Vox (Opinion)
By Amanda Taub
March 1, 2016
The
American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out
something of a mystery: Why
is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned
populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and
often bizarre views? How has Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere,
suddenly become so popular?
What's
made Trump's rise even more puzzling is that his support seems to cross
demographic lines
— education, income, age, even religiosity — that usually demarcate
candidates. And whereas most Republican candidates might draw strong
support from just one segment of the party base, such as Southern
evangelicals or coastal moderates, Trump currently does
surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the towns of
upstate New York, and he won a resounding victory in the Nevada
caucuses.
Table of contents
I. What is American authoritarianism?
II. The discovery
III. How authoritarianism works
IV. What can authoritarianism explain?
V. The party of authoritarians
VI. Trump, authoritarians, and fear
VII. America's changing social landscape
VIII. What authoritarians want
IX. How authoritarians will change American politics
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.
Last September, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Matthew MacWilliams
realized that his dissertation research might hold the answer to not just one but all three of these mysteries.
MacWilliams
studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a
psychological profile
of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a
fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they
feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever
action necessary to protect them from outsiders
and prevent the changes they fear.
So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump.
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. He
later repeated the same poll in South Carolina,
shortly before the primary there, and found the same results, which he
published in Vox:
As
it turns out, MacWilliams wasn't the only one to have this realization.
Miles away, in an office
at Vanderbilt University, a professor named Marc Hetherington was
having his own aha moment. He realized that he and a fellow political
scientist, the University of North Carolina's Jonathan Weiler, had
essentially predicted Trump's rise back in 2009, when
they discovered something that would turn out to be far more
significant than they then realized.
That
year, Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of
authoritarianism on American
politics. 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.
This
trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic
changes such as immigration,
which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to
seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is
under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly
alien.
Trump embodies the classic authoritarian leadership style: simple, powerful, and punitive
These
Americans with authoritarian views, they found, were sorting into the
GOP, driving polarization.
But they were also creating a divide within the party, at first latent,
between traditional Republican voters and this group whose views were
simultaneously less orthodox and, often, more extreme.
Over
time, Hetherington and Weiler had predicted, that sorting would become
more and more pronounced.
And so it was all but inevitable that, eventually, authoritarians would
gain enough power within the GOP to make themselves heard.
At
the time, even Hetherington and Weiler did not realize the explosive
implications: that their
theory, when followed to its natural conclusion, predicted a looming
and dramatic transformation of American politics. But looking back now,
the ramifications of their research seem disturbingly clear.
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?"
This
winter, I got in touch with Hetherington, MacWilliams, and several
other political scientists
who study authoritarianism. I wanted to better understand the theory
that seemed to have predicted, with such eerie accuracy, Trump's rise.
And, like them, I wanted to find out what the rise of authoritarian
politics meant for American politics. Was Trump
just the start of something bigger?
These political scientists were, at that moment, beginning to grapple with the same question. We
agreed there was something important happening here — that was just beginning to be understood.
Donald Trump could be just the first of many Trumps in American politics
Shortly
after the Iowa Republican caucus, in which Trump came in a close
second, Vox partnered with
the Washington-based media and polling company Morning Consult to test
American authoritarians along a range of political and social views —
and to test some hypotheses we had developed after speaking with the
leading political scientists of the field.
What
we found is a phenomenon that explains, with remarkable clarity, the
rise of Donald Trump —
but that is also much larger than him, shedding new light on some of
the biggest political stories of the past decade. Trump, it turns out,
is just the symptom. The rise of American authoritarianism is
transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of
national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well
beyond this election.
I. What is American authoritarianism?
For
years now, before anyone thought a person like Donald Trump could
possibly lead a presidential
primary, a small but respected niche of academic research has been
laboring over a question, part political science and part psychology,
that had captivated political scientists since the rise of the Nazis.
How do people come to adopt, in such large numbers and so rapidly, extreme political views that
seem to coincide with fear of minorities and with the desire for a strongman leader?
