https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/23/trump-america-authoritarianism-420681
By MATTHEW C. MACWILLIAMS
09/23/2020 05:45 PM EDT
•••••
In high school civics we were taught that “American authoritarianism” was an oxymoron. Authoritarianism was a relic of the past. America was a country founded on freedom, steeped in equality and justice, and uniquely immune to it.
•••••
We now know that this story is a national fairy tale. As I wrote in Politico nearly a year before Trump’s victory in 2016, the single factor that predicted whether a Republican primary voter supported Trump over his rivals was an inclination to authoritarianism.
•••••
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.
•••••
These results explain, in part, how Trump can remain popular with his base despite any number of policies that would have been considered unconstitutional, anti-American and perhaps even criminal in the past by members of both parties. He has sent paramilitary forces from the Department of Homeland Security to quell nonviolent protests, looked the other way when a foreign power interferes in American elections, celebrated the wounding of a journalist by police as “a beautiful sight,” and spent an election year casting doubt on the very basis of our democracy, the electoral system, rather than working to protect it—all without eroding his main base of support.
American thinkers have been alert to the dangers of authoritarianism stoked by demagogues since the nation’s founding. In Federalist 63, James Madison warned of the danger the “infection of [the] violent passions” stoked by “the artful misrepresentations of interested men” posed to the future of the Republic.
•••••
The political path to galvanize American authoritarianism is also well worn and documented. First, purveyors of the paranoid style conjure an “other.” Second, this other is described as different from mainstream Americans, and identified as a clear and present threat to majoritarian values and traditions. Third, the paranoid leader stokes fear that a hidden conspiracy to undermine mainstream values is afoot and alleges that the other is behind it—activating American authoritarians. Finally, in its most virulent manifestation, growing fear of the other is manipulated to rationalize actions that violate fundamental values, norms, laws and constitutional protections guaranteed to all Americans.
This path reads like the playbook guiding the Trump administration and campaign. Much of it was on view at the Republican National Convention:
•••••
Trumpism is McCarthyism on steroids, and its full expression menaces the stability of our democracy. A country where authoritarian ideals are ascendant, and remain ascendant, is no longer a democracy. It is on the road to fascism, or what some now call, euphemistically, illiberal democracy.
•••••
Let me be clear: Our fellow Americans, including our authoritarian neighbors, are not the enemy. The enemies of democracy are self-interested men and women who exploit fear to secure and expand their power. Fear activates the reservoir of intolerance that resides across ideological and partisan divides. And it dupes some of us into demanding uniformity over diversity, denigrating our neighbors, and turning our back on the very motto inscribed on the Great Seal of our Republic in 1782: e pluribus unum.
Democracy is fragile. As John Quincy Adams wrote in 1814, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”
•••••
Personally, we need to stop othering each other. No more schoolyard labeling of one another as “libtard,” “snowflake,” or “deplorable.” No more reveling in the drawing of differences between us and them. There is no “enemy within” except the self-interested misleaders who exacerbate our problems. The real enemy is ignorance, disinformation and the lure of simple authoritarian answers to complex problems.
Institutionally, we need to rebuild faith in the institutions of government and democracy by demanding that our leaders are constrained by the rule of law and our fundamental constitutional principles.
•••••
No comments:
Post a Comment