In a recent Politico story, Matthew MacWilliams identified the one trait which predicts if you’re a Trump supporter. It wasn’t gender, race, age, income, or religion.
It’s authoritarianism.
Max Borders has broken down what makes someone authoritarian over at FEE’s blog in a great piece: Beware Your Inner Authoritarian. He explores the foundations of people’s views on morality across the political spectrum, and how these have evolved over time.
He sums up with this:
“First, if you’re not an authoritarian, you should give strong consideration to the importance of checking political power of all kinds — even if those checks make it less likely that you’d have a socialist Utopia under President Sanders, or an upstanding, Christian nation under President Huckabee. Because if authoritarianism wins the day, the next guy will have the power to rip up all your gains and become your oppressor. That is why, for example, we should all be horrified by the unconstitutional use of executive authority. Don’t look the other way.
>Now, if you are an authoritarian — maybe a nationalist concerned with loyalty and hierarchy — I realize I’m writing from behind different moral taste buds. But consider that we might have a lot of dispositions within us that make less sense in the context of modernity. Hierarchy, for example, emerged when powerful clans needed to act in unison under a single strategist in order to defeat enemies competing for territory and resources. Today, our competitors are also assets to us. We’re far more networked, and power is distributed.
Leaders in distributed and commercial systems emerge not so much from battle glory or seniority, but from good ideas, savoir faire, and a demonstrated ability to inspire people to good ends (none of which is what presidents are made of). Might our conversation be headed for a clash of moral tastebuds? I don’t know.
If you can accept that at least these issues are worth discussing, congratulations on reining in your inner authoritarian — for now, anyway.””]
Read the excellent piece in its entirety over at the Foundation for Economic Education’s site.