# Resolved: You cannot understand Trump's support without understanding RWA and SDO **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Tags:** trump\ **Created:** [May 5, 2025, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-you-cannot-understand-trumps-support-without-understanding-rwa-and-sdo/1017933 "2025-05-05T23:27:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2025, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-you-cannot-understand-trumps-support-without-understanding-rwa-and-sdo/1017933/61 "2025-06-02T22:26:35Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > I agree. The US has always had a strong authoritarian undercurrent; but it was always presumed that anyone trying to take advantage of that would have to lean into the God-and-patriotism stereotypes and have a modicum of dignity and cunning. Trump doesn’t. Lots of people warned of the danger of fascism rising to power in the US, but the fascist they imagined was never a clown like Trump. > > Trump is just such a parody of awfulness that if he was a fictional character he’d be mocked as a ridiculous political strawman that in the _real_ world would never have any support from anyone. Yet in the _actual_ real world, he’s taken over the Republican party and made it into a personality cult. _Somehow._ Very much so. In 2016 when Trump was running for the GOP nomination I thought that him winning the nomination would be a good thing. I figured at most he’d get 50 million votes, that the American people weren’t willing to make the race competitive. Mitt Romney got 61 million votes in 2012, so I figured Trump would top out around 50 million or so. Instead he got 63 million. In my defense, I was basing this on the experiences with the tea party. After Obama won, the tea party put up a bunch of shit candidates for senate and cost the GOP a lot of senate seats in 2010 and 2012 that should’ve been GOP pickups. So I figured the same thing would happen on the national level. I figured the American public would treat Trump the way they treated Christine O’Donnell, Richard Mourdock or Todd Akin and reject them. This has been one of the hardest things about Trump, is having to accept how many Americans are perfectly happy to have someone this dysfunctional and destructive be entrusted with power and the US’s reputation. ---
**Author:** ![DemonTree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/demontree/32/8646_2.png) [@DemonTree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DemonTree)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2025, 1:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-you-cannot-understand-trumps-support-without-understanding-rwa-and-sdo/1017933/62 "2025-06-03T13:11:32Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Valid point. However right wing authoritarianism is called right wing because it means someone supports the existing system. In the USSR, people who supported the communists were the right wing authoritarians and the people pushing for reforms like more market economic policies and more personal freedom were seen as the enemies by the RWA types in the USSR. So in the USSR, the RWA were the ones that supported communism because that was the established system. Are you sure about that? I looked up the questions and there are quite a few about religion and traditional values that a communist, even a very authoritarian one, would likely answer ‘disagree’ to. Which is kind of my issue with it: if you ask specifically about _right-wing_ authoritarianism, then it’s completely unsurprising people who score highly on it would vote for the right-wing party. > [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > As far as your statement of labeling your political opposition as bad people, there are objective metrics. There can’t be, really, since morality is inherently not objective. You can determine how well a person lives up to their own moral beliefs, or to someone else’s, but there’s no objective way to determine which set of beliefs is correct. > [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > People who score higher in RWA and SDO are more bigoted. There are endless forms of bigotry (sexism, racism, nativism). Granted, this is expected since conservatives score higher on Haidt’s markers like purity, authority and in-group. These are all threatened by out-groups. Because liberals do not care about purity, authority or in-groups as much as conservatives, and because liberals value fairness and harm more than conservatives, liberals only see the harm done by oppression of out-groups, while conservatives more see the threats out-groups pose to purity and in-group loyalty. You realise there’s a whole world of crimes and ways to hurt other people that have nothing to do with bigotry, right? Arguably the worst thing Trump has done was try to overturn the 2020 election result, and that was merely self-interest. I don’t think the issue is that liberals value moral foundations more or less than conservatives so much as that each group applies them differently. Eg, liberals consider it unfair for some people to have plenty of money and others very little, while conservatives consider it unfair to take money from someone who earned it and give it to someone who didn’t. Liberals worry about the harm to criminals from giving them long sentences, conservatives worry about the harm to future crime victims if criminals are not locked up. > [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Brain scans show liberals feel more compassion than conservatives. Your statement that conservatives have better mental health is likely true, just like the statement that liberals feel more compassion seems to be true. Possible. Having argued with both on TwitteX, I’ve found them equally assholish towards anyone who disagrees with them, but it’s more jarring from left-wingers since they generally appear more caring. > [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Do you have a good argument for why a system that gives fewer rights, acceptance or integration for out-groups has benefits that need to be followed on a society wide level? From what I can see, the main benefit is the psychological benefits people high in RWA and SDO feel from keeping the social hierarchy intact. I don’t think that’s an answerable question. Nobody sets out with the goal of giving fewer rights or less acceptance and integration to outgroups; you need to look at specific examples and see what the motivation is. For example, if you were hiring someone for a job, you might refuse to employ a Trump supporter, because you think supporting Trump indicates bad judgement. Here’s a thread where some people say they would engage in this form of discrimination, and give various reasons for it: > [@Ethical to screen out Trump supporters applying for a job?