No, America Did Not Just Vote for Authoritarianism: A Defense of the American Voter

“Today we must reckon with the harsh reality that authoritarianism has arrived in America, that it’s broadly popular, and that millions of our fellow citizens have given it their votes,” writes the LA Times.

“This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history,” according to the New York Times.

“How Trump’s reelection signals a broader acceptance of authoritarian leadership,” cautions PBS News Hour.

A common theme in response to Donald Trump’s resounding presidential victory is to declare that Americans have finally given their souls to the dark side and brazenly voted for authoritarianism.

I study authoritarianism for a living, and I can confidently say that this narrative is patently ridiculous. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and countless others should be ashamed of themselves for such a childish, petty, and thoughtless interpretation of the Nov. 5 election.

I’m not speculating. The idea that the majority of the American public purposefully voted for authoritarianism is demonstrably false. Indeed, even one-sided mischaracterizations of polling data attempting to smear Trump voters — such as this hit piece on Trump voters at The Bulwark by Will Saletan — show that the majority of Trump voters don’t support authoritarianism.

A deeper look essentially smashes the Trump authoritarian voter narrative to pieces.

Our lab collected several representative American surveys in the two weeks before the election. Is there evidence that Trump voters were especially authoritarian? Let’s look at just two facts.

First, there has been a lot of talk of electing “Hitler.” We asked conservatives how much they supported Hitler and the Nazis, and very few of them scored above 1 on a 1-7 scale. The average score was less than 1.3. It is hard to overstate how low a score that is, but any methodologist would tell you that it is so small as to be almost zero.

So, Trump voters weren’t voting for Hitler, because almost no one in the country supports Hitler. Yes, there are a few outliers who support Hitler. Yes, those people were more likely to vote for Trump than Harris. But to suggest Nazi support was driving the election is empirically farcical.

Liberals do not support Hitler, but it is hard to accuse conservatives of voting for Hitler when they were literally voting against the people they (falsely) believed supported him.

Second, did right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) predict support for Trump? Yes, of course. I’ve been studying authoritarianism predicting election outcomes since 2008, and authoritarianism almost always predicts voting for the preferred candidate — especially when the candidate’s party is not currently in power. But that’s the wrong question here. The right question is: Did authoritarianism predict voting for Trump in this election more than it predicted voting for preferred candidates in other elections?

And the answer is: No. In no way was this election an outlier.

Actually, with proper controls, the biggest effect we’ve found so far for authoritarianism predicting an election outcome (in a 2019 published paper on the subject) was for left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) predicting support for Barack Obama in 2008 — an effect bigger than RWA predicting Trump support in any of the elections we’ve tracked. And even in the current election, the difference between LWA-Harris support and RWA-Trump support was not very large — in spite of the fact that Trump was in the “candidate not in power” category that tends to produce more authoritarian votes. So, if you want to argue that right-wingers voted for authoritarianism in Trump, you have to argue that left-wingers voted for authoritarianism in Obama.

It is also worth noting that across all these elections, the effect of authoritarianism predicting election outcomes — with proper controls — is not very large. People high in authoritarianism tend to vote for their party’s candidate at higher rates than other people, especially when they feel threatened. That is true. But looking at this from another angle is more instructive for our purposes: what percentage of the overall vote is affected by authoritarianism?

In our data, it tends to be something between 1 percent and 4 percent. This is a meaningful percentage, and as an authoritarianism researcher, I am always concerned about signals revealing our populace contains a lot of authoritarians in raw numbers. And I do believe the nation has a potentially dangerous authoritarianism problem on both sides of the political aisle.

Nonetheless, suggesting from this data that the majority of Americans purposefully voted for an authoritarian government is bordering on the absurd. At all times and in all places, authoritarian persons exist and are more likely to vote for their party’s candidate. But that doesn’t mean American voters are especially prone to this malady; in fact, they are probably among the least prone toward purposefully electing authoritarian leaders in the history of the world. Objective data comparing authoritarianism across nations shows that Americans are at a minimum lower than the average nation in authoritarian beliefs.

Yes, Trump himself has done some questionable things. Some of those things are authoritarian and have been rightly criticized by other prominent Republicans such as Bill Barr and Mike Pence. It turns out that almost all leaders at all times and in all places, even in the world’s longest-running and most successful democracy (that is us, America, in case you were wondering), tend to overreach their own power.

The acknowledgment of that fact by the Founding Fathers is precisely what makes our system so brilliant — we have a lot of checks and balances to stop individuals from succeeding in their overreach. Our system was meant to block the executive branch from becoming authoritarian. At this endeavor, it has worked and is still working. And I do believe we should be vigilant about Trump’s potential overreach in the same way I believe we should be vigilant about President Joe Biden’s very real overreach.

No, this isn’t a defense of Trump, even though I voted for him and I’m not ashamed of that fact. Rather, this is a defense of the American voter. Americans did not vote for authoritarianism on Nov. 5. If anything, they voted against authoritarianism. But what is certain is that they voted for a stable economy, a reasonable border policy, a return to common sense, and (above all) equality and freedom over equity and woke bullying. They were tired of being gaslighted by progressive bullies, and they told Democrats so.

Pretending Americans turned authoritarian may make Democrats feel better. But it sure won’t help them win more elections. I’d strongly suggest they try another and more constructive narrative.

READ MORE from Lucian G. Conway:

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