26% Would Like To See An Authoritarian Government In U.S.

 

The Republican Party has taken steps recently that show they no longer respect our democracy, and are willing to short-circuit that democracy to seize and retain power for themselves. Now we have a poll showing that is true -- that about 26% of Americans (mostly Republicans) have highly authoritarian tendencies.

Here is some of what Jennifer Rubin has to say about that in The Washington Post:

We want to believe that goodwill can foster a return to less contentious and hyperpartisan times. But what if one side adopts noxious views antithetical to democracy — and, worse, rejects the basic premise of America?

We have witnessed Republicans’ reflexive defense of the disgraced former president’s illegal and corrupt conduct. We have observed that the majority of the party accepts the “big lie” of a stolen election and seeks to use that as a basis for suppressing the votes of minorities.

And we know that, once more, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has committed himself to one objective: the defeat and failure of a Democratic president.

In short, they have taken themselves outside the small-d democratic compact that requires, at the very least, that we respect election results and abide by normative guidelines in defeat or victory.

It would be somewhat reassuring to think this is a problem of Republican officials, donors and activists. Alas, the authoritarian temptation is luring millions of Americans away from the democratic experiment. “A scale measuring propensity toward right-wing authoritarian tendencies found right-leaning Americans scored higher than their counterparts in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom,” a Morning Consult poll finds. “26% of the U.S. population qualified as highly right-wing authoritarian, Morning Consult research found, twice the share of the No. 2 countries, Canada and Australia.”

This means that a large percentage of Republicans — that is, tens of millions of Americans — embrace an authoritarianism defined “as the desire to submit to some authority, aggression that is directed against whomever the authority says should be targeted and a desire to have everybody follow the norms and social conventions that the authority says should be followed.” This inclination to follow a demagogue and to reject democratic values is more pronounced than in other Western democracies.

The most authoritarian-inclined Americans tend to be over age 45, live in rural areas and don’t have a college degree. This is the profile of the GOP base, not coincidentally. It follows that many authoritarian-minded Americans are willing to abide by the cult of former president Donald Trump and reject rational analysis. They burrow within right-wing media, refusing to confront facts and views that contradict their philosophy. . . .

Robert P. Jones, the author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” explains: “The most striking difference between right-wing politics in the U.S. and other countries such as Australia, Canada, and [Britain] is the dominance and influence of white evangelical Protestants, who have a theological proclivity toward authoritarianism.” He continues, “The evangelical worldview in America has historically been built on a set of hierarchies that have been defended as divinely ordained — Christian over non-Christian, Protestant over Catholic, white over non-white, men over women. In its strongest forms, this worldview is fundamentally anti-democratic and theocratic.” In what sounds like a perfect alignment with political authoritarianism, “It demands deference particularly to white male charismatic leaders (even when they themselves violate communal norms) and builds identity through a politics of aggression to a shifting array of perceived out groups,” Jones observes.

“Most notably,” he adds, “it gives no quarter to critical thought or dissent, defending its own views as divinely ordained and beyond question.”

If a significant faction of the Republican Party adheres to Christian nationalism rather than the democratic civic religion (equality, the rule of law and the aspiration to perfect the American experiment), the rest of us cannot embrace them as good-faith partners in democracy. As disturbing as it may seem, today’s GOP cannot be entrusted with power and cannot play the role of the “loyal opposition” if it continues to operate outside the democratic compact.

Moreover, if millions of Americans maintain an authoritarian fixation, our democracy will founder, and what happened on Jan. 6 may become a post-election pattern.