Democracy Rests on Trust #3: The Authoritarian Appeal

Sometime around fifth grade, I decided Nazis and Communists weren’t opposites. They were more like the tips of a horseshoe, curving around to arrive closer together than either was to the middle. I didn’t yet know the word authoritarian, but I understood both Nazi and Communist systems were the opposite of freedom.

I had a pretty secure childhood. My family was intact. My dad had a job. I brought milk money to school without having to wait for payday. We didn’t hold air raid drills to stir fears of nuclear war. Who would bother to bomb West Virginia?

It’s easy to value freedom when your world feels safe. It’s harder when your expectations wither and you lose agency or control. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” (W B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1919). That happened amid the horrors of World War I. It happened in the Great Depression. It happens when Americans lose trust in the possibility of a better life than their parents, the hope of ever getting out of debt, or the notion that their sacrifices are for something worth sacrificing for.

When freedom feels like anarchy or victimhood, many prefer tough, charismatic leaders who promise to set the world in order. How do we build trust in ways that sustain democracy instead of undermining it? I don’t know the full answer. I suspect it begins with creating conditions in which most people feel both free and secure, with a sense of agency and hope.
​
Images: (left) The Haymarket Riot, in Harper’s Weekly, May 15, 1886. (right) Winter Olympic Games, photograph by Heinrich Hoffmahn, Feb. 6, 1936. German Federal Archives.