Perilous Times for Liberal Democracy

Long before the Covid-19 pandemic entered our lives, liberal democracy was reeling across the world.

Countries such as Poland, Hungary, Brazil and others succumbed to authoritarianism and transformed into illiberal democracies. The Big Daddy of them all, the United States of America, inspired despots like Orban, Bolsonaro, Modi, Erdogan, Duterte and Netanyahu.

Many of us prayed that it was a temporary affliction, that liberal democracy and democratic norms would soon stage a comeback.  We misjudged how authoritarianism is deeply embedded in the conservative psyche.

From The New York Times.

A team of four Canadian psychologists studied patterns of “cognitive reflection” among Americans. 

They found that a willingness to change one’s convictions in the face of new evidence
was robustly associated with political liberalism, the rejection of traditional moral values, the acceptance of science, and skepticism about religious, paranormal, and conspiratorial claims. 

Those who ranked high on a scale designed to measure the level of a respondent’s “actively open-minded thinking about evidence” were linked with the acceptance of “anthropogenic global warming and support for free speech on college campuses.” 

Conversely, the authors — Gordon Pennycook of the University of Regina, and James Allan Cheyne, Derek J. Koehler and Jonathan A. Fugelsang of the University of Waterloo — found that an aversion to altering one’s belief on the basis of evidence was more common among conservatives and that this correlated “with beliefs about topics ranging from extrasensory perception, to respect for tradition, to abortion, to God.”

The soon to be released Canadian paper dovetails with earlier research in America.

Consider a 2019 paper, “False Equivalence: Are Liberals and Conservatives in the United States Equally Biased?” by Jonathan Baron and John Jost, professors of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and N.Y.U., who write, “Nowadays we read that liberals are every bit as authoritarian as conservatives; as rigid and simple-minded; as intolerant; as prejudiced.” 

The authors found it ironic and more than a little bewildering that social psychologists are drifting into this relativistic view of morality and politics just as authoritarian conservatism (and illiberal hostility to democratic norms) seem to be reaching new heights of popularity and brazenness not only in Trump’s America but also in Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary, and Netanyahu’s Israel. 

Baron and Jost also cite studies suggesting that those on the right are more susceptible to authoritarian appeals:

"Conservatives score higher than liberals on measures of personal needs for order and structure, cognitive closure, intolerance of ambiguity, cognitive or perceptual rigidity, and dogmatism." 

Liberals, they write, “perform better than conservatives on objective tests of cognitive ability and intelligence” while conservatives “score higher than liberals on measures of self-deception” and “are more likely than liberals to spread ‘fake news,’ political misinformation, and conspiracy theories throughout their online social networks.”

Baron cites John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty,” specifically this famous passage:

The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious.

These findings have been well borne out in my experience with conservative-minded acquaintances,  both small and large "C" conservatives, from the highly educated and accomplished to rebel-flag waving, backwater rednecks (yes, I know a few of those too).  Across the social spectrum their shared attitudes and attributes are inescapable.

In a February 2019 paper, “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches,” four political scientists, Martijn Schoonvelde, Anna Brosius, Gijs Schumacher and Bert N. Bakker, argue that “speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties” and that this variance in linguistic complexity is

rooted in personality differences among conservative and liberal politicians. The former prefer short, unambiguous statements, and the latter prefer longer compound sentences, expressing multiple points of view.

It is no accident that Trump speaks on a 5th-grade level. That's the frequency common  to his base. That's where they communicate, how they parlay.

Separate studies of the language used by presidents — both “The Readability and Simplicity of Donald Trump’s Language,” and an analysis of the language used by the last 15 presidents on the blog Factbase — concluded that President Trump speaks at the lowest level of all those studied, as measured on the on the Flesch-Kincaid index. As Factbase put it:

By any metric to measure vocabulary, using more than a half dozen tests with different methodologies, Donald Trump has the most basic, most simplistically constructed, least diverse vocabulary of any president in the last 90 years. 

Some scholars argue that a focus on ideological conflict masks the most salient divisions in the era of Donald Trump: authoritarians versus non-authoritarians.
Karen Stenner, the author of “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” emailed me on this point to say that

It’s really critical to help people understand the difference between conservatives and authoritarians. Conservatives are by nature opposed to change and novelty, whereas authoritarians are averse to diversity and complexity. It’s a subtle but absolutely critical distinction.

“What we’re facing,” she continued,

authoritarian revolution — not a conservative revolution, the term is inherently contradictory — which in the U.S. has been creeping up since the 1960s. 

Donald Trump, in the shadow of the November elections, seems to be transforming Washington into Festung Trump from which he dispatches raiding parties onto the streets of Democratic-leaning cities, starting with Portland, Oregon.

Trump is determined to use authoritarian means to restore race to the core of his campaign. 

Last week, Trump sent dozens of armed federal forces in camouflage to quell Black Lives Matter protests in Portland. 

On July 19, Trump responded to a direct question from Chris Wallace of Fox News about whether he would “accept the election” win or lose. Trump answered: “I have to see. Look, you — I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.” 

And on July 20, Trump threatened to send more armed troops to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland to quell dissent, noting that these cities’ mayors were all “liberal Democrats.” 

Put another way, Trump plans to echo George Wallace and take his stand in the schoolhouse door or, even more ominously, to use urban America as his Alamo.

No one outside the Oval Office can be sure what Trump has planned for the next three months to counter his popularity deficit. If he can't win at the ballot box and knows it, we can probably watch for him to do something to sweep the democracy handicap out of his path.