Sunday, August 5, 2018

Jordan Weissmann affects a fever over QAnon despite Pew finding that "commitment to representative democracy is strongest in North America and Europe"


What makes QAnon a little a different, and little bit scarier, than many of the conspiracy theories Americans have latched onto through the decades, is that it’s fundamentally authoritarian . . . They’re waiting for the sitting president to deliver their country from evil by rounding up his political opposition. Adherents have taken to jubilantly counting up the sealed indictments federal authorities have filed lately because they see them as a sign that a mass wave of arrests is coming. At Trump’s Wednesday night rally in Tampa, Florida, a shocking number of attendees showed up with QAnon T-shirts and signs. These people are all but asking for a strongman to seize control of the country . . . You can’t tell how many are really out there, but they’re now part of the political fabric in a country where around 1 in 5 people think we’d be better off with a strongman leader, and 17 percent say they’d be OK with military rule.

He's referring to this from Pew, which nevertheless finds "broad support for representative and direct democracy" globally:

There is less support for a strong leader who can make decisions without interference from a parliament or courts. Still, about a quarter or more back this idea in Japan, Italy, the United Kingdom, Israel, Hungary, South Korea and the U.S. And while military rule is relatively unpopular, 17% endorse this idea in the established democracies of the U.S., Italy and France.

France, Italy, the US, three overly generous countries being injected with many costly, difficult to assimilate, and lawless "refugees".