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From Chapter 8 of Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers:

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

Altmeyer has a new book on Trump and authoritarianism.

Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers

>[How did America end up with a leader who acts so crudely and despotically, and counter to our democratic principles? Why do his followers stick with him, even when he acts against their own interests?

To fully understand, John Dean, a man with a history of standing up to autocratic presidents, joined with Bob Altemeyer, a professor of psychology with a unique area of expertise: Authoritarianism.](https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Nightmare-Trump-His-Followers/dp/1612199054)

From Chapter 8 of Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers:

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

I will wholeheartedly recommend John W. Dean's "Authoritarian Nightmare". It attempts to explain the Trump base.

John W. Dean served as White House Council for Nixon and the book is co-written by Bob Altemeyer who's a prominent psychologist in the field of studying "Authoritarians".

It's FASCINATING.

>Because these followers submit to those they consider the established, legitimate authorities in society, they are called right-wing authoritarians.The “right” in right-wing authoritarianism does not refer to conservatism as a political philosophy, but to the word’s earlier use in Olde English, where riht (pronounced writ) meant lawful, proper, and correct. The established authorities involved may embrace any politico-economic position, even overwhelmingly “left-wing” views. Thus, when there was a Soviet Union, the people who gladly submitted to the Communist Party would be considered right-wing authoritarians, even though state-controlled socialism is anathema to conservatives in the United States. Right-wing authoritarianism, as used here, is a psychological variable, a trait. It is an aspect of a person’s personality, like the need for achievement or emotional intelligence, not their economic philosophy or political beliefs

Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his Followers.

No worries. And I agree with you! After all, it's been proven over and over again. And last thing: I read a decent book about the underlying mindset of many right wingers a little while ago. And even though it focuses on Trump, the underlying principles remain the same.

There are about 70% of people in the US who consider themselves Christian. Among them, about half of them are Christian fundamentalists (most of them are evangelicals). One research I read has this summary about them:

>“So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

Source: Chapter 8 of Authoritarian Nightmare.

These fundamentalists are very good at co-opting the term Christian, but in reality their God is pretty much themselves. It is interesting that evangelicals used to call themselves fundamentalists until the term got tarnished. I have seen many real Christians like Hillary, Obama, Biden who are pro-choice. These fundamentalists are fake who attacks women rights co-opting the name of Christian.

I came across a research carried out in 2020 which asked: Can most prejudice be explained by support of Trump? The answer is yes, almost totally. The results are:

​

>How Prejudiced Are Donald Trump's Supporters? (White Respondents Only, N=808)
>
>NOTE: The items were scored on a 1-9 basis, and there are 24 items. So, the lowest possible score is 24, and the highest is 216. Actual scores ran from 24 to 214. The mean for "No Opinion" is now shown because so few people chose that category.

​

The researcher said that the correlation is 0.856.

>To put it another way, suppose you decided to hold a dance for the 100 most prejudiced white people in your community, along with the 100 most authoritarian ones. (Who knows why you would want to? We do not.) Would you need to print 200 invitations? No, about 120 should do it, since most of the people who are one will also be the other. There is about an 80 percent overlap.

​

Source: Chapter 10 of Authoritarian Nightmare.

Read this book- https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Nightmare-Trump-His-Followers/dp/1612199054

Stalin and Mao were more rightwing than people think they were. Political discourse in this country has been so tainted that people can't see ambiguity in the objective fact that most people are a complex mixture of left and right wing politics.

Reminding me of this. From Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers, Chapter 8:

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

There are probably 30-40% of Trump supporters who are evangelicals. For evangelicals, it is a mistake for people to predict behaviors of the group in general based on our understanding of the teaching from Jesus.

From Chapter 8 of Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers:

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

Authoritarianism is a very touchy subject. Most people who discuss authoritarian never even mention Totalitarianism.

>[How did America end up with a leader who acts so crudely and despotically, and counter to our democratic principles? Why do his followers stick with him, even when he acts against their own interests?

To fully understand, John Dean, a man with a history of standing up to autocratic presidents, joined with Bob Altemeyer, a professor of psychology with a unique area of expertise: Authoritarianism.

Relying on social science findings and psychological diagnostic tools (such as the "Power Mad Scale" and the "Con Man Scale"), as well as research and analysis from the Monmouth University Polling Institute (one of America's most respected public opinion research foundations), the authors provide us with an eye-opening understanding of the Trump phenomenon — and how we may be able to stop it.](https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Nightmare-Trump-His-Followers/dp/1612199054)

From Chapter 8 of Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers:

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

Trump is not a symptom like coughing. A researcher found that Trump actually has made people even more prejudiced, more submissive to him and more firmly believe that they are superior. I think what people actually meant is that there are pre-existing conditions which allow Trump to gain power and tear apart the system. I personally think that Trump is more like a virus or a disease causing agent. Saying Trump is a symptom implies that removing Trump is useless, just like drinking cough syrup is useless against COVID.

The first order of business when facing Trump or disease causing agent is to remove that. Then we need to deal with the pre-existing conditions.

I read recently a study of prejudice and political leaning. It divides political leaning into: democrats, lean democratic, independents, lean republican and republicans. It found that lean democratic and lean republican are pretty much democrats and republicans respectively in term of prejudice. Independents are roughly in the middle in term of prejudice.

Prejudice is a spectrum, so it is natural that there are people in the middle.

Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (Chapter 10):

>Figure 5 shows the mean prejudice scores among the white respondents broken down by political party preference, including the differentiation among independents. You will notice that Republicans outnumber Democrats; again, that is because Republicans were oversampled. You will also notice that non-leaning independent-registered voters amount to only a small fraction of the sample. Although small in number, true independents can determine who wins a close election, and their presidential choice is probably more moveable than anybody else’s. They likely constitute a sizable chunk of the undecided voters who lead pollsters to an early grave because they make up their minds on election day. And to the extent that the TV ads, et cetera, that we all get sick of during a campaign are intended to persuade voters, they are targeting this small group of straight-up-and-down independents.

Many Trump supporters are evangelicals. Research found that they don't really believe in God.

Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (Chapter 8):

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

Next to nothing. Read Authoritarian Nightmare (https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Nightmare-Trump-His-Followers/dp/1612199054) cowritten byJohn W. Dean and Bob Altemeyer (arguably the world's authority on Right-Wing Authoritarians)

The book focusses on Trump's base, how they score high on Social Dominance Orientation and Authoritarian Follower scales, and why after Trump goes they will seek another strong-man to follow.

White evangelical has turned Republican Party into the first religious party in the US.

A researcher published a book in 2006 (a decade before Trump) with a chapter talking about them. He predicted that they would support someone like Trump who would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest. Enclosed below the summary of the chapter (1).

The researcher published another book in 2020, with discussion of evangelical and Trump. Enclosed below a summary from this book (2).

(1) From The Authoritarians:

>This chapter has presented my main research findings on religious fundamentalists. The first thing I want to emphasize, in light of the rest of this book, is that they are highly likely to be authoritarian followers. They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority, and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason, and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times, and are often hypocrites.
>
>But they are also Teflon-coated when it comes to guilt. They are blind to themselves, ethnocentric and prejudiced, and as closed-minded as they are narrow- minded. They can be woefully uninformed about things they oppose, but they prefer ignorance and want to make others become as ignorant as they. They are also surprisingly uninformed about the things they say they believe in, and deep, deep, deep down inside many of them have secret doubts about their core belief. But they are very happy, highly giving, and quite zealous. In fact, they are about the only zealous people around nowadays in North America, which explains a lot of their success in their endless (and necessary) pursuit of converts.

