Flip flopping may not hurt McCain, Giuliani, & Romney

Yesterday I recommended the book The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer. Today I suggest one lesson that might be learned from it. Don't be too sure that the shifting positions of McCain, Giuliani, and Romney on positions like abortion or gays will hurt them among the voters on the right. Altemeyer concludes that those with high scores on his authoritarian follower index (what he calls the "RWA") are also highly gullible when someone is telling them what they already believe to be true. Here are a couple of graphs from the third chapter:

Well, aren’t most people likely to trust someone who seems to agree with them?
Probably, but people differ enormously in gullibility. Low RWAs are downright
suspicious of someone who agrees with them when they can see ulterior motives
might be at work. They pay attention to the circumstances in which the other fellow is operating. But authoritarians do not, when they like the message.


So (to foreshadow later chapters a little) suppose you are a completely
unethical, dishonest, power-hungry, dirt-bag, scum-bucket politician who will say
whatever he has to say to get elected. (I apologize for putting you in this role, but it will only last for one more sentence.) Whom are you going to try to lead, high RWAs or low RWAs? Isn’t it obvious? The easy-sell high RWAs will open up their arms and wallets to you if you just sing their song, however poor your credibility. Those crabby low RWAs, on the other hand, will eye you warily when your credibility is suspect because you sing their song? So the scum-bucket politicians will usually head for the right-wing authoritarians, because the RWAs hunger for social endorsement of their beliefs so much they’re apt to trust anyone who tells them they’re right. Heck, Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany running on a law-and-order platform just a few years after he tried to overthrow the government through an armed insurrection.