This link is to a very lengthy examination of the role of authoritarianism in the rise of Trump and the polarizing process going on in the Republican party. It makes brief allusion to the role of populism - perhaps too brief- but the studies on authoritarianism, latent and enacted, suggest that "anger" and populism are not sufficiently explanatory for the rise of one such as Trump.
For those interested, it is worthwhile reading this (my granddaughter forced me to it!). I'm not sure what conclusions to draw but she will no doubt insist that I have some - and then argue.
"Have we misunderstood hard-line social conservatism all along?"
Most of the other social-threat questions followed a similar pattern2. On its surface, this might seem to suggest that authoritarianism is just a proxy for especially hard-line manifestations of social conservatism. But when examined more carefully, it suggests something more interesting about the nature of social conservatism itself.
For liberals, it may be easy to conclude that opposition to things like same-sex marriage, immigration, and diversity is rooted in bigotry against those groups — that it's the manifestation of specific homophobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia.
But the results of the Vox/Morning Consult poll, along with prior research on authoritarianism, suggests there might be something else going on.
There is no particular reason, after all, why parenting goals should coincide with animus against specific groups. We weren't asking questions about whether it was important for children to respect people of different races, but about whether they should respect authority and rules generally. So why do they coincide so heavily?
What is most likely, Hetherington suggested, is that authoritarians are much more susceptible to messages that tell them to fear a specific "other" — whether or not they have a preexisting animus against that group. Those fears would therefore change over time as events made different groups seem more or less threatening.
