‘The Seeds Had Been Planted. Trump Didn’t Do It Himself.’
PHOTO: Damon Winter/The New York Times
by Thomas Edsall
May 15, 2024
New York Times
"Over the past 30 years, authoritarianism has moved from the periphery to the center, even the core, of global politics, shaping not only the divide between left and right in the United States but also the conflict between the American-led alliance of democratic nations and the loose coalition of autocratic states including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a co-author of “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics,” has tracked the partisanship of white voters in this country who are in the top 15 percent on measures of support for dictatorial rule.
Replying by email to my inquiry, Hetherington wrote:
"In 1992, those whites scoring at the top of the authoritarianism scale split their two-party vote almost evenly between Bush and Clinton (51 to 49). In 2000 and 2004, the difference becomes statistically significant but still pretty small.
By 2012, those high-authoritarianism white voters went 68 to 32 for Romney over Obama. In both Trump elections it was 80 to 20 among those voters.
So from 50 Republican-50 Democrat to 80 Republican-20 Democrat in the space of 24 years."
The parallel pattern of conflicting values and priorities that has emerged between nations is the focus of a paper published last month, “Worldwide Divergence of Values” by Joshua Conrad Jackson and Dan Medvedev, both at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The two authors analyzed data from seven studies conducted by the World Values Survey in 76 countries between 1981 and 2022.
Jackson and Medvedev found that over those years, “Values emphasizing tolerance and self-expression have diverged most sharply, especially between high-income Western countries and the rest of the world” and characterized this split as a clash between “emancipatory” values and values of “obedience.”
I asked Medvedev whether authoritarianism represents the antithesis of a regime based on emancipatory principles, and he wrote back, “It certainly does seem that authoritarian regimes tend to reject values that we categorize as emancipative.”
What is clear is that authoritarianism has become an entrenched factor in partisan divisions, in global conflicts between nations and in the politics of diversity and race.
Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, wrote that the embedded character of authoritarianism in America “is like a barnacle attached to our affective polarization, a side effect of a political realignment being run through the uniquely polarizing effects of our first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system and primary structure.”
In an email, Kleinfeld argued that the Great Recession played a pivotal role in stressing the importance of authoritarianism in American politics:
This newly mobilized, angry electorate, Kleinfeld continued, is “not choosing the antidemocratic behavior — they are choosing their tribe, and the behavior comes with it. Authoritarian behavior is happening in America, not in Europe, because of our political structures.”
In support of her argument, Kleinfeld cited a January report issued by the Democracy Fund, “Democracy Hypocrisy: Examining America’s Fragile Democratic Convictions,” that shows how Americans can endorse democratic principles and simultaneously support autocratic behavior by fellow partisans.
Among the report’s conclusions:
While a vast majority of Americans claimed to support democracy (more than 80 percent said democracy is a fairly or very good political system in surveys from 2017 to 2022), fewer than half consistently and uniformly supported democratic norms across multiple surveys.
Support for democratic norms softened considerably when they conflicted with partisanship. For example, a solid majority of Trump and Biden supporters who rejected the idea of a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress and elections” nonetheless said their preferred U.S. president would be justified in taking unilateral action without explicit constitutional authority under several different scenarios.
About 27 percent of Americans consistently and uniformly supported democratic norms in a battery of questions across multiple survey waves, including 45 percent of Democrats, 13 percent of Republicans and 18 percent of independents.
In contrast to an overwhelming and consistent rejection of political violence across four survey waves, the violent events of Jan. 6, 2021, were viewed favorably by many Republicans. Almost half of Republicans (46 percent) described these events as acts of patriotism, and 72 percent disapproved of the House select committee that was formed to investigate them.
In 2008, the financial crisis created a great deal of anger and a desire for more government intervention. At the same time, an identity revolution was taking place in which group identity gained increased salience, especially in America.
Together these movements opened space for a political realignment: a long-dissatisfied group of voters who were pro-economic redistribution, but only to their “deserving” group, found political voice. These “more for me, less for thee” voters who hold left-wing redistributive economic ideas and socially conservative views formed Trump’s primary base in 2016, and moved firmly into the Republican camp in 2020.
