The rise of American authoritarianism - Vox
Donald Trump's supporters have something in common: authoritarianism. "Trump embodies the classic authoritarian leadership style: simple, powerful, and punitive."
His support cuts across a lot of demographic fault lines, unlike many candidates who mostly appeal to a few demographic groups.
Perhaps strangest of all, it wasn't just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory. In South Carolina, a CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves.
Some social scientists think that they have found out what is going on here. Authoritarianism.
Matthew MacWilliams has been studying this psychological tendency, not among leaders, but among followers. Authoritarian leaders need followers who willingly support them, otherwise they'd get nowhere. Even those who rule by pure force need people who are willing to use that force on their behalf.
He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator.
Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler wrote a book on US political polarization, and they found
Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.
Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.
How the sorting out happened, then
Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.
A candidate like Donald Trump.
Even Hetherington was shocked to discover quite how right their theory had been. In the early fall of 2015, as Trump's rise baffled most American journalists and political scientists, he called Weiler. He asked, over and over, "Can you believe this? Can you believe this?"
Then some history of the research into authoritarianism, with
According to Stenner's theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or "activated" by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian.
(Karen Stenner)
The field had a problem: how do you measure authoritarianism? The more obvious ways of doing so had problems. Asking people if they are bigoted won't do. Then in the 1990's, Stanley Feldman had an idea.
He realized that if authoritarianism were a personality profile rather than just a political preference, he could get respondents to reveal these tendencies by asking questions about a topic that seemed much less controversial. He settled on something so banal it seems almost laughable: parenting goals.
He settled on four simple questions about parenting. What is it more important for a child to have?
- Independence or respect for elders?
- Obedience or self-reliance?
- To be considerate or to be well-behaved?
- Curiosity or good manners?
The third insight came from Hetherington and American University professor Elizabeth Suhay, who found that when non-authoritarians feel sufficiently scared, they also start to behave, politically, like authoritarians.
Here is how far the political polarization has gone:
Today, according to our survey, authoritarians skew heavily Republican. More than 65 percent of people who scored highest on the authoritarianism questions were GOP voters. More than 55 percent of surveyed Republicans scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians.
And at the other end of the scale, that pattern reversed. People whose scores were most non-authoritarian — meaning they always chose the non-authoritarian parenting answer — were almost 75 percent Democrats.
It started with Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy and campaigning on "law and order" to protect virtuous white people from criminal black people.
Democrats, by contrast, have positioned themselves as the party of civil rights, equality, and social progress — in other words, as the party of social change, a position that not only fails to attract but actively repels change-averse authoritarians.
What do they fear?
Physical threats from abroad, like ISIS or Russia or Iran. Authoritarians fear them much more than non-authoritarians, though some non-authoritarians also have a lot of fear of them. Domestic physical threats they fear only as much as non-authoritarians fear them.
They also fear social threats like acceptance of same-sex marriage, much more than non-authoritarians. They also don't like Muslims building mosques in their cities.
What do they want?
The responses to our policy questions showed that authoritarians have their own set of policy preferences, distinct from GOP orthodoxy. And those preferences mean that, in real and important ways, authoritarians are their own distinct constituency: effectively a new political party within the GOP.
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- Using military force over diplomacy against countries that threaten the United States
- Changing the Constitution to bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrants
- Imposing extra airport checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent in order to curb terrorism
- Requiring all citizens to carry a national ID card at all times to show to a police officer on request, to curb terrorism
- Allowing the federal government to scan all phone calls for calls to any number linked to terrorism
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"Many Republicans seem to be threatened by terrorism, violence, and cultural diversity, but that's not unique to Trump supporters," Feldman told me.
"It seems to be the action side of authoritarianism — the willingness to use government power to eliminate the threats — that is most clear among Trump supporters," he added.
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Just as striking is what was missing from authoritarians' concerns. There was no clear correlation between authoritarianism and support for tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 per year, for example. And the same was true of support for international trade agreements.
What will happen next. Even if Trump loses, his followers won't go away.
It would also mean more problems for the GOP. This election is already showing that the party establishment abhors Trump and all he stands for — his showy demagoguery, his disregard for core conservative economic values, his divisiveness.
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We may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians
Duverger's law states that first-past-the-post voting forces a two-party system. While that has happened in the US, it is evident that both parties have multiple factions that would likely be separate parties in a multiparty-friendly electoral system.
Under such a system, the Republican establishment and the Trumpites would be separate political parties, as would the Democratic establishment and the Sandersites. So the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment would end up cooperating with each other and not with the Trumpites and the Sandersites.
The Religious Right would also likely be a separate party in that system.
