“He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured ok?
I hate to tell you.”
The 2016 Republican presidential nominee disregards the norms of adult behavior.
He disregards the norms of American democracy as we know it.
“It should be heartbreaking to every American that we have a frontrunner who suggests there
will be a religious test for anybody that wishes to come to our shores.”
He’s so unusual, his rhetoric at times so extreme, that political experts and commentators
were blindsided by his rise.
"We better be ready for the fact that he might be leading the republican ticket."
[Laughter] "I know you don't believe that"
How did Donald Trump attract such broad support within the Republican party? And what does
it mean for the US, beyond this election?
And it turns out that this is a question that can be answered to a really
surprising extent via this niche field of political science. It developed a theory about
what’s called authoritarianism.
We’re not talking about dictatorships here. Authoritarianism is a term political scientists
use for a worldview that values order and authority, and distrusts outsiders and social change.
And when authoritarians feel threatened, they look for strongman leaders.
Leaders who are punitive, who target out-groups and have a simple, forceful leadership
style that makes them feel strong. And if you were going to grow that candidate in a lab...
"I’m going to bomb the shit out of them."
He would look a lot like Donald Trump.
"When you get these terrorists, youhave to take out their families. They care about their lives.
Don't kid yourself. But they say they don't care about their lives. You have to take out their families.
Authoritarianism is not, in an of itself, necessarily a partisan issue.
For most of this country’s history, authoritarians were likely divided between the two parties.
But now, only one of the parties really appeals to them.
What happened was the Republican party started to embrace what it referred to as
traditional values, and it stood against a series of major social changes in this country.
After initially supporting civil rights, Republicans began courting southern white voters who opposed
racial integration. They turned against the Equal Rights Amendment, denounced abortion,
and later, fought against same-sex marriage.
Our nation must enact a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage in America.
More recently, foreign threats like terrorism have become major political issues, with Republicans
taking positions that align with authoritarian fears and preferences.
2002 headline: Republicans get a bonus from War on Terrorism
So Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, two political scientists. They tracked data
over several decades, and they found that authoritarian voters were shifting into the
Republican Party. So that means that when authoritarians become scared, when they become
activated by a particular social change or issue, the Republican Party can’t ignore
them. And they are a ready-made constituency for a candidate like Donald Trump.
Are you going to have a massive deportation force? "You’re going to have a deportation force."
"’d bring back waterboarding. And I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding."
Testing people for authoritarianism is a bit tricky.
You can’t just ask people, you know,
‘Are you really freaked out by social change? Do racial differences unsettle you? ‘Do
you support strongman leaders?’ because those are very sensitive questions and people
won't necessarily answer them honestly.
So instead, political scientists ask people about something more neutral:
their parenting preferences.
Please tell me which one you think is more important
for a child to have: independence, or respect for elders? Obedience or self-reliance?
These questions seem like they’re about raising children, but really what they’re
asking people is how much they value order and authority.
So when political scientists tested these 4 parenting questions
against the behaviors they knew authoritarians exhibited, they found
out that the correlation was very close. It was very predictive, at least for white voters.
Using this 4-question test, Vox worked with Morning Consult in February to poll a large
sample of likely voters.
Our results yielded a few really interesting
things. The first one was that, yes, scoring high on the authoritarianism questions was
very predictive of support for Trump.
A political science PhD student named Matthew MacWilliams has found similar results.
He’s done 2 polls, both of which found
that authoritarianism is not only strongly predictive of Trump support, but that it seems
to do a better job of predicting it than virtually any other factor.
We also looked at what authoritarian voters are afraid of.
On things like gun violence, or car accidents, or prescription drugs,
there wasn't a huge difference between
authoritarians and nonauthoritarians. But when it came to threats associated with people,
and particularly foreign people, authoritarians were much more afraid.
And we identified policies that authoritarians were more likely to support.
So authoritarians were much more likely
to say for instance that the United States should use force rather than diplomacy when
dealing with countries that threaten our interests overseas. And they were much more likely to
want to sacrifice civil liberties in exchange for safety.
"I want surveillance of certain mosques, ok? If that’s ok. I want surveillance."
It’s a set of priorities that doesn’t always align with the Republican establishment.
They don’t seem to have that much interest in small government. And they definitely
don’t seem particularly interested in shrinking entitlements like Social Security or Medicaid.
This theory doesn’t fully explain the Trump phenomenon -- researchers will probably study
this election for decades. But what it tells us is that he’s benefitted from a larger shift
in this country - one that goes beyond any one candidate.
Trump isn’t just a fluke. He’s not somebody who is just doing well because
he had name recognition or was a famous TV star.
This is a large group of people. They want these things.
And they’re going to be looking for politicians who can give it to them.
And that means that Donald Trump could be just the first of many Trumps in American politics.