Trumpism as social contagion

On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I want to address a panoramic idea about democracy and its foes. One of the themes of this newsletter is the degree to which propaganda has done so much to shape authoritarian regimes of the past around the world, as well as the present crisis in the United States. The rise of programming from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, and before them, grifter television evangelists, turned out to be critical in blocking the country’s movement toward equality and true representation, instead bringing democracy to the brink of collapse.

The U.S. disaster is currently mirrored around the world by ascendant authoritarian parties and movements. Something larger is going on, and as always, it’s worth paying attention to the very particular history of each country while also looking at trends on the global stage.

And this phenomenon isn’t always just about propaganda from governments, news outlets, and corporations. Personal exchanges can sometimes drive a turn toward embracing policies of hate and exclusion.

But those can be a little harder to measure. So for today’s post, I’ll look at a recent set of experiments from a paper published not two weeks ago in The American Journal of Political Science. The study looked at how authoritarianism infected individuals through small communities and peer pressure, changing views and creating community consensus. The findings open a window on how to view the expanding corruption and violence in America today. I’ll riff a little on why people are going along with it, and how we might stop it.

Studying Norwegian recruits

“Is support for authoritarian rule contagious?” is the title of the paper under discussion. Its authors, political scientist Sirianne Dahlum at Norway’s University of Oslo and Torbjørn Hanson of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (along with several others), set up field and survey experiments with incoming members of the Norwegian Armed Forces. They surveyed individuals before and after boot camp.

On intake, they measured individual attitudes toward authoritarianism. With their subjects randomly assigned to different groups, researchers could measure shifts in attitude after exposure to peers with similar or different ideas. After eight weeks of training, they returned to record any changes.

A striking discovery resulted, indicating that that not only were participants aware of the “prevailing opinion” about authoritarianism in their quarters, but individuals tended to increase their level of support for authoritarianism to match their peers’ beliefs.

“Even recruits who initially possessed low or moderate levels of openness to authoritarian rule,” the authors wrote, “noticeably open up for strong leader governance when exposed to peers with preferences for authoritarian rule.”

Dissecting how and who

One initial issue with this finding was that the authors couldn’t be sure what exactly had triggered increased support for authoritarianism. Perhaps the recruits had been convinced through personal persuasion. Or maybe someone shared information on the topic—or even propaganda—with them. It might also have been possible that the subjects simply conformed to the group identity of those they saw as their social peers. Researchers also wondered whether people at a young age and in the hierarchical setting of military training might be particularly susceptible to indoctrination.

To address these issues, they plotted additional surveys, hoping to answer two questions: 1) What was the actual mechanism of how views on authoritarianism shift? And 2), were the results they got from young recruits arriving for military training generalizable to broader groups of human beings?

The authors conducted additional boot camp surveys, informing them (accurately) in advance about whether or not the other recruits in their group supported authoritarian rule. This knowledge had the effect of changing not just the recruits’ perception of others’ support for authoritarianism, but in changing their own levels of support.

Expanding the surveys to the broader Norwegian population, the authors found that the tendency held. People who found out about support for authoritarian rule among their peers changed their own opinions toward greater support themselves.

Norway was an interesting setting for this experiment as a whole, because it tends to rank high on global democracy indexes. Over time, Scandinavian nations have typically occupied the highest spots, with Norway in first or second place. The country has a strong social network of health care and education for all, and would seem to have created institutional guardrails against typical resentments that have been thought of as seed corn for planting authoritarianism in a society. So it’s particularly troubling that support for authoritarianism could be highly socially malleable in an entrenched democracy.

Yet the researchers didn’t stop there. They wound up surveying more than 25,000 participants from at least 29 countries, and consistently found that preferences for authoritarian rule could be transmitted through social perception of others’ views. If the authors still didn’t identify all the mechanisms that could trigger the shift, they appeared to have determined that knowing a group of peers supported authoritarian rule was sufficient to shift individuals further in the same direction.

Defining authoritarianism

It’s worth taking a minute to address authoritarianism itself. For nearly a century, practitioners in different fields—from philosophers and historians and political scientists to psychologists (a lot of psychologists)—have tried to address the rise of strongmen and looked at how they come to appeal to populations around the world. And they’ve come up with varying, and sometimes conflicting, ideas about what exactly it is.

In the wake of World War II, many attempts were to analyze fascist movements. And early attempts to model authoritarianism sometimes understandably focused on right-wing government policies and attributes. But there’s also been an attempt to understand how it is that people become susceptible to supporting these cruel and dangerous forms of government. Which led to more psychological analysis: what kind of individual was especially vulnerable to authoritarian leaders?

This psychological approach tried to identify people who wanted to submit to an authority figure, or who wanted to be subordinate to someone who would do harm on their behalf. But one challenge is that policies like mistreatment of women, immigrants, and people of color don’t only draw people who already support those viewpoints. They draw people in who had not held those beliefs before, or had held them latently rather than taking action on them. It turns out that a tremendously broad range of people in extreme situations can wind up supporting authoritarianism.