To
answer that question, these theorists study what they call
authoritarianism: not the dictators
themselves, but rather the psychological profile of people who, under
the right conditions, will desire certain kinds of extreme policies and
will seek strongman leaders to implement them.
The political phenomenon we identify as right-wing populism seems to line up, with almost astonishing
precision, with the research on how authoritarianism is both caused and expressed.
After
an early period of junk science in the mid-20th century, a more serious
group of scholars
has addressed this question, specifically studying how it plays out in
American politics: researchers like Hetherington and Weiler, Stanley
Feldman, Karen Stenner, and Elizabeth Suhay, to name just a few.
The
field, after a breakthrough in the early 1990s, has come to develop the
contours of a grand
theory of authoritarianism, culminating quite recently, in 2005, with
Stenner's seminal The Authoritarian Dynamic — just in time for that
theory to seemingly come true, more rapidly and in greater force than
any of them had imagined, in the personage of one
Donald Trump and his norm-shattering rise.
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.
It is as if, the NYU professor Jonathan Haidt has written, a button is pushed that says, "In case
of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant."
Authoritarians are a real constituency that exists independently of Trump — and will persist as
a force in American politics
Authoritarians
prioritize social order and hierarchies, which bring a sense of control
to a chaotic
world. Challenges to that order — diversity, influx of outsiders,
breakdown of the old order — are experienced as personally threatening
because they risk upending the status quo order they equate with basic
security.
This
is, after all, a time of social change in America. The country is
becoming more diverse, which
means that many white Americans are confronting race in a way they have
never had to before. Those changes have been happening for a long time,
but in recent years they have become more visible and harder to ignore.
And they are coinciding with economic trends
that have squeezed working-class white people.
When
they face physical threats or threats to the status quo, authoritarians
support policies that
seem to offer protection against those fears. They favor forceful,
decisive action against things they perceive as threats. And they flock
to political leaders who they believe will bring this action.
If
you were to read every word these theorists ever wrote on
authoritarians, and then try to design
a hypothetical candidate to match their predictions of what would
appeal to authoritarian voters, the result would look a lot like Donald
Trump.
But
political scientists say this theory explains much more than just
Donald Trump, placing him
within larger trends in American politics: polarization, the rightward
shift of the Republican Party, and the rise within that party of a
dissident faction challenging GOP orthodoxies and upending American
politics.
More
than that, authoritarianism reveals the connections between several
seemingly disparate stories
about American politics. And it suggest that a combination of
demographic, economic, and political forces, by awakening this
authoritarian class of voters that has coalesced around Trump, have
created what is essentially a new political party within the GOP
— a phenomenon that broke into public view with the 2016 election but
will persist long after it has ended.
II. The discovery: how a niche subfield of political science suddenly became some of the most relevant
research in American politics
This
study of authoritarianism began shortly after World War II, as
political scientists and psychologists
in the US and Europe tried to figure out how the Nazis had managed to
win such wide public support for such an extreme and hateful ideology.
That
was a worthy field of study, but the early work wasn't particularly
rigorous by today's standards.
The critical theorist Theodor Adorno, for instance, developed what he
called the "F-scale," which sought to measure "fascist" tendencies. The
test wasn't accurate. Sophisticated respondents would quickly discover
what the "right" answers were and game the
test. And there was no proof that the personality type it purportedly
measured actually supported fascism.
More
than that, this early research seemed to assume that a certain subset
of people were inherently
evil or dangerous — an idea that Hetherington and Weiler say is
simplistic and wrong, and that they resist in their work. (They
acknowledge the label "authoritarians" doesn't do much to dispel this,
but their efforts to replace it with a less pejorative-sounding
term were unsuccessful.)
If this rise in American authoritarianism is so powerful as to drive Trump's ascent, then how else
might it be shaping American politics?
But
the real problem for researchers was that even if there really were
such a thing as an authoritarian
psychological profile, how do you measure it? How do you interrogate
authoritarian tendencies, which can sometimes be latent? How do you get
honest answers on questions that can be sensitive and highly
politicized?
As Hetherington explained to me, "There are certain things that you just can't ask people directly.
