"Last fall, a study published by the The Journal of Politics found that the Democratic voters who preferred Hillary Clinton in 2016 largely have more authoritarian psychological tendencies than Sanders supporters do. Julie Wronski, one of the political scientists who carried out the study, has said that they defined authoritarianism as “an individual’s psychological preferences for social conformity over individual autonomy,” a trait which they looked for among a series of selected Democratic voters. They found that Clinton voters consistently rated higher on the authoritarian scale than Sanders voters did, with “the probability of voting Clinton [increasing] dramatically from 0.18 to 0.867 as young Democrats shift from the lower end of authoritarianism to its maximum value.”

This study explains the behavior and cultural pathologies that so much of the Democratic Party’s base has participated in in recent years. To be fair, I’ve personally met people that voted for Clinton in 2016 who have a quite nuanced view of the world, and who’ve supported the Democratic Party only because they see it as necessary to stop the Republicans. But there’s been so much evidence in recent years, both anecdotal and (in the case of the study) scientific, that’s shown the most loyal parts of Democratic Party’s base to be aggressively attached to the neoliberal, imperialist mentalities which define their party’s leadership.

Throughout the 2016 Democratic primary, it became apparent that Hillary Clinton could most solidly maintain support among the kinds of people who wouldn’t concede that there was anything wrong with their candidate, and who were eager to malign Bernie Sanders and anyone else who challenged their position. Shortly after the 2016 election, the blogger and experienced online political arguer Caitlin Johnstone recounted about the mentality of Clinton’s remaining supporters: “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to bring up a legitimate concern about the Democratic establishment in a debate with a party loyalist and been told that I’m crazy or ridiculous because it’s a concern they’d never encountered before. Whether I’m discussing a WikiLeaks release that didn’t get much coverage or the fact that Hillary Clinton really seemed to be gearing up for an all-out war with Russia, I have never, ever been met with sincerity or had my concerns directly addressed in an earnest debate of ideas with a Hillary voter. Not once. Not one single time, ever, to this day. And I’ve spoken to a lot of them.”"