One of the more intriguing discoveries is that growing racial diversity activates authoritarianism.
In their 2017 article “Racial Diversity and the Dynamics of Authoritarianism,” Yamil Ricardo Velez and Howard Lavine, political scientists at Yale and the University of Minnesota, determined that racial diversity “magnifies the political impact of individual differences in the psychological disposition of authoritarianism.”
“In white areas with minimal diversity, authoritarianism had no impact on racial prejudice, political intolerance and attitudes toward immigration,” they wrote. “As diversity rises, however, authoritarianism plays an increasingly dominant role in political judgment. In diverse environments, authoritarians become more racially, ethnically and politically intolerant and nonauthoritarians less so.”
Velez and Lavine defined authoritarianism as
"a stable propensity concerned with minimizing difference and maximizing the “oneness and sameness” of people, ideas and behaviors or, more simply, as a preference for social conformity over individual autonomy. The worldview of authoritarians stresses conformity and obedience, as well as the belief that too much individual autonomy — and diversity in general — will result in social rebellion and instability of the status quo."
Authoritarians, Velez and Lavine wrote, “find diversity threatening, and they react to it with increasing racial resentment, anti-immigration beliefs and political intolerance. By contrast, nonauthoritarians react to diversity by becoming more politically tolerant and by embracing African Americans and immigrants.”
As issues “related to race and ethnicity, crime, law and order, religion and gender” have gained centrality, according to Velez and Lavine, “two fundamental changes have occurred in the nature of partisanship.”
The first is the creation of “an alignment between political identity and authoritarianism, such that high authoritarians have moved into the Republican Party and low authoritarians have moved into the Democratic Party.”
As such, the movement of these voters to the G.O.P. long predated Trump. His rhetoric has made this line of conflict between the parties even sharper than before. So that percentage of high-scoring authoritarian voters for Trump is higher than it was for Bush, McCain and Romney. But that group was moving that way long before 2016. The seeds had been planted. Trump didn’t do it himself."
by Thomas Edsall
May 15, 2024
New York Times
"Over the past 30 years, authoritarianism has moved from the periphery to the center, even the core, of global politics, shaping not only the divide between left and right in the United States but also the conflict between the American-led alliance of democratic nations and the loose coalition of autocratic states including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a co-author of “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics,” has tracked the partisanship of white voters in this country who are in the top 15 percent on measures of support for dictatorial rule.
Replying by email to my inquiry, Hetherington wrote:
"In 1992, those whites scoring at the top of the authoritarianism scale split their two-party vote almost evenly between Bush and Clinton (51 to 49). In 2000 and 2004, the difference becomes statistically significant but still pretty small.
By 2012, those high-authoritarianism white voters went 68 to 32 for Romney over Obama. In both Trump elections it was 80 to 20 among those voters.
So from 50 Republican-50 Democrat to 80 Republican-20 Democrat in the space of 24 years."
The parallel pattern of conflicting values and priorities that has emerged between nations is the focus of a paper published last month, “Worldwide Divergence of Values” by Joshua Conrad Jackson and Dan Medvedev, both at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The two authors analyzed data from seven studies conducted by the World Values Survey in 76 countries between 1981 and 2022.
Jackson and Medvedev found that over those years, “Values emphasizing tolerance and self-expression have diverged most sharply, especially between high-income Western countries and the rest of the world” and characterized this split as a clash between “emancipatory” values and values of “obedience.”
I asked Medvedev whether authoritarianism represents the antithesis of a regime based on emancipatory principles, and he wrote back, “It certainly does seem that authoritarian regimes tend to reject values that we categorize as emancipative.”
What is clear is that authoritarianism has become an entrenched factor in partisan divisions, in global conflicts between nations and in the politics of diversity and race.
Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, wrote that the embedded character of authoritarianism in America “is like a barnacle attached to our affective polarization, a side effect of a political realignment being run through the uniquely polarizing effects of our first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system and primary structure.”