You can't ask people, 'Do you not like black people?' You can't ask people if they're bigots."
For a long time, no one had a solution for this, and the field of study languished.
Then
in the early 1990s, a political scientist named Stanley Feldman changed
everything. Feldman,
a professor at SUNY Stonybrook, believed authoritarianism could be an
important factor in American politics in ways that had nothing to do
with fascism, but that it could only reliably be measured by unlinking
it from specific political preferences.
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.
Feldman
developed what has since become widely accepted as the definitive
measurement of authoritarianism:
four simple questions that appear to ask about parenting but are in
fact designed to reveal how highly the respondent values hierarchy,
order, and conformity over other values.
Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect
for elders?
Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance?
Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to
be well-behaved?
Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?
Feldman's test proved to be very reliable. There was now a way to identify people who fit the authoritarian
profile, by prizing order and conformity, for example, and desiring the imposition of those values.
In
1992, Feldman convinced the National Election Study, a large survey of
American voters conducted
in each national election year, to include his four authoritarianism
questions. Ever since, political scientists who study authoritarianism
have accumulated a wealth of data on who exhibits those tendencies and
on how they align with everything from demographic
profiles to policy preferences.
What they found was impossible to ignore — and is only just beginning to reshape our understanding
of the American electorate.
III. How authoritarianism works
In
the early 2000s, as researchers began to make use of the NES data to
understand how authoritarianism
affected US politics, their work revealed three insights that help
explain not just the rise of Trump, but seemingly a half-century of
American political dynamics.
The
first was Hetherington and Weiler's insight into partisan polarization.
In the 1960s, the Republican
Party had reinvented itself as the party of law, order, and traditional
values — a position that naturally appealed to order- and
tradition-focused authoritarians. Over the decades that followed,
authoritarians increasingly gravitated toward the GOP, where
their concentration gave them more and more influence over time.
The
second was Stenner's theory of "activation." In an influential 2005
book called The Authoritarian
Dynamic, Stenner argued that many authoritarians might be latent — that
they might not necessarily support authoritarian leaders or policies
until their authoritarianism had been "activated."
The social threat theory helps explain why authoritarians seem so prone to reject not just one specific
kind of outsider or social change, such as Muslims or same-sex couples or Hispanic migrants, but rather to reject all of them.
This
activation could come from feeling threatened by social changes such as
evolving social norms
or increasing diversity, or any other change that they believe will
profoundly alter the social order they want to protect. In response,
previously more moderate individuals would come to support leaders and
policies we might now call Trump-esque.
Other
researchers, like Hetherington, take a slightly different view. They
believe that authoritarians
aren't "activated" — they've always held their authoritarian
preferences — but that they only come to express those preferences once
they feel threatened by social change or some kind of threat from
outsiders.
But
both schools of thought agree on the basic causality of
authoritarianism. People do not support
extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative
desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing
certain kinds of threats.
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.
But
Hetherington and Suhay found a distinction between physical threats
such as terrorism, which
could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more
abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic
changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out
to be important, but it also meant that in times
when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population
of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly.
Together,
those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social
change and physical
threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially
enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a
strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to
meet the rising threats.
This
theory would seem to predict the rise of an American political
constituency that looks an awful
lot like the support base that has emerged, seemingly out of nowhere,
to propel Donald Trump from sideshow loser of the 2012 GOP primary to
runaway frontrunner in 2016.
Beyond being almost alarmingly prescient, this theory speaks to an oft-stated concern about Trump:
that what's scariest is not the candidate, but rather the extent and fervor of his support.
And it raises a question: If this rise in American authoritarianism is so powerful as to drive Trump's
ascent, then how else might it be shaping American politics? And what effect could it have even after the 2016 race has ended?
IV. What can authoritarianism explain?
In early February, shortly after Trump finished second in the Iowa caucus and ended any doubts about
his support, I began talking to Feldman, Hetherington, and MacWilliams to try to answer these questions.
