Study: People who identify as alt-right find security in the status quo

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- Who are the alt-right, and what do they stand for? The term is broad — an alt-right supporter could be anyone from an armed insurrectionist to an armchair political pundit — but they tend to have one thing in common.

According to new research involving faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York, people who identify as alt-right tend to be “system justifiers” who want to maintain the traditional status quo as an antidote to insecurity.

Alt-right means different things to different people, but the term is often used as a ‘catch-all’ for a variety of right-leaning, extremist, and reactionary ideologies in the American context, according to Kanisha Bond, an assistant professor of political science at Binghamton University and co-author of the new paper.

Bond and her colleagues were interested in understanding the social psychology that might underpin the attractiveness of an alt-right identity for everyday individuals. “All movements are very diverse; there's rarely only one single set of interests that might galvanize people into a community with each other,” said Bond. “But understanding more about folks’ underlying values or ways of seeing the world can be useful for explaining why some people are more or less likely to gravitate toward a particular collective identity.”

Specifically, they wanted to explore whether system justification theory – which holds that individuals vary in a psychological orientation to manage a sense of threat and distress by defending established systems – could explain that attractiveness. “System justification can be appealing to anybody who believes that traditionalism facilitates order, and particularly when they are experiencing some perceived or real insecurity,” said Bond. “System justifiers don't actually care who or what the specific authority is, but they care a lot about maintaining the safety that they assume comes with keeping stability in the status quo. They believe that the antidote to their insecurity is a traditionalist approach to order.”

Bond and her co-authors conducted two surveys of 4,700 Americans in June 2020 and January 2022. The surveys included self-identification questions, like “To what extent do you identify with the views of the ‘alternative right’ or ‘alt-right’?” and support questions, like a prompt asking respondents to indicate whether they are or are not a supporter of the alt-right movement. They didn’t define ‘alt-right’ for respondents ahead of time, to be sure that all self-identifications were based on respondents’ own ideas about what the term meant to them. 

The team used the average response on a question inventory developed by Aaron Kay and John Jost to determine the presence of system-justifying beliefs. They measured the strength of those beliefs on a seven-point scale, from strongly disagree to strongly agree. 

The new findings suggest that individuals who report higher levels of system-justifying beliefs are more likely to identify with the alt-right. Higher levels of system-justifying beliefs also appear to correlate with a delegitimation of protest activity that challenges existing social and racial inequality, such as by the Black Lives Matter movement. The authors also find meaningful racial and ethnic diversity among “system-justifiers.” Bond thinks this might help us understand more about the broadening appeal of alt-right ideological messaging.  

Bond and her colleagues are using the results of these surveys to study the anti-lockdown protests during the COVID-19 pandemic as well. They are specifically interested in probing the assumption that anti-lockdown protests served as a sort of “dry run” for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Bond says it’s important to take people's beliefs about themselves and their understandings of the world seriously, especially in the face of ideologically extreme views. “I think a big part of this research is trying to make clear that there are real political consequences to interactions among those beliefs, particularly when it comes to understanding the quality of democracy and the possibilities of national unity in light of real and perceived inequalities of experience, access, and security” said Bond.

The paper was co-authored by Katherine Sawyer, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Stony Brook University; and Hannah Ham, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Brooklyn College.

“System justification and the American alt-right,” was published in Politics, Groups, & Identities.