I’m not sure exactly how you would poll/control for this; but I’d be curious how the numbers break down in terms of people who are in favor of the idea think that they’ll get from their strongman. (and what, if any, effect on perception of military rule actual time in the actual military has).
There’s certainly a long strain of denegration of the effectiveness of government generally(by the time St. Ronnie did his ‘fear the person who says they’re from the government and here to help’ he was almost certainly tapping into a preexisting vein, even if the specific cute formulation might have been an original coinage by him or a speechwriter); with an adjacent but more focused “tough-on-crime/victim’s rights” project that’s dedicated to harping on all cases, real when available and imagined where necessary, where some detail of due process conern is seen to have delivered an unsatisfactory result.
There’s also, undeniably, a very real, and downright grotesque, vein of flagrant and more or less entirely unpunished(most fail upwards, and resigning with no further consequences is treated like some sort of radically harsh outcome) elite failure in a variety of areas.
The (comparatively) recent GOP enthusiasm for theatrical ungovernability in congress, sometimes just for its own sake, since chasing social media clout is easier and more fun than doing boring policy nerd stuff, sometimes as a tactical measure because gridlock is close to getting what you want if you desire a crippled federal government or are mostly focused on packing the judiciary and local and state office gerrymandering; also provides a no-conspiracy-theory-needed reason to perceive existing modes of government as ineffectual(it’s the point where you decide that the solution is an Action Junta or Supreme Generalissimo rather than voting against deliberately ineffective legislators where you are leaving the empirically justified zone; not when you merely perceive ineffective legislators)
What’s less clear, though, is what part of this people expect Strong Leader With Vigorous Gun Mans to address: do they actually think that the military is just an untapped well of broad-spectrum competence that would slot neatly into various areas of civil administration and just do them better? Is it the old theory that expertise is actually a con bubbling back up; and they don’t think that the problems are actually that hard(common sense!), but have just been obfuscated by self-serving ‘experts’, so will magically become simple and clear once you take some of those out back and shoot them? Is there no actual expectation that competent governance is possible; but at least if we stop listening to defense attorneys and bleeding hearts we can take comfort in our precarious existences knowing that “crime” is being summarily taken to the camps rather than coddled?
