How this could be possible, was and is a topic in the literature. See, for example, the novel by Phillip Roth 'The plot against America' or Margarth Atwwod: The handmaid's tale and 'The testaments'. And the danger is not yet over. Even, after Biden has taken over power on 20th January, there is still a scenario possible á la Atwood. Indeed, the most mportant ingredient for such a scenario is the split of a population into almost two equal parties, of which one is more decided and consequent than the other. And, what is important: this part of the population needs (1) a topic and (2) a leader. Trump is still exploring his chances to impose martial law and to nullify election results..... Let's wait a couple of weeks and see what happens.

Dear Hubert, thank you for your comment...

Sometimes science fiction can turn out consistent with science.... Those scenarios of authoritarianism can be framed through parallel schemes where the two main components are effective targeted chaos (ETK) and legal loyalty to individual/party when in conflict, not to country/democracy, a situation that leads to either temporary or permanent authoritarianism....

Temporary authoritarianism comes from a shift from normal democratic outcome to an extreme democratic outcome(e.g. Trumpism) where the legal system remain loyal to country/democracy,,,,,,

Permanent authoritarianism can come in two ways, i) one step process(shift from a corrupt normal democratic outcome to an extreme democratic outcome) or ii) two steps process(shift from a normal democratic outcome to an extreme democratic outcome; and effective targeted chaos soon after gaining power aimed at to transform the legal loyalty to democracy/ country to legal loyalty to party/individual for when there is legal conflict....

These dynamics have been on since 2016, but the main parties and the general population in the USA cannot see that clearly yet as under paradigm shift knowledge gaps it is difficult to know how to act or how to react so the normal democratic outcome becomes hostage of the extreme democratic outcome, ....When a shift takes place, paradigm shift knowledge gaps are created….

To persist after coming to exist, the extreme democratic outcome needs to win all cost, even when it loses; and to win even when it loses it needs to have courts with legal loyalty to party/individual, not to country/democracy.

To persist after a loss the extreme democratic outcome needs, not political loyalty only, it needs at the last result the sealing touch....legal loyalty to party/individual....

In his coming last ditch to win when it has lost, Trumpism may win a political loyalty test in congress/senate, but when it reaches the loyalty to country/democracy courts at the supreme court, the normal democratic outcome(Biden) win WILL BE RETIFY in the supreme court or the supreme court will not even hear the case as show of independence.....

If the USA supreme court were to put party/individual loyalty over country/democracy loyalty, it will be the end of president Lincoln dream of "a government of the people by the people for the people" and become a " government of the minority by the minority for the minority" and the end of democracy in the USA as the seeds for permanent authoritarianism would be in place, where win or lose, the extreme democratic outcome or Trumpism persist....

Assuming that the USA Supreme Court is still an independent body that puts country/democracy before party/individual it will reject fake facts and require facts and proof, this first try of Trumpism is done....

Assuming that the last 3 judges added to the supreme court during Trumpism transformed the court into a corrupt court that puts party/individual over country/democracy by accepting fake facts and leaving the facts and proof aside, then Trumpism will persist, and real widespread chaos will begin to force Trumpism out....

Sadly, as Trumpism requires loyalty to party/individual, it does not care about the political, social, and economic cost inflicted to the country/democracy, it only cares about PERSISTING...

Understanding the dynamics that rule the shift from normal democratic outcome to extreme democratic outcome ; and the conditions needed for them to persist or to be neutralized is important to properly safeguard democracy/country in the future….

I am just right now putting together a set of articles to be published in 2021 bringing out the ideas related to the structures of democracy that ensure the persistence of normal democratic outcomes through the fortification of the independent rule of law….and make it difficult for extreme democratic outcomes to come to exist, and to make it impossible to have the conditions that allow extreme democratic outcomes to persist when they lose when trying to come into existence or when they lose after they have come into existence…

Thank you for your comment and the links to science fiction to the question at hand.

Respectfully yours

Dear Hubert and friends, given the suspense for what happened in the USA during the 2016 election and what happened during Trumpism period 2016-2020 and what is happening after the 2020 election, I will share here two key figures in the series of papers I will have out during 2021....

To have an idea of what to expect after the challenges Trumpism has placed after losing the 2020 election, and the coming challenges left in congress and senate, and what ending to expect, I will share my view about what is at stake in the USA,,,,

I am doing this with positive intentions from the researcher point of view as I am not a politician as the average American and perhaps the average politician cannot see it, and whatever happens in the USA will validate this research later on:

Two possible endings, all depending on the type of rule of law under which the Trumpism challenge is addressed:

A) The case of temporary authoritarianism in the USA

If the legal rule of law in the USA is based on loyalty to country/democracy over loyalty to party/individual, we are going to see the end of temporary authoritarianism in the USA, a situation summarized in Figure 11 attached:

Or

B) The birth of permanent authoritarianism in the USA

If the legal rule of law in the USA has been corrupted and it is now based on loyalty to party/individual over loyalty to country/democracy, we are going to see the birth of permanent authoritarianism in the USA, a situation summarized in Figure 12 attached

Let's see which way normal liberal democracy in the USA goes in the end, if it persists or if it fades away

Wishing you health and a nice holiday

Hi, Lucio,

In response to your question, "When can permanent authoritarianism take hold under majority rule liberal democracies?" My initial, perhaps slightly humorous or sarcastic reaction that flashed through my mind was, “Whenever majorities in liberal democracies feel like it.”

In a more serious vein, your question reminded me of the classic example of Germans first voting Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists into power in Germany in 1933, followed by overall public support for the elimination of any political institutions that were supposed to keep executive power in check—and with one of those institutions, the courts of law, readily going along with the transfer of all power to the executive, in keeping with the legal theories of interwar German legal scholar Carl Schmitt.

That in turn made me think of Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the “state of exception” when, usually in the face of national crisis and emergency, executive power claims the right to ignore and go around the law, constitutional institutions and customs, and anything else that stands in the way of executive power.

That in turn made me reflect upon how power perhaps will always tend toward seeking a state of exception that justifies removing all limits on power, and will thus also seek either to claim or to create a state of crisis that justifies the state of exception. That is, any chance power gets, any loophole it can exploit, it may inexorably tend to go in that direction.

Your question also made me return to an idea I’d considered glumly over at various points over the past four years: Germans, in the early 1930s and the Great Depression, with an unemployment rate of—what was it?—over 30%, were facing a truly serious crisis that threatened the lives of many of their fellow citizens as well as the existence of the entire nation, when they made their fateful, terrible wrong decision to follow Hitler. Germans, as such, had at least a better explanation, if not an excuse, for allowing themselves to be panicked and terrified into embracing the “state of exception.”

Americans had nowhere near as good an explanation or excuse for a sufficient number of them to foolishly embrace a dangerous and inadequate leader whose main ambition was, in effect, to assume unbridled, dictatorial power—to do whatever he wished, regardless of the other institutions of government and their traditions and customs. That is, yes, some regions of the nation were not doing as well or cashing in as effectively on the post-2008, post-Mortgage Meltdown “reinflation of the bubble” economy that tended to direct most wealth in America to rich people and corporations in other regions (“the Coasts”). But they weren’t anywhere close to the state of desperation in Depression-era, pre-Nazi Germany. They also, of course, could have used political processes all along to help redress individual and regional inequalities.

[Which raises another aspect of the whole issue that never ceases to strike me as bizarre: Those Americans who were suffering at the hands of an economy that functions as a powerful engine to generate inequality, could not meaningfully confront that engine of inequality, because at the same time, they already largely worshiped that economy as a pseudo-religion. So their only solution to the situation in which they found themselves was to “double down”—to do, even more aggressively, the very thing that was injuring them, while becoming increasingly angry and resentful about being injured. And their emotional commitment to their pseudo-religion kept them from doing what would have been required to stop their injuries.]

So anyway, although a truly horrific national crisis may always bring a nation to a state of exception or dangerously close to that state of exception, a real crisis also isn’t necessary to bring a nation dangerously close to a state of exception. The public, or large portions of the public, can imagine that there is a crisis, if they find that emotionally satisfying—sort of like QAnon conspiracy theorists delight in spinning out their absurd conspiracy theories, even when there’s nothing there to support them—and, of course, leaders who would like to harness those dangerous emotions and energies can whip them up quite effectively, as Trump and other demagogues have done throughout human history. [Here I’m reminded of Hermann Goering’s statement at the Nuremberg War Trials of how easy it is to start beating the drums of war and to get people to follow, mindlessly.] Or there perhaps is no real need for any sort of crisis, real or imagined; the public, or segments of the public, can also simply decide that they wish to be free of restraints on executive power more or less on a whim, sort of like the fans of Ayn Rand novels.

It occurs to me that because humans like to justify their acts, and typically do so with rationalizations even if they cannot do so with legitimate reasons, there are various different interrelated factors that all feed into the mix in supplying a claim of right for a state of exception. That is, a truly dire, real national emergency may always, inherently and inevitably, tend to provide such a claim of right, and will always be extremely hard to resist as such. But an imagined or invented crisis will work equally well if enough of the public can be persuaded to believe in it. A sense of entitlement (or, if you prefer, “exceptionalism”), based upon nationalist or populist sentiments and emotions, perhaps can provide a claim of right to a state of exception without any crisis. But given the nature of human psychology, and the especially powerful effect of fear—or better yet, fear converted to hatred—as a motivating factor to mobilize the public, probably factors like these always will be woven together in actual practice. Pre-Nazi Germany faced an actual crisis, but Nazis also very effectively drew upon an ultra-nationalist (but also, ironically, populist—National Socialists always claimed to be the friends of the “common working man” in Germany) sense of entitlement (Germans liking to believe that they were in fact “the Master Race”), as well as imagined crises or mortal threats (whipping up irrational fear and hatred of the Jews (and others) and of an international Jewish conspiracy that threatened the “Master Race”). Trump’s base of supporters eagerly joined Their Leader in imagining crises and threats to “justify” (rationalize) feelings of fear and hatred toward their supposed enemies, together with a rather similar mixture of ultra-nationalism and populism that produced a radicalized conservatism, all of which combined to give Trump supporters a feeling of entitlement to indulge in the emotional power-rush that comes with fear turned to hatred and self-righteous anger—as well as a feeling of entitlement to allow Their Leader to flout all legal and constitutional restraints on his power and create an Agambenian “state of exception.”

Nazi Germany always provides sort of the classic example of this horrifically toxic syndrome, a quite modern, comparatively very well-educated nation and public nightmarishly running off the rails and triggering the greatest global catastrophe the world has yet seen. [Hence the cry at the time and later—“How could the nation that produced Beethoven and Goethe also set loose Hitler?”] But Nazi Germany was only an especially extreme example of a much wider syndrome. Japan, by the 1920s, also had made itself into a quite modern and generally well-educated nation, yet in the 1930s, enough Japanese actually believed that their emperor was a “God-Emperor,” and that the Japanese themselves were in fact a “Master Race” because they were all descended from the Sun Goddess while other people weren’t, that the Japanese felt a sense of entitlement to rampage throughout Asia and the Pacific, committing many unspeakable atrocities often on par with those of the Nazi Germans. Nearly all of Trump’s supporters received a standard basic education, and many of them also went to college. The United States was also a relatively modern and well-educated nation when it entered a Trump-like cycle of fear, hatred, and ultra-nationalism with the onset of the Cold War and the post-World War II “Red Scare” and era of McCarthyism. [People outside the United States may be more likely not to be aware that Roy Cohn, who coached and mentored U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy in his very effective harnessing of fear and hatred to gain political power back in the 1950s, also coached and mentored the young Donald Trump.]

[And, after four years of miserable and embarrassing failures by the worst, most corrupt and incompetent president the American nation has yet seen, his “base”—that roughly 40% of Americans who always steadfastly supported Trump through all the many scandals and crises that rocked his failed administration—remain rock solid even now. Rather like the followers of a death cult. Or the Nazi SS (the “true believers” in Nazism and Hitler during the years of the Third Reich). In other words, the devotion to Trump is irrational, emotional, and quasi-religious, not rational—however apologists might try to rationalize it.]

Which all perhaps tends to confirm novelist Joseph Conrad’s observation in “Heart of Darkness” that all civilization, modernity, education, and other such trappings are really only thin veneers covering the dark areas of the human mind and spirit, all of which always remain strong, undiminished, and ready to surge back into power whenever the chance presents itself.

[I should note for the record: I’ve recently been studying the history of the Japanese American internment during World War II, when roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans—some of them non-citizens and thus legally “enemy nationals” during wartime, but many others of them born in the United States and therefore U.S. citizens—were herded into detention camps for the duration of the war. Most such families lost almost all their possessions, as well as their homes, farms, and businesses. This is considered one of the single greatest episodes of mass violation of human rights and constitutional rights in U.S. history. [The whole vast, long history of mistreatment of African Americans in the United States does not usually fit into such discrete episodes.] The Japanese American internment was triggered by a very real crisis—America’s abrupt entry into World War II with the Japanese sinking of most of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in December 1942—but the actual crisis was further magnified by imagined crises, fear and vehement hatred and anger toward the Japanese in Japan, and association of the Japanese in America with Japanese in Japan—as well as a long earlier pre-war history of racist attitudes, hostility, and suspicion toward Japanese immigrants on the U.S. West Coast where such immigrants traditionally were concentrated. One of the other great episodes of mass human rights and constitutional violations in U.S. history, though, notably came without any real crisis. In the 1830s, the “Five Civilized Tribes” of Native Americans, who had settled down to live and practice agriculture on their traditional ancestral lands in the Southeastern United States in a manner quite similar to their Anglo neighbors, were forcibly removed from their land and were forced to resettle in unfamiliar lands west of the Mississippi River, in a process, later labeled “The Trail of Tears,” that cost thousands of Native American lives along with general anguish and other great suffering. This happened simply because white Americans wanted the Native Americans’ valuable land, and removal of the Native Americans became politically popular as such. White Americans no longer had any real basis for fearing the Native Americans, but rather felt an overarching sense of entitlement based upon assumptions of racial superiority—together with, ironically, a sense of entitlement based upon populism: “Jacksonian Democracy” of the 1820s-1830s, named for popular president Andrew Jackson who would champion the Native American removal, was known for its populist sentiments that all white American men should have both the right to vote and the right to economic opportunity—and the right to Native American land if they wanted it. [Note some similarities to the populist dimension of National Socialism in Germany.] The United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Japanese American internment under the circumstances of the Second World War—at least until very recently. In the 1830s, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Native Americans’ title and claim of rights to their land, but President Jackson and his supporters ignored the Court and set about removing the Native Americans anyway.]

[For the record, I’ve been using the somewhat cumbersome term “Native American” here, instead of “Indian” or “American Indian,” both to avoid any possibility of confusion with immigrants to America from South Asia, as well as for the sake of any readers who, like me, were taught while growing up in the 1970s-1980s not to use the terms “Indian” or “American Indian.” However, the latter terms reportedly are more popular even among Native Americans in describing themselves and their heritage, and those terms seem to have come back into general use. I used the traditional term “internment” to describe the fate of the Japanese Americans during World War II, but some historians have argued that the term is both legally inaccurate and too weak to describe what was, in effect, the creation of a system of concentration camps.]

Now I’ve rambled on way too long (and probably uselessly), so I should apologize. I find these issues both interesting and disturbing, and I’ve been tossing them around in my own mind for a while now. Probably anything I’ve said is either wrong or else already has been said better by others.

But I suppose my basic point, if I have any, is this: The forces supporting conventional law and order, constitutionality, liberal democracy, and other such institutions, customs, and traditions, are always already locked in a death struggle with the darker forces of human nature that would readily toss aside such institutions to embrace unlimited executive power; but that actual ongoing struggle isn’t so apparent most of the time, during “normal” times when the established institutions appear to be comfortably in control while the darker forces of raw power and reckless disorder are (mostly) submerged. Which tends to lead to a dangerously complacent assumption that the established institutions are and always will be totally triumphant, and the dark forces already have been banished forever. [The assumption, tacitly noted and dismissed by Conrad, that we, as human beings, have simply and finally progressed to the point where we’re beyond all that darkness and evil, which henceforth will only be a thing of the past.] And I suppose that the established institutions, by their operation and persistence over years, do generate some significant inertia favoring their continuation, and their aura of power tends to give them some actual power, and so on. Yet what strikes me is how rapidly that supposed power can be eroded. And I’m thinking that the reason for that is this: the eternally ongoing, but sometimes submerged or invisible, death struggle between conventional, established, “humane” political and cultural institutions and the “forces of darkness” I’ve been alluding to is actually primarily a competition between different human emotions and emotional states. That is, actual events and objective reality influence the whole process and provide trigger points, certainly, but the real battle is and always must be fought on an emotional level, which is where most of human existence resides (far more so than on a rational level). And that, moreover, is why, typically or too often, “the center does not hold” during times of crisis (or merely perceived, imagined, or invented crisis)—basically, because whatever the conventional institutions are able to provide, emotionally, cannot compete with the dangerous but alluring and addictive elixir of fear, hatred, nationalism/populism, and self-righteous anger growing out of all these that gives humans a satisfying emotional power-rush of entitlement, exceptionalism, and empowerment. And that helps explain why conservative parties with no practical solutions to offer, but with power and appealing emotional messages, routinely thrive during times of perceived crisis. It also helps explain Trumpism, Brexit, the election (and continued American mass adulation) of Ronald Reagan (and a whole lot of other things I personally wish never had happened).

Conventional political institutions can, and do, seek to harness the power of emotion in various ways, including through the inculcation of “polite” patriotism as a form of quasi-religion—I can remember the morning flag salute in grade school, as well as being taught to revere the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. federal government system with its separation of powers, etc., etc. [Americans love to celebrate, even worship, their Constitution, but—also note the two episodes cited earlier, where at the times of greatest need, the U.S. Constitution unfortunately was revealed to be only a paper tiger. Nor are those the only examples.] But ironically, any such emotional support for and commitment to conventional institutions can be rapidly commandeered by the dark forces of unlimited power and used against the conventional institutions simply by persuasively and successfully—in other words, emotionally—claiming that the dark forces truly represent the correct understanding of the nation and its institutions. Leading to yet another struggle over emotional states, plus a superficial, quasi-religious battle over definitions and labels to rationalize the underlying emotional struggle.

[I wonder whether Freud already discussed all this a century ago in “Civilization and Its Discontents”? That’s still on my reading list …. ]

So far, I haven’t even touched the important situations you raise, where personal and family loyalties trump institutions of liberal democracy. [Thinking of personal loyalties as attachments between people who actually know each other, rather than the cult-worship of some remote figure like a film celebrity or a rock star—or Adolf Hitler, or Ronald Reagan, or Donald Trump. Though I guess the latter sort—“cult of the personality”—is also a type of personal loyalty, and one of the most powerful of all for defeating liberal political institutions.] Your discussion makes me think of the various new, post-colonial nations of Latin America in the 1800s, which struggled to follow the example of the United States by creating modern, liberal-democratic governments and societies, but whose efforts tended to founder, repeatedly, on the rocks of traditional and powerful individual and family loyalties. [But of course the same overall process has tended to damage or defeat similar efforts at liberal democracy on other continents in more recent times as well. As with the Roman Republic many centuries ago, I suppose.]

That makes me think, in turn, of something that’s bothered me for years in present-day America, which is: Why do we have political dynasties at all, in a supposedly liberal-democratic society and political system? Why is the very idea of a dynasty—of entitlement to power just because you’re related to somebody else who has power—not entirely abhorrent to citizens of a liberal democracy? Mercifully for the United States, none of Ronald Reagan’s children were particularly politically inclined; but we got a dynasty of too many of the Bushes, the Clintons struggled mightily to become a dynasty, the Trumps hope to become a dynasty (heaven forbid!), we’ve seen far too many of the Kennedys over far too many years and decades by now (though that strong dynastic line may finally be waning somewhat, sixty years later); and then there are of course countless dynasties at the state level in the United States, the Browns in California being one notable example (and perhaps a relatively worthy one, even for somebody like me who is suspicious of dynasties on principle).

A notable feature of these dynasties is that along with the family loyalty, they also focus, often obsessively, on other personal loyalties. The Bush clan has been described as being like the Mafia when it comes to both family and personal loyalties. The Clinton administration was ruled by a powerful network of “Friends of Bill,” who probably also intended and expected to be “Friends of Hillary.” [And perhaps even “Friends of Chelsea” down the road. Chelsea seems like the most decent and least power-hungry member of her family, so I sort of hope she gets to mostly avoid politics and just lead a decent, happy life.] I assume the Kennedys were similar, though I really don’t know. Given the depth of criminal or quasi-criminal corruption already clearly demonstrated among the Trumps, if they are able to form a political dynasty, their Mafia-like family and personal loyalties will likely be even beyond the Bushes’.

In theory at least, I would tend to think that citizens of a liberal democracy would and should be absolutely horrified by what strike me as clear violations of the basic principles of liberal democracy, along with related concepts or institutions such as professionalism, transparency, and other such devices that were supposed to banish traditional corruption and nepotism. Basically, wherever you have a premium placed upon close personal and family connections, you inevitably will have a much-increased probability of corruption.

But instead, the general public apparently loves dynasties, and is titillated to read about them, as well as about the close relationships between powerful people—in politics the same as in the movie industry, rock bands, and powerful corporations. In fact, people—even citizens of liberal democracies—seem to feel an excitement and worshipful adoration regarding power and concentrations of power. This worship of power in visible human form—celebrity-mongering—goes against the theories and practices of liberal democratic government that seek to control, limit, and disperse power precisely to prevent dangerous concentrations of power in too few hands—as with the doctrine of separation of powers dating back to Montesquieu or even earlier. The kind of people who worship celebrities because they’re celebrities, or who worship very rich people because they’re very rich, are the kind of people who also will be less worried about seeing power concentrate in the executive branch. In fact, they might even get a bit of an emotional high at the thought of it. But—seemingly—that’s most people.

So, for instance, a lot of people drooled effusively over President John F. Kennedy primarily because he was very rich and had a glamourous wife—features which, at least in theory, should have pretty much nothing to do with the office of the presidency. [Though in practice, of course we all know better—since the presidency actually is all about creating images and stimulating positive emotional responses.] Later, a lot of people drooled effusively over Donald Trump because he was a wealthy celebrity, regardless of his total lack of qualifications for political office. Which all tends to suggest that a very substantial percentage of the population (or perhaps all of us?), even in a modern and supposedly well-educated nation with a supposedly liberal-democratic system of government, really aren’t that well-equipped for self-government or bearing the burdens of citizenship in a liberal democracy—which, to be done right, would require rational judgment, not enthusiastic emotional responses.

I recently encountered an interesting article about the social and political structure of baboon “societies,” in which everything is controlled by family clans of female sisters, with elaborate hierarchy both within individual clans as well as between different clans, and with that hierarchy enforced very aggressively by the dominant clans and clan members. I would venture to suggest that humans’ acceptance of, and even delight in, political dynasties and networks of powerful insiders based upon personal loyalties cannot be explained rationally in terms of liberal democratic theory (either that of John Rawls or anybody else’s)—but it can be explained rather well by looking at primate evolution and primate psychology/sociology. Similarly, humans’ seemingly hard-wired fascination with families and clans, as well as with interpersonal power relationships and hierarchies, which also translates into celebrity worship as well as the worship of any concentration of power with a human face on it, helps explain why hereditary monarchies ever developed in the first place and proved to be so persistent over so many centuries and millennia. [And overcame the apparently more egalitarian social structure of traditional hunter-gatherer societies.] And it may help explain why, again contrary to liberal democratic theory, humans are, in a sense, always in the process, or at least always awaiting an opportunity, to recreate the sorts of hereditary monarchies that, emotionally if not rationally, they seem to adore.

And now I REALLY must apologize for spewing what is probably just a lot of wordy nonsense! But anyway, good luck with your interesting research.

That is an interesting and timely discussion! Lucio's question is right to the point, as are the remarks by Herbert and Scott.

I think Scott's first line hits a nail that has not been hammered yet: “Whenever majorities in liberal democracies feel like it.”

