6/14/2023 0 Comments Data wing game explainedThat year, Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. He realized that he and a fellow political scientist, the University of North Carolina's Jonathan Weiler, had essentially predicted Trump's rise back in 2009, when they discovered something that would turn out to be far more significant than they then realized. Miles away, in an office at Vanderbilt University, a professor named Marc Hetherington was having his own aha moment. He later repeated the same poll in South Carolina, shortly before the primary there, and found the same results, which he published in Vox:Īs it turns out, MacWilliams wasn't the only one to have this realization. W hat he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator. He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear. MacWilliams studies authoritarianism - not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. Last September, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Matthew MacWilliams realized that his dissertation research might hold the answer to not just one but all three of these mysteries. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. In South Carolina, a CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. Perhaps strangest of all, it wasn't just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory. How authoritarians will change American politics
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