Why do people keep voting for authoritarian leaders?

AvaddonLFC ☄️ 🤘@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 235 points –

I'm just trying to understand. Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary etc... Why do these leaders still get so much support after all they've done? What do they exactly like about them?

Aren't these people seeing a massive drop in their quality of life?

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The short answer is that they think the authoritarian is on their side.

The long answer is that people in groups are stupid and they have been manipulated into thinking the authoritarian is on their side

Those leaders offer simple answers to complex social problems and claim to restore their country to the halcyon days of yore. The days when there were no immigrants, liberals, degeneracy or whatever "came later to ruin the country."

Also the voters may believe that voting against their interests somehow benefits them.

Some other factors that I have noticed -

  • Since most of the democracies determine the result based on first past the post (FPTP) or closely related voting system, the candidates only need to get 50% of the voting population to agree with them. They focus on populist policies that resonate with at least 50.1% of the population even if those policies will be detrimental to the remaining 49.9%.
  • The opposition is not seen as strong enough to lead the country. This was the case in recent Turkish elections and has been the case in the last 3 Indian elections. Erdogan and Modi keep winning because people who don’t want to vote for them are not convinced by the other candidates’ abilities to lead the country. So many of the opposing people don’t vote at all or have their votes fragmented across multiple candidates in FPTP systems. That was and also remains the concern with Biden in the US.
  • Once these leaders are in power, they actively suppress the voice of the minorities, by controlling the media and law enforcement, or by making it harder for minorities to vote and express themselves. This reduces the total voting population in favor of these leaders which again benefits them get past the 50% votes. Ultimately, we observe the vicious cycle of more power consolidation over time and more authoritarianism.

I think it comes down to not understanding who they are and what does, infact, benefit them. This state is induced by design. These are professional human traffickers, and they deal in trading suffering for power.

The covid lock down in North Korea for example. Why? My understanding is that it is just to hold the seat of power, whatever that means to the ruling people. Letting in food or people or medicine would introduce am outside factor that offers something the current ruling class can not offer. So shut it down.

It's greed...average, kind, simple people are screwed over all in the name of ego or what have you.

I'm not really sure there is an answer at all anymore. People suffer, because we are conscious beings. That is a pretty unnatural state to be in, when you think about it.

All we can really do is alleviate the suffering we encounter in our everyday lives at the end of the day, and try to be better people, and maybe one day far from now, we will all have this understanding of ourselves

Demagoguery, something that Socrates critiqued as a product of democratic systems.

Socrates imagined an election between a doctor and a candy store owner. The doctor would tell the populace what they didn’t want to hear.
As Socrates described it, the candy store owner would say of the physician that he works many evils on you. He hurts you, gives you bitter potions, tells you not to eat and drink whatever you like. What fun is that? The candy store owner, however, would offer sweets and tasty things. He would appeal to what people wanted, not what they needed. He would provide easy and popular answers to all their difficult problems

source

unfortunately we have too many candy store politicians across the globe.

Or, distilled into a modern cliché: "What is popular is not always right; what is right is not always popular." Elections are contests of popularity, not contests of thoughtfulness or morality.

In Spain the government decided that housing is a basic human right. Sounds awesome, right? But the population voted for its right-wing opposition anyway because immigrant bad.

Problem is that people disagree on who's the candy store owner. "Let's make housing a human right" may look like candy if you don't fully believe in their actual plans to make housing available at reasonable prices.

It's always wild seeing reading about ancient civilizations having the same exact conversations and challenges we're still having today.

Well, in Russia, Putin is having his opponents killed/thrown in jail. It's not a democracy, like in NK where Kim have 99.9% of the vote.

Went here to write this.

Source: I've left Russia, where I've been born, after war started. Left there my whole family and all friends.

Must be hard, hope you’re doing ok 👍

Not as hard as for people from Ukraine, so, nothing to worry about.

Putin and his government has been killing and putting their opponents to prison since 2000-s. At the same time they were telling older people, that if they chose anyone from opposition, Russia will return to its darkest ages.

While doing this, they closed or took under their control all indepent media and made it illegal to say something, that doesn't fit their narrative.

And now people wondering why Russians aren't protesting or fighting that regime.