Political developments like this require a tendency among the voters, or more precisely: an authoritarian leader needs authoritarian followers. Someone wanting to take the stage as 'the strong man', is always available somewhere, ready in the wings waiting for the opportunity, but usually the societal conditions are not helpful. An important condition is the presence of potential followers with the right psychological built-up, the right sort of fundamental need, a craving for submitting to a strong leader, a craving for mindless following and a craving to be allowed to be violent.

The main characteristic of these followers appears to be authoritarianism and the level of authoritarian attitudes in society fluctuates over time. Sometimes authoritarianism in the population appears to be on the rise, sometimes going down again. In a period of high authoritarianism, the potential leader can step forward and the whole circus gets started with fascism, racism, discrimination, violence and so on.

There has been a lot of research on this. I refer to Adorno et al. 1950, 'The Authoritarian Personality'. Their work got lots of attention in the 1950s and 1960s as well as lots of research. However, it went out of fashion and nowadays it is not even remembered, although a few colleagues have done excellent work since, especially Meloen (1983, 1991, 1994 etc.) in the Netherlands and Altemeyer (1981, 1998 etc.) in Canada.They did great work and solved quite a bit of the scientific puzzles.

So, I think an important factor in understanding phenomena like Trump and the man we already mentioned in 1930's Germany, is to realise that such a man needs a base of followers, with a strong need for security and a great readiness to follow the authoritarian leader.

If I may quote from an book chapter by myself (I did some work on the subject in the past): "Authoritarianism can best be described as a syndrome of dogmatic, totalitarian attitudes (regardless whether expressed as support for radical rightist, leftist, religious fundamentalist or any other extreme system of convictions), an eagerness to submit unconditionally to the authority figures representing that system and a readiness to join in aggression and violence if leaders require or allow this."

For more on this see my publications on the subject here in Researchgate. I did not upload full texts. Besides some of it is in Dutch, but you can get a copy in English from me, if you are interested.

So, apart from all the political factors we see, and apart from sociological factors like unemployment, poverty, backwardness, existential insecurity, we must also look at the psychological background. May be, there is an important factor to be found there helping us to understand what is presently happening!

Dear Scott and Laurens, thank you for your detailed comments.

Your comments summarize in detail all the dynamics involved with respect to how authoritarianism conditions came about and take hold(e.g the experience in Germany and Japan), which are consistent with the structure of temporary authoritarianism in Figure11 and permanent authoritarianism in Figure 12 if we just change the nature of the chaos that bring temporary authoritarianism first and the type of chaos that completes the hold of permanent authoritarianism…

I am attempting an outside the box way to look at the same issues from the point of view of paradigm shifts from normal democratic outcomes/normal liberal democracies to extreme democratic outcomes/extreme liberal democracias and paradigm shift back linking targeted chaos(TK) to specific target complacency conditions, where effective targeted chaos(ETK) shift the normal democratic outcome to become an extreme democratic outcome as the normal democratic outcome then loses the democratic contest…leading to a war between the true majority view and the true minority view…. Only from this view you can see that Trumpism is authoritarianism with a TWIST that differenciate it from traditional way of looking at the coming and going of authoritarian regimes…

For example, your comment….“Whenever majorities in liberal democracies feel like it.” under majority rule based liberal democracies and targeted chaos can be shown to be a wrong statement as it does not fit what happen with the coming of BREXIT/BREXISM and USEXIT/TRUMPISM as in both cases the true majorities were tricked to take voting actions that later came to bite them later as the minority view won the democratic contest leading to widespread social discontent in 2016 both in the UK and in the USA as soon as it was revealed that what was impossible had happened, the minority view won the democratic contest….

If we have a democratic model V that brings together people into two voting groups G1 and G2, the general democracy model with one person one vote where everybody votes can be stated as follows:

1) D = V = G1.G2

a) if G1>G2

then

2) D = V = G1.G2--------> G1 wins the democratic contest as G1 > G2

b) if G1 < G2

then

3) D = V = G1,G2--------> G2 wins the democratic contest as G1 < G2

In these two cases if G1 or G2 or both chooses to go authoritarian, then your premise is right, when the majority wants there is authoritarianism,,,, but that is not what happens when there are extreme democratic outcomes like Trumpism…..

c) extreme democratic outcomes can only come to exist using effective targeted chaos ETK, the one that leads to full true majority complacency tricking the true majority so the true majority votes collapses and the true minority count goes up and wins

If we subject formula 2 to effective targed chaos that leads to full true majority complacency in group G1, then the outcome is reverse and group G2 the minority view wins

ETKG1 [D ] = ETKG1[V] = ETKG1[G1].G2-------> G2 wins the democratic contest as now G1 < G2

The same can happen with Formula 3 if we appled effective targeted chaos to the majority G2(EFTG2).

Hence, the true majority can be tricked using effective targeted chaos, which is what leads to extreme democratic outcome to come to exist when it thought that is impossible to happen as it happened in 2016 in the USA and in the UK.

You may find the following articles interesting, with rules of how complacency and targeted chaos work in all possible scenarious to show that only one scenario leads to extreme democratic outcomes….

Moral and Amoral Liberal Democracies: How Targeted Chaos Can Affect the Democratic Process?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329905677_Moral_and_Amoral_Liberal_Democracies_How_Targeted_Chaos_Can_Affect_the_Democratic_Process

The 2016 shift from normal liberal democracy to extreme liberal democracy in the USA: Pointing out the structure of Trumpconomics, its meaning, and its expected local and global implications, both analytically and graphically

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334964196_The_2016_shift_from_normal_liberal_democracy_to_extreme_liberal_democracy_in_the_USA_Pointing_out_the_structure_of_Trumpconomics_its_meaning_and_its_expected_local_and_global_implications_both_analyti

Have a nice day

I am writing this under the impression of the events on 6th January, and feel confirmed by my intuition in my first comment (26th December): it's not yet over. Together with these events, he commeents by the other contributors motivate me to some additional thoughts. There are so many attempts providing a taxonomy of political regimes. Let me mention Dani Rodrik's 2017 paper, where he developed a model to sharpen the contrast between electoral and liberal democracies. An electoral democracy seems close to Lucio's concept of temporary authoritarianism (= 'extreme democratic outcome'): majority decisions are ruthlessly executed, but they are backed by a majority. In a liberal democracy, the wishes of the majority finds their limits in the individual rights of minorities, defended by variou check-and-balance institutions (among them, federal states in the US). Insofar, Trump's reign was not yet temporary authoritarianism, because liberal democracies still dominated in many federal states, as electoral ones even prior to Trump. Insofar, Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Russia are still electoral democracies at different degrees. The next step is to transform an electoral democracy into authoritarianism without fair elections and election campaigns. What Trump tried to do was/is exactly this by mobilizing his basis for an direct (no step in between) transformation of a liberal democracy into a authoritarian regime. Whether his authoritarianism is temporary (certainly not an extreme democracy) or permanent, can be assessed only ex-post. Therefore, I am sceptical with respect to identy temporary authoritarianism with an 'extreme' democracy. There is an unclear demarcation. Hopefully, nothing nasty will happen until 20th January.....

