when political scientist Bob Pape’s team at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats carefully studied the beliefs and attitudes of the January 6th insurrectionists they found fears of the “Great Replacement” were the most consistent factor, tripling the likelihood of someone joining the coup attempt.
In Greater Appalachia, a region where having a white-and-British ethnic identity was central to regional mythology, this strand may be the most important element of Trumpism’s appeal. The region has experienced the largest drop in the proportion of people who identify as white, falling from 75% to 68% in the ten years leading up to the 2020 census. In the Deep South, by contrast, support for Trumpism may be driven by a more expansive desire for strongman rule, Great Replacement and all. The results suggest the Far West is not a natural fit for the right-wing authoritarian agenda and would be susceptible to appeals to resist such, and that the anti-authoritarian majority in Yankeedom and the Midlands would be foolish to let their guard down.
The ACT right-wing authoritarianism question panel was part of a national poll we conducted in April connected to our work developing a revised civic national narrative for the United States. You can find full topline results and methodology statements at our previous post on this polling work here.
