The Authoritarian Party

Inductive reasoning is more than mere anecdote, and yet a few anecdotes may lead one to craft a proper study (resting on systematic observation, representative sampling, and repeatability). While anyone can supply anecdotes, meritorious inductive reason requires much more. And yet, and yet, anecdote may point to a possibility that a proper study later indicates. That's the case with the Republican Party: anecdote suggests and inductive reasoning reveals that rank-and-file Republicans hold an authoritarian politics.

Of anecdote as a mere beginning, an bare hint: Here in the Midwest, relying on the anecdotes from a small college town, the GOP holds authoritarian views supporting an expansive, predatory state. The view is common, almost to each Republican who speaks on the subject. This ilk wants to exact culture revenge through state power against its adversaries (e.g., gays, ethnic minorities. etc.) without restriction of legal precedent of individual rights or recognition of equal moral worth. Simultaneously, it defines its rights not as a negative liberty of freedom from interference but an expansive suppression of any position it does not wish to see or hear. In debate after debate, discussion after discussion, small-town Republicans will insist that they support free speech where their free speech requires silencing others. They view contrary views as a kind of pollution; it's their version of a pro-environmental position.

(So Black residents shouldn't talk about Black Lives Matter because local Republicans see the movement as a threat to social order, or gays shouldn't tell of their lives and experiences because that's upsetting to the GOP community. These commonplace Republicans run on a platform of book-banning and closet-confining.)

It's all anecdote, however significant to a community, until a proper survey comes along. So one now has, for the nation since MAGA. Looking at the World Values Survey, John Burn-Murdoch writes Why the Maga mindset is different:¹

Usually, analysis is done at national level, but by drilling down to different political parties in the latest raw data, I find that on everything from attitudes towards international co-operation, to appetite for an autocratic leadership style, through to trust in institutions and inward- vs outward-looking mindset, Trump’s America is a stark outlier from western Europe and the rest of the Anglosphere. In many cases, the Maga mindset is much closer to that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.

Burns-Murdoch includes a diagram that places MAGA in the far right corner of authoritarianism:

See John Burn-Murdoch, Why the Maga mindset is different ('US decisions can no longer be analysed using assumptions shared across the democratic west'), March 6, 2025. See also World Values Survey Association, Who we are.

Often, including for those given to a kind of tragic optimism, one would rather be wrong than right. Better to be mistaken about a tragedy than reminded that it's widespread far beyond one's vicinity.

No, it's true in this case: anecdotes pointing to the authoritarian perspective of local Trumpists find their indication through inductive reasoning among the national Trumpist population.

The Republicans are simply an authoritarian party, on their way to becoming the Authoritarian Party, and if they should have their way, simply the Party.

1. I originally learned of Burn-Murdoch's story from the Jonathan V. Last's March 10, 2025 edition of Triad, New Data: Republican Voters Want Authoritarianism.