These numbers show that the sharp turn toward authoritarianism started before the 2020 election. It’s been brewing on the right for some time:
[A] partisan gap has opened over the whole idea of defending democracy. In a 2018 Chicago Council poll, 54 percent of Democrats said “the decline of democracy around the world” was a critical threat to U.S. interests. Only 36 percent of Republicans shared that view.
A year later, 52 percent of Democrats said “the rise of authoritarianism” was a critical threat; only 30 percent of Republicans agreed.
Three months ago, in a survey by the Center for American Progress, 72 percent of Democrats agreed that “America has clear security and economic interests in building alliances with other democracies to protect individual rights and fight corruption.”
Only 52 percent of Republicans felt that way. In February, the Reagan foundation found that 71 percent of Democrats were willing to invest more money in “promoting freedom abroad,” but most Republicans weren’t.
I guess we should be relived that the Neoconservative bullshit about invading foreign countries to install Jeffersonian democracy at the point of a gun is not longer operative. But this isn’t good either, particularly as it pertains to our own country.
These people have always been temperamentally authoritarian. Now they have been given permission to apply it to their politics in ways that are incoherent (freeeeedom!, tyranny!) and dangerous.
By the way, the rest of the article goes into how these attitudes are helping Vladimir Putin, which is true but also slightly beside the point IMO. I have no love lost for that thug but I think the right’s love for Putin has more to do with the fact that Russia has a white authoritarian government than anything else. They certainly don’t like Xi Jinping and he’s just as bad.
It’s complicated. But the upshot is that the American right no longer advocates democracy, here or around the world even in the most anodyne ways. They just don’t believe in it at all.