(2) From Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers, Chapter 8:

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

This is true for Republican politicians in power or seeking power, but it is also true for many Republican voters who believe that they deserve to be superior. In one study, the number of Trump supporters who hold this belief is about two-third. The remaining 1/3 of Trump supporters are followers. They believe virtually any lies they are fed, regardless of evidences and logics. They also know that their leaders have lied to them after the fact. They simply revise their history that they knew and they are part of the con. 1

I found this 2 and this 3 describe the supremacist type and the follower types respectively rather well.

Selected quotes:

1. Chapter 10 of Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers:

>Decades of study have established the validity of both the RWA and SDO Scales as measures of authoritarianism. But we wondered, does authoritarianism, so defined, exist strongly in the United States? Is it a highly organized, interlocking, cohesive system of attitudes that would show great resistance to change if challenged? Or is it a hit-and-miss, loosely assembled superficial rattletrap of beliefs that would fall apart if at all challenged? The poll answered, “Sisters and brothers, this is almost an ideology and will probably survive no matter who calls it out and how often they do so." Responses to the RWA Scale’s items went together to a degree never seen in previous studies of ordinary people. The same was true for the SDO measures. The RWA Scale’s result particularly caught one’s eye because its items are much more diverse. But respondents’ beliefs about all its issues proved almost as highly organized as the beliefs in a religion’s statement of faith such as the Apostles’ Creed, which some people actually do memorize. Nobody emphatically teaches all the specific elements of right-wing authoritarianism to Americans, but many people come to embrace the whole deal, bit for bit, pound for pound. The desire to submit to a strong leader, aggress in his name, and insist that everyone follow your rules is dialed up to intense in some people while being almost totally absent in others. So also, to nearly the same extent, is the belief in one group dominating others, as measured by the SDO Scales. > > ... > >The especially troublesome and frightening Double Highs from chapter 9 have been rare in previous social science research because High RWAs have seldom scored highly on the SDO Scale, and vice versa. But they abounded, strikingly, in the survey undertaken by Monmouth for this book. Fourteen percent of the white subjects in the sample—far more than usual—proved to be Double Highs. Maybe so many have always roosted in the United States but remained previously undiscovered. But it could instead be that some people who would have been just social dominators in the past are now scoring high on the RWA measure as well, and some authoritarian submitters are now scoring high on the SDO test. We think both things happened, for the reason Dean exclaimed when he learned of this result: “Trump brings out the worst in people!” Trump has made submission to his mighty leadership more acceptable to some of “the forgotten,” who believe he is their ticket to greater dominance. And he has convinced some evangelicals, who basically want to submit to a powerful leader, that they deserve to be superior too. These two kinds of authoritarians have seemingly interacted with each other in cafes and cheered for one another’s goals so much at Trump rallies that they have become more alike.

1. Jean-Paul Sartre

>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

1. The Origins of Totalitarianism

>In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Broadly speaking, there are three groups of Trump supporters:

1. The followers who are not dumb but are sincere and blind (high RWA, not high SDO)
2. The supremacists who are not dumb but are disingenuous, like acting as you said. (high SDO, not high RWA)
3. People who have the worst characteristics of both followers and supremacists. (high RWA & high SDO, or double highs)

I think your opinion is that there are very few people in the first category. On the other hand, research found that there are significant number of both followers and supremacists, and surprisingly many people in the last category. Based on one study, it found that among people in these three categories, the distribution is like this:

1. The followers - 30%
2. The supremacists - 32%
3. Both - 38%

From Chapter 10 of Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers:

>Decades of study have established the validity of both the RWA and SDO Scales as measures of authoritarianism. But we wondered, does authoritarianism, so defined, exist strongly in the United States? Is it a highly organized, interlocking, cohesive system of attitudes that would show great resistance to change if challenged? Or is it a hit-and-miss, loosely assembled superficial rattletrap of beliefs that would fall apart if at all challenged? The poll answered, “Sisters and brothers, this is almost an ideology and will probably survive no matter who calls it out and how often they do so." Responses to the RWA Scale’s items went together to a degree never seen in previous studies of ordinary people.6 The same was true for the SDO measures. The RWA Scale’s result particularly caught one’s eye because its items are much more diverse. But respondents’ beliefs about all its issues proved almost as highly organized as the beliefs in a religion’s statement of faith such as the Apostles’ Creed, which some people actually do memorize. Nobody emphatically teaches all the specific elements of right-wing authoritarianism to Americans, but many people come to embrace the whole deal, bit for bit, pound for pound. The desire to submit to a strong leader, aggress in his name, and insist that everyone follow your rules is dialed up to intense in some people while being almost totally absent in others. So also, to nearly the same extent, is the belief in one group dominating others, as measured by the SDO Scales. > > ... > >The especially troublesome and frightening Double Highs from chapter 9 have been rare in previous social science research because High RWAs have seldom scored highly on the SDO Scale, and vice versa. But they abounded, strikingly, in the survey undertaken by Monmouth for this book. Fourteen percent of the white subjects in the sample—far more than usual—proved to be Double Highs. Maybe so many have always roosted in the United States but remained previously undiscovered. But it could instead be that some people who would have been just social dominators in the past are now scoring high on the RWA measure as well, and some authoritarian submitters are now scoring high on the SDO test. We think both things happened, for the reason Dean exclaimed when he learned of this result: “Trump brings out the worst in people!” Trump has made submission to his mighty leadership more acceptable to some of “the forgotten,” who believe he is their ticket to greater dominance. And he has convinced some evangelicals, who basically want to submit to a powerful leader, that they deserve to be superior too. These two kinds of authoritarians have seemingly interacted with each other in cafes and cheered for one another’s goals so much at Trump rallies that they have become more alike.

The book is eye-opening to me. The researcher performed original researches in the US and Canada, and has a very good track record on predicting what is happening in US. Some of the main correct predictions made in or before 2006 (a decade before Trump) are:

• America would elect someone like Trump.
• How do I know the author described someone like Trump? The author described the personality traits of the authoritarian leaders in thousands of words, and all of them are accurate description of Trump.
• Evangelicals would form the key constituent of the Trump-like leader.
• The Trump-like leader would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest, but the supporters would not abandon him.
• The Trump-like leader would pursue isolation policies.
• The Trump-like leader would not care about the environment.

I recommend people read more from him (summary 1 and summary 2). I also highly recommend a recent book coauthored by the researcher: Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. It ties his years of researches with Trump and Trump supporters.

It's a myth that unlikely voters in general lean left. Yes, it is the case for certain segments like youth, blacks or college educated people, but there are also unlikely voters who are white working class, rural people who lean right. Republican Party took advantage of their disregard of COVID-19 and invested heavily in ground games to drive turnout of voters who lean right. This means that if turnout increases generally, it is likely that both Republican Party and Democratic Party get more votes.

So, the discouraging fact shouldn't be more people voting for Trump, but it should be that a high percentage of people support Trump no matter what. This phenomenon was predicted long before Trump was elected in 2016.

The best theory I read about would-be Trump supporters come from The Authoritarians (published in 2006). It is because the researcher who wrote the book predicted many things correctly and at least two decades before Trump was elected, when Fox News was just starting. Some of the main correct predictions are:

• America would elect someone like Trump.
• How do I know the author described someone like Trump? The author described the personality traits of the authoritarian leaders in thousands of words, and all of them are accurate description of Trump.
• Evangelicals would form the key constituent of the Trump-like leader.
• The Trump-like leader would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest, but the supporters would not abandon him.

