The prospect that the nation might knowingly put back in power a man who cozies up to authoritarian leaders, tried to overturn the results of a free and fair election, and promises to be a dictator himself (if only, he says, for a day) has not only alarmed but baffled Democrats. How could voters in the United States, a country that styles itself as a paragon of democracy, let this happen? Relentless recitations of Donald Trump’s promises and threats—including a pledge to exact retribution against his enemies—do not appear to be eroding Trump’s popular support. The fact that Trump is neck and neck (or leading) Joe Biden in polling could only be the product of Biden’s age and other campaign weaknesses, the theory goes: There is simply no other reason Americans would willingly reinstall a man who refused to accept the results of the 2020 democratic election and who appears eager to centralize power in his own hands.
That conclusion ignores a very uncomfortable and inconvenient truth: A big chunk of the public actually wants an authoritarian leader. This is true worldwide, according to research, and no less so in what many Americans like to describe as the world’s greatest democracy. According to a February study by the Pew Research Center, 32 percent of Americans believe a military regime or authoritarian leader (described as a strong leader who can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts) would be a good way of governing the country. A PRRI study last October found that 38 percent of Americans (and 48 percent of Republicans, 38 percent of independents, and 29 percent of Democrats) think the country needs a leader who will “break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.” Democratic operative Steve Schale, in a 2022 poll, found that 56 percent of voters surveyed agreed that Washington is “broken” and that “for America to remain a world power, we need stronger presidents who will use their power to make change and get things done.” Meanwhile, 44 percent backed the American tradition of competing branches of government as a model, if sometimes “frustrating,” system.
Why would people want to live under an authoritarian’s thumb? It’s rooted, experts say, in a psychological need for security—real or perceived—and a desire for conformity, a goal that becomes even more acute as the country undergoes dramatic demographic and social changes. People also like to obey a strong leader who will protect the group—especially if it is the “right” group whose interests will be protected. Recall the Trump supporter who, during the 2019 government shutdown, complained, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
“For those of us who value representative democracy, the fact that some of our fellow citizens might prefer authoritarianism can be surprising or even unfathomable,” Joe Pierre, health sciences clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s Weill Institute for Neurosciences, told me. But, he said, when people feel threatened—either by a lack of order or a challenge by people who think differently—a controlling leader looks like a savior.
“Authoritarianism and a ‘strongman’ leader who’s willing to trample over civil rights can sound like a very appealing solution,” Pierre said. “In turn, democracy—which tells us that our ideological opposites deserve to be heard or should be given equal voice—can sound like the root of the problem.” People who favor an authoritarian regime, notably, don’t think it will be used against them, he noted, but “to subjugate others and have their freedoms taken away.”
Even recently ousting an authoritarian regime does not necessarily lead people to reject the general idea. When I worked as a freelance journalist in Eastern Europe in the mid-1990s, I was struck by the number of people who said they missed the Communists who had just recently been booted from power. An elderly man in Budapest told me he spent his mornings picking flowers in the countryside, then taking the train to the capital to sell them in the subway. When the Communists were in power, he said, he’d be at home, secure with his pension, instead of hawking blooms to commuters. Now, he said, he couldn’t even buy a piece of meat.
Even in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s ouster in Iraq, I discovered a longing for the order and predictability Hussein’s regime—however brutal—provided. A man who operated a fruit stand in Baghdad told me that when Hussein was in power, he could stay open until late, but after the dictator was deposed he had to close up his kiosk in the afternoon because drug dealers came around, no longer having to fear the death sentence they might have gotten under Hussein. To be clear, the man didn’t want Hussein back; he thought Hussein was a tyrant. He just wanted to operate his fruit stand without worrying about crime.
Conformity, another element of authoritarian appeal, seems antithetical to the American idea of individualism. But it’s a powerful psychological force, experts say, with people nostalgic for a “simpler,” idealized time—a theme embodied by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
In his 1941 book Escape From Freedom, noted psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm describes how the longed-for liberty that democracy provides also makes individuals feel more alienated and alone. That, in turn, makes people anxious and more vulnerable to a dictator who “offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual’s life.”
Fast-forward 83 years, and we have the ideal political environment in the U.S. for the rise of a Trump—even, in some quarters, a hunger for one.
Human beings will always struggle with the competing desires to be free and to be led, Dutch psychoanalyst, professor, and writer Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, has noted. But now, Kets de Vries told me, the perpetual high anxiety caused by wars, climate change, Covid, terrorism, nuclear threats, and economic insecurity moves the needle toward authoritarianism.
Couple that with Trump’s scapegoating nonconformers (immigrants, so-called criminal elements in ethnically diverse urban areas), and the environment is ripe for a Trump rebound. The assassination attempt on the former president merely intensifies the fear upon which he is playing.
“Human beings are actually very primitive,” said Kets de Vries, who teaches at the graduate business school INSEAD in Paris. “They are looking for a father figure to take care of them. They are willing to be blind to all the defects of Trump. He appeals to their most primitive instincts.”
They are instincts that overcome history and memory. Notably, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán vocally opposed his country’s late-twentieth-century authoritarian Communist regime, leading the student dissident movement against it. Orbán, who has been described as “perhaps the most popular foreign leader in the Republican Party,” is now decried by liberals around the world as a danger to democratic norms and open societies. U.S. Democrats (and democrats) are frantically pointing at Trump’s record as president and plans for the future as a warning to stop him. It may do the opposite.
