Wayne Selcher1
26 de maio de 2025
Em parceria com o Observatório Político dos Estados Unidos (OPEU), o Boletim Lua Nova republica, em cinco partes, a análise do professor Wayne Selcher, de Elizabethtown College, sobre a erosão do consenso democrático nos Estados Unidos. Este texto é o primeiro de uma série para o OPEU sobre as notícias políticas nos Estados Unidos. O texto foi originalmente publicado em 29 de fevereiro de 2024, no site do OPEU.
***
The Permeation and Supremacy of Polarized Partisanship
The Role of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement
Both parties have moved away from the traditional center in the last decade or so, broadening the active range across the political spectrum (especially on the far right), a definite contrast from the 1990s. The Republican Party has shifted far more so, taken over from the more moderate former leadership by Trump and the populist, highly personalistic Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement under his sway. Political scientist Pippa Norris demonstrates, using an internationally comparative attitudes survey on two current wedge issues in American politics, that there is a strong conservative backlash against certain social attitude changes in the U.S.
“…we need to examine party polarization in socially liberal and conservative attitudes among voters. In this regard we can focus on comparing public opinion among supporters of 115 political parties in a range of 19 equivalent Western liberal democracies and affluent post-industrial societies. Attitudes towards abortion can also be compared with approval of homosexuality, as a closely related benchmark of moral values. As illustrated in Figures 2 and 3, the results of the comparison suggest that the position of voters in the Republican Party is one of the most conservative on these issues compared with party voters across almost all other Western democracies, except for Greece, where the Orthodox church has long been vigorously opposed to reproductive rights. By contrast, party voters in the Democratic Party, far from being extremely liberal, as sometimes claimed, are in fact mainstream on these issues when compared with most parties in Western democracies, including both left-wing and conservative parties.” [Emphasis added.]
An international survey study in 2021 by Morning Consult concluded that authoritarianism is notably higher in the American right than in that of several other comparable democracies.
“A scale measuring propensity toward right-wing authoritarian tendencies found right-leaning Americans scored higher than their counterparts in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. 26% of the U.S. population qualified as highly right-wing authoritarian, Morning Consult research found, twice the share of the No. 2 countries, Canada and Australia… The 39-point gap in right-wing authoritarian scores between America’s left and right was more pronounced than it was in any of the other countries included, though the test also revealed a 30-point gap between the right and left in Canada and 28-point differences between the two groups in Australia and the United Kingdom.”
The late Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist, was the founder of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior and profiled the personalities of many key world leaders for the U.S. government. After retiring from serving five presidents, he wrote (with Stephanie Doucette) “Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers” (2019), warning of the dangers to democracy of the personalistic, semi-charismatic MAGA movement that highly narcissistic Trump marshalled and leads. Among many other negative traits for leadership, a narcissist has a fragile sense of self-worth, no empathy, does not accept accountability, overestimates his own abilities, resists advice, cannot accept loss, and is slow to recognize his mistakes.
As a Kirkus reviewer of Post’s book noted: “‘The only loyalty a person with his malignant or pathological narcissism has is to himself and his own survival,’ Post writes, and never mind the fate of those around that person, since loyalty flows only in the direction of Trump and not the other way. Paranoia, insecurity, bluster, constant aggression, and utter lack of empathy are other components of the template.”
Among other major effects on the political culture, Trump redefined for Republicans what “conservative” means in the U.S., based on highly personalistic populist loyalty to him. He had a tenacious hold on most Republican voters and the party in mid-2023, even with the report of the Select January 6th Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump’s several state and federal legal troubles, his constant lies and misleading statements to keep his base agitated and loyal to him, and his insulting and bombastic style of petty put-downs and focusing heavily on his own personal grievances. Trump has convinced his followers that there is an existential crisis for the soul of America and that all U.S. federal government institutions, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, are merely partisan and corrupt, controlled by the “deep state,” with the liberals in ruinous control of most (plus dominating the U.S. cultural and media elite). Many Republican politicians have successfully emulated him.
