I’m somewhat active on the subreddit r/AskTrumpSupporters. The board is intended to be a place where Trump supporters and critics can talk about the differences across their views. I don’t think it’s very successful at this, due to a combination of high rates of trolling by supporters and critics flooding supporters’ replies.
But I still sometimes try to post questions there. These are usually rejected. I’m not sure why, since I try to follow the guidelines and the mods don’t give any explanation for rejections. Since these posts take some effort, I thought I’d put them up here.
This post was originally written March 17, 2024
Were you aware that Democrats do not want to undermine democracy?
In this political science study, they asked both Democrats and Republicans whether they would support take steps to undermine democracy if it hurt the other party, and then what they think members of the other party would support. They specifically asked about:
- reducing the number of voting stations
- banning rallies
- ignoring controversial court rulings
- freezing the social media accounts of journalists
- changing laws to make it easier for one’s own side to get elected
- using violence to block laws
- reinterpreting the Constitution to block policies
For both Democrats and Republicans, the most common response to most items was that they would “never” support it, and 60-80% said they would “never or probably not” support it.*
So neither party supports undermining democracy. But each party thinks the other would support these things. Figure 1 shows how dramatically we misunderstand each other. The authors argue that:
This provides would-be authoritarians with a powerful weapon against democracy. They use propaganda to convince their supporters that the other side is undermining democracy. As their supporters come to believe that the other side is defecting, they are more willing to tolerate their leaders’ antidemocratic actions, which are seen as merely levelling the playing field now tilted against them.
What do you think of this?
* In the supplementary info, you can see the breakdown of responses for individual items on pages 24-25. For Democrats, for two items “probably not” was more common than “never”: banning rallies by the far right and freezing the social media accounts of journalists. Except for banning rallies, no more than 30% of Democrats said they would “probably” or “definitely” support taking the step. For Republicans, “probably not” was more common than “never” for banning rallies by the far left and ignoring controversial court rulings.