Donald Trump’s strongman image is a plus for many voters.
Meanwhile, 44 percent backed the American tradition of competing branches of government as a model, if sometimes “frustrating,” system.
Why would people want to live under an authoritarian’s thumb? It’s rooted, experts say, in a psychological need for security—real or perceived—and a desire for conformity, a goal that becomes even more acute as the country undergoes dramatic demographic and social changes. People also like to obey a strong leader who will protect the group—especially if it is the “right” group whose interests will be protected. Recall the Trump supporter who, during the 2019 government shutdown, complained, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
They want their opinion mirrored back at them by someone in power so they don't have to take responsibility for their own opinions.
A close friend of mine is a woman of color and her bosses want the same things from her. They wants to hear their opinion come out of someone with her skin tone so they feel justified and not responsible at the same time. I imagine these are similar phenomenon.
They support him because they believe he is like them, so they won't need to change anything. It's everyone else that will be forced to be like them that they want...
I hope I'm not spreading misinformation, but I believe one of the victims of the assassination attempt had a flag on his Facebook page that was a play off of "don't tread on me" and in it's place was a tank with "tread on all of them."
Every tabletop scenario he ran (think like a UN version of Risk) in which the Authoritarians had control, they wiped out everyone with nuclear war including themselves.
32% of americans are chickenshit responsibility abrogators that want everything they do to be dictated to them. Religion has been a major primer for that mindset
At some level, people just want a particular policy. It's silly to pretend a democracy where I never get what I want is going to be more attractive than a dictatorship where I get to unleash my libidinal id.
And you can't just blame this on religion. Religiosity has plummeted over the last 40 years, but we seem to be as accommodating towards fascism as ever.
32% of people know their preferred way of doing things are unpopular and will not get their way unless a regime that agrees with them is in power, because democracy would favor the majority.
Religion can of course drive an entitlement that's very dangerous (people asserting a higher power justifies their particular view), but more mundane motivations can easily drive people to demand they are right over the majority).
You can pretty much ask almost any insane thing and it somehow always comes out to at least 30% of Americans.
I sometimes wonder if it'd always the same 30% and there just 30% idiots, or if that 30% spans multiple topics and groups of idiots and its actually higher like 60%
I wonder if it's something like 25% of survey respondents are just picking the most outrageous thing and 5% actually believe that way. I remember a while ago on a survey about being ok with political violence, they tried to control for that kind of thing and it dropped the numbers a lot.
I mean, I imagine if someone like Bernie Sanders became Dictator for Life; the quality of life for 99.999% of Americans would improve; so purely in a thought-experiment kind of way, it works.
The issue with even the most benelovent dictatorships is the matter of succession.
Yup, that is the exact problem of benevolent dictatorships. No matter how good it is in the short term, the long term will always end in disaster at some point or another.
Which is still braindead. What happens when their perfect leader can no longer serve? Even if a dictator 100% aligns with you, you're a fool to support them.
An overwhelming majority of California and New York leftists disagree with you and have neutered themselves in order to prevent black people from organizing during the segregation era protests and now the reason is for children's safety from school shooters.
Even well-meaning authoritarians can do terrible things, to say nothing of their eventual replacement. Look what happens to otherwise great companies when the founder dies and is replaced by someone just looking to maximize next quarter profits.
If you check the poll it's not what you'd expect. The self-identified left had 25% support. The self-identified right had 29% support. The self-identified center had 37 PERCENT support. There's apparently a thirst for some strong authoritarian radical centrism.
I struggle to trust numbers nowadays. After being on Reddit for 11 years and now here on Lemmy, and around the Internet my entire life, lemme tell you about why people would self-identify as something else for a moment:
Because they are anonymous.
There are a huge amount of people who are on the Right on Lemmy trying to pass off as Blue, or blue-leaning.
It was a disturbingly close call which side of WWII we were gonna land on. In 1939 the second-largest Nazi party in the world was right here in America.
Stupid people who don’t know how the system works think that they will someday be wearing the boot. They think because they kiss the boot that they’ll never be stomped.