Russians who live in other countries support Putin and vote for politicians who support Putin. Nobody will throw a Russian in jail for protesting against Putin in my country. But few Russians actually do that.

A bigger problem is that most of the people in Russia actually support Putin. It is a democracy, just not a liberal one.

The same reason Republicans still manage to win elections... through massive amounts of fraud and "gaming the system". People don't understand how thoroughly "representative democracy" is rigged - it can barely even be called "representative," never mind "democratic."

You also have Democrats willing to work with Republicans to carve out their own gerrymandering districts. Jim Clyburn was recently exposed for helping the Republicans in his state carve up the biggest black majority city into small sections diluted by the suburban white voters. This created only one black majority area which is where Clyburn runs.

If it were properly sectioned off then maybe two or three districts could be made with higher black populations that would have to compete to maybe have black friendly candidates.

Jim Clyburn is an Uncle Tom like traitor to democracy. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-rep-james-clyburn-protected-his-district-at-a-cost-to-black-democrats

Democracies work when the voting populace is educated and informed. Unfortunately, humanity willfully avoids being either in favor of opinion and bias.

The simple answer is people are stupid, and half of them are even stupider then you might think they are.

I would specify a bit, "stupid" is so broad and not really easy to see what's actually going wrong.

People are biased and irrational by default. Beliefs do not require evidence, they are mostly formed just by hearing about things from an authorative voice, e.g. your parents, friends, or the media.

People also are by default all in on a belief, or all out. In their minds, admitting even one good thing about the opposite side is unforgivable treason, admitting just one bad thing about your own beliefs is admitting total defeat.

So if you don't grow up in an environment where rationality is being taught, you're simply not rational and thus fall victim to all these biases.

The same is by the way true also for democrats or whoever is not voting for the fascists. Just their beliefs were filled by other authorative voices around them. True rationalists knowing about their biases and actively trying to work against them and trying to get to the truth are very rare.

Step 1. Take control over all types of media Step 2. Eliminate opposition Step3. ???? Step 4. Profites !

People keep voting for them because they foster and environnement where there is no one else to vote for.

Last election in Turkey may have looked like a close call for Erdogan. But during the campaign he got over 85% of media coverage, while the other candidates have to share the crumbs (I am pulling those numbers out of my ass).

They control the media, so they are able to redirect blame for the drop in quality of life to other sources

There is a whole system of media devoted to getting normal folks to vote against their own interests. In the regimes you list (and I'd argue also in western so called liberal democracies too but to a lesser extent) the capitalist class and political class are so intertwined due to influence and corruption, that whatever the needs and whims of the leading politicians, the media machine will distract and manipulate. The same tactics that they use are the ones which have worked since the start of mass media, they know how human psychology works.

Appealing to emotional arguments, external threats, racism, nationalism. Remember these are political tools, unfortunately very effective ones, as we saw in fascism in the 1900s. A curious consequence is that often, the worse things get for the normal people, the easier it is for these malicious actors to spin and manipulate and blame it on an external force or political enemy which deflects blame or allows for more extreme political ideology to rise in a society. So you get an accelerated political extremism.

People like authoritarians. Especially one they agree with, which many do.

Even in the US we have children's programming replete with kings and queens ruling over people. How many people watch things like Black Panther and think "this would be so much better with a Congress debating what direction to take"? I mean other than me...

Dictators get things done compared to committees and legislatures. Nobody likes compromise.

Once a competent authoritarian leader takes root, it becomes very hard to remove him: the necessary mechanisms, formal or informal, tend to be sabotaged - not at once, but more and more over the years. It also helps when some of opposition have their lives broken, when uncertainty about one's own life is high, the value of human life low, when loyalty is placed above both competence and the law, and the law above competence, when the reputation of any possible contenders is questionable or made questionable, when people are used to the thought of futility of resistance (with fresh examples produced all the time) and being alone before the oppression, when somewhat educated people are made to think their views are in minority (independently of whether it's the case) and some of less educated people have some of their misery alleviated (and are occasionally given some power they did not deserve) in return for voicing the pro-government position (even if a good measure of said misery is a consequence of the government's actions).

Because compromise is messy and progress is incremental and sometimes hearing someone yell words that sound true will make you feel like you’ve found the answer to all the political bullshit.