So for this study, researchers looked at one concrete aspect: support for a strong leader with overwhelming power in a political system structured to maximize the leader’s ability to act. This is less a theory of every aspect of authoritarianism than an attempt to understand how support for authoritarian government expands (and is expanding so rapidly right now).

I’ve also been thinking recently about the book Cultural Backlash, by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. It came out in 2018, a year after my history of concentration camps was published. Norris and Inglehart consider the rise of authoritarian-minded leaders, who had begun to expand their support in several European countries to double digits by that point. And in the years since the book came out, support for authoritarian governments has continued to grow, with a few exceptions—one of them being Hungary, where the public definitively rejected the authoritarian model run by Viktor Orbán earlier this year.

Populism vs. authoritarianism

For their project, Norris and Inglehart defined authoritarianism as prioritizing collective security for the tribe at the expense of individual autonomy. The identified three components of authoritarianism. First, security is emphasized over any risk of instability and disorder, with the authors giving examples such as rhetoric about “foreigners stealing jobs,” “immigrants assaulting women,” or “terrorists” threatening the future of the country. The second component is an emphasis on conformity, in the interest of preserving some conventional way of life. And the third is the expectation of loyalty and obedience towards strong champions.

Norris and Inglehart laid out how populist rhetoric can combine with authoritarian values to create a cult of fear. Populism takes aim at elites, who can be egregious in how they behave or in their corruption. But populism can also disrupt faith in elected government or public institutions much more broadly.

Populist rhetoric that takes aim upward can be deflected outward to whole parties and institutions by authoritarian leaders. Successful strategic deflection corrodes social trust as a whole, confidence in all institutions, and faith in democracy altogether, which winds up aiding authoritarian politicians. (So If you adopt populist rhetoric or tactics, be attentive what you’re taking aim at and how your attacks can be used.) 

The big picture

Of course authoritarian leaders around the globe would like nothing more for us to throw up our hands and declare the current wreckage of government as hopeless, and assume strongmen are inevitable. But if we decide not to give up, how can we respond to these tsunamis of authoritarianism?

The answer is a global one, a national one, and a local one. In the big picture, we need to maintain international coalitions collaborating on specific issues—and on democracy itself—even where governments, like that of the United States today, have rejected partnerships on key issues like climate and renewable energy.

Here in the U.S., experts on everything from children’s health to immigration and education can work to reestablish sites of public information, such as those previously hosted at the Centers for Disease Control. As we work to retake the reins of governance in this country, we can begin to protect these records and access to them more fully by both custom and statute. When we’re able to reestablish a Congress without Trumpist control over it, political leaders need to make propaganda more difficult to disseminate, with consequences for corporations spreading conspiracy theories.

Act locally, too

But in the immediate, everyday scale, we can begin to secure our safety and shift awareness in communities at the state level and below. Protecting local educational institutions, our schools and libraries, remains critical. We can push for transparency in local government on everything from data centers to sanitation contracts, demanding regulations and ordinances that limit corruption and cronyism.

But perhaps most critical is to speak up. You might remember that I’ve referenced the study that found that Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 actually shifted the political landscape in measurable ways, and made a difference in the 2020 presidential election. The influence of BLM protests was seen as particularly strong in smaller, whiter, and less-educated populations.

That study mentioned the work of Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, who noted that “protest participation can create a ripple effect whereby one protester potentially influences multiple non-participants.”

My guess at the time was that it was due especially to the exposure that people in these communities had to ideas countering the dominant ones where they lived. In places where authoritarian views are perceived as normal and legitimate, people saw their neighbors stand up for something else. The results make me wonder if the Black Lives Matter protests acted as a reverse of the authoritarian social contagion that’s been underway for many years now, showing people that their neighbors were willing to publicly identify against authoritarianism instead.

If support for authoritarian rule can be influenced by something as simple as knowing that others support authoritarian rule, then it’s incumbent upon all of us who can to publicly reject strongmen and their tactics. This study shows that in communities with a free flow of information (as should be the case), the malleability of public opinion will remain a real risk. And this kind of peer influence on people supporting strongmen—when they realize others do—means that norms can shift radically for the worse in a short period, just as we’ve seen in the U.S. in recent decades.

This runs deeper than Trumpism. And one way that each of us can push back is to let our peers know, though word and deed, that these abuses of power are against our values, and that the authoritarian response is a shameful one based in fear and weakness.

There are a million ways you can take on that challenge, publicly embracing freedom and openness to everyone in the community—through art, through writing, through community cleanup, through calls for accountability, through social get-togethers. The main thing is to do something to stake your claim and turn those who support authoritarian rule into the definite minority where you live and around the world.

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