Ignorance in America; Analyzing worldwide authoritarianism

A NYT article (not paywalled) highlights the profound ignorance that some segment of the American public operates with: 

17% of Voters Blame Biden for the End of Roe

The mistaken belief, in a new poll, shows how even as abortion is mobilizing Democrats, confusion over the issue is also a challenge

Nearly one in five voters in battleground states says that President Biden is responsible for ending the constitutional right to abortion, a new poll found, despite the fact that he supports abortion rights and that his opponent Donald J. Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who made it possible to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Trump supporters and voters with less education were most likely to attribute responsibility for abortion bans to Mr. Biden, but the misperception existed across demographic groups. Twelve percent of Democrats hold Mr. Biden responsible, according to New York Times/Siena College polls in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin and a Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll in Pennsylvania.  

Many voters who held Mr. Biden responsible said they simply didn’t pay close attention to politics or government affairs. For some, the confusion came from the fact that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision happened while Mr. Biden was president.

Freaking unbelievable but true. 😵

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A long NYT opinion (not paywalled) considers at the rise of pro-authoritarian sentiment in the US and democracies worldwide. An important points is this: People in different societies can be propagandized and taught to be pro-authoritarian. 

‘The Seeds Had Been Planted. 

Trump Didn’t Do It Himself.’

Over the past 30 years, authoritarianism has moved from the periphery to the center, even the core, of global politics, shaping not only the divide between left and right in the United States but also the conflict between the American-led alliance of democratic nations and the loose coalition of autocratic states including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a co-author of “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics,” has tracked the partisanship of white voters in this country who are in the top 15 percent on measures of support for dictatorial rule.

Replying by email to my inquiry, Hetherington wrote:

In 1992, those whites scoring at the top of the authoritarianism scale split their two-party vote almost evenly between Bush and Clinton (51 to 49). In 2000 and 2004, the difference becomes statistically significant but still pretty small.

By 2012, those high-authoritarianism white voters went 68 to 32 for Romney over Obama. In both Trump elections it was 80 to 20 among those voters.

So from 50 Republican-50 Democrat to 80 Republican-20 Democrat in the space of 24 years.

The parallel pattern of conflicting values and priorities that has emerged between nations is the focus of a paper published last month, “Worldwide Divergence of Values” by Joshua Conrad Jackson and Dan Medvedev, both at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The two authors analyzed data from seven studies conducted by the World Values Survey in 76 countries between 1981 and 2022.

Jackson and Medvedev found that over those years, “Values emphasizing tolerance and self-expression have diverged most sharply, especially between high-income Western countries and the rest of the world” and characterized this split as a clash between “emancipatory” values and values of “obedience.”

I asked Medvedev whether authoritarianism represents the antithesis of a regime based on emancipatory principles, and he wrote back, “It certainly does seem that authoritarian regimes tend to reject values that we categorize as emancipative.”

He said he would prefer to use the word “traditional” but “that’s just my preference — I don’t think it’s incorrect to use ‘authoritarian.’”  

“These cultural differences were not always so stark; they have emerged over time,” Jackson and Medvedev wrote. “These two groups of countries are sorting in their emancipative values over time. For example, Russia and the United States used to be quite similar in their values, but now the United States is closer to Germany in its values, and Russia is closer to Iran.”

Value divergence was assessed by asking 7 questions, one about the importance of obedience of children, and six about the justifiability of homosexuality, euthanasia, divorce, prostitution, suicide, and abortion. The answers to those questions revealed values differences between democratic and authoritarian countries.

People under authoritarianism tend to believe that obedience of children is important and homosexuality and divorce are not justifiable. People in the United States, Japan, Germany and Canada tend to believe that homosexuality and divorce are justifiable and disagree that obedience is an important value to teach their children. Jackson's and Medvedev's research also show that while Russia, China and Iran became increasingly authoritarian while democratic countries became more emancipatory.

Looking back, it now appears increasingly miraculous that (1) the US was established as a republic with representative democracy, and (2) we still are. To me, this research hints at the how miraculous America is today. No wonder human history is overwhelmingly dominated by kleptocratic authoritarianism, built on lies, slanders and irrational emotions.

That we are on the verge of becoming a kleptocratic authoritarian country is a profound tragedy. It doesn't have to fail and end like that.[1] But given the ignorance of some of the American public (enough to tip the election to American authoritarianism), the American experiment in self-governance can fail. That could very well depend on the outcome of the elections next November. 

Maybe we are just going through a rough patch and we will come out of this horror in reasonably good shape. For example, society still has not adapted to the poison and power of authoritarian dark free speech on social media. That is a very toxic, very powerful combination. Maybe democracy will survive if enough Americans become sufficiently immune to the lies and irrational emotional appeals that authoritarians always heavily rely on. Social media effectively spreads divisive lies and emotion-laden crackpottery long before actual fact and truth get out of the starting gate. 

Footnote: 

1. A countervailing force in favor of democracy has been noticeable over the last ~350 years (since the Enlightenment started). Steven Pinker writes in his 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress:

Since the first governments first appeared about 5,000 years ago, humanity has tried to steer a course between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny. In the absence of a government or powerful neighbors, tribal peoples tend to fall into cycles of raiding and feuding, with death rates exceeding those of modern societies, even including their most violent eras.

One can think of democracy as a form of government that threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself. A good democratic government allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny. But it's not the only reason: democracies have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, healthier and better-educated citizens, and virtually no famines.

[Critics of democracy argue that democratization is] “a conceit of Westerners projecting their tastes onto the rest of the world, whereas authoritarianism seemed to suit most of humanity just fine.” [Pinker responds:] “Could recent history really imply that people are happy to be brutalized by their governments? Most obviously, in a non-democratic country, how could you tell? The pent-up demand for democracy might be enormous, but no one dares express it lest they be jailed or shot.” (emphasis added)