I'd say the average person just doesn't want to deal with politics. Instead, they choose the easy way out and vote one or a small group of authoritarians to rule the whole system. Plus, authoritarians have historically been equated to social stability and security. Can't have violent political demonstrations or "problematic speech" under people like Putin or Kim Jung-un; everything is "politically correct." And once the authoritarians are in power, the people have no say or power anymore, and at the very least the people FEEL powerless against the government, and again choose the easy way out by keeping their head down and refusing to instigate a fight against the government force that would easily and brutally overpower them.

Plus, the authoritarian governments are quick to blame their enemies for the problems of the people, utilizing propaganda, and the people are either obediently putting their trust jn their government (many people in every nation, both liberal and authoritarian, tend to trust the "credible source" that is their government), or the people stay quiet to avoid becoming an enemy of the state. I could go on, but I think I'll just say I digress right here. Feel free to chip in and let me know what y'all think! :)

In Hungary, one big reason is that the government has all the media coverage, and they basically created a false narrative that if Orbán loses, then a) the previous government will come back and no matter how bad things are right now, it will be WORSE, b) migrants will come and wreak havock, c) our sons will have to go to war (in the last election, the opposition lost a lot of votes because there was a billboard campaign stating that the new PM candidate would send soldiers to Ukraine), d) there will be some kind of woke dictatorship.

People also think that the bad quality of life is mostly the fault of the EU and the previous government (which was in power over a decade ago...), and that it's okay that Orbán and his party steals from them because at least they're "on their side".

The government also provides some help to parents, which people find valuable, so they keep voting for FIDESZ.

I think most people are just trying to live their day to day and don't see long term, or just can't because of their station. It's back to nature/nurture I guess.

What you head is filled with determines how your brain is wired.

Most people want the same things. And no one wants to go fight a war. People do the best they can with what they are given. It's a sad truth of human history. We can never quite avoid tripping over our very own nature. And that fact is taken advantage of. Over and over again.

People are seeing a massive drop in their quality of life before they vote for an authoritarian.

That's why they vote for strongmen - the neoliberals that were in charge before fucked everything up, and without any understanding of why that happened they just react by electing the opposition.

Except that leaders like Orban or Erdogan have been in power for like a decade already.

Sure, once these types get in to power they're hard to dislodge.

Quality of life declines, people vote for a strongman. Then, once he's in, he just has to make sure he isn't the one that gets blamed for continuing declining quality of life. They usually control the media and suppress political opponents, and it doesn't help that the alternative being offered is just a return to the previous neoliberal politics that oversaw the start of the decline in the first place.

Eventually people get fed up and turn to more radical solutions, but they have to lose faith in voting first.

An authoritarian isn't simply the person at the top, it is also all of the people who support them. Authoritarians like the comfort of being told what's good and what's bad. Life is simpler when those difficult moral choices are made for you and you free yourself of the responsibility of them. They don't believe they're at fault if those choices end up being disastrous because they were just following along, it wasn't their idea after all.

Of course that's all nonsense, but the point is that it's a comfortable fiction which means it is very appealing to someone who is susceptible to that mindset.

People who are afraid vote for someone they perceive as strong. Thus you'll see that right-wing media and politicians are constantly trying to instill fear in people. They want their voters to think that their way of life is under attack and there are enemies everywhere. The only one they can count on is their fearless leader to save them!

Be afraid - be angry - be afraid - be angry, the drumbeat that runs through all right wing media for mass consumption.

The idea of someone that strong to make a change persuade people to vote them or they just already spreading fear to the people but not just that, this one is a bit unique, I think. Well, in El Salvador they got Bukele which basically a dictator, you can search it. In his term, democracy is decreasing but the homicide feel down drastically on country that so dangerous before, now they just could walk on the street without afraid getting shot and die.

I think a lot comes from a memory or propagandized history of a more prosperous past. For a lot of those countries that means a super authoritarian USSR or Ottoman Empire. They were, at least perceived to be, global powerhouses of political and economic power. Nostalgia is powerful and its easier to look back at a known thing than look forward at the unknown.

Authoritarian leaders can control the media and the experience of the people.