MacWilliams
had already demonstrated a link between authoritarianism and support
for Trump. But
we wanted to know how else authoritarianism was playing out in American
life, from policy positions to party politics to social issues, and
what it might mean for America's future.
It
was time to call Kyle Dropp. Dropp is a political scientist and
pollster whom one of my colleagues
described as "the Doogie Howser of polling." He does indeed appear
jarringly young for a Dartmouth professor. But he is also the co-founder
of a media and polling company, Morning Consult, that had worked with
Vox on several other projects.
When
we approached Morning Consult, Dropp and his colleagues were excited.
Dropp was familiar with
Hetherington's work and the authoritarianism measure, he said, and was
instantly intrigued by how we could test its relevance to the election.
Hetherington and the other political scientists were, in turn, eager to
more fully explore the theories that had
suddenly become much more relevant.
Non-authoritarians who were sufficiently frightened of threats like terrorism could essentially
be scared into acting like authoritarians
We
put together five sets of questions. The first set, of course, was the
test for authoritarianism
that Feldman had developed. This would allow us to measure how
authoritarianism coincided or didn't with our other sets of questions.
The second set asked standard election-season questions on preferred candidates and party affiliation.
The third set tested voters' fears of a series of physical threats, ranging from ISIS and Russia
to viruses and car accidents.
The fourth set tested policy preferences, in an attempt to see how authoritarianism might lead voters
to support particular policies.
If
the research were right, then we'd expect people who scored highly on
authoritarianism to express
outsize fear of "outsider" threats such as ISIS or foreign governments
versus other threats. We also expected that non-authoritarians who
expressed high levels of fear would be more likely to support Trump.
This would speak to physical fears as triggering
a kind of authoritarian upsurge, which would in turn lead to Trump
support.
We wanted to look at the role authoritarians are playing in the election
The
final set of questions was intended to test fear of social change. We
asked people to rate a
series of social changes — both actual and hypothetical — on a scale of
"very good" to "very bad" for the country. These included same-sex
marriage, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in
the United States, and American Muslims building
more mosques in US cities.
If the theory about social change provoking stress amongst authoritarians turned out to be correct,
then authoritarians would be more likely to rate the changes as bad for the country.
In
the aggregate, we were hoping to do a few things. We wanted to
understand who these people are,
in simple demographic terms, and to test the basic hypotheses about how
authoritarianism, in theory, is supposed to work. We wanted to look at
the role authoritarians are playing in the election: Were they driving
certain policy positions, for example?
We
wanted to better understand the larger forces that had suddenly made
authoritarians so numerous
and so extreme — was it migration, terrorism, perhaps the decline of
working-class whites? And maybe most of all, we wanted to develop some
theories about what the rise of American authoritarianism meant for the
future of polarization between the parties as
well as a Republican Party that had become both more extreme and
internally divided.
About 10 days later, shortly after Trump won the New Hampshire primary, the poll went into the field.
In less than two weeks, we had our results.
V. How the GOP became the party of authoritarians
The
first thing that jumped out from the data on authoritarians is just how
many there are. Our
results found that 44 percent of white respondents nationwide scored as
"high" or "very high" authoritarians, with 19 percent as "very high."
That's actually not unusual, and lines up with previous national surveys
that found that the authoritarian disposition
is far from rare1.
The
key thing to understand is that authoritarianism is often latent;
people in this 44 percent
only vote or otherwise act as authoritarians once triggered by some
perceived threat, physical or social. But that latency is part of how,
over the past few decades, authoritarians have quietly become a powerful
political constituency without anyone realizing
it.
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.
But
this hasn't always been the case. According to Hetherington and
Weiler's research, this is not
a story about how Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from
Venus. It's a story of polarization that increased over time.
They
trace the trend to the 1960s, when the Republican Party shifted
electoral strategies to try
to win disaffected Southern Democrats, in part by speaking to fears of
changing social norms — for example, the racial hierarchies upset by
civil rights. The GOP also embraced a "law and order" platform with a
heavily racial appeal to white voters who were
concerned about race riots.
