Meanwhile, 44 percent backed the American tradition of competing branches of government as a model, if sometimes “frustrating,” system.
Why would people want to live under an authoritarian’s thumb? It’s rooted, experts say, in a psychological need for security—real or perceived—and a desire for conformity, a goal that becomes even more acute as the country undergoes dramatic demographic and social changes. People also like to obey a strong leader who will protect the group—especially if it is the “right” group whose interests will be protected. Recall the Trump supporter who, during the 2019 government shutdown, complained, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
We fought a fucking war over this and people still seem to love licking boots.
Stupid people who don’t know how the system works think that they will someday be wearing the boot. They think because they kiss the boot that they’ll never be stomped.
They are a part of our DNA. Perhaps the tribe in the jungle needed bootlickers to survive and we inherited that DNA.
We never were civilized. We added extra steps to the (concrete) jungle and pretended we were.
It was a disturbingly close call which side of WWII we were gonna land on. In 1939 the second-largest Nazi party in the world was right here in America.