In an email, Kleinfeld argued that the Great Recession played a pivotal role in stressing the importance of authoritarianism in American politics:
This newly mobilized, angry electorate, Kleinfeld continued, is “not choosing the antidemocratic behavior — they are choosing their tribe, and the behavior comes with it. Authoritarian behavior is happening in America, not in Europe, because of our political structures.”
In support of her argument, Kleinfeld cited a January report issued by the Democracy Fund, “Democracy Hypocrisy: Examining America’s Fragile Democratic Convictions,” that shows how Americans can endorse democratic principles and simultaneously support autocratic behavior by fellow partisans.
Among the report’s conclusions:
While a vast majority of Americans claimed to support democracy (more than 80 percent said democracy is a fairly or very good political system in surveys from 2017 to 2022), fewer than half consistently and uniformly supported democratic norms across multiple surveys.
Support for democratic norms softened considerably when they conflicted with partisanship. For example, a solid majority of Trump and Biden supporters who rejected the idea of a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress and elections” nonetheless said their preferred U.S. president would be justified in taking unilateral action without explicit constitutional authority under several different scenarios.
About 27 percent of Americans consistently and uniformly supported democratic norms in a battery of questions across multiple survey waves, including 45 percent of Democrats, 13 percent of Republicans and 18 percent of independents.
In contrast to an overwhelming and consistent rejection of political violence across four survey waves, the violent events of Jan. 6, 2021, were viewed favorably by many Republicans. Almost half of Republicans (46 percent) described these events as acts of patriotism, and 72 percent disapproved of the House select committee that was formed to investigate them.
In 2008, the financial crisis created a great deal of anger and a desire for more government intervention. At the same time, an identity revolution was taking place in which group identity gained increased salience, especially in America.
Together these movements opened space for a political realignment: a long-dissatisfied group of voters who were pro-economic redistribution, but only to their “deserving” group, found political voice. These “more for me, less for thee” voters who hold left-wing redistributive economic ideas and socially conservative views formed Trump’s primary base in 2016, and moved firmly into the Republican camp in 2020.
One of the more intriguing discoveries is that growing racial diversity activates authoritarianism.
In their 2017 article “Racial Diversity and the Dynamics of Authoritarianism,” Yamil Ricardo Velez and Howard Lavine, political scientists at Yale and the University of Minnesota, determined that racial diversity “magnifies the political impact of individual differences in the psychological disposition of authoritarianism.”
“In white areas with minimal diversity, authoritarianism had no impact on racial prejudice, political intolerance and attitudes toward immigration,” they wrote. “As diversity rises, however, authoritarianism plays an increasingly dominant role in political judgment. In diverse environments, authoritarians become more racially, ethnically and politically intolerant and nonauthoritarians less so.”
Velez and Lavine defined authoritarianism as
"a stable propensity concerned with minimizing difference and maximizing the “oneness and sameness” of people, ideas and behaviors or, more simply, as a preference for social conformity over individual autonomy. The worldview of authoritarians stresses conformity and obedience, as well as the belief that too much individual autonomy — and diversity in general — will result in social rebellion and instability of the status quo."
Authoritarians, Velez and Lavine wrote, “find diversity threatening, and they react to it with increasing racial resentment, anti-immigration beliefs and political intolerance. By contrast, nonauthoritarians react to diversity by becoming more politically tolerant and by embracing African Americans and immigrants.”
As issues “related to race and ethnicity, crime, law and order, religion and gender” have gained centrality, according to Velez and Lavine, “two fundamental changes have occurred in the nature of partisanship.”
The first is the creation of “an alignment between political identity and authoritarianism, such that high authoritarians have moved into the Republican Party and low authoritarians have moved into the Democratic Party.”
As such, the movement of these voters to the G.O.P. long predated Trump. His rhetoric has made this line of conflict between the parties even sharper than before. So that percentage of high-scoring authoritarian voters for Trump is higher than it was for Bush, McCain and Romney. But that group was moving that way long before 2016. The seeds had been planted. Trump didn’t do it himself."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section
since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American
politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The
Washington Post. @edsall
