Authority
Americans Don't Know How To Feel About It.
When I was in my twenties, and thinking about settling down and having kids, the whole notion of that was being updated. The idea that children should be ‘seen and not heard’ had gradually been replaced by the idea that youngsters needed to be respected. Listened to. Allowed to make their own decisions as much as possible. You know, so that they would grow up with a sense of ‘personal agency’.
Still, when juggling the needs and desires of several kids all pulling in different directions, any parent would eventually succumb to frustration. Eventually a directive being given to unruly brats, would morph into an absolute command.
”But Mom, why do we have go-outside/do-our-homework/clean-our-rooms-etcetera? Why?!”
”BECAUSE I SAID SO!!”
Parents didn’t want to be dictators. But when dealing with a bunch of small people who aren’t mature enough to see beyond their own momentary desires, somebody has to be the bad guy.
This country was born in a revolt against authoritarian governance. But have we ever really escaped it’s allure? As we were declaring our independence and crafting our democracy, many people wanted George Washington to become king. But Washington understood the new country in a very different way.
He was willing only to be a president. One who presides over representative bodies that would craft and impose the laws. And he was only willing to do it for two terms, setting that as precedent.
Ours was an agrarian nation then, with few cities, and little daily need for people even to think about government.
Last summer’s campaign though, was presented as a referendum about which candidate could be trusted to save this great and troubled nation.
Each side insisted that the other was out to destroy the country … that the 2024 election would be the most consequential in our history
Save the nation? The democracy? From what? From whom? Why, from ourselves of course.
Modern parenting’s cultivation of ‘agency’, isn’t only about wanting one’s children to become self-directed and self-sufficient. It’s also about the need of a democracy for a citizenry which understands both the potential of our system, and its limitations.
We don’t want our kids to be lost when we are lost to them. Neither do we want them to be intimidated by us while we’re still around. That my grown children now know my feet to be made of clay is a GOOD thing. As long as they grok the implications of that. That every hero will be less than perfect. And that hero-worship of any sort is a return to childhood fantasy.
Trump however, is not a big fan of ‘agency’. In this famous clip he was extolling the intelligence of his fanbase, when suddenly he lurched into praising them for a loyalty so strong that it could eclipse their moral integrity completely.
“ … I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue, and shoot somebody … and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
I don’t know how smart somebody is if you can insult them at such a fundamental level, and have them take it as a compliment.
The left-biased press has long made much of Trump’s authoritarian leanings. Ever since he won the nomination in 2016, they’d been comparing him to Hitler. Or Mussolini if they were in a forgiving mood.
During his first term, he stubbornly refused to live up to the hype. Four years that seem absolutely tranquil if compared to the first four months of his second coming.
This time, as we watched him build a wall of sycophants around himself, and behave as if he’d been coronated rather than inaugurated … we could almost hear his inner voice.
”You want to see authoritarian? I’ll show you authoritarian!”
Most Trumpers identify themselves as Christian. Most would tell you that the good old USA is a Christian nation. And they are mostly right about that. Two-thirds right anyway. Recent Gallup numbers say 67%.
But I think most of them mean it more in the sense of origins. And that’s fair enough. It’s hard to imagine Western Civilization emerging as it did without Christianity having replaced a hundred forms of paganism.
When you think about it … religion itself is a form of authoritarianism. Christopher Hitchens used to talk about God as a celestial dictator, with us - his creations - living in an Orwellian police state. Constantly monitored, spied upon, forced to do The Creator’s will, or face eternal torture.
That’s certainly the God of my childhood. The term ‘God-Fearing’ was common parlance in the Catholicism of the 1950s and 60s. Apparently it’s still in use throughout the Bible Belt.
In that demographic, ’Faith’ has long surpassed charity as the keystone virtue. To not question God - or doctrine - is considered a spiritual achievement. God is the ultimate authority. And God is never wrong. The ultimate authority CAN’T be wrong.
Since Trump achieved martyrdom - with enormous help from left-wing partisans who blurred the line between prosecution and persecution - his long-term supporters have truly become disciples.
They seem incapable of doubting him. Let alone, of questioning their own loyalty to him.
As any parent of multiple kids knows, there is only so much ‘personal agency’ that children can live up to. What they really need is structure.
And this is what our founders sought to provide for them as they reached voting age. Some simple unchanging rules and regulations. And many figures of distributed authority who would abide by and enforce these rules and regs.
Young families and old religions might work alright with the ‘unquestioned authority’ model, but civil society needs for us all to be involved and informed. If we want the rights that establish our agency, we need to grow into them.
Understanding that I will never be able to count on getting my own way, is another sort of spiritual achievement altogether. And it’s the bottom-line understanding that enables democratic governance.
We don’t get new brains at the age of consent. That inner child doesn’t evaporate when exposed to grown-up concerns. It just gets added-on to by experience and received wisdom and the wrong turns that end in hard lessons. By self-reflection. By efforts toward empathy. By delaying gratification.
And sometimes by accepting that not even a delay will bring gratification. I could go on.
The point is that some of what you see in a ‘mature’ person is innate, but very much of it is what that person is working hard to internalize and hold on to. Her ‘values’, if you will. It’s an effort. The inner child doesn’t die until we do.
I’d say that the GOP’s shift toward authoritarianism is really only a relapse to the natural state for humans. Almost all of us are followers by natural inclination. There could be no Alpha humans if more than a minority of us were potential leaders.
The religions that last a long time, know this. Can you name a creed that posits a representative celestial government? A deity that must perform or face the wrath of voters? No, those who center their lives on the idea of God, do so from a perspective of bended-knee servitude. They don’t want God to explain himself. They want him to be above understanding and beyond reproach.