“Susan Sontag was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10% of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10% is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80% could be moved in either direction” —Kurt Vonnegut
Yeah, I like to call that the 10-80-10 principle. That's why it's so important to keep the arguments up for why we should vote Blue no matter who. 10% want to fuck everyone over. And they've managed to convince another 22% that they are right. We're all screwed if we don't get the 68% that aren't assholes to vote Blue.
Here's the problem with your partisanship. If you give a party your unconditional support, then they have no reason to cater to your needs. All they have to do is just to be slightly better than the alternative. Which is exactly the current situation and which is also exactly what makes the Democratic party today so unattractive.
For the independent electorate it's feels as though they are being coerced into voting Democrat. That's not good for anyone.
be me
hardcore Trump supporter
Trump wins, I'm ecstatic
world starts going to hell, WW3 kicks off
married with three sons, trying to keep everything together
decide to start a construction company, war efforts boost business
build a bunch of buildings, making bank
get elected to local office, life is on the up and up
land a huge contract, biggest yet
build the place, turns out it's a gay bar
fml
media catches wind, calls me part of the "woke agenda"
sons get drafted into the war, proud but terrified
trying to keep the family safe as the world burns
business takes a nosedive, firebombed by extremists
every building I've ever built gets torched
house goes up in flames, barely escape with wife
wife blames me for everything, says I'm the reason we're targeted
receive word from the front lines
"All three of your sons killed in friendly fire"
caskets arrive the next morning
wife loses it completely, leaves the country, I'm left alone
arrested, accused of contributing to "trans agenda"
just a foreman trying to get by, now rotting in jail
every dream turned to ash
life was supposed to be perfect
now I'm just a broken man with nothing but regret
tfw everything falls apart because of one misguided decision
This coming from the "if you exchange freedom.for security you will enjoy neither freedom nor security" folks.
Just a quick question: give me one, ONE simple example of a successful military dictatorship that didn't take the country to hell and left damn near all its citizens poor, suppressed, and suffering?
I hate a military dictatorship but to play devil's advocate: South Korea and Taiwan?
I'm not saying their transition to democracies was bloodless or clean but they managed. Those two are extreme examples and not models, one country built after a war that split the country in two, the other fleeing the mainland to create its own state. But I'm stretching to find a better example.
I’m not saying their transition to democraciesliberal democracies
FTFY - so-called "liberal democracy" is about as democratic as "social darwinism" is Darwinist. And those are two terrible examples to use - they only went pretend-democratic after the fascist regimes murdered and tortured any elements in society that could be called democratic with a straight face.
If that's what you want for the US you might just as well start marching with the fascists.
Not really. There certainly was a concentration of levers in the government, but while it certainly had authoritarian traits, it wasn't militaristic and was still quite free. There was a healthy opposition.
Also.... Do you really want a military dictatorship run by right wing Christian extremists with an obsession with the end times with access to nukes? Just something to ponder about.
Maybe the citizens weren't suffering but their massive slave population definitely was. Heck, the reason they trained so hard was to put down slave revolts.
That's what the Germans though in 1932, too. Maybe those idiots now should have a look into some history books about that era to see what happened next.
Reactionaries believe that all of the problems they face are due to the fact that the wrong people are ruling.
They are 100% in favor of a neo-feudal pseudoaristocracy where billionaires are unleashed to rule the States as their fiefdoms and will impose their vision upon their subjects.
Reactionaries do not value individual autonomy except for the privileged man who runs the factory, farm, or family; all others should do as they're told or face his wrath.
They do not believe in structuring society to be fair and equitable, as is evident by their crusaides against DEI, holding police accountable, women, LGBTQ people, the non-religious, the unhoused, progressive taxes, and welfare.
All they care about is power to enact their will on others.
The dissonance is astounding. The average mouth breathing MAGA is either so poor and stupid that they don't realize that their taxes are going to go way up and their services like Pension and medical will evaporate. The other type of MAGA supporter is probably a fairly well off enough to insulate them from the worst of this (except the tax shift to them) but are happy because they get to openly hate the people they see as a problem which will lead to blow back that they can't understand. Bad times ahead if trump wins guaranteed
Know what FINE! I say we give them a Democrat run military regime that imposes our beliefs on them under threat of execution.
