Name:   copperline - Subject:   Ben Carson's moral flexibility Date:   3/12/2016 5:05:17 PM

It seems that lots of people are willing to reframe Trump as the sort of leader they admire and would be happy to follow.  Here is a link to a really good article that examines research on the voting public and offers an explanation for the rise of Donald Trump.   It’s worth reading.

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

In it, the author looks at several researchers who study “authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.”

“Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms. A candidate like Donald Trump.”

They conclude that Trump embodies the classic authoritarian leadership style: simple solutions, powerful messaging, and punitive reactions.  

I would say you should be very careful what you wish for, you might just get it because flirting with Trumpism is playing with fire on a scale we haven’t known before.   This isn’t good leadership, it’s following a distorted political movement off a cliff.    As a counter-reaction to Trump grows (not talking about the political opposition to him, but the activation of people in the street who have taken the brunt of his rhetoric as insulting)…. As these counter-protests grow, so will the opposite reaction of the Authoritarians who will see these counter-protests as evidence of the decline of social order they fear most.   Trump will deny his role in the provocations and repeat calls for authoritarian solutions and hostility…creating an upward spiral of violent confrontations.   

Trump isn’t going to back off his incendiary rhetoric because it affirms his power to see these reactions in the crowds.   His ego feeds on it rather than being repulsed by it.    He’s like the school yard bully who sends his followers to beat up the kid he doesn’t like, then crows that he could have done it himself… but just didn’t want to get dirt under his fingernails.  What he really likes is seeing people do what he tells them to do, even if he denies responsibility for it later.