The Hidden Reasons Authoritarianism Is Growing — And How to Reverse It

It takes all kinds. Humanity would have never made it this far without a multitude of people with a wide diversity of personality types and preferences. It is our individual differences wherein lies our strength as a society, but my belief in the truth of that statement is also in polar opposition to those who disagree with individuality and diversity and prefer oneness and sameness.

This core disagreement does not make them bad people. It makes them different than me, and that's not only okay, it's important, however annoying it can be, and how scary it can be when it comes to elections. But we do need to recognize why some people are the way they are and why they vote the way they do, and in what environments they vote the way they do, because we also need to recognize that Trump is the effect, not the cause, and how important universal basic income is, and universalism in general is, to the future of democracies around the world.

A Village of Steadfasts and Explorers

Before we get into the politics of this argument, let's first go back in time, way back before agriculture, and think about a small band of humans that includes you and me. We've set up a small encampment and a perimeter. Outside the perimeter is the unknown. Beyond that boundary lies danger. It's where THEY are, whatever THEY may be. THEY can be a dangerous animal, or another human that could cause US harm. We care about the safety of US. We need to protect OUR people. But if we're going to advance, we also have to explore the unknown. This is where two primary type of humans come into play - steadfasts and explorers. Steadfasts stay inside the perimeter. Explorers venture outside the perimeter.

We will always need someone who really cares about the perimeter, who is primed to detect an outsider and sound the alarm. We will always need the person who really cares about the safety and well-being of the community. We will also always need someone to venture outside the perimeter into the great unknown, who loves to explore despite the risk of injury and death that lies in the great unknown. We will always need the person who seeks out newness even if it actually endangers the community, because with that danger also comes the opportunity of progress.

It's this kind of push and pull between two types of human worldviews that lies at the heart of our stories as a species for thousands of years. Joseph Campbell described it as the "monomyth" and wrote about it in The Hero With a Thousand Faces which in turn inspired storytellers like George Lucas when creating Star Wars. Village elders and perimeter watchers are important. They want the village to survive which requires protecting the status quo and keeping out dangers, but it's the hero who ventures into the unknown and brings back some new truth that improves the status quo. This new status quo will then be protected by the elders and perimeter watchers until the next successful hero's journey.

Change isn't always good. The explorer can rouse a new enemy or bring back a virus that wipes out the village. They can also find a new friend or bring back a cure that saves the village. Lack of change isn't always good either. Those who fight against change can in some cases save the village, but in others they can lead to its end in their pursuit of stasis that prevents adaptation. Which is which simply depends, and sometimes isn't known until long after something has changed or remained the same.

Fast forward to the present day with that wisdom of the importance of those focused on the maintaining of the safety of the village and those who love exploring the unknown and meeting new people and seeking novelty. Everyone can be considered as existing somewhere along this personality spectrum where on the one end, there's an extremely strong preference for uniformity and an insistence upon group authority, and on the other end where there's an extremely strong preference for difference and an insistence upon individual autonomy. Most of us exist somewhere between these two extremes.

All of us are predisposed from birth and our childhoods to be somewhere along this spectrum. As we age and experience things like college and international travel, our location on this spectrum can shift a bit, and environmental factors that impact cognitive capacity can impact our predispositions too, but for the most part, where we exist on this spectrum is an unchanging part of who we are as individual humans, and about half of it is inherited.

If you're curious about where YOU exist on this spectrum, here's a few questions to consider that are used to measure your worldview. Do you enjoy trying new foods or do you enjoy sticking with what you already love? Do you enjoy a variety of foods from all over the world or do you prefer a few standards like meat and potatoes? When it comes to your kids, whether you have any or not, would you prefer they be independent or respect their elders? Would you prefer they be obedient or self-reliant? Would you prefer they be curious or well-mannered?

In general, if you enjoy new stuff, and variety, and the thought of your kids being independent and curious and self-reliant, you exist towards the "libertarian" side or "open" end of this spectrum. If you enjoy the stuff you already enjoy, and the consistency of it, and the thought of your kids being obedient and respecting their elders and being well-mannered, you exist towards the "authoritarian" side or "closed" end of this spectrum.

It's important to understand that there is no passing or failing these questions. Don't be thrown off by the labels of libertarian or authoritarian. These are just labels to describe a way of existing as a human being. Remember, we need both types. We can't just have a village full of explorers who refuse to stay in the village or a village full of steadfasts who refuse to explore. We need them both existing together and each doing their things in a balanced way.

Our predisposition isn't the only thing that matters though. Who we are interacts with our environment and under certain conditions of "safety", authoritarians and libertarians are hard to differentiate from each other without testing them with the previously mentioned questions about personal preferences. Under other certain conditions of "threat", both authoritarians and libertarians become "activated" and begin insisting on exact opposite things which only further activate each other.

