About six years ago, he released a book titled “The Authoritarians”, in which he describes something called an “authoritarian personality”. The problem of the book is to understand the rise of tyrants in a democracy. Such a person needs the support of large numbers of ordinary people. How did someone like Adolf Hitler gain the enormous popular support he needed to take over political power in Germany? Bob Altemeyer’s answer is that there is a large minority in every population of people, perhaps one out of every three or four, who share three personality traits: