Psychology: My Google news feed is a weird mishmash of “How to gain muscle after 40″ exercise articles, “New research identifies what predicts dementia” pop psychology stuff, and “Paul Weller explains how John Lydon betrayed punk” music news.
I clicked on the last, out of weird nostalgia – my family migrated to the UK not long before the Tories took over in 1979, so my early teens were defined by the experiences of Thatcher’s Britain. In my memory, it’s a dark foreboding time, and the soundtrack is punk giving way to new wave. I say “weird” nostalgia because I really didn’t like The Sex Pistols’ music and I wasn’t wild about Weller’s band, The Jam, either.
But I can easily conjure up the music and lyrics of London Calling by The Clash and Ever Fallen in Love (The Buzzcocks). There’s something about the music you hear during these formative times.
In the article, Weller criticises Lydon for turning his back on the anti-establishment foundation of punk and taking up “Make America Great Again”. From one extreme to another, one might say.
This is something that one of my students, Gerard, recently wrote about in their doctoral thesis. The research is an attempt to understand ideology – the social and political lens through which we frame our world – by combining a bunch of factors from personality and political psychology. Part-way through Gerard’s work, a new factor was published: a way to robustly measure left-wing authoritarianism after generations of scholars had tried and failed to do so.
The method beautifully complements our existing measures of right-wing authoritarianism.
For decades, psychology scholars have been taking potshots at people who adopt more than averagely rightist or conservative political positions. Those positions go with bad stuff like anti-minority sentiment and general comfort with wielding the big stick to keep rabble-rousers down. Having a way to rigorously characterise people at the other end of the spectrum brings some balance to the fore.
And what Gerard finds makes sense when we look at international politics. Sure, we learn that more-than-averagely-right/conservative folk fear that social cohesion and co-operation are disintegrating, with a resulting desire to have dominance over those who threaten the status quo. “Fearful repression”, Gerard calls it.
But he also finds evidence of “system attenuation” on the left. These folk also want dominance, but from the position of being marginalised: to overthrow unfair hierarchies and privilege and dominate the dominators.
I’ll illustrate what this looks like in real life. Keir “no-drama” Starmer has just led the British Labour Party in an absolute pasting of Rishi Sunak’s Tories. But it was Labour that was walloped in 2019 under self-identified socialist Jeremy Corbyn, who was dogged by criticism for what was seen as an antisemitic streak within the party. Whether those criticisms were fair or well-founded, it’s not hard to find historical links between the left and anti-Jewish sentiment and behaviour.
Nationalism on the right is a big talking point in US politics, but you can find a strong white nationalist ideology, with a particular antisemitic focus, in corners of that historical punk following. Why? White nationalism on the right is motivated by fear that other folk are coming for our goodies. But on the left, that anti-hierarchical aggression is aimed at overthrowing those who are perceived as keeping folk on the margins. The fact that some of these punk bands are reviving right now says something about the times we live in.
