Many of these leaders are making a Faustian bargain: stop the entry of immigrants but also muzzle the opposition by controlling media and courts, while targeting
opposing elites and their supporters for investigation and prosecution. Turkey’s Erdogan
jailed journalists and academics who resisted his efforts to consolidate power. Hungary’s Orban mocked the idea that citizens are “free to do anything that does not violate
another person’s freedom,” and forced through constitutional changes to centralize
power in the executive. Poland’s Law & Justice party claiming “politicization of courts,”
enacted sweeping reforms of the judiciary designed to bring judges under government
control. In France, Austria, the Netherlands, the UK, and elsewhere parties that promise to prevent and even reverse immigration, close the borders to outsides, and “deislamize” and restore ethnoreligious homogeneity to their societies.
The story is the same across the Atlantic. The rise of Donald Trump in the United
States has been accompanied by the blatant disregard if not contempt for the country’s
egalitarian social norms, the politicization of the administrative state, and efforts to
change electoral rules to cement party advantages and prevent the opposition from
“Recent data from the United States paint an alarming picture...significant proportions of white Americans…have embraced
authoritarian populism”
gaining ground. From extreme gerrymandering, to voter-ID laws, to proposed constitutional amendments to exclude non-citizens from the official population count, to calls for
the impeachment, replacement, or “packing” of state high court justices issuing decisions that political leaders dislike, the U.S. has witnessed it all in the span of a decade.
Recent data from the United States paint an alarming picture. The 2016 ANES
suggests that significant proportions of white Americans—the political majority group—
have embraced authoritarian populism. More than a third of whites endorse having a
strong leader even if he bends the rules; half want a leader who will “crush evil” and
take us back to the “true path”; and just shy of a majority want the authorities to get rid
of “rotten apples” who are ruining everything (Figure 1).
http://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home
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