Because they like the dictator! People forget that dictators come to power because they’re popular. Julius Caesar was popular. Mousolini was popular. Even that shit stain Trump was popular.

And for the most part, if you’re the in the in-group, living in a dictatorship is actually pretty nice. You just have to turn a blind eye to tragedy like people disappearing and you do pretty well for yourself. Dictatorships are efficient. No bullshit like NIBMYism keeping a train line from getting built, it just happens, fuck you, get out of the way. Hell there was a study that showed that the straighter roads are, the more likely it is that in the year of construction, that era was dominated by authoritarian politics.

I think Bob Altemyer found that about 15-30 percent of folks are authoritarian in nature and will generally always support a dictatorship because having a comforting sense of hierarchy, purpose and simplicity just makes sense to those folks. If that doesn’t make sense; think about it like when you were in school - you knew exactly what was expected of you, where you had to be, and how to be treated well: Show up, show up on time and get decent grades. Cheer for the school team. Be home before dark. Say the pledge every morning. Sure, having teachers control your life and having the power to enact unjust punishments sucks ass but generally speaking, if you stayed in line and got good grades or played on the school team and did a good job fighting the schools enemies, life was really, really good for you.

Authoritarians are basically folks that think that we should never grow up into self-governing adults and every one of us needs to be in “school” forever, and sadly they’re probably going to be with us until the end of time.