We the People … Are the Problem – Inside Sources

Having spent three decades working on democracy issues in the United States and abroad, I’m in endless conversations on how we can reform our institutions, systems and regulations to address alarming democratic erosion. 

And there is plenty to be done, from rethinking our election system to ensure fair representation (one person, one vote) to addressing money in politics. While supply-side reform is clearly needed, we have fewer conversations about how to fix us, the people who go into the polling station and happily vote for illiberal strongmen (yes, mostly men) who take sledgehammers to our democracy.

Democracy scholars and practitioners have examined many theories of the case as to why, after years of democratic growth around the world, particularly the third wave of the 1990s, democracies are eroding in rich and poor countries, old and new democracies. 

Democracy is failing to deliver for citizens; growing inequality, corruption, an emphasis on majoritarianism over liberalism, information disorder, social and value cleavages, among other factors, create vacuums. Vacuums that anti-democratic figures exploit with simple and “fight”-themed Robin Hood messages of fixing all ills, “restoring” society to some make-believe, better past, and identifying bogeymen to blame and punish for problems. 

It is unoriginal. Aspiring autocrats have alarmingly similar narratives, from the United States and France to Moldova and the Philippines; replace a few words, and it all sounds the same.

Why do we fall for the autocrat’s siren calls? The World Values Survey has measured the desire for a strongman for years. The question “would you say that having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections is a very good, fairly good, fairly bad or very bad way of governing this country?” is soliciting far more “goods” (up to 50 percent) in the last five years than 30 years ago.

The Altemeyer Test measures right-wing authoritarian (RWA) tendencies among the public. Traits of RWA include ethno-nationalism, desire for social control, and survivalist and traditional values. Agreement with questions such as “our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs” or “what our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil, and take us back to our true path” indicate high RWA. An example of low RWA would be agreement with a statement such as “our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people.”

Sadly, the United States is outpacing its peers, with more than a quarter of Americans falling on the high RWA scale compared to 10 percent of Brits and six percent of Germans. Americans with lower educational attainment, older in age, and who lean ideologically to the right have higher RWA, according to Morning Consult polling from 2021.

Research reveals that we are seeking transgressive, illiberal leaders less for economic delivery and more in response to discomfort and grievances over the disruption of traditional pecking orders of privilege and power. Scholar Pippa Norris describes a backlash against more women in positions of power, civil rights advances, and cultural changes, arguing that this has greater explanatory power for democracy’s decline than other factors.

From my experience abroad living through democratic decline in several parts of the world, one of the first signs a country was on a backsliding track was when political leaders started incorporating attacks on women and sexual minorities, such as decriminalizing domestic violence, banning abortion, codifying heterosexual marriage, into their language. 

Immigration is another flashpoint, paving the way for Great Replacement narratives and attacks on ethnic and/or religious minorities. Attacks on marginalized communities necessitate illiberal measures to remove rights, quickly paving the way to restricting independent media, civil society, universities, the legal community, and others who defend liberalism and uphold rights.

Some experts have argued that the demand problem is driven by low-information or bad-information voters. Focus group guru Sarah Longwell frequently points out that people are not necessarily driven by bigotry or hatred/fear of others, but simply do not know what is going on. She described, for example, that no one in her recent focus groups with swing voters had even heard that ICE shot and killed two men with no criminal records in Maine and Texas. I have written extensively about the damage caused by disinformation in our democracy, where people are not just uninformed but lied to.

I do not think the information business, poisoned as it may be, lets us off the hook. First, it excuses ignorance. Second, it presumes that if people just had the right information in front of them, they would spurn the strongman and liberal democracy would be saved. 

Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling once described how he painstakingly debunked every lie his friend believed about the 2020 elections in his state. Sterling was the perfect messenger — a Republican, voted for Trump, and was the leading official overseeing the election in question, so he had all the receipts. When his family member exhausted his list of conspiracies, rather than be convinced of the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory, he said, “But I know in my heart they cheated.”

Facts will not reliably change behavior because it is about hearts as much as minds, as the brilliant Hannah Arendt warned us in the “Origins of Totalitarianism.” 

Tribe, in-group, cultural mythology, fear, grievance, hate — these are the deeper drivers of our demand problem for the illiberal autocrat. Addressing those drivers requires more than institutional or process reforms and requires creative thinking and initiatives driven by psychological expertise. 

Regenerative depolarization programs that bring diverse groups of people together to work on a common problem (think: mandatory civil service), resilience-building efforts that strengthen community engagement (Bowling Alone), or “whole of society” approaches embraced by our northern European friends should all be explored.

We have been here before (1930s!), and we’ve always had this element in our society. We need to claw back to a place where a healthier majority rejects authoritarianism and embraces the liberal-democratic values we’ve long aspired to.