"Because you need me, Springfield. Your guilty conscience may move you to vote Democratic, but deep down you long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king." -Sideshowbob The Simpsons

They have control over the media so the only side of the story people hear is that they are wonderful leaders and that the only people who oppose them are low class idiots, possibly criminals.

Also, they have control over the elections as well so it doesn't really matter how people vote.

Kind of like what Republicans are trying to do in the US.

more often than not, authoritarian leadership coincides with a strong chokehold on local media and strong dismissal or even attempts to completely bar entry of foreign media

think the great firewall, or local newsstation, being subsidiaries of fox, reading the exact same statements from a script across the USA

There are a surprising number of authoritarians who are perfectly happy to control others as long as it's their guy in power. They span the entire political spectrum.

Depends on a lot of things.

Some people are outright sadistic, and just want to be able to step on others. Some people need a de facto father figure (I know a few that suffered under very abusive parents). Some just want a real-life tiny god they can worship. Some just fear. Some actually believe the lies about the fears of migrants, islamists, progressive politics, etc.

I personally voted for Orbán in 2010. I was told gay men will accuse me of homophobia if I reject their advances, that my tax will be spent on welfare for people that are able to work, that liberalism will destroy culture, that I'd be jailed for saying slurs, that "communists" will force me to do hard manual labor I"m incapable of (I'm somewhat disabled), and that feminists ruined my dating chances. I learned a week later, feminism isn't a "female supremacist" movement, then in a year, almost all of the other lies have crumbled. And now I'm forced to work in the communal work program for full time, below minimum wage, because those old "communists" can't differentiate between a computer and a Super Nintendo, and office work would turn me into gay (I'm bi with a strong bias towards femme people).

People love having an "enemy" to blame for all their problems.

Throughout history it was often the Jewish people. But immigrants, LGBT, racial minorities work just as well.

Life is inherently unfair. Some people are born into money and never have to work a day in their lives. Others work hard everyday and get almost nothing in return.

It where things like heaven/hell, karma, reincarnation etc. come from. Don't worry that life sucks there's a big cosmic force that'll balance the scales at some point.

We crave something to blame for that injustice and they jump on that.

Because the system gives them no other real choice. When all major parties serve the interests of the oligarchs, the people know that they're being screwed. Which makes them angry. And since the powers that be absolutely will not allow the emergence of a truly populist movement or leader, the people have no other option but to support a charismatic authoritarian leader who promises them whatever they want. I suspect that most of the people know that those leaders are lying, but at least they acknowledge that the people are being screwed!

Note that while the establishment never allows a leftist populist movement, they're fine with an authoritarian one. Translation: our owners won't allow their cattle to run free, but they're happy to have us all choose a leader to send us to the slaughterhouse for their profit.

If those leaders are not newcomers, which is true for Putin, Erdogan, Orban, Xi and so on, there is also another reason. People understand that these guys would not just leave if people would try to vote them out. They will use election frauds, threats and then open violence. So these attempts to overthrow them either fails at the beginning or would lead to violent turmoil which is highly likely to end up with bad guys winning and tightening the grip even further. A lot of people just want to save those bits of freedom and comfort that they currently have instead of risking it all for the sake of possible (but not exactly likely or guaranteed) better future. If you live long enough in such societies, this starts to work even on subconscious level.

Just look at Hong Kong - people were living in a relatively free society and they revolted against creeping injustice, revolt was violently crushed and society destroyed. Now people would be much more hesitant to even vote for alternative candidates (even if there would be any) because they know or suspect where it may lead

I'm from Hungary, and there's also the issue of "divide and conquer" between many groups.

  • The Roma are almost universally hated because that would invalidate the trauma of a boy that was stabbed for an MP3 player in 2006.
  • The trans are almost universally hated because TERFs and some queer people suddenly caring about optics, most infamously by Zsófia Balogh, who ruined Partizán (Hungarian ex-breadtube), and only cares about optics if it benefits her (seriously, she flip-flops between [crappy radfem/tankie talking point] and "the trans are going too far").
  • Gays and lesbians are mostly hated because pedojacketing.
  • The disabled is pitied at best, and hated at worst, because Hungarian kusoge developer Tamás "Tomcat" Polgár found Mercedeses and BMWs with disability cards (cards that signal them to be allowed to park in restricted parking lots, even allowing people transferring the disabled to use it), which he photographed and posted to his crappy blog, which automatically means each disabled gets enough money to afford luxury cars. If they're not hating you, they'll instead figure out how to give each disabled person a job, because "that teaches good morals". This usually consists of adjusting or even inventing jobs to caricatures of the disabled.
  • There's also a lot of fights between intellectual and manual laborers. This is mostly seen in the teacher's strike, where manual laborers (the "real working class") are accusing them of not wanting to work "real" jobs, and that their jobs are way too easy, and thus are overpaid. Similarly many intellectual workers demean people that aren't educated enough.
  • And don't get me started on the religious...