Along with other extremist rhetoric on their part, Trump and other radical Republicans freely call the Democrats “communists,” a very inaccurate label that has emotional resonance within MAGA. One telling indication of Trump’s egomania and authoritarian bent was his December 2022 rant on his “Truth Social” account that the Constitution and other rules and regulations should be “terminated” to allow him to assume his rightful place as president because he actually won in November 2020.
Trump regularly protests his innocence, refers to accusations against him as “hoaxes,” to official investigations and criminal indictments as “witch hunts” (“greatest of all time!”) and “election interference,” and to critical press reports as “fake news,” all designed by political enemies to keep him from winning in 2024. Loyal Trump supporters and many Republicans follow suit and discount the controversies and lawsuits as “just (stirred up by) the Democrats,” or because he’s “a fighter and a disrupter” unbeholden to the political establishment and the “deep state.” They see a “weaponization of government” by the Democrats which is unfairly and selectively persecuting front-runner Trump to weaken the MAGA movement and to benefit Joe Biden in 2024. This argumentation usually involves Republican mention of the ongoing federal criminal investigation of corruption charges against President Biden’s son–“What about Hunter Biden…?”
Trump’s personalistic authoritarian outbursts against democratic institutions should not be easily dismissed as merely odd personal quirks, given the context of other aspects of Trump’s discourse and behavior, such as his angry themes of “vengeance” and “revenge” in his campaigning in mid-2023, as at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2023: “I am your justice… I am your retribution…” His rhetoric became more radical and confrontational as 2023 progressed, always with the long-standing underlying theme designed to encourage strong personal identification of his followers with himself, his grievances, his enemies (“they”), and his sense of “victimization”expressed through rambling speeches and repeated slogans at rallies, such as “They’re not after me, they’re after you… I’m just standing in the way… I’m being indicted for you…”
Although a multi-billionaire, he consistently and very successfully requests contributions by followers to his legal defense or campaign funds at dramatic moments, such as after criminal indictments, even as little as five dollars, as a way of strengthening their emotional ties to him and giving them a sense of voice and participation.
A CBS News/YouGov poll in May 2023 showed clearly why many (but not all) Republican voters still supported Trump so strongly and why at that time he was the overwhelming front-runner for the party’s nomination in 2024. Republican voter preferences for 2024 were heavily for a candidate who challenges “woke” ideas, opposes gun restrictions, says that Trump won in 2020, and makes liberals angry. (“Owning the libs” by making them angry is a major aspect of MAGA, and “woke liberal agenda” is used as a derisive and catch-all major putdown of the despised liberal programs.) Republicans who supported Trump for 2024 in this poll like his past performance in office, feel that he stands up for people like them, think he would beat Biden, and like how he deals with political opponents. They also tend to see him as he regularly paints himself, an “innocent victim” of “leftist hate” for Trump and for America. Many also tend to like him personally.
By using data from various polls, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake profiles some key ways in which Republicans who consider themselves “MAGA” differ from other [i.e., “party-first”] Republicans, an analysis that reveals the major split within the party. Blake notes that “4 to 5 in 10 Republican-leaning voters identify as MAGA.” In contrast to more traditional Republicans, MAGA identifiers show highly personalistic loyalty and devotion to Trump (more so than to the Republican Party), detest and immediately attack any Republican who criticizes Trump in any way, and are more evangelical, conservative, conspiracy-minded, and fully intransigent against the Democrats (rather than ever compromising). They are more extreme on Trump’s “stolen” electoral victory in 2020, events of January 6, their favorite news sources, and coronavirus vaccines. They are especially angry with former Vice-President Mike Pence, because he did not stop the Congressional certification of the November 2020 election results on January 6, 2021, as Trump had asked him to do.
