@Red see this? Can democracy survive when 30-40 percent of the electorate views authoritarianism as being more attractive than democracy?
I do not know. I have wondered, since I believe conservatives and liberals respond to the world at large in fundamentally different ways, if favoring authoritarianism is more prevalent among conservatives. I also believe we might help ourselves if we simply recognize part of our problems, maybe particularly in the culture wars, is due to differences in how we respond to the world at large. Let’s get to know what makes us different better, and we might fight less.
But, and anyway, it’s a global thing in Western democracies:
Who Is Open to Authoritarian Governance within Western Democracies? - Volume 20 Issue 3
www.cambridge.org
Abstract
Recent events have raised concern about potential threats to democracy within Western countries. If Western citizens who are open to authoritarian governance share a common set of political preferences, then authoritarian elites can attract mass coalitions that are willing to subvert democracy to achieve shared ideological goals. With this in mind, we explored which ideological groups are most open to authoritarian governance within Western general publics using World Values Survey data from fourteen Western democracies and three recent Latin American Public Opinion Project samples from Canada and the United States. Two key findings emerged. First, cultural conservatism was consistently associated with openness to authoritarian governance. Second, within half of the democracies studied, including all of the English-speaking ones, Western citizens holding a protection-based attitude package—combining cultural conservatism with left economic attitudes—were the most open to authoritarian governance. Within other countries, protection-based and consistently right-wing attitude packages were associated with similarly high levels of openness to authoritarian governance. We discuss implications for radical right populism and the possibility of splitting potentially undemocratic mass coalitions along economic lines.
The GOP-fueled far right differs from similar movements around the globe, thanks to the country’s politics, electoral system, and changing demographics.
www.wired.com
“Nearly half of Republicans
say they would prefer “strong, unelected leaders” over “weak elected ones,” according to a September Axios-Ipsos poll, and around
55 percent of Republicans say defending the “traditional” way of life by force may soon become necessary. About
61 percent of Republicans don’t believe the results of the 2020 presidential election.”.
“To call a party democratic—committed to democracy—they’ve got to do three basic things: They have to unambiguously accept election results, they have to unambiguously renounce violence, and they have to consistently and unambiguously break with extremists or antidemocratic forces,” says Steve Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University. “I think the Republican Party now fails these three basic tests.”
And, in a word, THIS!!:
““The problem is our incentives—the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, the fact that sparsely populated territories are dramatically overrepresented in our electoral system—allows the Republicans to wield a lot of power without winning national majorities,” Levitsky says. “If the Republican Party actually had to win over 50 percent of the national vote to control the Senate, to control the presidency, to control the Supreme Court, you would not see them behaving the way they’re behaving. They would never win.”
Global freedom faces a dire threat. Around the world, the enemies of liberal democracy—a form of self-government in which human rights are recognized and every individual is entitled to equal treatment under law—are accelerating their attacks.
freedomhouse.org