Atop of that, many doesn't want to name the issue with Fidesz, which is creeping cristofascism into mainstream politics. They think a center-right politician like Péter Márki-Zay is "too far left", want hard right and Christian-theocratic talking points to enshrined as a base point, and serve the big automotive corporations.

The response from many Hungarians, especially of those who don't vote? "Fidesz is a communist party, because Orbán once supposedly said 'state-capitalism', and he is not a real Christian, because he's hateful, and real Christianity is about loving thy neighbor. If he was a real right-wing politician, he wouldn't sell out the country to foreign corporations, or nationalize things."

Note that the "nationalization" is a great misnomer. Fidesz wants to signal to it's ex-tankie voter base (that are now only interested in work moralism and worshiping some authoritarian leader like a god), but without actually nationalizing things. It mainly consists of giving state money to a Fidesz oligarch (or sometimes a GONGO, like how the book store Libri was bought by MCC, a far-right GONGO), then calling it nationalization. Once a power plant was even sold to Orbán's personal gas repairman, Lőrinc Mészáros, then bought back by the state for more money than it was sold, essentially making Mészáros to gain money off of the deal.

Once you understand right-wing as "authority of wealth", this all immediately makes sense. Fidesz is serving a small group of capitalists, both domestic and foreign, but they don't care about the free market anymore, just to stay in power at all cost. Meanwhile what Hungary needs is lessening the social inequalities, and rebuilding secularism. Not "real" capitalism and "real" Christianity. Especially not "real" work morals.

You can ask for French too, at least its subtile (less more the time is passing). I guess sometimes we are just morons, and we should really care and just not show China and others fuckers (meaning dictators not people )

Edit : Its an reddit's level answer

  1. They have at least some if not many supporters of their ideologies. (Even in the most repressive states the need some degree of this to maintain power)

  2. Systems that empower those that support them and disadvantage those dissent.

Honestly, take a look at gerrymandering and voter suppression in some US states. These are systems that facists are using to cement their positions of power within state legislatures. In addition to banning books, blocking professors they don’t like from tenure, and turning some public universities and schools into religious institutions.

These are all things that are happening in some US states and if that surprises you then you haven’t been paying attention.

When it comes to Russia, when liberals took power in the 90s the death toll reached WW2 levels, and they were massively deindustrialized to boot. Liberals are rightly despised there, their economy minister even said of the massive numbers of dead that they "didn't fit in to the market" while living standards for everyone else plummeted. They also crushed democracy and replaced it with dictatorial presidential powers so they could remain in control, and people like Medvedev have openly stated that the KPRF won the 1996 election and were cheated out of it. Nobody wants them anywhere near power and the two most popular parties remain United Russia and the communist KPRF.

I think one answer that's not yet been provided is that many people generally "don't know, and don't want to know". They just want it to work the way they want. Politics, social engagement, philosophy, and other broad concepts are gigantic and difficult topics. These strong men figures understand that if they can just say they're taking care of "it" they can also get a lot of what they want as well.

Religion is largely the same, and you'll see a ton of overlap from these kind of people. Often so much so that the venn diagram is nearly a circle. It's just more comfortable and easy to not be introspective and address your own personal biases and entrenched beliefs. Why do that when big strong guy can hurt others when they argue with you.

Who else would try to be elected into such a powerful position? I mean, why else would you run, except to exert your own authority?

Go ahead and try to fantasize about what you would do in your first week as the elected leader of your nation. Would you be tough on crime? Restrict access to guns? Criminalize transgender people? Criminalize people who want to hurt transgender people? What about war, or taxes? There's really no way to do the job without being authoritarian.

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