Are We Really All Authoritarians at Heart?

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In light of American politics these days, with the possibility of a second Trump presidency looming, many think of authoritarianism as emerging exclusively from Right-wing politics. And while that side of the political fence may be where the biggest threat is coming from at the moment, there’s been no shortage of authoritarian leaders coming from the Left throughout history. Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, for example, were some of the most notorious Russian Communist authoritarians of the 20th century. More recently, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez led the “pink tide” Socialist movement that swept through Latin America during the 21st century.

Indeed, while it was once claimed in political psychology circles that Left-wing authoritarianism is a myth,¹ there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary both here in the United States and abroad.^2-7 Even a recent New York Times roundtable discussion made the argument—mostly through the opinion of political analyst Ross Douthat—that whether we're Left- or Right-leaning, “we’re all authoritarians at heart.”⁸

Why Authoritarianism Can Arise on Both the Right and Left

Once we understand authoritarianism—the term used to describe the psychological predisposition to support authoritarian leaders—it’s easy to see why authoritarian regimes can arise from both the Right and the Left. As I explained in my previous blog post, the historical notion that there are “authoritarian personalities” associated with a desire to forgo the personal freedoms afforded by democratic representation in favor of submitting to an authority figure is outdated.

Rather than thinking about authoritarianism in terms of psychopathology, we can instead understand it more simply as the desire to elect an authoritarian “strongman” leader willing to knock down the pillars of democracy in order to put down a perceived societal threat, typically in the form of enemies within, immigrants, and various “others.” In that way, those who support authoritarianism don’t see themselves as being the victims of trampling upon democracy that welcomes opposition; they see themselves as the beneficiaries.

Political psychologist Karen Stenner has characterized our support of authoritarianism as determined by what we see as the “appropriate balance between group authority and conformity vs. individual freedom and difference.”⁹ While the former perspective eschews pluralism in favor of the “normative order,” the latter values diversity and tolerates disagreement. Based on a simple, one-item measure about the value of authoritarian perspective on child-rearing, Stenner found that across 28 countries in the European Union, about 15 to 20 percent of both Left- and Right-leaning respondents supported authoritarianism in a 2016 survey.

A recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll revealed similar numbers in response to the question, “Do you think it would be a good thing, a bad thing, or neither a good nor bad thing for the next president to be able to take action on the country's important policy issues without having to worry about Congress or the courts?”¹⁰ Overall, 21 percent of U.S. respondents answered that it would be a “good thing,” including 17 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans.

While those numbers might not sound high enough to usher in a new authoritarian regime, affirmative responses more than doubled when asked the same question if the respondents’ party’s presidential candidate were elected in 2024 with 57 percent of Republicans answering “good thing” if Donald Trump is elected and 39 percent of Democrats answering “good thing” if Joe Biden is elected. Only 21 percent of Republicans and 26 percent of Democrats responded that it would be a “bad thing.” When asked the same question if the opposing candidate was in office, however, 76 percent of Republicans and 83 percent of Democrats responded that it would be a “bad thing.”

Anecdotally, I distinctly remember that more than a decade ago, some liberal friends had gone on social media advocating for sweeping gun control in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook at a time when Barack Obama was president and Democrats held the majority in the Senate. I warned them that trying to bulldoze such legislation while so many conservatives view their 2nd Amendment rights as sacrosanct might not be the best way to move forward and that one day the tables might be turned, with conservatives scaling back abortion rights, for example. Sure enough, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade a decade later, I was proven right.

Saving Democracy

Taken together, these findings make clear that the predisposition toward authoritarianism can also be thought of as a social attitude that’s dependent on motivated reasoning. Even in a democratic country like the United States, authoritarianism doesn’t look so bad to some of us—perhaps as many as 40 to 60 percent—when it involves pushing forward our own agendas over the objections of our ideological opposites.

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Conversely, we can see then that supporting democracy over authoritarianism requires that we tolerate those who disagree with us, even when that disagreement is rooted in heated moral opposition. That this often becomes untenable for some in an increasingly multicultural and pluralistic society helps to explain why authoritarian leaders arise from the flames of a failed democracy and why psychologists like Stenner have argued that the tendency to support authoritarianism is a constant or “eternal dynamic” within liberal democracies and that “liberal democracy has now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate it” in the United States.^₉

“Until we fix this central problem [of “tribalism, political polarization, alienation, and mutual distrust that has unfolded across the liberal democratic West”],” Stenner writes, “nothing else works.”

The New York Times’ Carlos Lozada puts it somewhat more positively:

…democracy is this very, very fragile bargain. And it’s not always based on a consensus over shared values, but a recognition by the various sides that they can’t achieve dominance. Democracy is not what partisans want, it’s what they settle for.⁸

If there’s any hope in saving American democracy, it will require that we settle for all the messiness and discomfort involved when we live together with our ideological opposites and embrace compromise while finding and working toward common goals. It will require that we accept that “We the People” isn’t a single, privileged group with the same religion, skin color, sexual orientation, values, morals, and political ideologies as our own. If we can’t or won’t do that, it could mean the end of democracy as we know it in the United States.

To read more about authoritarianism:

► Why Do People Choose Authoritarianism Over Democracy?