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ethical-to-screen-out-trump-supporters-applying-for-a-job/928467): > > [This thread](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-im-looking-for-a-therapist-is-it-ok-to-ask-if-they-are-a-trump-supporter/928400) got me thinking … IANAHRP, but if I were a hiring manager, I would review social media accounts for anyone I was considering and eliminate those whose feeds indicated strong support for Trump. IMHO, anyone who supports him enthusiastically enough to fly that flag on social media is … Seriously stupid and/or delusional Racist An authoritarian-craving asshole All of the above Since any of those qualities would suggest someone I would not want on my team, would it be ethical to disq… Similarly, many left-wingers want to ban certain kinds of speech. The effect is to take away the right to free expression disproportionately from right-wingers, but their goals are to stop misinformation and/or prevent harm (including psychological harm) to oppressed minorities. For a right-wing example, consider the homeless people I mentioned earlier. Conservatives want to break up homeless encampments not because they enjoy oppressing the homeless, but because homeless camps create a nuisance that reduces quality of life for other citizens and even for the homeless themselves. Here’s an actual conservative argument for this: > **[Grants Pass Isn't About Housing. It's About Camping.](https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/grants-pass-isnt-about-housing-its)** > > What people aren't getting about the camping ban case In general if you want to understand conservatives’ motives for supporting policies you consider harmful or exclusionary, looking at specific examples and picking out the common themes is probably the way to go. > [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Thats like saying a corporation feeling motivated by a strong sense of desire to improve profits mean that their desire for quarterly profits makes it an objective good, irrelevant to the damage caused to the environment, labor force, etc by this philosophy. I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. We support corporations being profit driven because that’s the best system we know of for generating wealth and meeting demand. Its much easier to channel people’s self-interest in pro-social directions than to try and force them not to act on it, and a bunch of smaller separate actors are far more able to adapt and respond to circumstances than some distant and necessarily bureaucratic central planning department. That doesn’t mean we should just ignore negative externalities like environmental damage. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2025, 12:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-you-cannot-understand-trumps-support-without-understanding-rwa-and-sdo/1017933/63 "2025-06-10T12:38:07Z")
> [@DemonTree](#): > > I don’t think that’s an answerable question. Nobody sets out with the goal of giving fewer rights or less acceptance and integration to outgroups; This isn’t factually true though. People high in RWA and SDO want a hierarchical system that gives themselves more rights and privileges. They actively want a system that gives men, whites, christians, cishet and Americans to have more rights and privledges than other groups. Thats a huge part of Trump’s appeal, the fact that white christian patriarchs are shrinking in power and having to share power with people who do not fit into that demographic box. Make America great again is just a dog whistle for recreating a sociopolitical system that puts white christian patriarchs on top despite the fact that in 2025, white christian patriarchs only make up ~30% of America. > [@DemonTree](#): > > There can’t be, really, since morality is inherently not objective. You can determine how well a person lives up to their own moral beliefs, or to someone else’s, but there’s no objective way to determine which set of beliefs is correct. There is no objective morality outside human biology. There are no morals on an uninhabited planet in a solar system 5,000 light years away. Morals are a construct of human biology and human psychology. Having said that, humans do have general trendlines. Humans generally prefer we be pro-social within our group. Humans generally prefer to be healthy and wealthy, and when they get healthy and wealthy they generally prefer to have more personal freedom. Virtually every nation with a per capita income above 10k or so had universal K-12 education I believe. Virtually every nation (other than outliers like the US) have universal health care when per capita income is 20k or higher. Even in the US, we don’t have UHC but around 60% of medical spending is done by the public sector. The majority of nations that are high income and that achieved their high income status due to human capital (not natural resources) tends to prefer democracy. There is no objective morality, but each human is not a brand new creation. We all evolved in the same environment, and humans share 99.9% of their DNA. This shared evolution and shared biology shows that, in general, humans generally want the same things (wealth, health, good things for their relatives, personal freedom for themselves, etc). > [@DemonTree](#): > > Liberals worry about the harm to criminals from giving them long sentences, conservatives worry about the harm to future crime victims if criminals are not locked up. I think a big part of it is that liberals see the systemic issues that lead to crime. Lead poisoning, abusive parenting, being raised in poverty, being excluded from the mainstream economy, being disenfranchised from society as a whole, over-policing of minority groups, etc result in more arrests and more crimes for some groups vs others. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-you-cannot-understand-trumps-support-without-understanding-rwa-and-sdo/1017933.md?page=3)