How To Activate Authoritarians

What we think of as the demands and behaviors of authoritarians occur whenever authoritarians deem them necessary, which is when they consider the normative order of overall oneness and sameness to be sufficiently threatened. According to Dr. Karen Stenner, a political psychologist and behavioral economist who wrote the book on the authoritarian dynamic, "the conditions most threatening to oneness and sameness are 'questioned or questionable authorities and values': that is, disrespect for leaders or leaders unworthy of respect, and lack of conformity to or consensus in group values, norms, and beliefs." In other words, a great way to activate authoritarians is everything Trump has been repeating for a decade. When those with authoritarian predispositions feel let down by institutions, leaders and compatriots, or when they feel like “we can't agree on anything anymore”, or that “we’ve lost the things that once made us great,” all of that is highly threatening. It arouses anger. It activates authoritarians and causes them to seek certain measures that the rest of us consider to be extreme.

Once authoritarians are activated, this is what tends to happen: political demands for authoritative constraints on behavior. If your heart yearns for conformity and consensus, you must allow the coercion and constraint needed to achieve it. This typically includes legal discrimination against minorities and restrictions on immigration; limits on free speech, assembly, and association; and the regulation of moral behavior, for example, via policies regarding religion, abortion, censorship, and LGBTQ people; and the punitive enforcement of law and order.

If that list looks familiar, it should. The MAGA movement basically has the entire list as their platform. The MAGA movement is an authoritarian movement. This is not to say it's somehow evil. If authoritarianism as a label feels a bit much, it may be better thought of as “difference-ism”. They want oneness and sameness. It's important to understand that Trump may have helped further activate already activated authoritarians, and may have activated those who weren't yet activated, but for the most part, MAGA is a response to what existed before Trump came along, and will remain after Trump's political career is over and done, for as long as they remain threatened by lack of oneness and sameness.

There's something else that's important to understand too. It's that authoritarians exist on both the political right and left, and that status quo conservatives also exist on the right and left. It is not accurate to say there are two kinds of people: Democrats and Republicans. As authoritarians have become activated, they have gone toward the Republican party, and as the Republican party has become more authoritarian, status quo conservatives have gone toward the Democratic Party. There is a political realignment going on, and it's party driven by the difference between status quo conservatives and authoritarian conservatives.

The Conservatives Who Will Save Democracy

According to Stenner's research, there are three types of conservatives: laissez-faire conservatives, authoritarian conservatives, and status quo conservatives. To be conservative, in general, is to prefer the status quo to not change. But there are different ways of disliking change. One is to dislike change over space, and the other is to dislike change over time.

Imagine for example that for a decade, everyone has agreed to wear red hats. Both authoritarians and status quo conservatives would be really happy with that. But authoritarians would also be perfectly happy if tomorrow everyone started wearing blue hats, because everyone would be wearing the same color. They value conformity. Status quo conservatives would be horrified. You can't just decide on a dime to switch hat colors! They would not at all abide the swiftness of that change.

It is this difference that makes status quo conservatives defenders of democracy against authoritarianism. This is what is driving those like Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, and so many of the conservatives who served in Trump's cabinet or elsewhere in his administration, to have pushed to elect Harris over Trump. Their interest is not oneness and sameness, but to preserve the United States as a representative democracy. Their interest as traditional conservatives is to preserve the traditions of the village. They are not interested in the major changes sought by authoritarian conservatives. This makes them natural allies to those who exist in the middle or on the opposite side of the authoritarian spectrum.

Again, none of this is to suggest that those with authoritarian predispositions are the enemy. Remember, they exist in every political party. There are authoritarian leftists too. They are the ones pushing for oneness and sameness and wanting to enforce it. If you've ever encountered someone on the left who polices language and insists everyone on the left must be on the same page, who seem very willing to wield group authority to coerce behavior, they may be an authoritarian and want laws to prevent a diversity of viewpoints. According to Stenner, two-thirds of leftist authoritarians who were activated by perceived normative threats flipped to the GOP in 2016. That's why so many Bernie supporters became Trump supporters.

Authoritarians can embrace big changes quickly. That can be extremely important in times when status quo conservatives are fighting against necessary changes. Because authoritarians seek oneness and sameness, universal policies can be very appealing to them because they treat everyone the same. They can absolutely get behind policies like universal healthcare and universal basic income. Big policy changes can be much more difficult for traditional conservatives to get behind.

The problem with authoritarians comes from their activation and their insistence on policies that can hurt a lot of people they consider to be THEM instead of US. So the question becomes, is it possible to deactivate authoritarians? Yes, it is.

How to Deactivate Authoritarians

Remember, it's normative threats that activate authoritarians, and authoritarians care a lot about the group as a whole. In a series of fascinating experiments done by Stenner, authoritarians were deactivated by normative reassurance and by expanding the group to include THEM. It's also possible to slightly tweak the authoritarian predisposition itself.

