Meanwhile, 44 percent backed the American tradition of competing branches of government as a model, if sometimes “frustrating,” system.
Why would people want to live under an authoritarian’s thumb? It’s rooted, experts say, in a psychological need for security—real or perceived—and a desire for conformity, a goal that becomes even more acute as the country undergoes dramatic demographic and social changes. People also like to obey a strong leader who will protect the group—especially if it is the “right” group whose interests will be protected. Recall the Trump supporter who, during the 2019 government shutdown, complained, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
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.