Authoritarian Minded Voters Fueled The trump presidency...

December 09, 2020

As we move into the next phase of repair and rebuilding, though, there’s an uncomfortable truth all Americans must now face. The problem wasn’t just President Trump. The problem was also us.

Yes, at the root the problem of Trumpism and the 2020 election rests the American poeople. Seventy plus million of us. That number of people voting for an individual that clearly revealed his lack of democratic principals and penchant for authoritarianism and loyalty to him rather than the US Constitution and the rule of law highlights the depth of the struggle between democracy and tyranny. Right here in the god ole US of A.

Every since that fateful day back in 2015 when donald j.trump descended the elevator at his hotel to announce his candidacy for the presidency of the United States of America his Trumpism has been growing and metastasizing in an ever growing segment of our populace. And the dangers have increased almost exponentially. As a result we have witnessed the disgrace of the post election fraudulent activity of trump and his sycophants and cultists across America.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin when asked by a women in Philedelphia at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, So, Mr. Franklin, what kind of government have you given us, to which he replied, A republic ma'am, if you can keep it.

Not since 1860 and the start of the War Between the States (Civil War) has this nation been at such great risk of splitting apart at its seams. Which is exacty why a comparison between president donald trump and the president of the confederacy jefferson davis seems apt. trump has done more to destroy the institutions of our democratic republic than any president in United States history.

Only We the People can rectify the very real dangers we are facing. The question is are we capable of that task. The bigger question is de we even want to. Most specofically the trumpers and cultists that have brought us to this point.

On to the supporting article...

The Washington Post - For the past four years, American democracy has been in firefighting mode. Our institutions, our norms and our democratic values were being torched by the president himself. Thankfully, voters doused those flames on Nov. 3 by rejecting four more years of Trumpism. The United States’ authoritarian emergency will soon be over.

As we move into the next phase of repair and rebuilding, though, there’s an uncomfortable truth all Americans must now face. The problem wasn’t just President Trump. The problem was also us.

Every so often, history produces dangerous demagogues. When that happens, citizens are tested: Do you unite to reject a politics of fear, division and authoritarianism? Or does the country splinter, with half fighting back and the other half cheerleading as a would-be despot seeks to undermine democracy to consolidate power?

Now we know the answer: America splintered. When presented with a man who saw democracy as a pesky inconvenience, a huge chunk of the American electorate didn’t just accept him. They cheered, applauded and sported his memorabilia. They embraced him not in spite of his authoritarian impulses, but because of them.

To understand why this happened, we have to acknowledge a depressing reality: A substantial proportion of Americans are “authoritarian voters.” In other words, they crave the leadership of a strongman without significant checks. Moreover, their political preferences are only about outcomes, not process. If they want to ban Muslims from entering the country or to stop abortions, authoritarian voters aren’t particularly bothered if the norms of democracy are shredded, so long as they get their way.

A Vox-Morning Consult survey found that just under half of White American respondents scored high on measures of authoritarian personality, a proxy for authoritarian voting. Nearly 1 in 5 scored very high. Of these authoritarians lurking among us, nearly 7 in 10 were self-identified Republican voters. And for them, Trump was a godsend.

Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, and Jonathan Weiler, a professor of global studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discovered the Republican leanings of authoritarian voters before Trump did. Back in 2009, they argued that Republicans had positioned themselves as the defenders of cultural order and traditional values, which had the unanticipated consequence of attracting a lot of authoritarian voters to their ranks. Trump just tapped into them in a way that nobody had before.

In that way, when it comes to our diseased democracy, Trump is both symptom and cause. He activated latent authoritarians who would have voted for a Trumpian figure if one had been on the ballot. But he also made the language, behavior and policy of despotism mainstream. In short, he activated authoritarian voters that already existed, but also spent the past four years transforming plenty of constitutional conservatives into cheerleaders for American autocracy.

These dynamics, which might seem like abstractions, help to explain why so many Trump voters are not only willing to go along with Trump as he tries to overturn the results of a democratic election that he lost — they’re actually willing to punish Republican politicians who don’t indulge Trump’s despotic whims. It’s clear that elected Republicans — who largely refuse to answer basic factual questions about the winner of the presidential election — know that their voters are authoritarians. And they are catering to them.

Unfortunately, it’s not only these authoritarian voters whom we have to worry about. There is also evidence that Americans’ ideological commitment to democracy could be waning with each passing generation. A 2017 article in the Journal of Democracy found that around 3 in 4 Americans who were born in the 1930s said that it was “essential” to live in a democracy. That figure falls with each successive decade of birth, to around 3 in 10 Americans born in the 1980s. (Similar dynamics are showing up across other Western democracies, raising the possibility that generations that didn’t live through fascism or the Cold War have a less rigid personal commitment to democratic values.)

Democracy is not self-repairing. Over time, without citizens who are committed to protecting it, it will eventually die, smashed under the iron fist of a would-be strongman who attracted a big enough chunk of the electorate to go along with him. Trump failed, but it was close.

There are many structural reforms needed to stave off the risk of a future Trump — or a repeat of his demagoguery in 2024. But those measures are insufficient, because they deal with only half of the problem: how to constrain an autocratic president once in power. The other half is much harder, because it’s not about one individual. Instead, it’s about the tens of millions of Americans who, long after Trump is gone, will welcome another aspiring despot with open arms. And that, unfortunately, is the next front in the battle to protect American democracy.

We the People have it in our power to repair the damage trump, his administration, and the GOP have wrought on America. But to do so will require a very large segment of our populace, about seventy million, to start askewing conspiracy, lies, and corruption. The question is, is this even possible given the cult like nature of trump's apparent popularity among the authoritarians among us.