We mistake extremism in belief for political extremism. The rise of authoritarianism isn’t only tied to political division or partisanship. Authoritarianism is an extremism we can find anywhere in politics.
Why our fear of division blinds us to the real threat to democracy
We’ve taken it as gospel that we’re divided. It seems like we are. And division is bad. So we better fix it.
We’re trying to fix what we think is the problem. But it isn’t the whole problem.
Of course, we’re divided. There’s no question about that. We’ve read the reports of increasing polarization in our culture and have seen it with our own eyes.
And every time we venture online, the backlit screen practically begs us to stop fighting, to restore some sanity and order to our world. Even sacrifice a little freedom along the way to end the fighting.
This seems important, necessary even. We all give a little to get along.
It doesn’t make sense
But there’s something off about it, too. Something isn’t right, but we can’t put a finger on it. It’s like we can see that our division is just so obvious and therefore it’s solution should be just as obvious! And yet we are befuddled by the fact we don’t just get along.
So clearly its obvious and then also somehow not. It should be obvious. Like telling each other to just stop fighting or the sad person to just get happy. But we know that never works.
And yet, at the very same time that we believe the stuff, we know this reaction is too simple; like we’re fools for thinking that our just being nice is enough. We know that our central problem may be as simple as that and somehow far more than that.
These two very different internal conflicts are going on inside us.
It is simple and complex; obvious and obscured; and yet the best advice we give to each other is to just stop arguing, quit reading the news, and start sharing more cat videos.
So I try. I quit reading the news and share the internet’s version of Successories posters. And every time, this internal conflict rears up again. Like this mandate for positivity is fundamentally good and yet, I then feel guilty for reading the news and staying informed.
I feel bad and I also don’t. Because as much as I know I need to focus on being positive, I also know that division won’t end if we just shared cat videos.
Obviously, there’s something lost in the communication. Because there’s something we’re not actually talking about.
Afflicting the comfortable
As a priest, I’m supposed to help people better connect with God and their spiritual journey. But this often makes people think that I should just walk into the pulpit each week and make them feel good or talk about how awesome Jesus is. That’s great and all, but Jesus is a pretty complicated dude.
Jesus doesn’t only comfort and he doesn’t only comfort the comfortable. As the saying goes, he’s also awfully fond of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
Unfortunately, too many of the often-comfortable see themselves as the always-afflicted.
I don’t just feel that tension when I’m in the pulpit or Facebook. But strangely, I sometimes feel like I alone am expected to feel that tension. Like my job is to deal with both that tension and your tension and then just always dismiss it—even when Jesus is trying to get us all to feel this tension. And not fear it.
But that same truth can be felt in other vocations: from lawyers and social workers to mayors and janitors. That we are all here to make you feel less tense.
And this imbalance and inequality is messing with our thinking. Like we need to overwrite the documents on the hard drive, even the ones we believe are authored by Jesus. Because some of them have tension in them.
We refuse to see what should be patently obvious: there’s something more to the division than that two sides have a beef with each other. That would make things way easier. But it isn’t like that. Our division isn’t binary. Now that reality really pisses us off.
It’s about the tension.
None of us likes tension. Well, OK, a few of us do. But most of us don’t. And some of us really, really hate it.
And the thing about tension is that it’s pretty nonpartisan. It’s felt on the left and the right and all things in between.
When we claim the problem is division, I think we’re most often making a statement about tension. And for many, it is speaking to a willingness that some tension is normal—that we’re always divided—and that it’s actually OK!
But the ones who really hate tension often sit in the middle of the political divide. And they’re not alone. People also hate tension when they’re bound to lose.
This reality is making our present landscape far more interesting than we think.
Here comes Authoritarianism!
While we’re distracted by our petty left/right squabbles, something else is going on. There are shifting political ideologies which don’t align left or right inherently or wholly. For instance, the polling before the 2016 election showed remarkable levels of racism: frighteningly high on the right and embarrassingly high on the left.
This should have cast the 2016 election in a new light, but it hasn’t yet. In part because of our insistence on making politics exclusivist: left v. right.
But as we saw, racism cut through both parties, and, at the same time, animated many on the right. Both of these are true.
And according to Noah Berlatsky, white American intolerance correlates with the rise of authoritarianism.
He cites the work of political scientists Steven V. Miller of Clemson and Nicholas T. Davis of Texas A&M:
“Their study finds a correlation between white American’s intolerance, and support for authoritarian rule. In other words, when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy.”
We’ve seen the same effect with affirmative action and quotas: opposing it for African-Americans and Latinos, whom many white believe will “steal” their spots in universities, but support it when talking about Asian American students, whom many fear will outperform their children.
This tracks with what we’ve seen in our country over the last few years. On location interviews of rural white voters and the sudden concern for the deteriorating middle class have been a boon for the national and local media, seeking to better understand people as if they’re observing wild animals in their natural habitat.
It is also really easy to force this narrative into the left/right sorting machine and spit out a pre-conceived partisan split which embodies our preconceptions about those extremists leading us to authoritarianism.
But that’s not the whole story. And it isn’t a particularly honest one.
Centrists are the most authoritarian.
David Adler wrote a piece for The New York Times called “Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists” in which Adler uses the same World Values Survey data to mark a rather surprising conclusion.
He examined the responses of left, moderate, and right groups around their approval of democracy and authoritarianism. These results should completely change our calculus.
It isn’t the right which is prone to authoritarianism or the left: it’s the middle.
Based on the surveys, centrists offered less support for democracy and more for authoritarianism than both the left and right.
The main reason for this support should be obvious: centrists like when the trains run on time. Centrists are more risk-averse and tension-averse. And because of that, it would seem, that of the three groups, they are least interested in the messiness of democracy. In other words, when democracy gets too messy, centrists are more likely to abandon it.
So what do these two pieces combine to reveal?
The greatest threat to American democracy likely doesn’t come from the left-wing or the right-wing. It isn’t some fringe on the outskirts of political thought or the most zealous partisans we know. It comes from the middle. And perhaps particularly from disaffected white centrists.
So the more we focus on the political extremes rather than the extremists in the middle, the less likely we are to see the nature of the problem. And we may also miss that many of those causing trouble self-identify as centrists or moderates or otherwise outside the simple left/right paradigm.
Because is it’s also easy to mark the rise of fascist groups espousing neo-nazi and white supremacist ideologies as fringe others; outliers and aliens; rather than somehow normal. Radicalized extremists don’t only come from partisan extremes. They represent a different kind of extreme.
Centrists Aren’t Necessarily Moderates
I know it goes against political orthodoxy to say it, but centrists aren’t necessarily moderates. More often they act as political ambiverts—holding seemingly conflicting political ideologies at once or possessing a high tolerance for switching ideologies.
Centrists also have their own sets of goals, political ideologies, and orthodoxies, often demanding cohesion, moderation of tactics, and building compromise.
Centrists are just as much their own group with an operational orthodoxy as the supposed “extremes” on the left and right.
And we are just as likely to find extremists in the center. Like conservative commentator David Frum whose neoconservatism makes him an extremist in geopolitics or Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer who is an extremist on Israel.
But the point isn’t to discount centrists or argue for greater polarization. The point is that polarization seems to be causing centrists to react to increasing tension the way disaffected whites are to their social dislocation.
If they weren’t already, centrists are becoming political extremists. At the very same time that white supremacy is on the rise. And I don’t believe this is coincidental or paradoxical.
Perhaps this rising tension leads to a sense of grievance and entitlement. Both groups make a scapegoat of division and transformation. And neither feels like the system is working right or that those in charge are up to the task.
So what do we do? Make the buck stop somewhere. Force the trains to run on time, the plants to reopen, and pilots back in their cockpits.
We demand the clock to turn back and the will of the almighty to drop the im- from the impossible.
Left or right? Who cares. Somebody has to do something!
It isn’t about the cause.
And this is ultimately what gives us the most trouble. We want the scapegoat, especially when its one of the usual suspects: one of those extremists with their radical ideas.
But that’s not how it’ll happen. That’s not how the authoritarian rises.
The trouble we’ll have with authoritarianism is that we’ll focus on its cause as if it’s a logical conclusion. And forget that people are more likely to choose it given the right circumstances. So the problem is just as much about the cause as it’s about how many will see despotism as the only solution.
So in this way, well-meaning liberals are leading us to authoritarianism just as eagerly as well-meaning conservatives. Not that it’s equal. Or the same. We all do it for different reasons. But it’s important to remember that we’re doing it from the center.
And we’ll do it because we think it’s our only choice.
Stop blaming division. The problem is dysfunction.
We must, therefore, understand that our political division itself isn’t truly responsible for the rise of authoritarianism. But our fear of increasing division is. And more importantly, our political dysfunction is. And for that, we’re all guilty.
The smart play isn’t to push us all into the center or to shout down the solidly liberal or conservative. It’s to focus on getting rid of dysfunction itself and those unwilling to do the work of democratic rule—not just those willing to break or bend the system—even from the center.
Authoritarianism will rise with the desire to make that tension go away. History reveals that. Even if we don’t want to hear it.
So if authoritarianism overtakes democracy in the U.S., it won’t be because of liberals or conservatives, the fringe or the media.
It’ll be the radicalization of centrists; not to a polar extreme, but to their own extreme. Their own pole with their own demands.
The trains must run on time. Our jobs must return. And thank God someone took charge to end this long, national nightmare.