The author found that many would-be Trump supporters are highly fearful (of dangerous world), self-righteous and prejudiced. They also trust their leaders too much, and have highly impaired thinking regarding their leaders. As Trump and his cronies inflame the prejudice-based fear constantly, it makes people more and more prejudiced and less and less willing to get to know other people spontaneously and more and more submissive to Trump.

All these lead to the vicious cycle: 1) prejudices -> 2) fear -> 3) trusting their leaders -> 4) back to 1).

On the other hand, the researcher also found that they have remarkable capacity for changes, if they get to know more different people. This makes sense due to eliminating prejudices in the vicious cycle. Of course, removing Trump also helps because he is also in the vicious cycle, but it may be short term because other leaders like Trump may emerge soon.

Note that holding lots of prejudices doesn't mean lack of empathy or morality or other virtues. It just means that they have negative default opinions about strangers in many groups. Non-Trump supporters are not inherently better, but luckier to know more different people.

The way I reconcile with these Trump supporters is to think of them like people who are drowning. A drowning person is likely to push any people who come to rescue him/her down so he/she can breathe. A rescuer could be pissed that the drowner is trying to kill the person who is helping and abandon the drowner, or the rescuer could understand that the fear incapacitate the drowner and continue to help. I think Trump to many of his supporters is like water to drowners. We should vote Trump out and reach out as much as we can to save these Trump supporters.

NOTE: The researcher also coauthored Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (published in 2020), which directly applies his previous and new researches on Trump and his supporters.

My understanding is that a prejudiced mind makes people highly susceptible to these manipulation. This is kind of like a highly biased parent blames any bad things happened to his/her disliked kids, especially when encouraged by his/her favorite kids. Research found that many Trump supporters are broadly prejudiced, highly, self-righteous and they blindly trust someone who agree with their beliefs (i.e. prejudices). It doesn't matter whether a parent or a Trump supporter is highly educated or not.

I would also not discount many people are being disingenuous. Reasons and reality don't matter to them. They mirror Trump in being manipulative. All that matter to them is to own the libs.

It used to be that most people are manipulated, but since Trump, research found that there has been a significant rise of people who are also manipulators.

From The Authoritarians (published in 2006):

(page 75) >The key to the puzzle springs from Chapter 2's observation that, first and foremost, followers have mainly copied the beliefs of the authorities in their lives. They have not developed and thought through their ideas as much as most people have. Thus almost anything can be found in their heads if their authorities put it there, even stuff that contradicts other stuff. A filing cabinet or a computer can store quite inconsistent notions and never lose a minute of sleep over their contradiction. Similarly a high RWA can have all sorts of illogical, self-contradictory, and widely refuted ideas rattling around in various boxes in his brain, and never notice it.

(page 90) >So (to foreshadow later chapters a little) suppose you are a completely unethical, dishonest, power-hungry, dirt-bag, scum-bucket politician who will say whatever he has to say to get elected. (I apologize for putting you in this role, but it will only last for one more sentence.) Whom are you going to try to lead, high RWAs or low RWAs? Isn’t it obvious? The easy-sell high RWAs will open up their arms and wallets to you if you just sing their song, however poor your credibility. Those crabby low RWAs, on the other hand, will eye you warily when your credibility is suspect because you sing their song? So the scum-bucket politicians will usually head for the right-wing authoritarians, because the RWAs hunger for social endorsement of their beliefs so much they’re apt to trust anyone who tells them they’re right.

From Chapter 10 of Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers:

>We think both things happened, for the reason Dean exclaimed when he learned of this result: “Trump brings out the worst in people!” Trump has made submission to his mighty leadership more acceptable to some of “the forgotten,” who believe he is their ticket to greater dominance. And he has convinced some evangelicals, who basically want to submit to a powerful leader, that they deserve to be superior too. These two kinds of authoritarians have seemingly interacted with each other in cafes and cheered for one another’s goals so much at Trump rallies that they have become more alike.

Hillary got into trouble not because she was wrong, but because

• Democratic voters in general didn't know how extreme their counterparts were.
• Republican voters didn't know how extreme they themselves were.
• Everyone didn't know that Trump did bring out the worst of his supporters.

One of the best researches I read about would-be Trump supporters confirm that they are some of the most highly prejudiced people. By highly prejudiced, it means they hate all different people (e.g. women, gays, racial minorities, religious minorities, democrats, poor, etc) The research is great because the researcher predicted many things correctly at least a decade before Trump:

• America would elect someone like Trump.
• How do I know the author described someone like Trump? The author described the personality traits of the authoritarian leaders in thousands of words, and all of them are accurate description of Trump.
• Evangelicals would form the key constituent of the Trump-like leader.
• The Trump-like leader would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest, but the supporters would not abandon him.

The research performed a follow-up research (which is elaborated in a book he coauthored) on Trump supporters late last year. The results confirmed what his research predicted. One major surprise was that Trump supporters were even more prejudiced than his research predicted.

Relevant quotes

The Authoritarians(page 24)

>Prejudice has little to do with the groups it targets, and a lot to do with the personality of the holder. Want to guess who has such wide-ranging prejudices? Authoritarian followers dislike so many kinds of people, I have called them “equal opportunity b?g?ts.”

The Authoritarians(page 88)

>As a path to truth, this amounts to skipping on quicksand. It essentially boils down to, “I know I’m right because the people who agree with me say I am.” But that works for authoritarians. And it has lots of consequences. For example, this selective exposure is probably one of the reasons high RWAs do not realize how prejudiced they are “compared with most people.”If you spend a lot of time around rather prejudiced people, you can easily think your own prejudices are normal.

Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (Chapter 10):

>The connection between prejudice and authoritarianism lay at the heart of our analysis of Trump’s supporters, and the survey strongly supported it. How strongly? The correlation between RWA Scale scores and prejudice equalled .856, which is as close to perfection (1.00) as you are likely to ever see in social science. To put it another way, suppose you decided to hold a dance for the 100 most prejudiced white people in your community, along with the 100 most authoritarian ones. (Who knows why you would want to? We do not.) Would you need to print 200 invitations? No, about 120 should do it, since most of the people who are one will also be the other. There is about an 80 percent overlap. > >... > >The especially troublesome and frightening Double Highs from chapter 9 have been rare in previous social science research because High RWAs have seldom scored highly on the SDO Scale, and vice versa. But they abounded, strikingly, in the survey undertaken by Monmouth for this book. Fourteen percent of the white subjects in the sample—far more than usual—proved to be Double Highs. > >... > >"Trump brings out the worst in people!” Trump has made submission to his mighty leadership more acceptable to some of “the forgotten,” who believe he is their ticket to greater dominance. And he has convinced some evangelicals, who basically want to submit to a powerful leader, that they deserve to be superior too. These two kinds of authoritarians have seemingly interacted with each other in cafes and cheered for one another’s goals so much at Trump rallies that they have become more alike.

Yes.

The Authoritarians (page 24):

>Prejudice has little to do with the groups it targets, and a lot to do with the personality of the holder.

Authoritarian Tendencies in the American Electorate (Part 1)

>The analysis here is based on a survey of 990 registered voters conducted online from late October to November, 2019.

