On many levels, the re-election of Donald Trump looks like an aberration, a singular event that stands outside the expected flow of history. After all, America has never elected a convicted felon as president, and has elected a president for two non-consecutive terms only once before. Yet, from a broader perspective, Trump’s triumph reveals itself as part of a larger trend around the world of countries shifting away from liberal democracy and toward autocratic rule.

Multiple economic, political, sociological, and historical forces underlie this trend, yet for psychologists, the question is this: What are the psychological processes at play as people vote to turn away from democracy?

After all, on its face, such a move appears counterintuitive. Why would people willingly abandon a system in which they have abundant personal freedom and a voice in running their lives for a system in which those provisions are denied or heavily curtailed? Aren’t humans wired to pursue and cherish freedom and to enjoy a sense of control over their affairs? Psychological research suggests several mechanisms that may underlie a flight from democracy.

First, in the process of overtaking a democracy using democratic means, would-be autocrats need to amass popular support to win an election. You must win the game before you can rig it in your favor. The bulk of that popular support, in the US and elsewhere, arrives from within the ranks of the poor. What may explain this phenomenon? Research on this question is scarce, and existing work has tended to focus on the potential role of stress and anxiety with mixed, inconsistent results.

Recently (2022), Jasper Neerdaels of Kühne Logistics University in Germany and colleagues proposed an answer. The authors provide data to support the hypothesis that the link between poverty and support for authoritarianism is mediated by feelings of shame.

The authors first define shame as “a strong negative feeling that entails a sense of worthlessness and powerlessness, as well as a negative evaluation of the entire self.” They argue that poverty, which they define as the “lack of the capability to live a minimally decent life,” is psychologically taxing in large part because it gives rise to feelings of shame, emerging from the subjective experience of worthlessness and powerlessness. For example, the inability to pay bills may lead to feelings of powerlessness. Poverty also tends to beget social exclusion, since going out and joining events and organizations costs money. Finally, contemporary culture’s tendency to cast poor people as lazy, individual failures, and blameworthy is also at play, leading to negative social judgment and negative self-evaluation.

Shame leads to supporting authoritarianism because those who feel the shame of poverty “are likely to be highly motivated to escape their painful experiences.” Authoritarian leaders always campaign on the promise of re-inclusion and empowerment of the excluded and powerless, on bringing order to existing chaos, and on eliminating social threats.

The psychological promise embodied in authoritarianism is that it will neutralize not only one’s external enemies but also internal ones, such as one’s sense of shame, providing “psychological protection against feelings of social exclusion and diminished relational value.”

A recent (2024) article by Syracuse University psychology professor Leonard Newman also addresses this conundrum. In looking at the psychology of how people turn away from democracy and embrace autocracy, the author presents potential explanations rooted in the work of several psychological theorists.

First, Newman cites Eric Fromm’s famous work concerning what he called “the escape from freedom.” Fromm, a Jewish German psychoanalyst and social philosopher who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States, argued that individual freedom may come to be experienced as an intolerable burden, since freedom puts the “I” at the center of the story, thus exposing the individual’s fragility and insignificance. The search for remedying this pain may lead many people to give up their individuality in an effort to shed their loneliness, anxiety, and powerlessness.

Fast-moving social changes, in particular, may overwhelm individuals and lead them to seek alliances with power. One way to reclaim power and significance is through submitting to a strong leader, by which one may, in Fromm’s words, “fuse one’s self with somebody or something outside of oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual self is lacking.” An individual who feels threatened, unmoored, anxious, and insignificant can overcome these feelings by surrendering to a big, powerful organization and finding meaning in group identification.

The work of social psychologist Roy Baumeister is explored next. Baumeister argued that many psychosocial phenomena are underlaid by what he called “escape from the self.” According to Baumeister, the immediate cause of this escape is not an abstract, general sense of anxiety and insecurity, as Fromm had proposed, but rather the specific negative emotions that arise out of the difficulties of maintaining an autonomous, agentic self.

Contemporary society, after all, expects individuals to have control over their lives. Maintaining such control is psychologically exhausting. You are constantly judged by others, and the possibilities of failure and negative judgment are ever-present. Over time, the burden may become exhausting. In such a state, the option to move to a space where such judgment is eliminated may appear quite attractive. Baumeister argued that this “escape from the self” may underlie several seemingly disparate mental health phenomena, including sexual masochism, binge eating, alcohol consumption, and suicide.

Democratic freedoms, including the freedom to vote, can, in this view, give rise to a sense of burden, judgment, and self-doubt, facilitating a desire to escape into the coherence and stability of single party—and single person—rule. Newman expresses this idea thus: “People might seek out situations in which they are either not required to or unable to reflect on their own individuality and how they are measuring up—that is, they might want to escape the self.”

Finally, the author cites the work of the American psychologist Barry Schwartz, who popularized the idea of “the paradox of choice,” by which an abundance of choices leads to decreased well-being. Too much choice brings with it stress and buyer’s remorse, followed by fatigue and a desire to have someone else decide for us. To wit: many secular people who find religion do so not despite but because the firm dictates and rules of a religion relieve them of the stresses of freedom.

Schwartz’s work has shown that an effective way to deal with the stress of multiple choices is by reducing the number of choices one must make, and by making more of the choices one has to make irreversible, thus limiting the stress of regret and remorse. Putting limitations on one’s freedom, in this analysis, can have paradoxically liberating effects.

Elections often force people to deal with multiple choices about different candidates’ policies, character, and competences. Politically, opting out of the messiness and stress of free democracy and into the fold of an autocratic regime takes away the burden of individual choice about political matters. Moreover, once a dictator takes power, their position is no longer easily reversible. As such, it provides psychological relief. One less thing to worry about.

The author summarizes: “The theories reviewed here at least suggest why no one should be surprised when, in turbulent times, members of free countries intentionally seek out—and perhaps even ecstatically embrace—a very different organizing principle for society.”