The Loch Ness Monster Was Real - by Kyle Saunders
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The Loch Ness Monster Was Real<br>Why weren't we looking for left-wing authoritarianism (LWA)? And why aren't we prepared for it now?
Kyle Saunders<br>Aug 03, 2026
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For most of my career, political psychology kept what seems, in retrospect, like a running gag going. The gag was that the left-wing authoritarian, a creature everyone had heard of and nobody could photograph, did not exist.<br>A few people swore they’d seen it in the wild. The sightings never held up... or got published. Bob Altemeyer, who built the field’s standard measure of the authoritarian personality, gave the joke its shape in 1996, asking whether the authoritarian on the left was like the Loch Ness Monster: “an occasional shadow, but no monster.” The irony, of course, is that the man who wrote the instrument for measuring the creature was the one certifying that four decades of looking had turned up nothing.<br>Sacred Cow BBQ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Quelle surprise: he wasn’t lying. That’s what makes this story worth telling, I suppose. So, join me, dear reader, as I take you down this rabbit hole. Some of this I knew, some of this I learned while researching. It’s pretty fascinating (to me anyway).<br>In 1998 Altemeyer reported that the left-wing authoritarian had been “as scarce as hens’ teeth in my samples,” and by his lights, and his measures, it had been. His scale, the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) measure, drafted in 1981 and still the workhorse of the subfield, captured submission to authority, aggression toward sanctioned targets, deference to convention. It found those things on the right, over and over, across samples and decades.<br>On the left, well, it came up mostly empty. So the field drew a conclusion about human nature, that authoritarianism was a right-wing trait.<br>That ended up being a bigger leap than it looked then. The scale measured something real, something that predicts real behavior, and that something does concentrate on the right in the samples where it was tested and with the measure that was used.<br>But “our instrument finds it on the right” and “it exists only on the right” are different sentences, and political psychology slid from the first to the second and stayed there. Nobody built a second net, one shaped for whatever authoritarianism might look like on the left. So, for four decades the discipline cast one net, hauled up one kind of fish, and announced the sea contained only that fish.<br>This essay is about why the second net took forty years, and the answer comes in layers. The top layer is a story about measurement, and, well, it’s damning enough. The bottom layer is worse. It’s about who still feels authoritarianism as a threat at all, and it runs through a fight two German philosophers had in 1969, a strategy memo published in The Nation in 1966, and an argument that happened on X this week.<br>The net was built for a different monster
Start at the origin, because the origin explains more than it should.<br>The concept of the authoritarian personality came out of the Frankfurt School in American exile. Max Horkheimer, directing the Institute for Social Research’s American operation, ran the American Jewish Committee’s Department of Scientific Research; under his direction, the AJC’s Studies in Prejudice series set out to understand the catastrophe that had just consumed Europe. Its flagship, published in 1950, was The Authoritarian Personality, with the Frankfurt School’s Theodor Adorno as senior theorist alongside three Berkeley psychologists, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. Its instrument was the F-scale. (Yes, the F is for fascism.) It was built to detect the pre-fascist character, the personality type the European disaster grew from, and to detect nothing else.<br>Now, we’re not going down the definitional road here, fascism versus National Socialism versus communism versus the rest of the isms. Another day, perhaps. This part is a story about measurement, and well, deciding to measure.<br>That said, a measure engineered to find the incipient fascist was never going to find an authoritarian on the left—they’re different, they have different beliefs, different ideology. So, this wasn’t a flaw someone failed to catch. It was the design brief, the measurement decisions, and those governed everything downstream. The mission came before the instrument. And the mission was anti-fascism because of Hitler’s Third Reich’s horrifying assault on the world, not anti-authoritarianism in general. In 1950 those two commitments looked identical. They aren’t.<br>And the distinction was visible at the time: the year after the Berkeley study appeared, Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, which treated Nazism and Stalinism as two species of a single genus. The framework that saw both was...