Best

Hubert

P.S. Mukand and Rodrik: The political economy of liberal democracy, Cesifo Working Paper 6433, April 2017.www.CESifo-group.org/wp

Hubert,

Extreme liberal democracy is the one where the minority view wins the democratic contest so the extreme democratic outcome reflect the best interest of the minority/party/individual, which set it into ongoing conflict with the normal democratic values, norms and institutions that are in place when it takes place...if the legal system remains independent it will lead to temporary authoritarianism as it can not persist if it loses one election...

If while in power it corrupts the legal system then it goes into permanent authoritarianism as even if it loses a reelection the corrupt legal system will back him up for what ever reason.... trumpism was temporary authoritarianism as it lost an election under independent courts where facs an proof matter

Dear Hubert and friends, the reason why it is difficult to see how authoritarianism (temporary or permanent) can come out of a majority rule based liberal democracy model is because such an outcome falls outside traditional democracy theory thinking as it is a kind of outlier that comes to exist only when specific voter complacency conditions are present, so I have taken up to my self to propose a new theory of liberal democracy that can capture the structure of normal liberal democracy and normal democratic outcome when they come to exist and persist and the structure of extreme liberal democracy and democratic outcome when the come to exist and persist separately in order to show how a shift from one model to another is linked with authoritarianims tendency and with true democracy tendencies and the implications related to those situations. Then you can see clearly what needs to be done to ensure that in the worse case scenario you have temporary authoritarianism and the normal scenario leads to normal democratic outcomes....to ensure democracy prevails in the end....

Then you can easily point out the shift structure of why Trumpism failed to persist for example and why BREXIT has persisted so far

Below is the article proposing such a liberal democracy model while pointing out how it works....Take a look at it when you have time, it has some good food for thoughts...consistent with what happen in the USA in november 2016 when trumpism came to exist to november 2020 when Trumpism failed to persist,,,,

Sustainability thoughts 132: How a general majority rule based liberal democracy model can be stated step by step and how it can be linked to normal democratic outcome and extreme democratic outcome existing and persisting dynamics?

Article Sustainability thoughts 132: How can a general majority rule...

I’ve been meaning to respond to Laurens’ interesting earlier contribution for some time, now—regarding the particular mass psychological state that allows a nation and society to willingly abandon democratic institutions in favor of authoritarian or totalitarian ones.

It made me think how recent events in the United States may have called into question earlier explanations of how that process could happen.

[And I was thinking of this, and we were all discussing this, before the now-infamous events that occurred in Washington, DC on January 6, but those events perhaps add an exclamation point to the whole matter.]

Anyway, returning to the earlier question of how relatively democratic, modern nations like Germany and Japan could have gone so dangerously off the rails to become Nazi Germany and militarist Imperial Japan in the 1930s—

Of course, both nations suffered during the Great Depression, like other nations, though Germany in particular, bearing the additional burden of the Treaty of Versailles and such, suffered even worse than its neighbors (even higher unemployment, etc.). But that’s still not quite a sufficient explanation for the global nightmares that followed in the Second World War.

In America, during the decades since the war, and presumably in other nations as well, various explanations have been offered. At least one substantial cluster of such explanations tends to center on how Germany and Japan, notwithstanding their modernization and development of elected representative legislatures and such, remained fundamentally more militaristic and authoritarian cultures, with a greater feeling of a need for structure, order, and hierarchy, which were for that reason more inclined to go in the direction they both did under the pressure of the Great Depression (and so on). Plus that their democratic institutions were too young and insufficiently developed to withstand the pressure (and so on).

My impression is that also in America, reflection on the events of World War II and its aftermath produced a more general critique of “corporatist” or “communalistic” societies as inherently inclined toward authoritarianism/totalitarianism by always too readily sacrificing the individual to the group will—and this line of thinking helped to extend the critique further from just Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to also include America’s major rivals in the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Maoist China. On the domestic scene in the U.S., this critique famously took the form of studies treating “the corporation man” (who dutifully took his orders from a large institution and followed them) and “other-directed” behavior (people working to fit in with a group rather than express their own individuality) as, in a sense, socially toxic and closely related to the same sort of mass psychology that produced the unquestioning herd behavior that led to Nazism, Japanese militarism, Stalinism, and so on.

And the American “solution” to this supposed problem was to celebrate the individual, and individual rights, as the highest aim and goal of society—in a sense taking the understandings and assumptions of traditional human societies, going back through the ages to medieval and ancient peasant agricultural societies and even prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies—namely, that individuals existed to support and reflect the will of the overall group, tribe, society—and turned these traditional understandings and assumptions on their heads—no, instead, it was the purpose of society to elevate the individual and allow him/her full and unfettered self-expression, etc. [John Stuart Mill was already experimenting with such ideas in mid-Victorian England, of course, and Mill was culturally “rediscovered” and saw a surge of popularity in America during the 1960s-1970s—notably even before the neoliberal takeover of American culture, society, and government that started to take root in the 1970s and visibly “metastasized” (if you’ll pardon the metaphor) with the election and administration of President Ronald Reagan (before it all got even worse with additional surges of neoliberalism under Presidents George W. Bush and, of course, the most recent disastrous failure to inhabit the White House, Donald Trump).]

