Will the Belgium attacks help any of the US Presidential candidates?

Anything that makes the world seem like a dangerous place, anything that feeds into a narrative about some threatening “other”, will make Trump more appealing to more people.

I’ve been looking at some fascinating political psychology research that investigates the appeal of authoritarianism. Some people are just naturally inclined to value order, obedience, social norms, conformity, and to be wary of outsiders, and these people will tend to find assertive, forceful, belligerent leaders attractive. For some time now, the GOP has been courting the segment of the electorate that has this inclination.

But an interesting finding of this research has been that even people who, under normal circumstances, aren’t particularly drawn to authoritarianism will embrace it if they perceive that they are under threat. In the language of the research, they are “latent” authoritarians who become “activated” when they feel threatened.

This has nothing to do with such factors as education, ethnicity, class, etc., which explains why Trump supporters aren’t easily classified in these terms. The one thing that characterizes them in any statistically meaningful way is that they have authoritarian inclinations.

The implication is that the greater the perception that we are under threat from a menacing “other”, the more of these latent authoritarians will be drawn to the most forceful leader. If you set out to create the ideal authoritarian leader, you couldn’t do much better than Donald Trump.

(This may be somewhat off topic, so I apologize if it is.)

It may be worth noting what role the media plays in this. You state that you are watching this on MSNBC. I can only imagine what type of coverage this is getting. People may go through the stations, getting bombarded with custom graphics, scary music, and stern looking people repeating this event over and over again. It’s easy to get people scared. From a media perspective, a scared audience is a repeat audience. And repeat audience = repeat customers and advertising dollars.

But does the fear people have concerning these types of events – and immigrants in general – correlate with risk? I don’t think it does. If we were to apply this level of fear to other threats to humans: driving a car, poor diet, poverty, climate change, etc. people would act in ways that would seem unrecognizable. But we assign a level of risk to “terrorism” that is unjustified. Why is this? I think it’s worth asking ourselves this question.

@thorninmud You might be interested in this Q that touches on some of what you referenced. In the thread you’ll see I had some trouble with the conclusions drawn by the article; however, I do agree (I don’t know if it’s agree, but I think people shift) that while under threat people are drawn to leaders who want to fight back and draw more black and white lines of us and them. Interestingly, regarding Israel Trump sounds soft relative to the other republicans. On terrorism he is harsher.

The only person it could possibly help would be Trump, as he’s the only one crass and brazen enough to make political hay out of death and destruction in another country.

Honestly, I don’t think America and Americans give enough of a shit about anyone but themselves for Belgium to make much of an impact. It’ll serve to reinforce prejudices already in evidence, nothing more. Liberals will stress the “Few bad apples” and conservatives will posit “Muslims are apples with rot in the core.”

It won’t sway political policy in the US significantly one way or the other.
Evidence Sandy Hook, and it was on American soil.

Probably not. The extremist candidates will remain extremist.

With the attention span of the American public, this episode will be out of the news cycle in two weeks. Trump will use fear and intimidation throughout his campaign; I don’t think any really thoughtful person would believe that he would make us safer.

Of course it will benefit Trump. He and others like him will blame the situation in Europe on lax immigration (though most often these terrorists are European-born) and his xenophobic cause will be strengthened by the example of uber-liberal Muslim-loving Europe.

America was hit first with the twin towers. Where was the anti muslim immigration talk then?

It will and you can guess who. IMO taking a stance like he is only paints an even bigger target on us.

The ”Losers” were in charge then, @cazzie.

Trump was busy with the insurance adjusters.

I believe the question sort of begs an assumption that the candidates are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I do not believe It will help or hurt any candidate.

Trump’s constituency is pretty fixed. It is primarily people who have noticed that the federal government is corrupt and is interested less in who actually controls the White House, or the legislature, and more in simply holding office in order to enjoy the power, perks and privilege of being in the political class. I do not think it has much to do with the current intellectual buzz about “the authoritarian figure”. That is simply partisan politics attempting to portray Trump as a sort of Hitler instead of a loudmouth douche.

