HOW MANY KRAZIES???

BuzzFlash linked to an interesting post by Sarah Robinson about how many right-wing krazies there are in America and she found that there are basically two groups of krazies.

"Chip, how many far-right wingers are there in the United States?"

I knew the question was vague. I figured, based on our past conversations, that I'd have to carefully define "far right" and qualify who belonged in that group. And then we'd have a discussion about how you slice and dice the various factions and their relationships to the whole, and....

But that's not what happened. Chip didn't even skip a beat.

"Ten percent of the population." He declared this with a jaunty certainty that's uncharacteristic of Chip, who usually has a sociologist's inbred caution about putting caveats around his claims.

"Ten percent? That's it? Flat out?"

"Ten percent. That's it. It's been the same number for most of our history, and it doesn't change much." He went on to explain that sociologists and social psychologists have spent decades doing on a large scale what I was doing with my little clutch of studies. And invariably, he said, no matter how they define "far right" or "authoritarian," no matter how they count up the fundamentalists and nationalists and proto-fascists, the numbers always come up somewhere between 7 percent and 12 percent. Or, on average, about 10 percent. Always. And it's been that way going back as far as they can go.

Using a different metric, I concluded that there were between 10% and 13% who were deranged.

The second group comprises those that psychologist Robert Altemeyer described as having authoritarian personalities. This group may be as large as 25% of the population, and with the right external circumstances, they can act as just as bad as the hardcore krazies.

In short, during bad times we may have as much as 37% (12 + 25) of the adult population who are basically unhinged.