[As a strange little stray example of (what I assume is) the particularly American notion that the solution to all human problems is more individualism, many years ago during the late 1980s, I was struck by what I found to be the weird case of my best friend’s first girlfriend in college. Earlier, in her early teens—and probably more than anything because she was in an overall poor state of health, nutritionally and otherwise, like so many young Americans, and especially girls (the 1980s were the heyday of teen female anorexia in America)—she became depressed to the point of being suicidal. Her affluent parents in Orange County, California sent her to a psychiatrist (not to a nutritionist). That psychiatrist taught her to think only of herself to prevent her from slipping back toward depressed or suicidal thoughts. She thereafter became, in effect, a shameless psychopath, lying, manipulating other people, and other such toxic behavior, and could (and did) always justify it with the argument that she simply had to do all that—and, essentially, whatever she wanted—to save herself. Meanwhile, by contrast, my sisters and I were brought up by our German-American mother, who herself had been raised by a German immigrant grandmother who dated back to the late 1800s—so we were in a sense throw-backs to an earlier time, raised to participate in a more traditional, corporatist/communalistic culture even as the culture around us was swinging rapidly (and perhaps recklessly?) toward individualism. We never fit that well in our own culture as such, and we also tended to get along better with other kids who, for reasons of their own family and cultural backgrounds, had been brought up in a more “corporatist” culture and were thus also throw-backs to earlier times—like the children of Asian or Latin American immigrants who typically had much more traditional (and less individualistic) understandings and expectations regarding their children and their place in the family and in society more generally.]

[I also remember what was my first experience of what I found to be a toxic neoliberal culture, with individuals selfishly rampaging out of control and society seemingly feeling powerless to do anything about it. This was when I spent a semester abroad in London, UK during college. It was a horrible semester. The city seemed to be full of people who had lost the ability to act like human beings. It seemed as though certain brash, aggressive individuals were doing whatever they pleased—sort of a form of societal bullying—while the rest of the populace existed in something like a permanent state of siege, sullen, angry, defensive, and rigidly uncommunicative, I suppose to resist the obnoxious and unbridled bullies that the rest of society was doing nothing to control. This was during the later Thatcher years, and also the tail end of the Punk Rock era in London, when attitudes that had started as an extreme cultural or fashion statement in the late 1970s among a very few cultural experimenters/pioneers had become more or less widespread and institutionalized among the youth of London—so all the youth were, in effect, encouraged by their wider society and popular culture to be freely foul-mouthed, disrespectful of others, and so on. I had earlier encountered punk rock in a much smaller, gentler way in Houston, Texas and had quite enjoyed it, but I did not like what I saw in London. During my dreadful semester in London, I took a multi-day trip to Dublin, Ireland, and the contrast was dramatic—Dublin still felt like a culture under control, and the people there acted like human beings, in a way I could recognize as human, and in a way Londoners did not. At that moment in time, my home city of Los Angeles, California remained, overall, a reasonably nice place to live, and quite different from London. Yet within ten or twelve years, the culture in LA had shifted to be much like what I’d seen earlier in London.]

[This has all given me the impression that decades, even generations, of affluence and consumerism gradually produce fundamentally damaged human beings—and I feel as though I’ve seen the same process at work in other places, too, that became infected with neoliberalism later than London or Los Angeles. But, that’s admittedly only my personal impression and observation, and is hardly social-scientific, I’m sure.]

Apologies for the long and probably useless or unnecessary digression.

To (finally!) get back to the immediate point: the United States recently came dangerously close to extinguishing its own democratic institutions, with the enthusiastic participation of a very large percentage of its population. But to me, the irony here is that in so many ways, the US, culturally, is nothing like 1930s Germany, Japan, or Soviet Russia—the kinds of societies where this sort of thing was supposedly more likely to happen, because of their structure, order, hierarchy, corporatist tendencies, etc., etc. The US has been, for decades, a hyper-individualistic society, diametrically the opposite of a corporatist society. [Although effectively ruled by corporations.] Unlike more order-conscious societies, the US, under the influence of neoliberalism, has by now for decades let its social and physical infrastructure deteriorate, with many of the fifty states tending to participate in a proverbial “race to the bottom” as to who can cut taxes the most while ignoring festering social problems. The US, in other words, has frankly shown itself to be comfortable with disorder in a way other societies could not tolerate. Although the US has been for now almost eighty years a mighty military power, it has still never developed the sort of nationwide military culture that existed in other societies—most Americans have no notion of ever providing military service themselves and tend to take military service members very much for granted (as in, being in the military is something for poor people to do who have no better options—tough luck for them, and we also aren’t willing to pay taxes to provide them with benefits when they leave the service injured, jobless, or whatever). Really the only order or discipline in neoliberal America comes from the giant corporations that control most people’s lives and employment directly or indirectly, but even that system still celebrates selfish individualism as the highest societal goal, as represented by the various billionaires who are worshiped by the American public. The various benighted clowns who cheered for Donald Trump did so in the name of unfettered free-market individualism, as reflected in unbridled corporate greed. [Admittedly, Trump supporters, like the rest of Americans only perhaps even more so, are rather confused and inconsistent in their responses—demanding unbridled free markets and unregulated corporations as the solution to all human problems while also wanting protectionism from Chinese competition, etc., etc.]

The overall feeling I get, from observing the decline of American culture and society during the age of neoliberalism from the 1980s onward, is that in our absurd and excessive pursuit of individualism and unapologetic selfishness, we have, more or less, forgotten how to cooperate enough with each other to function effectively as a society. Society is inherently a joint undertaking, requiring sharing and cooperation—but Americans, on the whole, seem to have lost the ideas of sharing, cooperation, or, for the most part, even talking to each other (unless they want something and are trying to get something out of somebody else). [Which is a lot like the impression I got from London already in the late 1980s.]

And strangely, and perhaps ironically, the overall resulting social breakdown led a hyper-individualistic, unabashedly selfish society to come close to undoing its own democratic institutions by popular demand—the way only more corporatist societies were supposed to do, at least in theory.

