Why did the Republican Party become so extreme?
Many political analysts have spent years warning that the GOP was becoming an extremist, anti-democratic party.
Long before Republicans nominated Donald Trump for president, let alone before Trump refused to acknowledge electoral defeat, congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein declared the party had become “an insurgent outlier” that rejected “facts, evidence and science” and didn’t accept the legitimacy of political opposition.
In 2019 an international survey of experts rated parties around the world on their commitment to basic democratic principles and minority rights. The GOP, it turns out, looks nothing like centerright parties in other Western countries. Instead, its resembles authoritarian parties such as Hungary’s Fidesz or Turkey’s AKP.
Such analyses have frequently been dismissed as alarmist. Even now, with Republicans expressing open admiration for Viktor Orban’s one-party rule, I encounter people insisting the GOP isn’t comparable to Fidesz. (Why not? Republicans have been gerrymandering state legislatures to lock in control no matter how badly they lose the popular vote, part of Orban’s playbook.) Yet as Edward Luce of The Financial Times recently pointed out, “at every juncture over last 20 years the America ‘alarmists’ have been right.”
Recently, we’ve received reminders of how extreme Republicans have become. The Jan. 6 hearings have been establishing, in damning detail, that the attack on the U.S. Capitol was part of a broader scheme to overturn the election, directed from the top. A Republican-stuffed Supreme Court has been handing down nakedly partisan rulings on abortion and gun control. And more shocks may come.
The question that has been bothering me — apart from whether American democracy will survive — is why. Where is this extremism coming from?
Comparisons with the rise of fascism in Europe between the wars are inevitable but not that helpful. Trump wasn’t another Hitler or even another Mussolini. True, Republicans like Marco Rubio routinely call Democrats — who are basically standard social democrats — Marxists, and it’s tempting to match their hyperbole. The reality, however, is bad enough.
And there’s another problem with comparisons to the rise of fascism. Rightwing extremism in interwar Europe arose from the rubble of national catastrophes, such as defeat in World War I.
Nothing like that has happened here. Yes, we had a severe financial crisis in 2008, followed by a sluggish recovery.
Yes, we’ve been seeing regional economic divergence, with some ugly consequences in regions left behind. But America has been through much worse in the past.
Also, the Republican turn toward extremism began in the 1990s. Many people, I believe, have forgotten the political craziness of the Clinton years — the witch hunts and wild conspiracy theories (Hillary murdered Vince Foster!), the attempts to blackmail Bill Clinton into policy concessions by shutting down the government, and more. And all of this was happening during what were widely regarded as good years.
I’ve been looking for historical precursors — cases in which right-wing extremism rose amid peace and prosperity. Consider the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
It’s important to realize that while this organization took the name of the postCivil War group, it was a new movement — a white nationalist movement to be sure, but far more widely accepted, and less of a pure terrorist organization. And it reached the height of its power — it effectively controlled several states — amid peace and an economic boom.
What was this new KKK about? I’ve been reading Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the K.K.K.: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition,” which portrays a “politics of resentment” driven by the backlash of white, rural and small-town Americans against a changing nation. The KKK hated immigrants and “urban elites”; it was characterized by “suspicion of science” and “a larger anti-intellectualism.”
Because GOP extremism is fed by resentment against things that, as I see it, make America great — our diversity, our tolerance for difference — it can only be defeated.