Authoritarian Nightmare (Chapter Ten: National Survey on Authoritarianism)

>“The correlation between RWA Scale scores and prejudice equalled .856, which is as close to perfection (1.00) as you are likely to ever see in social science. To put it another way, suppose you decided to hold a dance for the 100 most prejudiced white people in your community, along with the 100 most authoritarian ones. (Who knows why you would want to? We do not.) Would you need to print 200 invitations? No, about 120 should do it, since most of the people who are one will also be the other. There is about an 80 percent overlap.”

The Authoritarians (page 61):

>Interestingly enough, authoritarian followers show a remarkable capacity for change IF they have some of the important experiences. For example, they are far less likely to have known a homosexual (or realized an acquaintance was homosexual) than most people. But if you look at the high RWAs who do know someone gay or lesbian, they are much less hostile toward homosexuals in general than most authoritarians are. Getting to know a homosexual usually makes one more accepting of homosexuals as a group. Personal experiences can make a lot of difference, which is a truly hopeful discovery. The problem is, most right-wing authoritarians won’t willingly exit their small world and try to meet a gay. They’re too afraid. And “coming out” to a high RWA acquaintance might have long-term beneficial effects on him, but it would likely carry some risks for the outgoing person.

>It is an evil of ignorance. And while there very likely are some powerful folks in the Republican Party who are actually fascists and are equipped with enough IQ points to understand what they are doing and asking for, they’re not the majority.

Among Trump supporters, there are three types of them. All of them are highly prejudiced like you said. The differences are:

1. Type 1 are true believers (typically evangelicals) who think others are causing the demise of their society. (High RWAs)
2. Type 2 are the disingenuous and manipulative people (typically white supremacists) who think they are superior merely because of their race and deserve to be on top. (High SDO)
3. Type 3 has the worst characteristics of the type 1 and type 2. (Double Highs)

It used to be that most people are in type 1 who are ignorant as you said, but recent researches found that the split is more even that there are about 1/3 of people for each type. The hypothesis is that Trump with his massive and numerous and constant rallies allow these people to mingle and they become more and more alike.

From Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers, Chapter 10

>The especially troublesome and frightening Double Highs from chapter 9 have been rare in previous social science research because High RWAs have seldom scored highly on the SDO Scale, and vice versa. But they abounded, strikingly, in the survey undertaken by Monmouth for this book. Fourteen percent of the white subjects in the sample—far more than usual—proved to be Double Highs. Maybe so many have always roosted in the United States but remained previously undiscovered. But it could instead be that some people who would have been just social dominators in the past are now scoring high on the RWA measure as well, and some authoritarian submitters are now scoring high on the SDO test. We think both things happened, for the reason Dean exclaimed when he learned of this result: “Trump brings out the worst in people!” Trump has made submission to his mighty leadership more acceptable to some of “the forgotten,” who believe he is their ticket to greater dominance. And he has convinced some evangelicals, who basically want to submit to a powerful leader, that they deserve to be superior too. These two kinds of authoritarians have seemingly interacted with each other in cafes and cheered for one another’s goals so much at Trump rallies that they have become more alike.

You need to take a poltical science class to see how stupid you sound. The Political Compass is just a Nolan Chart turned on its side. No one uses it. No college uses it. It's fucking stupid.

If a college professor ever uses the Dog Shit Political Compass, they should be fired. That is why you NEVER, EVER, EVER, see the Dog Shit Compass used in colleges.

Read these books if you want to see how stupid you sound to me.

https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Nightmare-Trump-His-Followers/dp/1612199054

https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascism-Robert-Paxton/dp/1400033918

Oh, and I will ignore any response you have. You have nothing of any value to offer me. Good bye.

I read that many people in Afghanistan think that Talibans are just religious people. In the same way, many people in the US think that evangelicals are religious people. Both Talibans and evangelicals have been very successful in co-opting the term "religious".

For people who are not them and are religious, the easiest to understand these people is to realize that these people are not religious. It would be wrong to think that they just care about abortions or they are driven by compassion.

For people who are not religious and have negative opinion on religion, their understanding of these people is fine, but they are unfortunately a minority.

From The Authoritarians, page 106:

• Whether you are talking about evangelicals or talking about Christian fundamentalists, you are largely talking about the same people.
• A solid majority of them are authoritarian followers.
• highly likely to be authoritarian followers.
• highly submissive to established authority,
• aggressive in the name of that authority,
• conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide.
• fearful
• self-righteous
• have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups.
• easily incited,
• easily led,
• un-inclined to think for themselves,
• largely impervious to facts and reason,
• rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs.
• strong loyalty to their in-groups,
• thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds,
• use a lot of double standards in their judgments,
• surprisingly unprincipled at times,
• often hypocrites.
• blind to themselves,
• ethnocentric
• prejudiced,
• as closed-minded as they are narrow-minded.
• woefully uninformed about things they oppose,
• prefer ignorance and want to make others become as ignorant as they.

From Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers, Chapter 8:

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

These are Christian fundamentalists who are, in general, some of the most prejudiced people. These are the people who think government helping other people who they deem undeserving are discriminating against them, even though they are the ones who benefit most from government handouts. Ironically, religion is rather unimportant to them.

From The Authoritarians, page 106:

• Whether you are talking about evangelicals or talking about Christian fundamentalists, you are largely talking about the same people.
• A solid majority of them are authoritarian followers.
• highly likely to be authoritarian followers.
• highly submissive to established authority,
• aggressive in the name of that authority,
• conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide.
• fearful
• self-righteous
• have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups.
• easily incited,
• easily led,
• un-inclined to think for themselves,
• largely impervious to facts and reason,
• rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs.
• strong loyalty to their in-groups,
• thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds,
• use a lot of double standards in their judgments,
• surprisingly unprincipled at times,
• often hypocrites.
• blind to themselves,
• ethnocentric
• prejudiced,
• as closed-minded as they are narrow-minded.
• woefully uninformed about things they oppose,
• prefer ignorance and want to make others become as ignorant as they.

From Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers, Chapter 8:

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

This poll confirms the prediction made by a researcher in 2006 (a decade before Trump) that evangelicals would vote for someone like Trump even though Trump is extremely corrupt, dishonest and amoral. From The Authoritarians, page 106:

• Whether you are talking about evangelicals or talking about Christian fundamentalists, you are largely talking about the same people.
• A solid majority of them are authoritarian followers.
• highly likely to be authoritarian followers.
• highly submissive to established authority,
• aggressive in the name of that authority,
• conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide.
• fearful
• self-righteous
• have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups.
• easily incited,
• easily led,
• un-inclined to think for themselves,
• largely impervious to facts and reason,
• rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs.
• strong loyalty to their in-groups,
• thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds,
• use a lot of double standards in their judgments,
• surprisingly unprincipled at times,
• often hypocrites.
• blind to themselves,
• ethnocentric
• prejudiced,
• as closed-minded as they are narrow-minded.
• woefully uninformed about things they oppose,
• prefer ignorance and want to make others become as ignorant as they.

How do we know that the researcher was talking about Trump? The researcher described the personality traits of the leaders evangelicals support and all of them match with Trump. From The Authoritarians, page 165:

• intimidating, ruthless, and vengeful
• mean, pitiless
• love power, including the power to hurt in their drive to the top
• It’s all about them, not about a higher purpose.
• don’t spend a lot of time feeling sorry for people less fortunate
• striving to manipulate others, and to being dishonest, two-faced, treacherous, and amoral
• took the Scout Law (“A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, ...”) and turned it completely upside down: “A ‘winner’ is deceitful, manipulative, unfair, base, conniving, ...”
• feel a certain contempt for their followers ... the suckers, the “marks,” the fools
• Dominance is the first order of business
• Laws, they think, are not something you should necessarily obey in the first place, so much as things you should not get caught disobeying.
• there’s no such thing as “right” and “wrong.”
• one of the most useful skills a person should develop, they say, is how to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly
• masses of people are poor. That’s their tough luck.
• some racial groups are just naturally inferior to others
• Justice should not be applied equally to all
• The rich and powerful should have advantages in court
• The “right people” should have more votes than everybody else in elections.
• “equality” is a sucker word.

