The growing "authoritarian constituency"- something we CANNOT ignore!

[Lodestar]

The Rise of American Authoritarianism

This article is a crosspost from Good Reads forum:

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.

cont'd - http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

[Lodestar]

1. 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.

//

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."