<nettime> Return of the F-scale

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

We've come full circle. Forget the Californian Ideology, forget the 
Flexible Personality.  At issue today is exactly the thing that Adorno 
and his colleages studied in their sociological attempt to understand 
Fascism. What's happening in the US right now, and undoubtedly across 
Europe, is fear, disorientation and authoritarianism. BH

****

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533

The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You're a Trump Supporter
By Matthew MacWilliams

If I asked you what most defines Donald Trump supporters, what would you 
say? They're white? They're poor? They're uneducated?

You'd be wrong.

In fact, I've found a single statistically significant variable predicts 
whether a voter supports Trump - and it's not race, income or education 
levels: It's authoritarianism.

That's right, Trump's electoral strength - and his staying power - have 
been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. 
And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American 
electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it's very possible 
that Trump's fan base will continue to grow.

My finding is the result of a national poll I conducted in the last five 
days of December under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts, 
Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the country and the 
political spectrum. Running a standard statistical analysis, I found 
that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no 
significant bearing on a Republican voter's preferred candidate. Only 
two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: 
authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was 
far more significant than the latter.

Authoritarianism is not a new, untested concept in the American 
electorate. Since the rise of Nazi Germany, it has been one of the most 
widely studied ideas in social science. While its causes are still 
debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians 
obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond 
aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. From 
pledging to "make America great again" by building a wall on the border 
to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United 
States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations.

Not all authoritarians are Republicans by any means; in national surveys 
since 1992, many authoritarians have also self-identified as 
independents and Democrats. And in the 2008 Democratic primary, the 
political scientist Marc Hetherington found that authoritarianism 
mattered more than income, ideology, gender, age and education in 
predicting whether voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. 
But Hetherington has also found, based on 14 years of polling, that 
authoritarians have steadily moved from the Democratic to the Republican 
Party over time. He hypothesizes that the trend began decades ago, as 
Democrats embraced civil rights, gay rights, employment protections and 
other political positions valuing freedom and equality. In my poll 
results, authoritarianism was not a statistically significant factor in 
the Democratic primary race, at least not so far, but it does appear to 
be playing an important role on the Republican side. Indeed, 49 percent 
of likely Republican primary voters I surveyed score in the top quarter 
of the authoritarian scale - more than twice as many as Democratic voters.

Political pollsters have missed this key component of Trump's support 
because they simply don't include questions about authoritarianism in 
their polls. In addition to the typical battery of demographic, horse 
race, thermometer-scale and policy questions, my poll asked a set of 
four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed 
since 1992 to measure inclination toward authoritarianism. These 
questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the 
voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or 
self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. 
Respondents who pick the first option in each of these questions are 
strongly authoritarian.

Based on these questions, Trump was the only candidate - Republican or 
Democrat - whose support among authoritarians was statistically significant.

So what does this mean for the election? It doesn't just help us 
understand what motivates Trump's backers - it suggests that his support 
isn't capped. In a statistical analysis of the polling results, I found 
that Trump has already captured 43 percent of Republican primary voters 
who are strong authoritarians, and 37 percent of Republican 
authoritarians overall. A majority of Republican authoritarians in my 
poll also strongly supported Trump's proposals to deport 11 million 
illegal immigrants, prohibit Muslims from entering the United States, 
shutter mosques and establish a nationwide database that track Muslims.

And in a general election, Trump's strongman rhetoric will surely appeal 
to some of the 39 percent of independents in my poll who identify as 
authoritarians and the 17 percent of self-identified Democrats who are 
strong authoritarians.

What's more, the number of Americans worried about the threat of 
terrorism is growing. In 2011, Hetherington published research finding 
that non-authoritarians respond to the perception of threat by behaving 
more like authoritarians. More fear and more threats - of the kind we've 
seen recently in the San Bernardino and Paris terrorist attacks - mean 
more voters are susceptible to Trump's message about protecting 
Americans. In my survey, 52 percent of those voters expressing the most 
fear that another terrorist attack will occur in the United States in 
the next 12 months were non-authoritarians - ripe targets for Trump's 
message.

Take activated authoritarians from across the partisan spectrum and the 
growing cadre of threatened non-authoritarians, then add them to the 
base of Republican general election voters, and the potential electoral 
path to a Trump presidency becomes clearer.

So, those who say a Trump presidency "can't happen here" should check 
their conventional wisdom at the door. The candidate has confounded 
conventional expectations this primary season because those expectations 
are based on an oversimplified caricature of the electorate in general 
and his supporters in particular. Conditions are ripe for an 
authoritarian leader to emerge. Trump is seizing the opportunity. And 
the institutions - from the Republican Party to the press - that are 
supposed to guard against what James Madison called "the infection of 
violent passions" among the people have either been cowed by Trump's 
bluster or are asleep on the job.

It is time for those who would appeal to our better angels to take his 
insurgency seriously and stop dismissing his supporters as a small band 
of the dispossessed. Trump support is firmly rooted in American 
authoritarianism and, once awakened, it is a force to be reckoned with. 
That means it's also time for political pollsters to take 
authoritarianism seriously and begin measuring it in their polls.

***

PS:

The book by Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler, on which much 
of the above seems to be based, is called "Authoritarianism and 
Polarization in American Politics."

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