In 2020, the researcher published another book specifically about Trump and his followers. It contains this summary about why evangelicals support Trump. From Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers, Chapter 8:

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

Of course! The main book of Altemeyer's was The Authoritarians, a paper about the rise of authoritarian ideology worldwide, especially in North America. It is free on his site: https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/

Most of his other stuff is more of a consultant or assisting research, like Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Nightmare-Trump-His-Followers/dp/1612199054

>bullies

Billies are the characteristic of leaders of authoritarian supporters. There are in generally three kinds authoritarian supporters,

1. Followers who blindly submit to their leaders, are aggressive in the name of their leaders and think everyone else should do the same. (High RWA)
2. Bullies who are not bound by morale, who think their deserve to be superior, who are out to dominate others via manipulation and other means. (High SDO)
3. People who have the worse characteristic of the first and second groups of people. (Double Highs)

Sources

It appears that Trump is in the second group, but the ways Trump behaves around Putin makes me wonder if Trump is in the third group.

It used to be that many Republican voters are in the first group, but since Trump came to power, it was found that the distribution is pretty even (i.e. 1/3 in each group). Since the third group is the scariest, it is a very depressing finding.

Sources

So, it may be more accurate to say that Republicans are billies and bully-lovers.

Selected quotes:

Chapter 10 of Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers:

>Decades of study have established the validity of both the RWA and SDO Scales as measures of authoritarianism. But we wondered, does authoritarianism, so defined, exist strongly in the United States? Is it a highly organized, interlocking, cohesive system of attitudes that would show great resistance to change if challenged? Or is it a hit-and-miss, loosely assembled superficial rattletrap of beliefs that would fall apart if at all challenged? The poll answered, “Sisters and brothers, this is almost an ideology and will probably survive no matter who calls it out and how often they do so." Responses to the RWA Scale’s items went together to a degree never seen in previous studies of ordinary people.6 The same was true for the SDO measures. The RWA Scale’s result particularly caught one’s eye because its items are much more diverse. But respondents’ beliefs about all its issues proved almost as highly organized as the beliefs in a religion’s statement of faith such as the Apostles’ Creed, which some people actually do memorize. Nobody emphatically teaches all the specific elements of right-wing authoritarianism to Americans, but many people come to embrace the whole deal, bit for bit, pound for pound. The desire to submit to a strong leader, aggress in his name, and insist that everyone follow your rules is dialed up to intense in some people while being almost totally absent in others. So also, to nearly the same extent, is the belief in one group dominating others, as measured by the SDO Scales. > > ... > >The especially troublesome and frightening Double Highs from chapter 9 have been rare in previous social science research because High RWAs have seldom scored highly on the SDO Scale, and vice versa. But they abounded, strikingly, in the survey undertaken by Monmouth for this book. Fourteen percent of the white subjects in the sample—far more than usual—proved to be Double Highs. Maybe so many have always roosted in the United States but remained previously undiscovered. But it could instead be that some people who would have been just social dominators in the past are now scoring high on the RWA measure as well, and some authoritarian submitters are now scoring high on the SDO test. We think both things happened, for the reason Dean exclaimed when he learned of this result: “Trump brings out the worst in people!” Trump has made submission to his mighty leadership more acceptable to some of “the forgotten,” who believe he is their ticket to greater dominance. And he has convinced some evangelicals, who basically want to submit to a powerful leader, that they deserve to be superior too. These two kinds of authoritarians have seemingly interacted with each other in cafes and cheered for one another’s goals so much at Trump rallies that they have become more alike.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of Trump supporters: bullies and followers. The bullies are like Trump who think they deserve to be superior. They don't really believe in anything other than winning. They are insincere, manipulative, are willing to bid their time by temporarily pledging loyalty to someone more powerful. Even Trump is not immune to being submissive to powerful people, like he does to Putin. Their irony, hypocrisy, double standards are mostly due to them being amoral, dishonest and manipulative. Many Republican leaders and supremacists are like these.

The followers are people who are similarly broadly prejudiced, but their prejudices are due to fear and self-righteousness, rather than due to the belief that they deserve to be superior. Their fear inhibits their logical thinking and curiosity. This leads to them trusting their Trump-like leaders too much, and believe that everyone should submit to their leaders like they do. Due to their lack of logical thinking and knowledge regarding to their leaders, they simply copy what their leaders say without digestion. They can have all sort of self-blindness, hypocrisy, double standards, dogmatism, etc. Many evangelicals are like these.

Interestingly, there are people who both believe that they deserve to be superior and they are the righteous. They seem to have impulses to both dominate and submit. They have the traits of both bullies and followers, e.g. power-mad and dogmatic, etc. I think many of Trump's loyal enablers are like these. Previously, researches found this group of people to be very rare, like at 1-2% among the group of bullies, followers and both, but recent researches found this group to be more common, like at 40%.

From Chapter 10 of Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers:

>We think both things happened, for the reason Dean exclaimed when he learned of this result: “Trump brings out the worst in people!” Trump has made submission to his mighty leadership more acceptable to some of “the forgotten,” who believe he is their ticket to greater dominance. And he has convinced some evangelicals, who basically want to submit to a powerful leader, that they deserve to be superior too. These two kinds of authoritarians have seemingly interacted with each other in cafes and cheered for one another’s goals so much at Trump rallies that they have become more alike.

I hope after the last four years of Trump, non-Trump supporters will finally understand that there really is no principle from about 80-90% of Republican voters and their politicians. We can't convert unprincipled people via policies, until they understand themselves and change. Otherwise, they will continue to behave like robots of Trump or successors of Trump. The best we can do in short term is to outvote all these Trump supporters in elections after elections, until long term policies are implemented to reduce the fear and prejudices of all these Trump supporters.

EDIT: The best theory I read about would-be Trump supporters come from The Authoritarians (published in 2006). It is because the researcher who wrote the book predicted many things correctly and at least two decades before Trump was elected, when Fox News was just starting. Some of the main correct predictions are:

• America would elect someone like Trump.
• How do I know the author described someone like Trump? The author described the personality traits of the authoritarian leaders in thousands of words, and all of them are accurate description of Trump.
• Evangelicals would form the key constituent of the Trump-like leader.
• The Trump-like leader would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest, but the supporters would not abandon him.

I highly recommend people to read the book in order to understand Trump supporters and why they are the greatest threat to the democracy in the US. The researcher also coauthored Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (published in 2020), which directly applies his previous and new researches on Trump and his supporters.

Really? The experts on the matter seem to think that Trump exemplifies authoritarianism. Written by, a literal professor and an expert on the subject matter. https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Nightmare-Trump-His-Followers/dp/1612199054

The best theory I read about would-be Trump supporters come from The Authoritarians (published in 2006). It is because the researcher who wrote the book predicted many things correctly and at least two decades before Trump was elected, when Fox News was just starting. Some of the main correct predictions are:

• America would elect someone like Trump.
• How do I know the author described someone like Trump? The author described the personality traits of the authoritarian leaders in thousands of words, and all of them are accurate description of Trump.
• Evangelicals would form the key constituent of the Trump-like leader.
• The Trump-like leader would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest, but the supporters would not abandon him.

