Nur in den Vereinigten Staaten lässt keine der beiden populistischen Einstellungen auf die Unterstützung eines populistischen starken Führers wie Trump schließen. Trumps Unterstützung wird auf ein komplexes Zusammenspiel von Faktoren zurückgeführt, darunter rassistische Ressentiments, wirtschaftliche Missstände und eine einwanderungsfeindliche Stimmung.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2025.1605460/full
18 Kommentare
Anti-establishment versus authoritarian populists and support for the strong(wo)man
Frontiers in Political Science
Our findings show that in six countries—Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Brazil, and Argentina—support for populist leaders is primarily driven by authoritarian populist attitudes. In contrast, anti-establishment populism emerges as the dominant factor only in France and Canada, while neither dimension has a significant effect in the United States.
**Only in the United States do neither type of populist attitudes predict support for a populist leader—an outcome that is perhaps our most unexpected, given that Trump epitomizes the archetype of a populist strongman. However, Trump’s support in the 2016 election has been attributed to a complex interplay of factors, including racial resentment (Tolbert et al., 2018), economic grievances (Ferguson et al., 2020), and anti-immigration sentiment (Donovan and Redlawsk, 2018)**. These findings align with Inglehart and Norris’s (2017) cultural backlash thesis, which suggests that support for Trump reflects a defensive reaction against rapid social change and perceived erosion of traditional values. In such contexts, strongman appeals resonate not because of populist attitudes, but because they promise to restore a familiar moral and cultural order. Recent findings by Dai and Kustov (2024) similarly demonstrate that during the 2016 American elections, Trump’s populist rhetoric did not resonate as strongly with voters exhibiting populist attitudes. Instead, his electoral appeal was more closely tied to his perceived moderation on economic issues and his hardline stance on immigration.
complex interplay of factors, including racial resentment, economic grievances, and anti-immigration sentiment
Equals Hate…
No doubt because it’s a manufactured mix, like a lab experiment. We were manipulated by racist landowners from the very start.
In short, Trump’s support stems from a fascist leaning that underlies the feeling of belonging to the USA. For a while this was under control, but after the 2008 crisis, capital needed to let this surface to guarantee the obscene concentration of wealth among billionaires..
Absolutely wild that all of these attitudes can be traced back to how we botched reconstruction.
Since 2011 the media and political establishment has been pushing the idea that some out group is out to get you or take your livelihood away, and for many parts of the country that never recovered from the 2008 recession and were hit especially hard by the Opioid epidemic. Many politicians were eager to also ignore these parts of the country. All it took is pushing victim narratives and polarizing groups of people against their own interests to create the mess that enabled Trump to get in twice. Powerful groups pushed narratives that everything was far worse than it really was, for many americans it was already pretty bad, and the idea of what little they had left being taken from them was enough to fall into these traps of hate and fear.
Anger and hate. People know he’s an idiot with no answers, but they just want their hatred for their world and „the other“ made manifest. That’s really all there is to it.
Fraud. You’re forgetting fraud. Propaganda. Intimidation. Lies.
It was a perfect storm of shite.
The same strategy for the right is also how we keep getting massive social support for things like gay marriage, abortion rights, climate change action, etc but it stalls or fails on the federal level.
Being hateful and a bully doesn’t make you a strong man. It makes you weak, fearful, and ignorant.
That doesn’t sound complex at all… This three things are VERY closely related.
“Populist strongman”? I’ve never seen him referenced by anyone using either of those words. The 37% of the population that voted for him did so for much simpler reasons. Spite, hatred, selfishness, fear, and stupidity being the big ones.
Imo his support is based on a complex and advanced algorithms on social media allowing him to deliver specific messages to different demographics.
If you talk to a Trump supporter they often don’t actually listen to him directly – they listen to strange news reports and youtube personalities who basically lie.
The U.S. is a total outlier because our system only has two lanes. Instead of starting a new party, a populist has to pull a hostile takeover of an existing party like the GOP. This creates a „forced bundle“ where millions of people vote for the leader not because they love „strongmen,“ but because they’re negative partisans who just want to block the other side. You can’t predict support based on „populist attitudes“ alone because, in a two-party trap, people aren’t voting for their perfect ideological match, they’re voting for the only weapon they have against the side they fear more.
STEM competence isn’t enough. A society also needs a shared sense of moral purpose (telos) and the practical judgment to apply it, otherwise technical power gets steered by resentment rather than reason.
Is „racial resentment“ just another way of saying „racism“?
All core beliefs of the GOP.