After reading Laura Silver and Janell Fetterolf’s comprehensive article, I must first commend their rigorous presentation of data. The Pew Research Center’s ability to encapsulate such a sprawling global landscape—24 countries no less—into digestible figures is no small feat. Their findings, while alarming, paint a clear and important picture of the world’s ideological climate.
The article aptly addresses growing support for authoritarianism, particularly in regions where economic disparity and political instability breed disillusionment with democratic values. Yet, there’s something unsaid here—something simmering beneath the surface of these numbers that merits closer examination.
Indeed, it is easy to glance at statistics, see 31% of the population in favor of authoritarianism, and conclude that certain groups—youth, the lower-income, the political right—are simply dissatisfied with the status quo. The authors do well in highlighting demographic patterns that coalesce into trends, and yet, the article remains an artifact of the same technicist analysis that so often misses the deeper cultural and psychological currents underpinning political shifts.
The oversimplified juxtaposition of authoritarianism and democracy, framed as mutually exclusive systems, obscures a more unsettling reality: democratic…
