JOHN DEAN: Altemeyer on Trump’s Supporters

JOHN DEAN & ALTEMEYER GOT IT RIGHT ABOUT tRUMP SUPPORTERS: 

excerpt: 

We know enough about authoritarian supporters from research, and history, to know it will be very hard to change their minds about the leader they adore.

• They are extremely ethnocentric, dividing the world sharply into people in their in-group, and automatically disliking all others. They feel politicians who promote minority rights and immigration discriminate against them. Donald Trump tells them they are right. He is their champion.
• They are highly dogmatic. They get their ideas from others in the in-group, especially from their leader, not from evidence and logic. They say there is no evidence that will make them change their minds. They’re quite comfortable believing “alternate facts.”
• They get great satisfaction from being part of a large movement. Being in a cohesive crowd at rallies thrills them because they silently tell one another, just by being there, that they are powerful and right. They create an echo chamber that reinforces the belief that all the good people think like they do.
• They severely limit their sources of information. They get the news that they want to get. This also produces an echo chamber when the news sources they trust are copying each other and relaying Trump’s message.
• They have highly compartmentalized minds. When an unpleasant truth forces its way into their awareness, they do not try to integrate the other things they believe with it. Instead they put it in a box and isolate it from the rest of their thinking, which proceeds as if the truth never existed.

Put all this together and you get an idea how hard it will be to change their minds about Donald Trump.

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