Why have Republicans gone so extreme?

Many political analysts have warned for years that the Republican Party was becoming a political party. extremist and undemocratic.

Long before the nomination of the Republicans Donald Trump for the president, let alone before Trump refused to admit electoral defeat, Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein declared the party had become “a atypical rebel“which rejected” facts, evidence and science “and did not accept the legitimacy of the political opposition.

In 2019, an international survey of experts evaluated parties around the world on their commitment to basic democratic principles and minority rights.

It turns out that the Republican Party has nothing to do with center-right parties in other Western countries.

Instead, it resembles authoritarian parties like the fedez of Hungary or the AKP from Turkey.

Such analyzes have often been dismissed as exaggerated and alarmist.

Even now, with Republicans expressing open admiration for the one-party government of Victor Orban, I meet people who insist that the Republican Party is not comparable to Fidesz.

Why not?

Republicans have manipulated state legislatures to secure control no matter how much they lose the popular vote, which is absolutely out of Orban’s agenda.

However, as Edward Luce of the Financial Times recently pointed out, “at every juncture of the last 20 years, American ‘alarmists’ they were right“.

And in the past few days, we’ve received even more reminders of just how extremist Republicans have become.

The hearings of January 6 established, in great detail, that the attack on Capitol Hill was part of a wider floor cancel the elections, directed from above.

A Supreme Court packed with Republicans has handed down openly partisan sentences on the abortion and gun control.

And there may be more shocks to come: Keep an eye on what the Court is likely to do about the government’s ability to protect environment.

The question that bothered me, aside from the question of whether American democracy will survive, is why?

Where does this extremism come from?

Comparisons with the rise of fascism in interwar Europe are inevitable, but not entirely useful.

For one thing, ugly as he was, Trump was not another Hitler and not even another Mussolini.

It is true that Republicans like it blonde frame they routinely call Democrats, who are basically Standard Social Democrats, Marxists, and it’s tempting to match their hyperbole.

The reality, however, is pretty bad for not needing to exaggerate.

And there is another problem with comparisons with the rise of fascism.

Right-wing extremism in interwar Europe emerged from the rubble of national disasters:

defeat in the First World War or, in the case of Italy, a Pyrrhic victory which seemed like a defeat; hyper inflation; depression.

Nothing like that happened here.

Yes, in 2008 we had a severe financial crisis, followed by a slow recovery.

Yes, we have seen regional economic divergences, with some unfortunate consequences (unemployment, social decline, even suicides and addictions) in the regions lagging behind.

But the United States has fared much worse in the past, without seeing one of its main parties turn its back on democracy.

Furthermore, the Republican turn to extremism began in the 1990s.

Many people, I believe, have forgotten the political madness of the Clinton years:

witch hunts and savage conspiracy theories (Hillary killed Vince Foster!), Blackmail attempts bill clinton making political concessions by shutting down the government and more.

And all of this was happening during what were considered good years, when most Americans believed the country was in correct way.

it is an enigma

I have spent a lot of time lately looking for historical precursors: cases where right-wing extremism has risen even in the face of peace and prosperity.

And I think I’ve found one: the rise of Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

It is important to realize that while this organization took on the post-Civil War group name, it was actually a new movement: a certain, but much more widely accepted, white nationalist movement, and less than a pure terrorist organization.

And at the height of his power, he actually controlled several statesbetween peace and economic boom.

What was this new KKK about?

I have read Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition”, which portrays a “politics of resentment” fueled by the backlash of white, rural, small-town Small Americans. against a changing nation

The KKK hated immigrants and “Urban elites“; it was characterized by “suspicion of science” and “a broader anti-intellectualism”.

Sound familiar?

OK, the modern Republican Party isn’t as bad as the second KKK.

But republican extremism clearly draws much of its energy from the same sources.

And since republican extremism feeds on resentment against the same things that,

The way I see it, they make America truly great – our diversity, our tolerance for difference – cannot be appeased or compromised.

It can only be defeated.

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