The Working Class, Authoritarianism, and the War in Vietnam

Abstract

Support for escalation in Vietnam is used to address Lipset's (1959) theory of working-class authoritarianism. According to Lipset's original formulation, support for escalation should be disproportionate among the low-status groups. The data (from the Survey Research Center's [University of Michigan] 1964 and 1968 Election Studies) do not support this expectation. Lipset's and others' respecifications of the class authoritarianism thesis point to several intermediary variables (organizational affiliations, low education, little reading, low levels of political interest, etc.) which “interpret” the presumed relationship between social class and authoritarianism. Examining these variables within levels of social class for their effects on support for escalation shows them to be either unrelated or related in the opposite direction of that predicted by the theory: as a group, workers were no more hawkish than those in white collar occupations, but the most hawkish segments of the working class were those most, not least, integrated into the middleclass political culture, especially those high in media attention and those high in political knowledge and interest.