By Katie Posey

Americans tend to oversimplify their political differences due to the country’s two-party system, says UC Santa Barbara writing lecturer and author Robert Samuels.

The Democratic and Republican parties have internal divisions, such as the conflicting ideologies of libertarians and moral conservatives on the Right and those of radicals and moderates on the Left, says Samuels, who has a doctorate in both Psychology and English.

In his new book, The Psychopathy of Political Ideologies, Samuels points out the tensions that exist on each side and the underlying psychopathologies that drive them.

Robert Samuels is an author and Writing Program lecturer at UC Santa Barbara.

Samuels identifies four political ideologies: Left, Right, liberal and conservative, and introduces a fifth: centrist. He probes the fundamental beliefs of each political ideology from a psychological standpoint to highlight the internal nuances of American politics that are often mistakenly grouped together.

Samuels explores the forces that guide ideology, such as religion, science, and the notion of freedom, and he identifies psychological tendencies that shape decision making, such as the tendency of liberal centrists to avoid conflict.

In a recent interview, he stressed the importance of applying a psychoanalytic lens to political ideologies and how they contribute to political conflict.

Q: What are the main findings or conclusions that you present in your book?

A: One thing that I looked at a lot is what makes someone join a political party or have a particular belief system. I focused on how certain political ideologies fit with different types of personalities and psychologies. People say our politics are polarized, but I think that this idea of these oppositions as polarized is mostly due to the way we talk about it. If you really look at the two parties, Republicans and Democrats, each party is made of its own combination of two very different ideologies.

There are at least four different ideologies, so to polarize it is to oversimplify it. We’re seeing this right now. We have this tension between the liberals and the Left. Right now, with Biden’s infrastructure package you see how the Democratic party is divided internally between the Left and the liberal side, and the Left and liberals actually have very different belief systems and psychologies. On the other side, you have this interesting combination of two very opposing ideologies and psychologies like the ideology of conservative — mostly religious traditional  —  and then the Right, which is mostly libertarian, which is reacting to the Left. So part of what I show is that it is an oversimplification to see it as just polarization or opposition. It’s much more complicated.  

Q: In plain terms, how do psychological tendencies relate to political affiliations?

A: Much of politics is irrational, and to understand this irrationality you must understand how the human mind works. For instance, for a lot of the Right, their psychology has to do with trying to escape social control — for example protesting against vaccines and protesting speech codes and masking — as a form of wanting to be free. There are actually five sides, but on the Left, they’ve taken on the role of the conscience or superego — for example, trying to censor people's thoughts and speech and trying to influence people through emotional manipulation. You see that not just in politics but in interpersonal relationships, relationships where people try to manipulate other people through emotions.

Writing Program lecturer Rober Samuels’ new book, The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies, addresses political ideology from a psychological standpoint.

One of the things I tried to explain is how a conservative like Mike Pence unifies with a libertarian like Donald Trump because the conservatives tend to try to conserve moral order and libertarians are seeking freedom from morality, or moral order. You wouldn't think that these two opposing philosophies would fit together, but one key aspect of the conservative psychology and ideology is being submissive to authority. That allows a conservative like Pence to submit to Trump.

Q: So, is the fifth side you mentioned, centrism, somewhere in the middle?

A: This is where it gets complicated. It would be very easy with just Left and Right, one opposition being conservative, and another opposition being liberal. However, what's happened is that what we call liberals now are more of centrists. There’s old school liberalism, based more on science, democracy, and capitalism, and modern liberalism, which is more like what we think of liberals as today, Biden, Clinton, and Obama. It's more of a psychology of compromise. Obama's famous for saying there's no red states or blue states; there's only the United States. 

Biden came in thinking that he could somehow bring the two parties together, and what we're seeing now is that his approach is not necessarily working. He's not unifying his own party and he's not getting the other side to agree to anything. For the current centrist liberals, their psychological issue is mainly that they want to avoid conflict, so they tend to compromise. What we're seeing with Biden is that  his compromises are being rejected. You have distortion on the Left and distortion on the Right, and if you compromise two wrong approaches, you don't get a logical solution. Two wrongs don't make a right. What’s happening often is that liberals are so invested in avoiding conflict and being seen as well-intentioned, that they don't deal with the real conflicts that exist between the different ideologies.

Q: You write about “triumvirates of ideals” that are tied to political party affiliations, such as conservative ideals harking back to premodern institutions such as religion, feudalism and monarchy, and liberals favoring universality, objectivity, and empiricism. How did you come up with that?

A: I think a lot of intellectual history looks at the guiding forces throughout history in different cultural moments. It is a common idea that the transition from the premodern to the modern [era] meant that instead of basing your beliefs on what is true in faith and religion, you move towards science. Instead of having a fixed social order, which is feudalism, you have economic mobility, which is capitalism. Another example: instead of having a single authority monarchy, you have democracy. So, these are all common ideas about intellectual and historical developments, at least in the West.

Katie Posey is a third year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.