From Can it happen here?: Authoritarianism in America (Ed: Cass Sunstein, 2018) pp209-11
from ‘Authoritarianism is not a momentary madness, but an eternal dynamic within liberal democracies (Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt)
Trump ascended to the American presidency, Britain exited Europe, and the French flirted with the National Front because Western liberal democracies have now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate them – to live with them, and in them. This is hard to accept until one comes to terms with two critical realities. First, people are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with appreciation and enthusiasm for democratic processes. It is perhaps ironic that tolerance of difference is now threatened by liberal democrats’ refusal to recognize that many of their fellow citizens are . . . different. We all come into the world with distinct personalities, which is to say, predisposed to want, need, and fear different things, including particular social arrangements. Presumably, societies with a diverse mix of complementary characters tended to survive and adapt to changing environments in human evolution. Notwithstanding some ancient migration bottlenecks, these different personalities – authoritarian and libertarian, open and closed, risk-seeking and risk-averse, to name but a few – have over time distributed themselves all around the world. This means there are plenty of would-be liberal democrats languishing in autocracies, and many authoritarians struggling along under “vibrant” liberal democracies.
Second, there is remarkably little evidence that living in a liberal democracy generally makes people more democratic and tolerant. This means that most societies — including those “blessed” with democracies — will persistently harbor a certain proportion of residents (by our calculations, roughly a third) who will always find diversity difficult to tolerate. That predisposition, and those limitations, may be largely immovable. And this is the most important implication: if we are right about normative threat serving as a critical catalyst for these characters, then the things that multiculturalists believe will help people appreciate and thrive in democracy – experiencing difference, talking about difference, displaying and applauding difference — are the very conditions that encourage authoritarians not to the heights of tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes. Democracy in general, and tolerance in particular, might actually be better served by an abundance of common and unifying rituals, institutions, and processes.
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