This
positioned the GOP as the party of traditional values and social
structures — a role that it
has maintained ever since. That promise to stave off social change and,
if necessary, to impose order happened to speak powerfully to voters
with authoritarian inclinations.
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.
Over the next several decades, Hetherington explained to me, this led authoritarians to naturally
"sort" themselves into the Republican Party.
That
matters, because as more authoritarians sort themselves into the GOP,
they have more influence
over its policies and candidates. It is not for nothing that our poll
found that more than half of the Republican respondents score as
authoritarian.
Perhaps more importantly, the party has less and less ability to ignore authoritarians' voting preferences
— even if those preferences clash with the mainstream party establishment.
VI. Trump, authoritarians, and fear
Based
on our data, Morning Consult data scientist Adam Petrihos said that
"among Republicans, very
high/high authoritarianism is very predictive of support for Trump."
Trump has 42 percent support among Republicans but, according to our
survey, a full 52 percent support among very high authoritarians.
Authoritarianism
was the best single predictor of support for Trump, although having a
high school
education also came close. And as Hetherington noted after reviewing
our results, the relationship between authoritarianism and Trump support
remained robust, even after controlling for education level and gender.
Trump support was much lower among Republicans who scored low on authoritarianism: only 38 percent.
But that's still awfully high. So what could explain Trump's support among non-authoritarians?
I
suspected the answer might lie at least partly in Hetherington and
Suhay's research on how fear
affects non-authoritarian voters, so I called them to discuss the data.
Hetherington crunched some numbers on physical threats and noticed two
things.
The first was that authoritarians tend to fear very specific kinds of physical threats.
Authoritarians,
we found in our survey, tend to most fear threats that come from
abroad, such as
ISIS or Russia or Iran. These are threats, the researchers point out,
to which people can put a face; a scary terrorist or an Iranian
ayatollah. Non-authoritarians were much less afraid of those threats.
For instance, 73 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians
believed that terrorist organizations like ISIS posed a "very high
risk" to them, but only 45 percent of very low-scoring authoritarians
did. Domestic threats like car accidents, by contrast, were much less
frightening to authoritarians.
But Hetherington also noticed something else: A subgroup of non-authoritarians were very afraid
of threats like Iran or ISIS. And the more fear of these threats they expressed, the more likely they were to support Trump.
This seemed to confirm his and Suhay's theory: that non-authoritarians who are sufficiently frightened
of physical threats such as terrorism could essentially be scared into acting like authoritarians.
That's
important, because for years now, Republican politicians and
Republican-leaning media such
as Fox News have been telling viewers nonstop that the world is a
terrifying place and that President Obama isn't doing enough to keep
Americans safe.
There
are a variety of political and media incentives for why this happens.
But the point is that,
as a result, Republican voters have been continually exposed to
messages warning of physical dangers. As the perception of physical
threat has risen, this fear appears to have led a number of
non-authoritarians to vote like authoritarians — to support Trump.
An
irony of this primary is that the Republican establishment has tried to
stop Trump by, among
other things, co-opting his message. But when establishment candidates
such as Marco Rubio try to match Trump's rhetoric on ISIS or on American
Muslims, they may end up deepening the fear that can only lead voters
back to Trump.
VII. Is America's changing social landscape "activating" authoritarianism?
But
the research on authoritarianism suggests it's not just physical
threats driving all this. There
should be another kind of threat — larger, slower, less obvious, but
potentially even more powerful — pushing authoritarians to these
extremes: the threat of social change.
This
could come in the form of evolving social norms, such as the erosion of
traditional gender
roles or evolving standards in how to discuss sexual orientation. It
could come in the form of rising diversity, whether that means
demographic changes from immigration or merely changes in the colors of
the faces on TV. Or it could come in the form any changes,
political or economic, that disrupted social hierarchies.
What
these changes have in common is that, to authoritarians, they threaten
to take away the status
quo as they know it — familiar, orderly, secure — and replace it with
something that feels scary because it is different and destabilizing,
but also sometimes because it upends their own place in society.