This solves a couple problems. It lets them feed their persecution fetish, so they can finally cum and chill the fuck out. It also alters their stance on the issue. Conservatives don't care about anything until it happens to them. Once they see how their fun ideas plays out against them, they will actually care about the issue and how it affects others. A lot of their "imma bring down the gubment with mah AR-15" clowns will find out their ideas are as impotent as they are. After their wet fart of a revolution fails, and a few years of learning what real oppression is, we voluntarily go back to a democracy.
From this and other polls it really does seem that most countries would be immeasurably improved if a good third of the population were to spontaneously combust.
Bad news: the 1/3 authoritarian segment of society seems to be a human trait. Culture determines how the trait is expressed.
So fire them into the sun but statistically the hierarchically-minded, active-amygdala, contrarian and cruel segments of the genome will just always be there.
This is probably the primary challenge of the human condition: graduating from a troupe species with ling-refined tribal techniques for handling the problem individuals, to a noöspheric global species successfully coping with with emergent problems due to mass "civilizational" effects.
At this point, I would be unsurprised if a third of Americans voted for an industrial meat shredder for President, even after it had been repeatedly and clearly explained they would be marched into it at gunpoint if it won. The lower part of our bell curve is… well… very, very low.
The people who think this have never had to truly struggle in their entire fucking lives. Fat little American piggies who think that everything will stay the same in every facet of life under their military dictatorship, as if nothing bad could ever happen to them and bad things will only happen to the people they hate. They take for granted all of the freedoms and luxuries they enjoy daily and never once consider how quickly those would vanish for them too.
This right here. Even as a kid studying history, I never understood why someone would support a dictator. When I was like 9 or 10, we were learning about WW2 or something, and I said, "Wait, Mrs. <History Teacher>, you're saying people wanted Hitler to be a dictator and voted for him? Why would someone give up the possibility of being leader themselves?!" I couldn't comprehend how someone wouldn't want to at least have the possibility of having supreme executive authority.
Like, if it were me in charge, then I'm all for it, but some other person? HELLLLLLLL NO! It could be Gary down the block, and he's an asshole.
I'll outlaw most private vehicles, fund public transit, convert corporate governance to market socialism (the employees of a company should own the company - not rent seeking investors).
I would NOT want to be supreme leader for life, but I’d like to think I’d do a lot to benefit people. Y’all could, and usually do, do worse than me, but you’d have to catch me first
I read some research somewhere that found that about a third of the people in any given country are authoritarian shitheads (paraphrasing). The problem is that the unique structure of the US system of government gives said shitheads outsized power and representation relative to their numbers.
How very in-American of them. I thought those conservatives were all about 1776 and independence from a king/dictator. I guess it’s more like they want their king is charge to crush anyone who has slightly different views.
This sounds about right. If you look at the rise of authoritarian parties in Europe you will see numbers sitting between 25% and 35% too. I have a feeling that this might just be an innate personality trait that people are born with. Some people are more submissive and prefer strong leaders, even at the cost of personal liberties.
I mean, we already witness this in other aspects of life.
If you think about very early human history, like the first civilizations, I believe there's an answer there. Hunter gatherers were relatively egalitarian, but then we started settling into larger groups/cities. The cities needed to protect their food stores from the rest of the humans who were basically still hunter gatherers, and had no qualms about taking any food they could get
... as well as enemy cities that might come for the food or treasure or women or whatever. (The city people also went out and enslaved the hunter gatherers, but that's a different part of the story.) In this environment if you hesitated to kill your opponent then they would kill you, so the most ruthless killers (sociopaths) were seen as heros and protectors and often rose to leadership or king status. But, you needed your protector/king to be the most ruthless sociopath in the land to protect you from the next city over's ruthless sociopath. These sociopaths have pretty much continued to rule ever since. It made sense back then, because there was no way for regular (not sociopath) people to survive without the protection of sociopaths. My theory is that it holds over today for the more fearful and stupid among us because they don't/can't understand that we no longer need psychos to protect us.