The author found that many would-be Trump supporters are highly fearful (of dangerous world), self-righteous and prejudiced. They also trust their leaders too much, and have highly impaired thinking regarding their leaders. As Trump and his cronies inflame the prejudice-based fear constantly, it makes people more and more prejudiced and less and less willing to get to know other people spontaneously and more and more submissive to Trump.

All these lead to the vicious cycle: 1) prejudices -> 2) fear -> 3) trusting their leaders -> 4) back to 1).

On the other hand, the researcher also found that they have remarkable capacity for changes, if they get to know more different people. This makes sense due to eliminating prejudices in the vicious cycle. Of course, removing Trump also helps because he is also in the vicious cycle, but it may be short term because other leaders like Trump may emerge soon.

Note that holding lots of prejudices doesn't mean lack of empathy or morality or other virtues. It just means that they have negative default opinions about strangers in many groups. Non-Trump supporters are not inherently better, but luckier to know more different people.

The way I reconcile with these Trump supporters is to think of them like people who are drowning. A drowning person is likely to push any people who come to rescue him/her down so he/she can breathe. A rescuer could be pissed that the drowner is trying to kill the person who is helping and abandon the drowner, or the rescuer could understand that the fear incapacitate the drowner and continue to help. I think Trump to many of his supporters is like water to drowners. We should reach out as much as we can to save these Trump supporters, and push for policies like free public colleges to bring people together to reduce prejudices.

(NOTE: The researcher also co-authored a recent book Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (published in 2020). It contains application of his theory on Trump and his supporters, and contains a new study which confirms the validity of his theory. Highly recommended.)

I wouldn't oversell the Republican Party. They lost seats in the Senate and in the presidency. Yes, they gained seats in the House of Representatives relative to 2018, but they lost seats relative to 2016.

They did far better than what many polls suggested, but what if the polls had been wrong all along since earlier this year? If this is the case, the Republican Party only did better than an expectation based on illusion.

Having said that, I am not suggesting that Democratic Party did great either, but Democratic Party did better in 2020 than 2016. 2020 elections proved that the support for Trump was real in 2016, and it was not mainly due to strong dislike of Hillary. Both elections were close. This means that the dislike of Hillary and Trump only tipped the results, but for the majority of voters they stick to the parties they supported because of or despite the last 4 years. Most Trump voters are not motivated by economy.

With higher turnouts in 2020, it also busted a myth that unlikely voters in general lean left. Yes, it is the case for certain segments like youth, blacks or college educated people, but there are also unlikely voters who are white working class, rural people who lean right.

While all these are discouraging, this phenomenon was predicted long before Trump was elected in 2016.

The best theory I read about would-be Trump supporters come from The Authoritarians (published in 2006). It is because the researcher who wrote the book predicted many things correctly and at least two decades before Trump was elected, when Fox News was just starting. Some of the main correct predictions are:

• America would elect someone like Trump.
• How do I know the author described someone like Trump? The author described the personality traits of the authoritarian leaders in thousands of words, and all of them are accurate description of Trump.
• Evangelicals would form the key constituent of the Trump-like leader.
• The Trump-like leader would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest, but the supporters would not abandon him.

I highly recommend people to read the book in order to understand Trump supporters and why they are the greatest threat to the democracy in the US. The researcher also coauthored Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (published in 2020), which directly applies his previous and new researches on Trump and his supporters.

The way I reconcile with these Trump supporters is to think of them like people who are drowning. A drowning person is likely to push any people who come to rescue him/her down so he/she can breathe. A rescuer could be pissed that the drowner is trying to kill the person who is helping and abandon the drowner, or the rescuer could understand that the fear incapacitate the drowner and continue to help. I think Trump to many of his supporters is like water to drowners. We should vote Trump out and reach out as much as we can to save these Trump supporters.

The book I quoted above was published in 2006 (a decade before Trump). It contains the best theory I read about would-be Trump supporters. It is because the researcher who wrote the book predicted many things correctly and at least two decades before Trump was elected, when Fox News was just starting. Some of the main correct predictions are:

• America would elect someone like Trump.
• How do I know the author described someone like Trump? The author described the personality traits of the authoritarian leaders in thousands of words, and all of them are accurate description of Trump.
• Evangelicals would form the key constituent of the Trump-like leader.
• The Trump-like leader would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest, but the supporters would not abandon him.

The author found that many would-be Trump supporters are highly fearful (of dangerous world), self-righteous and prejudiced. They also trust their leaders too much, and have highly impaired thinking regarding their leaders. As Trump and his cronies inflame the prejudice-based fear constantly, it makes people more and more prejudiced and less and less willing to get to know other people spontaneously and more and more submissive to Trump.

All these lead to the vicious cycle: 1) prejudices -> 2) fear -> 3) trusting their leaders -> 4) back to 1).

On the other hand, the researcher also found that they have remarkable capacity for changes, if they get to know more different people. This makes sense due to eliminating prejudices in the vicious cycle. Of course, removing Trump also helps because he is also in the vicious cycle, but it may be short term because other leaders like Trump may emerge soon.

Note that holding lots of prejudices doesn't mean lack of empathy or morality or other virtues. It just means that they have negative default opinions about strangers in many groups. Non-Trump supporters are not inherently better, but luckier to know more different people.

The researcher also coauthored Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (published in 2020), which directly applies his previous and new researches on Trump and his supporters.

I found that what you said matches with the best research I read on would-be Trump supporters. Many people don't know these emotions: being highly prejudiced, fearful and self-righteous are very common among Trump supporters. On the plus side, many Trump supporters have remarkable capacity for changes, if they get to know more different people. Ultimately these emotions originate from ignorance. Non-Trump supporters are not inherently better, just luckier to know more different people early on and stay in touch with them.

One more thing which I think is interesting is that Trump is not a symptom like coughing. The same researcher also found that Trump actually has made people even more prejudiced, more submissive to him and more firmly believe that they are superior. I think what people actually meant is that there are pre-existing conditions which allow Trump to gain power and tear apart the system. I personally think that Trump is more like a virus or a disease causing agent. Saying Trump is a symptom implies that removing Trump is useless, just like drinking cough syrup is useless against COVID.

The first order of business when facing Trump or disease causing agent is to remove that. Then we need to deal with the pre-existing conditions.

Many people just don't know how prejudiced they are. They are so self-righteous and thinking so moral of themselves that they will do the most unholy thing because they think they are holiest. In addition, as it turns out, they don't want to be not prejudiced. They just want to be like their peers. The problem is that they live in their bubbles with highly prejudiced peers.

What's more, Trump brings together two flavors of most prejudiced people, the supremacist type and the self-righteous type, that many people become both supremacists and self-righteous (double highs). It used to be that double highs are about 2% of population. Now, there are about 14% of people like that.

From Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers:

(Chapter 6) >If a prejudice Olympics were held in North America some year, high RWAs would win either the bronze or the silver medal, with their fiercest competition coming from the social dominators discussed in chapter 5.