Continuing with the matter of a once-great nation having become too socially and culturally dysfunctional and incompetent to actually function as a nation and society, seemingly from an inability even to comprehend the ideas of sharing and cooperation that are necessary for societies to function—just consider the coronavirus fiasco and its comparative expression among various different nations. The coronavirus pandemic has been, more or less, a test of which societies are orderly and competent enough to function under shocks and intense stress (rather like a “stress-test,” such as those that banks are sometimes required to undergo to prove their solvency and reliability in the event of economic trouble). Relatively orderly and corporatist societies such as South Korea and Japan were clearly the star performers. Germany did rather well in the European context. The most pathetic, disorderly failures among major nations were: the United States and Brazil. [Both of which, notably, recently had selected embarrassing, truth-denying buffoons to be their supreme leaders. To an even worse extent than in the UK, which also hasn’t been a star performer on the coronavirus. Interestingly, though, two other Anglophone liberal democracies, one of them more culturally corporatist—New Zealand—and the other less so—Australia—also wound up among the star performers.]

I’d sum all this up by observing: whatever caused nations like Germany and Japan to go off the rails in the 1930s, the overall American postwar reaction to Nazism, Fascism, later Stalinism, and such—that the solution to all human problems, including even problems caused by individualism, always must be even more individualism—has been a disastrous failure, and a theory taken to absurd and dangerous extremes. Though this might be obvious to everybody outside America and some other similar nations, it would seem that, as with most things in human existence, there is a need to strike an appropriate balance between corporatism and individualism—a task at which neoliberal America has failed dismally.

Just one last point, and then I’ll end this interminable diatribe (I promise!): observing how Trump’s “base” of support has remained pretty well rock-solid through the past four years at 35-40%--and remains in that range even after all of his disastrous and buffoonish behavior, including the shocking fiasco and near-catastrophe that took place in Washington, DC on January 6—as well as other moments in American history when the nation lurched dangerously in the direction of abandoning its traditional democratic political institutions—such as the early Cold War/Red Scare/McCarthy Era of the late 1940s-early 1950s, or the substantial public support for left-wing or right-wing political demagogues during the 1930s and the Great Depression (the likes of Senator Huey Long, Father Coughlin, etc.)—and extending these examples to other societies (perhaps inappropriately given how cultures vary, but still—as a thought experiment) makes me think, somewhat glumly: even in a nation and society with seemingly strong and well-established democratic political institutions, probably some portion of the public nevertheless is always ready to toss them aside. [It would be nice to be able to say, “Based on sheer stupidity”—but that probably isn’t correct, because you’ll likely always find people among this population segment who would do just fine on IQ tests. It’s likely more a matter of their overall emotional configurations in their brains that apparently tend to produce stubborn, rigid right-wing troglodytes, as well as certain sorts of left-wing extremists. Precisely the “authoritarian personality” so well described by Laurens higher up in this string.] And, probably in any society, that percentage may always be at least 25%, maybe even 30-40% (the magic numbers for the Trump “base”). Which, if so, would mean (perhaps somewhat alarmingly) that the process of preserving democracy actually may always be, basically, trying to keep an additional 15-20% of citizens and voters from getting so frightened or panicked by real or perceived social and political crises that they go along with the already dangerous and undemocratically inclined 25-40% that are always already ready to throw away democracy. And that may be true even in the (hyper-individualistic) 21st-century United States, just as with (corporatist) 1930s Germany or Japan. [Which would suggest, perhaps, that rather than being a particular feature of only certain societies and cultures with authoritarian/militarist/traditionalist histories, it may be more of a constant in human populations?]

Dear Scott, thank you for your comment to complement Lauren's comments.

Just to bring to your attention that comparing Trumpism with other forms of authoritarianism tendencies as apple to apple may lead to the wrong conclusion if Trumpism is one orange just like comparing extreme democratic outcome and normal democratic outcomes you are comparing apples to orages....

To understand why Trumpism came and went this time around and how to counteract it you need to start by differenciating /defining normal with populism with a mask, then link that to specific democratic outcomes possible under mayority rule: and then link that to the specific rule of law environment needed to exist to persist re-election at all costs... that allows you to see the structure of temporary authoritarianism from within and to see the expected road towards permanent authoritarianism from within through extreme democratic outcome theory... then you will that if re-election takes place under temporary authoritarianism structure and the extreme democratic outcome loses re-election, no matter what it does IT CAN NOT PERSIST as the 2020 trumpism loss proves....

From this extreme democratic world you can see how to compare authoritarianism apples to apples and see why they are not oranges....

When I get home I will share two articles coming out in the coming days sharing food for thought related to this specific quesion I have posted...

Dear Scott and friends, I think you can find some interesting food for thoughts related to this question and ideas shared in the coming article shared below, you can take a look at it when you have time. It builds on the article ART132 I shared before....I will have a set of related articles coming this year to step by step expand on this ideas:

Sustainability thoughts 131: How can the shift from normal liberal democracies to extreme liberal democracies be used to extract the democratic structure that leads to the rise of temporary and permanent authoritarianism from within?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348607163_Sustainability_thoughts_131_How_can_the_shift_from_normal_liberal_democracies_to_extreme_liberal_democracies_be_use_to_extract_the_democratic_structure_that_leads_to_the_rise_of_temporary_and_permanen

Thanks, Lucio--this looks like it should be quite interesting! -- SHD

Sharing here final draft of paper about the 2016-2020 rise and fall of Trumpism using the thinking of the road from normal liberal democracies to permanent authoritarianism from within, it has some good food for thoughts:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349682410_Sustainability_thoughts_133_Stating_the_expected_step_by_step_road_from_majority_rule_based_liberal_democracies_to_permanent_authoritarianism_The_case_of_the_2016-2020_rise_and_fall_of_Trumpism?_sg=WRLVUYeypvysJFhtKYCbTTZZP7O9byOn7XMxcfHvhrh-NFEsTBYvQTi_OSzyu4EjF5qsJJa4rJWqNiH-XC5sGUAvg0ahoVF8cEW51XPI.-QBPNHf6ly3k8MUbygftWvjTwkQ62j8UUBniL8dmWVMuWuwnpCXBda_pBVskEJJlmzZGb0KfxanQmJcXHHu6ww

Thee is more risk of authoritarianism under the Democrats than under Pres. Trump. Also, watch what is happening in Canada under the Liberals. For example, a company cannot get a federal government grant to support hiring students for the summer unless the company pledge adherence to the government's permissive view on abortion.