According to the literature, authoritarians will seek,
in response, a strong leader who promises to suppress the scary
changes, if necessary by force, and to preserve the status quo.
This is why, in our survey, we wanted to study the degree to which authoritarians versus non-authoritarians
expressed a fear of social change — and whether this, as expected, led them to desire heavy-handed responses.
Our results seemed to confirm this: Authoritarians were significantly more likely to rate almost
all of the actual and hypothetical social issues we asked about as "bad" or "very bad" for the country.
For
instance, our results suggested that an astonishing 44 percent of
authoritarians believe same-sex
marriage is harmful to the country. Twenty-eight percent rated same-sex
marriage as "very bad" for America, and another 16 percent said that
it’s "bad." Only about 35 percent of high-scoring authoritarians said
same-sex marriage was "good" or "very good" for
the country.
Tellingly, non-authoritarians' responses skewed in the opposite direction. Non-authoritarians tended
to rate same-sex marriage as "good" or "very good" for the country.
The
fact that authoritarians and non-authoritarians split over something as
seemingly personal and
nonthreatening as same-sex marriage is crucial for understanding how
authoritarianism can be triggered by even a social change as minor as
expanding marriage rights.
We
also asked respondents to rate whether Muslims building more mosques in
American cities was a
good thing. This was intended to test respondents' comfort level with
sharing their communities with Muslims — an issue that has been
particularly contentious this primary election.
A
whopping 56.5 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians said it was
either "bad" or "very bad"
for the country when Muslims built more mosques. Only 14 percent of
that group said more mosques would be "good" or "very good."
The
literature on authoritarianism suggests this is not just simple
Islamophobia, but rather reflects
a broader phenomenon wherein authoritarians feel threatened by people
they identify as "outsiders" and by the possibility of changes to the
status quo makeup of their communities.
This
would help explain why authoritarians seem so prone to reject not just
one specific kind of
outsider or social change, such as Muslims or same-sex couples or
Hispanic migrants, but rather to reject all of them. What these
seemingly disparate groups have in common is the perceived threat they
pose to the status quo order, which authoritarians experience
as a threat to themselves.
And America is at a point when the status quo social order is changing rapidly; when several social
changes are converging. And they are converging especially on working-class white people.
It is conventional wisdom to ascribe the rise of first the Tea Party right and now Trump to the
notion that working-class white Americans are angry.
Indeed
they are, but this data helps explain that they are also under certain
demographic and economic
pressures that, according to this research, are highly likely to
trigger authoritarianism — and thus suggests there is something a little
more complex going on than simple "anger" that helps explain their
gravitation toward extreme political responses.
Working-class
communities have come under tremendous economic strain since the
recession. And white
people are also facing the loss of the privileged position that they
previously were able to take for granted. Whites are now projected to
become a minority group over the next few decades, owing to migration
and other factors. The president is a black man,
and nonwhite faces are growing more common in popular culture. Nonwhite
groups are raising increasingly prominent political demands, and often
those demands coincide with issues such as policing that also speak to
authoritarian concerns.
Some
of these factors might be considered more or less legitimately
threatening than others — the
loss of working-class jobs in this country is a real and important
issue, no matter how one feels about fading white privilege — but that
is not the point.
The
point, rather, is that the increasingly important political phenomenon
we identify as right-wing
populism, or white working-class populism, seems to line up, with
almost astonishing precision, with the research on how authoritarianism
is both caused and expressed.
That
is not to dismiss white working-class concerns as invalid because they
might be expressed by
authoritarians or through authoritarian politics, but rather to better
understand why this is happening — and why it's having such a profound
and extreme effect on American politics.
Have we misunderstood hard-line social conservatism all along?
Most
of the other social-threat questions followed a similar pattern2. On
its surface, this might
seem to suggest that authoritarianism is just a proxy for especially
hard-line manifestations of social conservatism. But when examined more
carefully, it suggests something more interesting about the nature of
social conservatism itself.
For
liberals, it may be easy to conclude that opposition to things like
same-sex marriage, immigration,
and diversity is rooted in bigotry against those groups — that it's the
manifestation of specific homophobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia.