(Chapter 7) >What then releases the aggressive impulse that fear creates? Again, experiments reveal that high RWAs come fully charged with self-righteousness. Feelings of moral superiority can brush aside inhibitions against attacking homosexual people, “radicals,” high school classmates who got pregnant, and many racial and ethnic minorities. > >... > >The years of research have uncovered many disheartening and troubling things about authoritarian followers. Yet they themselves are not disheartened—far from it—because they realize almost none of their shortcomings. Therefore, if you ask them if a lot of their ideas are inconsistent and even contradict one another, they will likely think you are talking about somebody else. Ditto about employing double standards, tolerating government injustices, and being mean-spirited. You name it. Out of twenty well-established behaviors regularly found in high RWAs, they thought they were like everybody else, “You know, normal,” in almost all instances. They did know they trusted authorities more than most people do and that they are more likely to help the government persecute vulnerable groups, and maybe have a touch of prejudice. But even then they had almost no grasp of how different they were compared to most people. Overall, they had practically zero insight into themselves. The person they thought they were did not exist. > >... > >High RWAs positively yearn to be in the middle, normal in most respects. It’s like they want to disappear. In another, experiment students were again told what the RWA scale measures and then discreetly told they had scored highly on the test—a lie for everyone but the actual highs (which was confessed minutes later). The students were asked to mark where they wished they could be in the distribution. The lows wanted to be lows, as did many moderates. But interestingly, the highs generally wanted to be moderates, “normal,” even though the feedback had made it clear that low scorers displayed strong integrity, careful thinking, low levels of prejudice, and other positive traits.

(Chapter 10) >The connection between prejudice and authoritarianism lay at the heart of our analysis of Trump’s supporters, and the survey strongly supported it. How strongly? The correlation between RWA Scale scores and prejudice equalled .856, which is as close to perfection (1.00) as you are likely to ever see in social science. To put it another way, suppose you decided to hold a dance for the 100 most prejudiced white people in your community, along with the 100 most authoritarian ones. (Who knows why you would want to? We do not.) Would you need to print 200 invitations? No, about 120 should do it, since most of the people who are one will also be the other. There is about an 80 percent overlap. > >... > >The especially troublesome and frightening Double Highs from chapter 9 have been rare in previous social science research because High RWAs have seldom scored highly on the SDO Scale, and vice versa. But they abounded, strikingly, in the survey undertaken by Monmouth for this book. Fourteen percent of the white subjects in the sample—far more than usual—proved to be Double Highs. > >... > >"Trump brings out the worst in people!” Trump has made submission to his mighty leadership more acceptable to some of “the forgotten,” who believe he is their ticket to greater dominance. And he has convinced some evangelicals, who basically want to submit to a powerful leader, that they deserve to be superior too. These two kinds of authoritarians have seemingly interacted with each other in cafes and cheered for one another’s goals so much at Trump rallies that they have become more alike.

>really can’t stress enough how radicalized this white population has become since Obama’s election in 2008.

This is consistent with a research I read. The researcher knew and published a book in 2006 (a decade before Trump) that America would elect someone like Trump and the supporters wouldn't abandon the leader even though the leader would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest. The researcher has since performed a follow up poll directly on Americans today (and coauthored a follow up book). The poll confirms what he predicted. The only surprise is that the absolutely most prejudiced people (pretty much people who think that they are both victims and superior) are more than expected.

People keep saying that Trump is a symptom. I have no idea what it actually means. Like if we are sick, is Trump just the cough?

I think what people actually meant is that there are pre-existing conditions which allow Trump to gain power and the system starts to fall apart. It's like with COVID, people who are obese or old or with high blood pressure, they are likely to die or be severely sick. However, if they don't catch the coronavirus, they would not have COVID. Of course, they are still susceptible to many possible harms related to their pre-existing conditions.

In my mind, Trump is not really a symptom like coughing. Trump is more like a virus or a disease causing agent. To treat us, it is absolutely necessary and highest priority to remove Trump, like we have to remove the virus.

From Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (Chapter 10):

>The connection between prejudice and authoritarianism lay at the heart of our analysis of Trump’s supporters, and the survey strongly supported it. How strongly? The correlation between RWA Scale scores and prejudice equalled .856, which is as close to perfection (1.00) as you are likely to ever see in social science. To put it another way, suppose you decided to hold a dance for the 100 most prejudiced white people in your community, along with the 100 most authoritarian ones. (Who knows why you would want to? We do not.) Would you need to print 200 invitations? No, about 120 should do it, since most of the people who are one will also be the other. There is about an 80 percent overlap. > >... > >The especially troublesome and frightening Double Highs from chapter 9 have been rare in previous social science research because High RWAs have seldom scored highly on the SDO Scale, and vice versa. But they abounded, strikingly, in the survey undertaken by Monmouth for this book. Fourteen percent of the white subjects in the sample—far more than usual—proved to be Double Highs. > >... > >"Trump brings out the worst in people!” Trump has made submission to his mighty leadership more acceptable to some of “the forgotten,” who believe he is their ticket to greater dominance. And he has convinced some evangelicals, who basically want to submit to a powerful leader, that they deserve to be superior too. These two kinds of authoritarians have seemingly interacted with each other in cafes and cheered for one another’s goals so much at Trump rallies that they have become more alike.

There is a poll which measure prejudices and political leaning in the US. If a person is prejudiced against more groups based on their answers to the list of questions, the person has higher prejudice score.

The results are that people who disapprove Trump are significantly less prejudiced than people who approve Trump. The correlation between people who supports Trump and who are prejudiced is very high.

From Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (Chapter 10) (which references the poll):

>The connection between prejudice and authoritarianism lay at the heart of our analysis of Trump’s supporters, and the survey strongly supported it. How strongly? The correlation between RWA Scale scores and prejudice equalled .856, which is as close to perfection (1.00) as you are likely to ever see in social science. To put it another way, suppose you decided to hold a dance for the 100 most prejudiced white people in your community, along with the 100 most authoritarian ones. (Who knows why you would want to? We do not.) Would you need to print 200 invitations? No, about 120 should do it, since most of the people who are one will also be the other. There is about an 80 percent overlap.

The text I quoted does have the number which answered the question. I think your question may be different depending on what you meant by fact. The researcher I quoted performed original study and the study is real. What "fact" do you expect?

As for the credibility of the author, I think he has the best theory of Trump supporters. Based on his theory, he predicted many things correctly and at least two decades before Trump was elected, when Fox News was just starting. Some of the main correct predictions are:

• America would elect someone like Trump.
• How do I know the author described someone like Trump? The author described the personality traits of the authoritarian leaders in thousands of words, and all of them are accurate description of Trump.
• Evangelicals would form the key constituent of the Trump-like leader.
• The Trump-like leader would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest, but the supporters would not abandon him.

It looks like the website is down for now. Hopefully it will be back up soon. In the meantime, you can read the reviews or a summary to get a sense of what it talks about. Also, you can read the recent book (which I also quoted above. For summary) coauthored by the researcher.

Many Christian fundamentalists (aka evangelicals) don't really believe in God.

The Authoritarians (page 139)

>This means the whole edifice of belief, Bible and bustle is built on an unresolved fundamental issue in many fundamentalists. Indeed, it’s the fundamental issue, isn’t it? But what speaks loudest to me is how secret these doubts are in so many cases. NO ONE knows, for very good reason, and the secret doubters will probably never “come out” of the choir. Instead their faithful presence in church will reassure all the others, including the other secret doubters, that “everyone in our group really believes this.” And they may well carry their secret to the grave.

Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (Chapter 8):

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

From The Authoritarians

(page 2)

>Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want--which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal. In my day, authoritarian fascist and authoritarian communist dictatorships posed the biggest threats to democracies, and eventually lost to them in wars both hot and cold. But authoritarianism itself has not disappeared, and I'm going to present the case in this book that the greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.

