Polls show that Americans interpret the January 6, 2021 assault on the US capitol differently. Some see it as an assault on democracy while others see it as an act to protect democracy. These divergent views portend to a long-term scenario where America loses its leadership position in the world.
Recent studies have indicated that America is backsliding from democracy toward authoritarianism. Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at University of California at San Diego, who serves on the CIA’s Political Instability Task Force, monitors countries around the world to identify the ones most likely to deteriorate into violence. “If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America…you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war possible…and what you would find is that the United States…has entered very dangerous territory.” The Center for Systemic Peace has the US falling from a 10 out of 10 on its Polity Index (with a 10 being a pure democracy) to a 5 out of 10. (Canada, New Zealand, Costa Rica, and Japan all still rate 10s.) And in November, Sweden’s International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance put the US on the list of “backsliding democracies.”
Authoritarianism is an older, more primitive form of nation-state. It first appeared after the English Civil War, when Oliver Cromwell became the de facto dictator over the first nation-state in the 1650s. It occurs today in countries that have poor separation and balance of powers, where too much power can accrue to a single individual. Such governments are not the future—they are the past. They ultimately cap a society’s leadership potential because too much decision-making is bottlenecked at one person.
Last year, John Dean, former Republican Chief of Staff under Richard Nixon, and Bob Altemeyer, retired professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba, published a book that uses a scale to assess a person’s propensity for authoritarianism. They found most Trump supporters to be highly authoritarian. If this persists into the 2024 election, it foreshadows bad news for America’s long-term leadership position in the world.
Source:
Dana Milbank, “We are Closer to Civil War than Any of Us Would Like to Believe,” Washington Post, 19 December 2021, A33; see also https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/17/how-civil-wars-start-barbara-walter-research/
Linda Killian, “The Authoritarian Mind-set of Trump’s Supporters,” Washington Post, 4 October 2020, B8; see also https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/10/12/trump-voter-authoritarian-research/
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