But the results of the Vox/Morning Consult poll, along with prior research on authoritarianism,
suggests there might be something else going on.
There
is no particular reason, after all, why parenting goals should coincide
with animus against
specific groups. We weren't asking questions about whether it was
important for children to respect people of different races, but about
whether they should respect authority and rules generally. So why do
they coincide so heavily?
What might look on the surface like bigotry was really much closer to Stenner's theory of "activation"
What
is most likely, Hetherington suggested, is that authoritarians are much
more susceptible to
messages that tell them to fear a specific "other" — whether or not
they have a preexisting animus against that group. Those fears would
therefore change over time as events made different groups seem more or
less threatening.
It all depends, he said, on whether a particular group of people has been made into an outgroup
or not — whether they had been identified as a dangerous other.
Since
September 2001, some media outlets and politicians have painted Muslims
as the other and as
dangerous to America. Authoritarians, by nature, are more susceptible
to these messages, and thus more likely to come to oppose the presence
of mosques in their communities.
When
told to fear a particular outgroup, Hetherington said, "On average
people who score low in
authoritarianism will be like, 'I’m not that worried about that,' while
people who score high in authoritarianism will be like, 'Oh, my god!
I’m worried about that, because the world is a dangerous place.'"
In
other words, what might look on the surface like bigotry was really
much closer to Stenner's
theory of "activation": that authoritarians are unusually susceptible
to messages about the ways outsiders and social changes threaten
America, and so lash out at groups that are identified as objects of
concern at that given moment.
That's not to say that such an attitude is in some way better than simple racism or xenophobia —
it is still dangerous and damaging, especially if it empowers frightening demagogues like Donald Trump.
Perhaps
more to the point, it helps explain how Trump's supporters have come to
so quickly embrace
such extreme policies targeting these outgroups: mass deportation of
millions of people, a ban on foreign Muslims visiting the US. When you
think about those policy preferences as driven by authoritarianism, in
which social threats are perceived as especially
dangerous and as demanding extreme responses, rather than the sudden
emergence of specific bigotries, this starts to make a lot more sense.
VIII. What authoritarians want
From
our parenting questions, we learned who the GOP authoritarians are.
From our questions about
threats and social change, we learned what's motivating them. But the
final set of questions, on policy preferences, might be the most
important of all: So what? What do authoritarians actually 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.
What stands out from the results, Feldman wrote after reviewing our data, is that authoritarians
"are most willing to want to use force, to crack down on immigration, and limit civil liberties."
This
"action side" of authoritarianism, he believed, was the key thing that
distinguished Trump
supporters from supporters of other GOP candidates. "The willingness to
use government power to eliminate the threats — that is most clear
among Trump supporters."
Authoritarians generally and Trump voters specifically, we found, were highly likely to support
five policies:
- 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
What
these policies share in common is an outsize fear of threats, physical
and social, and, more
than that, a desire to meet those threats with severe government action
— with policies that are authoritarian not just in style but in
actuality. The scale of the desired response is, in some ways, what most
distinguishes authoritarians from the rest of the
GOP.
"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.
If Trump loses the election, that won't remove the threats and social changes that trigger the "action
side" of authoritarianism
This
helps explain why the GOP has had such a hard time co-opting Trump's
supporters, even though
those supporters' immediate policy concerns, such as limiting
immigration or protecting national security, line up with party
orthodoxy. The real divide is over how far to go in responding. And the
party establishment is simply unwilling to call for such explicitly
authoritarian policies.
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.
These
are both issues associated with mainstream GOP economic policies. All
groups opposed the tax
cuts, and support for trade agreements was evenly lukewarm across all
degrees of authoritarianism. So there is no real divide on these issues.
But there is one more factor that our data couldn't capture but is nevertheless important: Trump's
style.
Trump's
specific policies aren't the thing that most sets him apart from the
rest of the field of
GOP candidates. Rather, it's his rhetoric and style. The way he reduces
everything to black-and-white extremes of strong versus weak, greatest
versus worst. His simple, direct promises that he can solve problems
that other politicians are too weak to manage.
