By my account, authoritarianism is a fundamental predisposition concerned with minimizing difference, and constraining the individual freedom that tends to surround and confront us with different people, beliefs, and behaviors. It should dispose authoritarians and libertarians to widely varying reactions to racial diversity, political dissent, and moral deviance. That being so, the responses of our authoritarian and libertarian subjects ought to be spontaneously and readily distinguishable along these lines as, with very minimal prompting and guidance from their interviewers, they answer rather broad questions regarding themselves; their lives; their hopes, fears, and pride; and their feelings about race, politics, and morality (see Table 7.1). That is to say, even structured to the least degree possible by my preconceived notions, the content of these (approximately) natural conversations should, if I am correct, reveal stark differences between the authoritarian and libertarian subjects in the manner in which they think and feel about racial diversity, political dissent, and moral deviance.

In this chapter, then, I examine the actual content of the in-depth interview discussions, dealing in turn with each of these three dimensions of racial, political, and moral intolerance. In each domain, I will report upon the size and consistency of any differences manifested between the authoritarian and libertarian subjects in their propensity to subscribe to certain ideas or to express certain beliefs about the world.