Further MAGA authoritarianism is shown in that Blake comments, “a recent poll from Vanderbilt University showed a particularly pronounced gap on the question of who was the better president, Biden or Russia’s Vladimir Putin. While 70 percent of non-MAGA Republicans said Biden was better, 52 percent of MAGA Republicans preferred Putin.” Trump, at various times, has expressed admiration for Putin’s leadership skills.
Some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s style and electability in the general elections of 2024, but the Republican leadership in Congress avoids frontally criticizing him as much as they can. They do not wish to antagonize the party’s activist base, heavily MAGA, upon which they must depend in their own primary elections (intra-party), in the context of a tight national and key-state party competition. In these primary elections, the conservative party activists, including MAGA, tend to show up to vote in greater percentages than do the more moderate party members. Republican leaders are also aware that Trump could start a separate party in his name, if denied the Republican nomination in 2024. There is little indication that Republicans or Republican leaders are turning against him openly because of his character defects, brash behavior, extremism, or mounting legal troubles. In fact, a serious case can be made that his narcissism (with his non-politician, free-speaking style) is attractive to the followers who identify most closely with him psychologically. But, interestingly, few of the former members of Trump’s cabinet, who worked closely with him, have come forward publicly to endorse him for the Republican nomination.
Two-thirds of Republican primary election voters rallied behind Trump in April 2023, as he faced several legal troubles, but the general public is strongly set against a Trump-Biden rematch in 2024, and “substantial majorities” were against either one running for president at all. Many voters cite the advanced age of both candidates. This negative sentiment is reminiscent of the high rejection rates in the 2016 presidential race, in which, as of September of that year: “Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the two most unpopular major party presidential candidates on record. Both of them have unfavorability ratings of more than 50 percent.” The two major American political parties are failing to nominate broad consensus candidates for president, if that is even possible anymore.
Trump’s high level of narcissism, self-obsession, and semi-charismatic appeal to his base prevent him from publicly acknowledging any defeat whatsoever or losing face to his base, even to the demonstrated extent of blaming the electoral and legal systems and challenging the Constitution itself after he lost re-election in November 2020. On January 7, 2021, Trump, still president, stated, under pressure from advisors, that the event of the day before was a “heinous attack” and “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”
As a measure of his shifting opportunism over time, Trump gradually came to praise the rioters, because they were his supporters. For the same self-seeking reasons, he robustly defended the “innocence” of his supporters arrested for criminal activities on January 6, 2021, belittled their trials, and promised to pardon them and issue an official apology for their “unfair” treatment, if elected in 2024. Key Senate Republicans strongly condemned that idea. In March 2023, Trump even tried to shift blame to his Vice-President Pence for the attack, because Pence did not send all of the electoral votes back to the state legislatures on the grounds of election fraud, as Trump had wanted him to do.
In light of such consistently erratic behavior, and even with his clear defiance of the law and the Constitution and his veiled threats of violence from his followers in his defense, it is a measure of the psychological strength and danger of Trump’s continuing power of persuasion over his followers and the party, that in mid-2023, 63 percent of Republicans still believed on Trump’s word, mere suspicion, doubtful claims, distrust of the Democrats, and conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by widespread fraud and that Biden was therefore not a legitimate president. This doubt persists in spite of scores of lost court cases, numerous failed election recounts (all of them) down to the county and precinct level, the official January 6 investigation results (including the committee’s vote to refer Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution), and two post-election investigations sponsored by Trump’s own election campaign that discovered no significant proof of the fraud claim.
A detailed “Lost, not Stolen” report in July 2022 by eight prominent conservatives with distinguished records concluded that fraud did not determine even a single outcome at the precinct or state level in 2020, in regard to all 64 of Trump’s claims against results in 6 states. Still, Republican election “deniers,” following Trump’s lead in promoting his “Big Lie,” ran in many electoral races in 2022, with the same message of fraudulent elections in 2020. Most were defeated, but the demagogical tendency continues toward November 2024, still encouraged by Trump, down to the county and local levels.