And,
perhaps most importantly, his willingness to flout all the conventions
of civilized discourse
when it comes to the minority groups that authoritarians find so
threatening. That's why it's a benefit rather than a liability for Trump
when he says Mexicans are rapists or speaks gleefully of massacring
Muslims with pig-blood-tainted bullets: He is sending
a signal to his authoritarian supporters that he won't let "political
correctness" hold him back from attacking the outgroups they fear.
This, Feldman explained to me, is "classic authoritarian leadership style: simple, powerful, and
punitive."
IX. How authoritarians will change the GOP — and American politics
To my surprise, the most compelling conclusion to come out of our polling data wasn't about Trump
at all.
Rather, it was that authoritarians, as a growing presence in the GOP, are a real constituency that
exists independently of Trump — and will persist as a force in American politics regardless of the fate of his candidacy.
If
Trump loses the election, that will not remove the threats and social
changes that trigger the
"action side" of authoritarianism. The authoritarians will still be
there. They will still look for candidates who will give them the
strong, punitive leadership they desire.
And that means Donald Trump could be just the first of many Trumps in American politics, with potentially
profound implications for the country.
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.
We may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP
authoritarians
But
while the party may try to match Trump's authoritarian rhetoric, and
its candidates may grudgingly
embrace some of his harsher policies toward immigrants or Muslims, in
the end a mainstream political party cannot fully commit to extreme
authoritarian action the way Trump can.
That
will be a problem for the party. Just look at where the Tea Party has
left the Republican establishment.
The Tea Party delivered the House to the GOP in 2010, but ultimately
left the party in an unresolved civil war. Tea Party candidates have
challenged moderates and centrists, leaving the GOP caucus divided and
chaotic.
Now
a similar divide is playing out at the presidential level, with results
that are even more destructive
for the Republican Party. Authoritarians may be a slight majority
within the GOP, and thus able to force their will within the party, but
they are too few and their views too unpopular to win a national
election on their own.
And so the rise of authoritarianism as a force within American politics means we may now have a
de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians.
And
although the latter two groups are presently forced into an awkward
coalition, the GOP establishment
has demonstrated a complete inability to regain control over the
renegade authoritarians, and the authoritarians are actively opposed to
the establishment's centrist goals and uninterested in its economic
platform.
Over
time, this will have significant political consequences for the
Republican Party. It will become
more difficult for Republican candidates to win the presidency because
the candidates who can win the nomination by appealing to authoritarian
primary voters will struggle to court mainstream voters in the general
election. They will have less trouble with
local and congressional elections, but that might just mean more
legislative gridlock as the GOP caucus struggles to balance the demands
of authoritarian and mainstream legislators. The authoritarian base will
drag the party further to the right on social
issues, and will simultaneously erode support for traditionally
conservative economic policies.
And
in the meantime, the forces activating American authoritarians seem
likely to only grow stronger.
Norms around gender, sexuality, and race will continue evolving.
Movements like Black Lives Matter will continue chipping away at the
country's legacy of institutionalized discrimination, pursuing the kind
of social change and reordering of society that authoritarians
find so threatening.
The
chaos in the Middle East, which allows groups like ISIS to flourish and
sends millions of refugees
spilling into other countries, shows no sign of improving. Longer term,
if current demographic trends continue, white Americans will cease to
be a majority over the coming decades.
In
the long run, this could mean a GOP that is even more hard-line on
immigration and on policing,
that is more outspoken about fearing Muslims and other minority groups,
but also takes a softer line on traditional party economic issues like
tax cuts. It will be a GOP that continues to perform well in
congressional and local elections, but whose divisions
leave the party caucus divided to the point of barely functioning, and
perhaps eventually unable to win the White House.
For
decades, the Republican Party has been winning over authoritarians by
implicitly promising to stand firm against the tide of social change,
and to be the
party of force and power rather than the party of negotiation and
compromise. But now it may be discovering that its strategy has worked
too well — and threatens to tear the party apart.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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