Okay, answer these four questions for me:
Is it more important for your child to be respectful or independent?
Is it more important for your child to be obedient or self-reliant?
Is it more important for your child to be well-behaved or considerate?
Is it more important for your child to be well-mannered or curious?
If you answered these questions by saying that you think it’s more important for your child to be respectful, obedient, well-behaved, and well-mannered, then the chances are that you like Donald Trump. Not only that, but you are supposedly the kind of person who is inclined to follow a fascist dictator. You are, in fact, looking for the same qualities in your child that you have yourself, although one can doubt how well-mannered and respectful your average Trump voters is in their personal lives.
I can’t say this all adds up for me, actually, but this is the story we’re being sold by Matthew MacWilliams, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In a piece published today in Politico Magazine, Mr. MacWilliams says that he’s polled “1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum” and found a strong correlation between Trump supporters and people who responded to the above questions with the former answers rather than the latter. He calls these folks “authoritarians” and tells us that political scientists have been using these questions since 1992 to measure people’s “inclination toward authoritarianism.”
Erick “Son of Erick” Erickson’s Red State is so hostile to Donald Trump and so dedicated to knocking him off his stride that they’re actually citing a social scientist from Massachusetts approvingly for the first time in all of their lives.
When your only tool is a Ph.D. candidate at UMass-Amherst, everything begins to look like social science might have some merit. Any port in a storm, I guess.
In any case, I’m not going to dispute the social science here except to say that I’d be more interested in a study that looks to define assholery. Preferring that your child be well-mannered rather than curious could just mean that you’re lazy and kind of stupid. But wanting to turn the Middle East into radioactive glass because you saw something that made you uncomfortable on the news? That’s where you find the secret to the conservative voter.
What kind of asshole is attracted to Chris Christie but not Donald Trump, or Marco Rubio but not Ted Cruz?
Write me a 3,000 word story about that social science experiment and you’ll begin to get my interest.