politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
This sounds about right. If you look at the rise of authoritarian parties in Europe you will see numbers sitting between 25% and 35% too. I have a feeling that this might just be an innate personality trait that people are born with. Some people are more submissive and prefer strong leaders, even at the cost of personal liberties. I mean, we already witness this in other aspects of life.
If you think about very early human history, like the first civilizations, I believe there's an answer there. Hunter gatherers were relatively egalitarian, but then we started settling into larger groups/cities. The cities needed to protect their food stores from the rest of the humans who were basically still hunter gatherers, and had no qualms about taking any food they could get ... as well as enemy cities that might come for the food or treasure or women or whatever. (The city people also went out and enslaved the hunter gatherers, but that's a different part of the story.) In this environment if you hesitated to kill your opponent then they would kill you, so the most ruthless killers (sociopaths) were seen as heros and protectors and often rose to leadership or king status. But, you needed your protector/king to be the most ruthless sociopath in the land to protect you from the next city over's ruthless sociopath. These sociopaths have pretty much continued to rule ever since. It made sense back then, because there was no way for regular (not sociopath) people to survive without the protection of sociopaths. My theory is that it holds over today for the more fearful and stupid among us because they don't/can't understand that we no longer need psychos to protect us.