(page 235)

>Authoritarian followers, who have always been there but were usually uninterested and unorganized, are now mightily active and highly organized in American politics. They claim to be the “real Americans,” but the America they yearn to create seems quite antithetical to the nation envisioned by the founding fathers. Far from seeing the wisdom of separating church and state, for example, they want a particular religious point of view to control government, and be spread and enforced by the government. Furthermore, if research on abolishing the Bill of Rights and tolerance for government injustices is to be believed, authoritarian followers frankly don’t give a damn about democratic freedoms.

(page 246)

>So what’s to be done right now? The social dominators and high RWAs presently marshaling their forces for the next election in your county, state and country, are perfectly entitled to do what they’re doing. They have the right to organize, they have the right to proselytize, they have the right to select and work for candidates they like, they have the right to vote, they have the right to make sure folks who agree with them also vote. Jerry Falwell has already declared, “We absolutely are going to deliver this nation back to God in 2008!”
>
>If the people who are not social dominators and right-wing authoritarians want to have those same rights in the future, they, you, had better do those same things too, now. You do have the right to remain silent, but you’ll do so at everyone’s peril. You can’t sit these elections out and say “Politics is dirty; I’ll not be part of it,” or “Nothing can change the way things are done now.”The social dominators want you to be disgusted with politics, they want you to feel hopeless, they want you out of their way. They want democracy to fail, they want your freedoms stricken, they want equality destroyed as a value, they want to control everything and everybody, they want it all. And they have an army of authoritarian followers marching with the militancy of “that old-time religion” on a crusade that will make it happen, if you let them.

​

NOTE: The book quoted above was published in 2006, a decade before Trump. The author coauthored a new book recently talking about the same thing with new data and with even more urgency.

Research found that supporters of Trump or Trump-like leaders tend to rely on each other and their authorities to maintain their belief. This is exactly like what many religious fundamentalists (e.g. evangelicals) do to maintain their beliefs. Interestingly, research also found that deep inside these religious fundamentalists don't believe their religion.

The Authoritarians (page 87)

>Most of us associate with people who agree with us on many issues. Birds of a feather do, empirically, tend to flock together. But this is especially important to authoritarians, who have not usually thought things out, explored possibilities, considered alternate points of view, and so on, but acquired their beliefs from the authorities in their lives. They then maintain their beliefs against new threats by seeking out those authorities, and by rubbing elbows as much as possible with people who have the same beliefs.

Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and His Followers (Chapter 8):

>So why did the greater religiousness of evangelicals not keep them from embracing Donald Trump? Because for a great many of them, despite all the fuss and bother and appearances, their religion is simply not important. Their religious commitment, like the person they think they are, does not exist in significant ways. When Donald Trump came along, resplendent in moral shortcomings but promising the moon, evangelicals had little difficulty setting aside their supposed beliefs and supporting him. In fact, this was their S.O.P. They had been setting those beliefs aside 167 hours a week for most of their lives. Con men know that the easiest people to fool are the people who persistently fool themselves. This reality is an amazingly simple answer, yet when you stand back from it, it also is simply amazing.

It is an eye-opening book to me. The author also coauthored a new book Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. This new book applies the years of research, a new targeted, larger scale survey and our experience with Trump so far to explain what has happened and predict what will happen if Trump get reelected. I highly recommend the new book.

I can assure you that the researcher sounds the alarm far earlier than most people and reiterates the important of constant vigilance because he noticed the massive and highly organized supporters of leaders like Trump in the US and Canada. It is not that Trump supporters and Trump are not predictable. It is that many people don't have valid models on these people.

From his 2006 book:

(page 2) >But authoritarianism itself has not disappeared, and I'm going to present the case in this book that the greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.

(page 253) >If the people who are not social dominators and right-wing authoritarians want to have those same rights in the future, they, you, had better do those same things too, now. You do have the right to remain silent, but you’ll do so at everyone’s peril. You can’t sit these elections out and say “Politics is dirty; I’ll not be part of it,” or “Nothing can change the way things are done now.”The social dominators want you to be disgusted with politics, they want you to feel hopeless, they want you out of their way. They want democracy to fail, they want your freedoms stricken, they want equality destroyed as a value, they want to control everything and everybody, they want it all. And they have an army of authoritarian followers marching with the militancy of “that old-time religion” on a crusade that will make it happen, if you let them.

From his 2020 book:

(page 161) >But first we must say that Trump’s supporters are entitled to back whomever they wish. Censoring their nonviolent messages, taking away their right to peacefully organize, restricting their right to vote would be an attack on the democracy one might claim to be protecting. You will find no appeal in this book to harass or intimidate the people who rushed to Donald Trump’s ranks, or any suggestion that the appropriate exercise of their democratic rights should be limited. If our means to the end are mean, the ends become unjust. Democracy will prevail if those who want it vote against tyranny, but not if they create tyranny themselves. In short, “the Resistance” must win at the ballot box repeatedly if our democracy is to reach, say, its 250th birthday in 2037. If Trump loses in 2020 you can be certain that he, who has “fixed” more outcomes than the World Wrestling Federation and whose campaign for the presidency involved deception and lying from the start, will tell his followers the election was rigged, and they will believe him. And even if Trump accepts the will of the majority and the Electoral College and leaves the White House, his backers will remain a very powerful force, ready to give undying loyalty to him for as long as he wants, and then to the next dictator-in-waiting. And the next one will almost certainly be smarter than Donald Trump. You can be sure someone is watching Trump closely, planning to step into his place. Thus, if you want to remain free, you will probably have to outvote today’s ardent Trump followers, not only in November 2020 but for some time in future elections. You may have heard that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. It is true.

The researcher I quoted performed original researches in the US and Canada, and has a very good track record on predicting what is happening in US. Some of the main correct predictions made in or before 2006 (a decade before Trump) are:

• America would elect someone like Trump.
• How do I know the author described someone like Trump? The author described the personality traits of the authoritarian leaders in thousands of words, and all of them are accurate description of Trump.
• Evangelicals would form the key constituent of the Trump-like leader.
• The Trump-like leader would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest, but the supporters would not abandon him.
• The Trump-like leader would pursue isolation policies.
• The Trump-like leader would not care about the environment.

I recommend people read more from him (summary 1 and summary 2). I also highly recommend a recent book coauthored by the researcher: Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. It ties his years of researches with Trump and Trump supporters.

Hopefully, these will give you more assurance.

Note that the article mentions that John Dean and Bob Altemeyer are releasing a new book (Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers) they coauthored. I haven't read it yet but I will because I think Altemeyer is the best researcher on Trump supporters and leaders like Trump.

I tried very hard to understand these Trump supporters. There are many hypotheses, but many of them are either untested, or their predictions turned out wrong, or their predictions apply to only a small subset of Republican voters (Trump supporters are about 80-90% of Republican voters.)

The best theory I found come from Altemeyer (summary 1 and summary 2). He predicted many things correctly and at least two decades before Trump was elected, when Fox News was just starting. I trust his theory more than any other hypotheses.

Some of the main correct predictions are:

• America would elect someone like Trump.
• How do I know the author described someone like Trump? The author described the personality traits of these leaders in thousands of words, and all of them are accurate description of Trump.
• Evangelicals would form the key constituent of the Trump-like leader.
• The Trump-like leader would be extremely corrupt, amoral and dishonest, but the supporters would not abandon him.
• The Trump-like leader would pursue isolation policies.
• The Trump-like leader would not care about the environment.

I recommend people read more from this Altemeyer.