+ 26,OOO COMMENTS WORTH READING!
Thank you Brian!
In 2017, JOHN DEAN wrote a lengthy article that included great insight & interesting observations that I encourage others to read in its entirety.
Altemeyer on Trump’s Supporters
7 Jul 2017 John Dean
excerpt:
Most of Donald Trump’s supporters are probably people whom social psychologists call authoritarian followers, because they are so supportive of the authorities they consider legitimate. These are the people Trump was talking about when he famously bragged that he could shoot somebody in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and it would make no difference to his backers. They are the people who so willingly took the “loyalty pledge” at Trump rallies in the early primaries—even calling on Trump to “do the swearing” when he had skipped it.
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.
One can expect some of Trump’s followers to waver if the months ahead are thick with damaging revelations like those that brought down the Nixon White House. But a repeat of “Watergate-type scandals” may not damage Trump as much as they did Nixon.
Nixon had little means of communicating directly with his supporters. Trump’s followers eagerly await his tweets to tell them the truth they will believe and repeat to one another. And so far, they have apparently believed everything he’s said.
Second, the major news outlets in the 1970s were the three TV networks. There was no Fox News. And while there were some newspaper columnists and radio personalities who supported Nixon, today there are dozens of Trump-endorsing blogs that are on tens of millions of “Favorites” lists in American homes.
Third, Trump’s party controls all three branches of the federal government.
Given this gloomy assessment of how likely Trump’s support is going to weaken, it seems clear that the more effective strategy now is to activate the Americans who oppose him, who happily amount to a solid majority of the public.
https://verdict.justia.com/2017/07/07/altemeyer-trumps-supporters
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