Does this say something about our politics? I’m sure that it does.
I can’t count the times that I or someone I know has expressed frustration with our unwieldy system of representative governance by saying, “I think I’m ready for a benevolent dictator”. Provided that you yourself could define ‘benevolence’, wouldn’t you sign up for that?
Isn’t that what our hopes always are when we look at candidates? That one of them will force into being a version of society that perfectly suits our own personal preferences?
Could it be that those who respond to an authoritarian leader are actually rewarding the person who has best responded to their own authoritarian impulses?
Allow me to posit an idea with all due humility. It goes like this: Trump’s minions haven’t been shaped by him nearly to the degree that he’s been shaped by them.
Donald Trump first suggested building a wall at our southern border way back in 2014 at a Freedom Summit in New Hampshire. He was spit-balling like any amateur comedian, and the audience-response told him he’d found a slogan. Just like the first time he said that Hillary Clinton should be jailed, and the audience came back with chants of ‘Lock Her Up’.
These weren’t policy goals for Trump. He didn’t expect to win. These were just catch-phrases. But the half-serious candidate did his rabble-rousing all too well, and the apple-cart has never again been upright.
By the time that Democrats revealed their October Surprise - a tape of Trump shit-talking about chicks - his fanbase felt as if they too were on that bus letting their monkey-selves out to play. Rather than correcting the excesses of their candidate, they joined him with excesses of their own.
Disaffected conservatives fell in behind him, because he was the one that gave voice to their collective id.
When an unprecedented level of sneaky-bastard Democratic politics finally sent Trump packing in January of 2021, he refused to accept it. Instead, he claimed that a vast conspiracy had physically stolen the election.
When it became clear that his presidency would not be resurrected, Trump faded from view for a while. This left a void in Trumpistan. So rather than accepting that their leader was gone and disbanding back into ordinary life, his followers shopped online for conspiracies of all sorts.
At first they had leapt onto the ‘Stop The Steal’ bandwagon proffered by Trump and his surrogates, Giuliani, Powell et al. When it became clear that ‘audits’ would not prove fraud, they switched - suddenly and en masse - to the then-small Anti-Vax movement; immediately becoming its dominant demographic. Their illogical solidarity cost Joe Biden the COVID-conquest glory he was trying to claim.
In rare appearances, Donald Trump Himself - the primary force behind these new vaccines - could not persuade his minions to take what they now called ‘the jab’. First he was booed in Alabama in August of 2021 for saying he was vaccinated. Months later at a public sit-down with Bill O’Reilly in Dallas, Trump said that the vaccines saved ‘untold millions’ of lives. Both men said they’d taken the booster shots. And again, segments of the audience voiced their disapproval.
Did Trump ever again dare to tout what was arguably his administration’s greatest achievement? Not to my knowledge. The ‘leader’ had become intimidated by his followers. And tens of thousands of them died as a result.
He let them die rather than risk their rejection. He seemed apologetic even to mention the MRNA vaccines on Rogan’s podcast late in the 2024 campaign.
So where does the authoritarian impulse really reside in this movement?
Look, this is the problem with populism. In a sense it’s the overthrow of a system where ‘authority’ is dispersed across many institutions, as our founders designed and refined it. Populism gives it instead to the person who’s best presented himself as the only necessary authority. And if I read it right, that ‘authority’ is captive to crowd-sourced opinion as revealed by applause levels at rallies, and retweets on X and Truth Social.
Among the most devout Trumpers, there is a general disdain for all traditional forms of distributed authority. The institutions that are designed to function outside of shifting partisan pressure, are now seen as useless obstacles.
A whole class of YouTube grifters was born out of the stop-steal-stop-vax implosion of Trump-support following his 2020 defeat. These are people who started out as Democrats challenging cancel-culture on their own side of the aisle.
They got love-bombed by the displaced wandering hordes of Trumpistan, while simultaneously being hate-bombed by angry ‘progressives’. This set into motion what is called ‘audience capture’, The bottom-up control that rises out of ‘the comments section’. Now they are trying to become some sort of hybrid cultural-political being that is somehow hip and up-to-date but also catnip to conservatives.
They present as ‘thought-leaders’, when actually they are being force-fed new beliefs by their supposed followers.
I mean, who ever thought that Russell Brand would be claiming Christian conversion? Being baptized in the Thames, and immediately hitting TikTok to spread the news. And then publicly praying with Tucker Carlson before a live YouTube audience.
Elon Musk as well. Who ever thought that the King of Green EV Futurism would have signed up to do Donald Trump’s dirty work? Paying nearly $300 million for the privilege, and damn-near destroying his brand before fleeing Trump’s government this week.
(I presaged this fall from grace in one of my own YouTube videos three years ago)
Anyway, that’s just some of my thinking on the last day of May, 2025.
Thanks for reading. As always I look forward to your comments.
Dave, I want to agree with you, but in the real world I’ve seen so many contradictions. For instance, here in Oregon, they’ve caught a couple hundred illegal aliens registering to vote and voting in elections. Does that mean that Biden wasn’t legitimately, elected? There’s no way of knowing because neither party will allow an investigation. Back in the 70s, my buddy and I joined a commune. It didn’t last longer than a summer because we didn’t want slackers dictating what we were doing and how much work we were donating. Or as a famous rock band once said, “we won’t get fooled again”.
Respect for Authority should be our rule of thumb.
Some in authority, prove they don’t deserve that respect.
Some who voted for Trump followed this formula: 2016, vote against Hillary.
After 4 years of success, 2020/2024 voted for Trump.
Is he an egotistical blowhard? Yes, but we need a bit of “hardball in your face” style when dealing with the world’s dictators.