Normative reassurance is the opposite of normative threat. Authoritarians want to believe WE are doing great and that WE are ALL on the SAME page. Trump is activating authoritarians by repeatedly claiming that the country sucks, and that the economy sucks, and that we're being invaded by immigrants, and that where we used to all be Americans, we no longer are. Now it's the true Americans and the "enemy within." Messages that convey how great the US is doing compared to other countries are reassuring. "Our economy is great. We're number one! We're all Americans and that makes us special." Those are appealing messages to authoritarians that help deactivate them. They are smart messages for Kamala Harris to embrace.

The feeling that we can't agree on anything anymore is a threat to authoritarians that has arisen from the internet itself and social media. It was reassuring to authoritarians when there were three TV channels. That became cable and then YouTube and now TikTok. I believe the internet itself has been activating authoritarians, which is a tougher problem to handle. If we no longer agree on reality and instead split into those who care about reality and those who believe in conspiracy theory nonsense, that activates authoritarians. This is one of the reasons it's important to moderate social media platforms like X. It is bad to massively amplify misinformation and disinformation.

What I think is the most fascinating of Stenner's experiments were her experiments that explored the expansion of the in-group to include the out-group. In one experiment, she tested what would happen if people were led to believe NASA had discovered we were not alone in the universe and that aliens were real and entirely unlike humans. Suddenly seeing all humankind as being US, and THEM being actual aliens elsewhere in the galaxy led to authoritarians expressing less racism. Their measured racial intolerance dropped by half. So an effective way of deactivating authoritarians is to encourage people to think of all humankind as having a shared human experience.

If all authoritarians were to travel into space and look back at the planet, I think many authoritarians would be permanently deactivated. The overview effect is no small thing. The more you think of humans all being in the same village called Earth, the harder it is to treat any human as an invader.

Shared experience is also how to deactivate authoritarians. Extreme inequality is a normative threat. Reducing inequality is a form of normative reassurance. A big, strong, middle class is reassuring. A suburb full of nice houses that all look the same is paradise for authoritarians. One of the biggest reasons we're facing rising authoritarianism is because we let inequality grow so large. As the middle class shrank and those with authoritarian predispositions looked around their neighborhoods and saw factories disappear and their neighbors get left behind as others appeared to get richer and richer, authoritarians got activated.

Because the authoritarian predisposition is partly inherited and partly about one's cognitive capacity to handle complexity, it's also possible to reduce authoritarian expression by increasing people's ability to handle complexity. There are a few ways of doing this. One is to teach people ways of better handling complexity. This is what stuff like a solid education and college does. Think of this like installing additional RAM in your computer. Another is to remove background applications that are sucking up resources. Insecurity sucks up resources and reduces our ability to handle complexity. This is another reason why universal basic income is important. Part of the reason conspiracy theories have grown in popularity is because they're a cognitive shortcut. No need to worry about all the impacts of the climate crisis when there is no climate crisis and it's just fake. Finally, another way to increase the ability to handle complexity is just to shrink the number of options a bit. Having too many options can be overwhelming to authoritarians.

It is very important to the present and future of democracy in America that we all come to better understand the authoritarian dynamic and embrace the ways of reassuring authoritarians instead of activating them. Government needs to actually work. Politicians need to be trustworthy. The American experience needs to be more universal, full of universal policies like UBI and M4A and greater equality in general. Public education needs to better help people handle the complexity of modern life, and include universal college as an option. Messaging needs to be more "e pluribus unum" oriented. Out of many, one. Liberty and justice for all. We are all Americans. Does it suddenly make more sense why QAnon embraced "Where we go one, we go all?" They crave that stuff.

As for me, as you can probably tell by my intense interest in all of this and how important I believe it is to deactivate authoritarians, I am on the far opposite side of the spectrum. As authoritarianism rises, I get more and more defensive of individual freedom and diversity, and because universal basic income achieves both individual freedom and diversity as well as greater oneness and sameness, it is yet another reason I consider it to be so incredibly important.

A Final Warning

Rising authoritarianism is not just going to go away with the defeat of Trump. It's a global phenomenon arising from the increasing complexity of 21st century life; the inherent diversity of opinions within multi-racial liberal democracies; rising inequality; immigration due to climate change, war, and bad governance; the internet and social media; the failure of education systems to adapt to the internet and social media; and the failed policies of politicians who simply refuse to care about people's basic Maslow needs or who insist on targeting over universality. Our world is only going to continue growing more complex and diverse, and with the climate crisis and artificial intelligence, we really need to start making a point of minimizing authoritarian activation, lest fascism take hold in such fertile soil.

To those who made it to the end of this who truly care about representative democracy and who dislike the many common ways that authoritarianism expresses itself and causes great harms to out-groups, please heed this essay.

If you found this essay interesting or even fascinating, I recommend reading The Authoritarian Dynamic by Stenner. Other books I read as research for this essay include Open Versus Closed by Johnston, Lavine, and Federico, Prius or Pickup by Hetherington and Weiler, and The Way Out by Coleman. I recommend reading any of them and all of them.

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