They are a vocal group to be sure, but there are not enough of them to elect him president. Their numbers will not increase because of terrorism- they already believe that the government isn’t being honest about the possibility that the differences between Islam and the West may be irreconcilable. Same with Cruz (and Kasich).

Clinton’s constituency has accepted the notion that Western concerns about Islam is just a bunch of right wing bigoted hysteria, xenophobia, and/or has somehow been caused by Western stupidity. So they will look at acts of Islamist terrorism as isolated aberrations, committed by lunatics who have hijacked a so called peaceful religion. Same with Bernie fans. They are unlikely to suddenly realize that there just might be a bigger problem than a few lone wolf psychotic killers who shout Allahu Akbar as a smokescreen.

In my opinion, most Westerners really don’t’ understand Islam, because it is so foreign to anything that the liberal democracies accept. So it is tough for anybody to come up with a strategy about how to deal with it. Having spent (too much)time there I will say that Islam generally breeds a distinct fatalistic apathy in many of its followers which makes any sort of discussion about things like progress, mutual understanding, cooperation, positive change etc. almost impossible.

Plus, very few Muslims actually read the Koran (illiteracy is common in the ME). They tend to be taught about what is in it by mullahs or sheiks. However the teacher presents the material, is what they believe. If you ask a lot of them about what the Koran says about violence, they will say that they are not qualified to intelligently discuss it, but sheik so and so says. That is why we are listening in on what is being said in the Mosques.

My opinion.

@Cazzie Partly because, Bush got in front of it. He’s an oil guy after all. He made sure his Saudi friends flew out of America as soon as a plane was allowed up. He also came out stating the Muslims were good people. To be fair, Bush in his inaugural speech talked about all religions, mentioning several, and our diverse country.

Also, much of America was much more worried about lunatics harming our Muslim citizens following 9/11 and the climate in the country was our Muslim citizens are American, and part of our melting pot.

Prior to 9/11 America had ignored other attacks, as @janbb said, short attention span, and some other jelly mentioned Americans tended to not give a shit, or didn’t relate to, or identify with, other countries being terrorized. Then, after 9/11 Americans became more aware, plus 24 hour politics was getting more and in the media. It snowballed.

Now, we have the Syrian refugee situation getting media attention, and pressure on the US to take in people, so the topic is very much in the mainstream now.

Really? This question, phrased in this way?

Is the question of “who becomes the US president?” so important in and of itself that we have reduced ourselves to looking at the world through the lens of “who will this help politically?”

I hope not.

The question I would rather see asked and dealt with is “which candidate” or, even better, “what policy” is a valid response to this kind of activity in the world? What should the next American president do in response to acts such as this, considering that the current occupant of the office has chosen to all but ignore them as some kind of weird and one-off anomaly, “because Republicans are the real terrorists”.

Because I’m so opposed to Trump on general principles – and for the same reason opposed to Clinton and Sanders – and because he at least paid lip service to the Constitution had been leaning more towards Cruz (with my nose held firmly, because I so strongly oppose his Christ-over-the-Constitution statements). However, his proposals today to ”‘patrol and secure’ Muslim neighborhoods” in the USA just blows me away with its tone-deafness. Maybe that kind of talk suits the wet-pants crowd, but more and more of us are getting more and more tired of “government surveillance” in general – that kind of suggestion turns off freedom lovers and leads more and more of us to plan open revolt, more than solidarity.

To answer the question, though, whoever this kind of atrocity “helps” in any political way, the boost that person receives is at the expense of the rest of us.

@CWOTUS Wow! I just gave you a GA on a political question!

@CWOTUS We should be discussing what’s the best way to deal with terrorism and which candidate has the best plan. That’s a great Q. It’s not this Q, but it would be a great Q.

It’s all bullshit and Americans are spoon fed their ideas from a disgusting group of small minded media. It’s only the Americans that are educated and independently minded enough to see beyond this petty bullshit that may have a hope of assisting the current mutilated America into anything resembling a recovery and improved future.