If you ask the same people if they would want a leftist military regime or authoritarian governement they would beg for democracy. These people have no scrouples. End of the day they just want to be left alone like everyone else. It's just lashing out because they themselves don't want to change.
And here's where the Democrats run into a massive problem.
The Democrats are running on two fronts: A policy position, and warning people of the authoritarianism that Trump and the GOP will bring if they return to power.
The problem is that the Republican base is basically saying "Yeah. We know. We want it that way. Screw your policies." And they have enough on their side to actually win the election. How the hell do you compete with that?
I agree with you. This is where I just throw my hands up and concede that this is the will of the people. Our democratic form of government affords people the freedom to choose to be sheep. Isn't it beautiful?
This election, like the last one, isn't about convincing maga extremists or lifelong Republicans to vote for the first Democrat in their lives. It's about convincing people in the middle to vote against Project 2025. I know it's insane, but there are still enough "undecided" voters that they will literally decide the election. That plus turnout. If enough people vote, Donald Trump cannot turn this country into an authoritarian regime.
32% of polled Americans who will admit it out loud, mind you. That number is absolutely higher. Pew Research found 43% of American adults trust Fox News and they trounce other cable news channels by a long shot. We ain’t never gonna make it.
32 percent of Americans believe a military regime or authoritarian leader (described as a strong leader who can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts) would be a good way of governing the country.
They didn't agree with a statement that explicitly endorsed authoritarianism or military dictatorship. They agreed with a statement that is being interpreted as the equivalent of supporting those things.
And the question itself is very open to interpretation. Does "strong" mean decisive and principled or cruel and dictatorial? Does interference refer to the normal balance of power between the three branches of government, or is it referring to extreme dysfunction, or even unconstitutional actions taken by courts and/or congress that violates constitutional principles.
They're absolute cowards anyways. They get scared of a trans person in the bathroom or someone with slightly too much melanin in their skin walking by. They'd just implode or run away in fear if they see their opposition with a gun. Also, I'd say a lot more non-nazis than 20% have guns in America. Plenty of normal people have them
Two completely different things in this climate. Anyone else remember when Gen. Miley literally went behind Trump's back to assure China that the military would block any of his (possible) tantrums?
Well then we know that 32% of people in America are not fond of America. I'm fine with the whole Trump bullshit of "kicking them out", but let's make it about these assholes and not the people who are here to have a functioning democracy.
The stupid minority. Only stupid people who don't bother learning about the world would think this. Minus the very few who just wanna use the situation to get rich.
One of my gramps fled fascism in Italy. Always warned me that a lot of people want someone to tell them what to do, primed to receive commands. That side is filled with rebels, flexible and rational people that operate in shades of grey.
On the other side, I have a cousin who had a strict dad, retired military guy, good soldier, no doubt. Cousin loves Trump. That side is more blue collar, less education, less financial means. Cousin never had to deal with emotions, couldn't have done so in a safe environment with her dad around anyway, yelling at her all the time, telling her exactly what to do, why to do it, how to do it.
She would get harshly punished for very specific things and her folks would make sure she understood the just desert of it clear. She's never led anything of her own, never started anything for herself. She's very attached to the idea that people get what they deserve and has a hard time related to anyone different from her, which are defense mechanisms and marks of her emotional immaturity. Like, she cannot fathom that there are innocent people in prison who have pleased guilty. Her ability to think for herself is as stunted as her compassion for others. She needed serious education and travel, exposure to other cultures and ideas, she got a certificate, a job, and an apartment instead. Super attached to her personal property. Cannot fathom the idea of not being angry if for example something was stolen from her that she was fully insured for. Obviously she has a gun and feels like it keeps her safe.
She has authoritarian sympathy engrained in her. It is her attachment style. Loud shouted orders are her love language.
I remember reading long ago that the best form of government is actually a benevolent dictatorship. The problem is that dictatorships never stay that way and doing anything about it becomes extremely difficult, if impossible.
So basically, leaving it all up to one person is a bad idea.