I’m just trying to understand. Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary etc… Why do these leaders still get so much support after all they’ve done? What do they exactly like about them?

Aren’t these people seeing a massive drop in their quality of life?

  • jargoggles@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    An authoritarian isn’t simply the person at the top, it is also all of the people who support them. Authoritarians like the comfort of being told what’s good and what’s bad. Life is simpler when those difficult moral choices are made for you and you free yourself of the responsibility of them. They don’t believe they’re at fault if those choices end up being disastrous because they were just following along, it wasn’t their idea after all.

    Of course that’s all nonsense, but the point is that it’s a comfortable fiction which means it is very appealing to someone who is susceptible to that mindset.