The current pressure toward continuing, antagonistic dualism in the U.S. two-party system encourages either-or thinking and disregard for shared perspectives in the citizen debate about public policies. Weakness in establishing a shared middle ground in public debate is one of the defects of the current U.S. party system. There is a bias against the success of third parties in the single-member district electoral system in which a large majority of Congressional districts are now dominated by a single party, often by the manipulation (gerrymandering) of the redistricting that is required after every national census. The public is used to being presented with a disparate and boxed-in “either-or” framing of persons, issues, alternatives, and solutions.
There is some ongoing interest in a third alternative, but, beyond the overwhelming structural obstacles of single-member electoral districts, it is unlikely that an emerging one would get enough actual voter support to be viable. In October 2022, Gallup noted that “The 56% of Americans who currently believe the country would benefit from a third major party roughly matches the average 55% holding this view across Gallup’s trend, since 2003.”
Strongly-held partisanship or other group membership may become a major element of personal identity, and a subsequent “truth filter” of perceptions with a deliberately narrow selection of news, analysis, and self-reinforcing explanatory theories to bolster one’s own convictions and sense of righteousness (called “confirmation bias”). Sound bite analysis, sensationalism, ridicule of the opposition, and virtue signaling in the chosen communications flow add to the pressure to conform to the group standard, especially when under stress from the opposition.
Such habits of constant selection, a strong wish to continue to believe and to belong, make it easier for a person to fall into a social media “echo chamber” of like-minded individuals and to divide the country into irreconcilable “us vs. them” categories, or “tribes.” Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua noted in Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2019) that, as population dynamics are shifting, “Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation’s identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition–pure political tribalism.”
This divisive tendency is easily exploited by politicians, however dangerous it may be for the system as a whole in engendering political violence, especially around elections. “Supporting the team” (a form of “political correctness”) becomes far more compelling than believing in any objective truth that goes against the party or group line, as events are re-framed in ways favorable to the interests of the party or group, whether the embarrassing topic be overwhelming immigration on the southern border, destructive urban riots, and urban decay and crime (for Democrats) or January 6, massive fraud in COVID relief funds disbursed during the Trump administration, and Trump’s several indictments (for Republicans).
Regarding systemic factors, this re-interpretation process is illustrated by decreasing disapproval (and the rise of approval) of the events of January 6 among Republicans in the public as months passed. In a June 2022 Reuters-Ipsos poll, “55% of the Republicans polled said they believed the riot was led by violent left-wing protesters,” for which there was no proof whatsoever in any official investigations. Views on the seriousness of the January 6 events remain largely divided by party, with only small changes around the edges, in spite of the findings of the major Congressional investigation. Each party holds basically to its original interpretation, including about the degree of Trump’s role in encouraging the attack or whether the “rioters” or “protestors” were “attacking” or “defending” democracy. Ongoing election denialism around the country, plus more general doubts raised about the integrity and legitimacy of the electoral system, thanks to the events of 2020 into 2021, present a major threat to American democracy, at the heart of that form of government and far beyond the formerly usual mere policy differences.
* Este texto não reflete necessariamente as opiniões do Boletim Lua Nova ou do CEDEC. Gosta do nosso trabalho? Apoie o Boletim Lua Nova!
Referência imagética: A crowd-erected gallows hangs near the United States Capitol during the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol (Credit: Tyler Merbler from the United States/Wikimedia Commons)
- Wayne A. Selcher, PhD, é professor Emérito de Estudos Internacionais no Departmento de Ciência Política, na Elizabethtown College, PA, USA, e colaborador regular do OPEU. É fundador e editor da WWW Virtual Library: International Affairs Resources, um guia para pesquisa on-line sobre os mais diversos tópicos. Contato: wayneselcher@comcast.net. ↩︎
