This article claims that they do, because of their ability to enforce social changes in favour of traditional and family. I’m not very convinced. It’s not like Trump was rebuked when challenging long-standing institutions…
I think most conservatives admire dictators because of their power - in some cases unlimited power.
Conservatives today worship power as an end unto itself. Power is everything.
Also, a dictator can enforce the will of a small minority - usually a conservative small minority. Democracy is seen by modern conservatives as taking away their power and giving it to the undeserving majority.
Conservatives, as they’re currently defined, certainly seem to. OG conservatives despised left wing dictators but held deep affection for the right wing variety.
The ones that plague my daily life seem to love Love LOVE telling others what to do, but have a shit-fit when a person/governing body tells them what to do.
My take is that while many people may admire dictators in theory, there is no way they would want to live under a dictatorship.
I could be wrong, but I thought non conservatives liked people such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez?
You would be wrong.
Point is, Castro stood against the U.S. Non-conservative Cubanos may not loooooove Fidel Castro, but that does not mean they want to go back to United Fruit.
It depends:
Answer in the above link: Mostly, yes.
Suppressing opposition media works.
Another data point is the current domestic popularity of El Salvador strongman Nayib Bukele. The lesson there is that if life gets hard enough, a security-first regime become attractive.
That helps explain this:
Trump polls best in counties with declining life expectancy.
While I find the Atlantic article, on the long-term association between American conservatism and support for authoritarianism, convincing, some on the left also go in a pro-dictatorship direction. Consider:
In the year after 9/11, even more Americans said that:
Belief Erodes in First Amendment (2002)
Insecurity fuels authoritarianism.
And vice versa.
I don’t know that I have a thoughtful answer to the OP. What I do observe is that – in classic demagogue fashion – Trump…
“We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you: [Donald Trump] is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle age, middle class, middle income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family, and American values and character, …”
– “The American President”
Trump daily gives people a laundry list of things to be absolutely terrified of. He targets a demographic that … um … I won’t deign to describe at length here.
He hits them right square in their ids, and he does it masterfully. That’s his little socioopathic superpower 
Suffice to say that they are easily made afraid.
He’s the arsonist-as-firefighter incarnate.
Do fearful people tend to be drawn to the one who seems credible as he constantly states as an immutable fact that he, “alone, can fix it?”
I think yes.
Trump isn’t a dictator. Not even remotely. Ask any MAGA prole; they’ll tell you that, unhesitatingly and unambiguously.
They’re also not afraid. They’ll tell you that, too.
Because they have Trump.
Just don’t try to take him away from them. That would be bad.
You’re in medicine. Maybe there’s a buprenorphine equivalent for what these people are experiencing. I can come up with that much mercy. Honest, I can.
I think this is the key factor. I don’t think conservatives - or liberals - have an inherent love for dictators. Both ends of the political spectrum would love to have their ideology embraced by the majority and achieved through democratic means. But they don’t have the numbers for that. And when it comes down to making a hard choice, a lot of conservatives pick their ideology ahead of democracy.
So a lot of current conservatives want to establish a dictatorship so they can enact a conservative agenda despite lacking majority approval. They tell themselves they would be doing this for the good of the country and after it was done, people would see their conservative ideology is correct and would retroactively approve.
If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy. - David Frum
The thing that conservatism wants to conserve is hereditary power. That comes in various forms, but the biggest ones are the power that comes from race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, religion, etc. This is what they really mean by family and tradition - they want others to play their game, not invent a new one. It’s not dictatorships in general they love it’s only conservative dictatorships. Up with Pinochet, down with Allende. Up with Putin, down with Castro. Up with Bolsonaro, down with Chavez. You get the picture.
In that light you can understand why they love some groups and hate others. Conservatives are comfortable with dictators who will protect white privilege and corporate structures that conserve financial wealth. International gangsters like Putin, Netanyahu, Pinochet and Bolsonaro will play ball. However the Soviets, Castro, Chavez, want(ed) to replace hereditary power with a socialist power structure, so conservatives hate those guys.
This is why conservatives stumble over themselves to blurt out “this is a Republic not a Democracy” every chance they get. Democracy is what gave the vote to women, minorities, and non-property-owners, so it’s deeply distrusted. It’s a threat to hereditary power, so it has to go.
They sure wish he would be, though.
I’ve never known a single conservative who liked Castro, Xi, Mao or Kim one bit.
It all has to do with whether Commie/leftwing or not.
Most people I know who lean to the left aren’t fans of Chavez or Castro. You can certainly find some, hell, you can find some people who are fans of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, but admiration for dictators isn’t something I associate with non-conservatives. I don’t associate a love for dictators with traditional conservatives though I do with MAGA conservatives. If you told me in 2004 that the Republican party would trust the Russian government more than they trusted their own government I would have laughed. Today I just weep in acknowledgement.
They may not like Castro or Chavez that much, but they certainly love Che Guavara. Wearing his face on shirts and everything, despite the guy sharing a whole lot of views that were…tyrannical.
Che was a guerrilla and very romanticized. He also was never a dictator.
Just to add, no non conservative ever liked or admired Hugo Chavez.
Maybe you had some youthful zealots that admired what Castro said, or claimed to want to do, but that kinda goes out the window when they grow up and look at the actual conditions.
Same with Mao. Mao’s little red book had tons of really good slogans. “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun.” But Mao the guerrilla was very different from Mao the dictator, who caused mass starvation, incredible chaos, and caused the greying population time bomb that is starting to explode. The founding Black Panthers in Oakland CA got a brilliant idea. They drove to the San Francisco Chinatown. Bought a box of Mao’s little red book, when the Berkeley campus, sold said books for 20x the purchase price, then went out and bought rifles and started shadowing the police. Cause then governor Ronnie Reagan to almost have an aneurism when armed Black Panthers exercising their 2nd amendment rights protested at the State Capital. The Black Panthers didn’t even read the Mao’s Little Red Book until months and months later.
“Just the tip, I promise”
That sounds very similar to the way fundamentalist groups like the Taliban, Boko Harum and the Moral Majority among many others of all flavours think.