- Joined
- Jul 3, 2019
- Messages
- 48,633
- Reaction score
- 41,988
- Location
- Ohio
- Gender
- Female
- Political Leaning
- Progressive
I was shocked when I read this a few days ago but roughly 40%of Americans would support living in a white conservative dictatorship instead of a constitutional republic with democratic elections and freedoms as we now do.
Through four national panel surveys launched the week before the 2016 election and continuing into this year, I sought to answer these questions. (While I focused on authoritarianism, my colleagues in this work, Brian Schaffner from Tufts University and Tatishe Nteta from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explored the effects of hostile sexism and racism in America, producing their own eye-opening and important findings).
What I found is that approximately 18 percent of Americans are highly disposed to authoritarianism, according to their answers to four simple survey questions used by social scientists to estimate this disposition. A further 23 percent or so are just one step below them on the authoritarian scale. This roughly 40 percent of Americans tend to favor authority, obedience and uniformity over freedom, independence and diversity.
This group isn’t a monolith, and these findings don’t mean that 4 in 10 Americans prefer dictatorship to democracy. Authoritarianism is best understood not as a policy preference, the way we talk about lower taxes or strong defense, but rather as a worldview that can be “activated” in the right historical moment by anyone with a big enough megaphone who is willing to play on voters’ fears and insecurities.
When activated by fear, authoritarian-leaning Americans are predisposed to trade civil liberties for strongman solutions to secure law and order; and they are ready to strip civil liberties from those defined as the “other”—a far cry from the image of America as a country built on a shared commitment to liberty and democratic governance.
So what do authoritarians in the US believe? In surveys I found that American authoritarians, compared with non-authoritarians, are more likely to agree that our country should be governed by a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections. They are more likely to support limiting the freedom of the press and agree that the media is the enemy of the people rather than a valuable independent institution. They are also more likely to think the president should have the power to limit the voice and vote of opposition parties, while believing that those who disagree with them are a threat to our country—a concerning trend as we head to the polls this year.
American authoritarians fear diversity. They are more likely to agree that increasing racial, religious and ethnic diversity is a clear and present threat to national security. They are more fearful of people of other races, and agree with the statement that “sometimes other groups must be kept in their place.”
Trump Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of Americans
It’s not how we think of our fellow-citizens, but no matter who wins in November, the impulse will be very much alive in the country. What do they want?www.politico.com
