What is wrong with Scott Walker; Will corporate press begin asking?

About a year ago John Dean penned among the most perceptive of analyses of Scott Walker as a "Double High Social Dominator," a potentially dangerous personality type marked by inadequacies and an accompanying slate of qualities including being: "mean-spirited, narrow-minded, intolerant, bullying, zealous, dogmatic, and uncritical toward chosen authority .... hypocritical, inconsistent and contradictory, prone to panic easily, highly self-righteous, ... severely punitive; with little self-awareness, and ... usually political and economic conservatives and/or Republicans."

In the 1950s and 1960s, many social scientists—still baffled by the phenomenon of normal, seemingly moral people throwing away critical faculties and becoming unquestioning followers of fascist leaders in Europe—see their work found in Dean's words, "recurring traits that, in varying degrees, are found in authoritarian followers—a group that includes both men and women—are as follows: They are submissive to authority but aggressive on that authority’s behalf. They are conventional and highly religious, with moderate to little education. They trust untrustworthy authorities, exhibit prejudice (particularly against homosexuals, women and followers of religions other than their own), and are mean-spirited, narrow-minded, intolerant, bullying, zealous, dogmatic, and uncritical toward chosen authority."

In Walker's case, he exhibits the qualities of a both social dominator and a submissive follower.

Writes Dean:

When testing social dominators, scientists noticed an incomparable situation: They occasionally found persons who garnered high scores for their cold, calculating dominance, yet also gained high scores on the tests for submissive followers.  How, it was asked, could the same person test high on both scales, since these traits are seemingly inconsistent?  Social scientists labeled these people 'Double Highs' because of their high scores on both testing scales.

Professor Robert Altemeyer, solved this conundrum when he found that these Double Highs relate to the questions regarding submission not by considering how they themselves submit to others, but rather how others submit to them.  They simply see the world as a place where they are always in charge.

So, it is no great surprise to hear Walker speak of taking his political cues from the "messiah."

Writes Dean in part II of his mini-treatise on the dangerous personality type, Social Dominator:

To be amoral, of course, is to be insensitive to moral matters.  A politician like Scott Walker will wrap himself in a cloak of morality, while, in fact, acting anything but morally.

Needless to say, Walker’s policies that attack poor women by cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood; his slashing of education budgets while giving tax breaks to wealthy corporations; and his pursuit of similar radical Republican actions all raise serious moral issues.  But different people have different moral standards and views of such activity, so I have excluded these matters from this discussion. ...

Nonetheless, Walker’s amorality is conspicuous.  It is found in his history of ethics violations and the record of his lying. A lengthy article could (and should) be written about both, but suffice it here to note that his ethics problems go back to his Marquette University days, when the college newspaper called him “unfit” for student office.

Later, in the Assembly (in 2005), Walker would earn the distinction of receiving the second-highest fine for an ethics violation in Wisconsin history.  His lying is notorious. Politifacts Wisconsin (which I am told is more reliable than most of these sites) finds Walker to be an accomplished falsifier. With respect to 44 statements that Politifacts examined, Walker was found to have been truthful only on six occasions.  The fact that 38 statements were pants-on-fire false, false, mostly false, or half-truths is stark evidence of amorality.

I watched a video of a Walker speech at the Goldwater Institute.  He’s slick: Fast-talking, confident, and dishonest—I watched him distort facts with which I was familiar.  He spoke in mostly half-truths, and certainly not with the kind of candor that the late Senator Goldwater expected from political figures.

Clearly, Walker has all the traits of a social dominator and authoritarian leader. More strikingly, it is also clear that he is, in fact, what social scientists term a 'double high authoritarian.'

Scott Walker Also Has Traits of Authoritarian Followers   

As I mentioned in Part One in this series of columns, to fit the definition of a double high authoritarian, a person must score highly as both a dominator/leader, and ironically, also as an authoritarian follower (because such people see themselves running the world, and believe that others should always follow leaders, like themselves).

Again, I listed all the traits of those who follow authoritarian leaders in that prior column.  The key and defining characteristics of such people are (1) their willingness to submit to established authority, (2) their aggressiveness on behalf of that authority, and (3) their conventionality.  Scott Walker has long shown that he possesses these traits, conspicuously so, and thus he would likely score high on such a test.