FROM THE OUTSIDE | A vision, a warning...

Por

José Carreño Figueras

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Publicado: 10/3/2025 · 1:42 p.m. MX | Actualizado: 10/3/2025 · 1:42 p.m. MX

A growing perspective among analysts in the United States is that the American population, or at least a significant portion, is tolerant of and even supportive of an authoritarian government.

“I believe a growing number of Americans have become not just tolerant but affirmatively in favor of authoritarianism... In 2024, a significant portion of voters (77 million) chose (Donald) Trump not despite his explicitly authoritarian proposals, but because of them,” wrote Jonathan Last, editor of the conservative-leaning online newspaper The Bulwark.

Indeed, this is nothing new. Many historians relate the current U.S. political situation to past eras and an ongoing historical presence of groups and sectors that can hardly be considered democratic.

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In fact, from the slaveholding era in the American South—which led to a civil war and ended slavery but not racial discrimination—to the current extremist groups of Trump voters, there is a direct line.

“The issues have changed (…) The circumstances have varied (…) The media landscape has evolved from print to radio and TV to the internet, but the fundamental grievances remain the same,” wrote influential neo-conservative historian Robert Kagan.

“All anti-liberal groups—from Southern slaveholders to the Jim Crow-era populists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birchers (anti-communists of the 1950s), and the followers of Pat Buchanan (in the 1980s)—have feared that their vision of the United States as a nation of ‘small government, maximum freedom, and a Christian, white populace’ was under attack.”

In that mythology, the culprits are the financial cabals of Wall Street and Jewish bankers, cosmopolitan (or globalist) groups, progressive intellectuals, and ethnic minorities bolstered by immigration—forces perceived as working to undermine and even destroy white groups.

Historically, these groups have been receptive to such narratives and have been exploited by populist leaders who have tapped into racial sentiments and social fears—ranging from anti-communism to anti-globalism, anti-Islamism, and resentment against immigrants.

And this approach has worked for them, at least in terms of personal power.

“Since the time of the Revolution, a large number of Americans have wanted to see the United States in ethno-religious terms—as a fundamentally white and Protestant nation, whose character is a consequence of white, Christian, and European civilization. Their goal has been to preserve white and Christian supremacy, contrary to the vision of the Founding Fathers, and they have tolerated the Founders' liberalism and the functioning of the democratic system only as long as it did not undermine that cause.”

José Carreño Figueras