“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Less than two hours after then-President Donald Trump called upon his supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically” in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, both chambers of Congress had been evacuated in response to the ongoing Capitol insurrection.
For the rioters, it was clear that neither peace nor patriotism was their aim. Many came to the Capitol armed. They waved the flags of alt-right internet inside jokes, far-right militias, and neo-Nazi groups. For the first time, the Confederate battle flag flew inside the Capitol building.
Despite many Republicans calling upon Trump specifically to call off the rioters they knew were his supporters while the attack was ongoing, the House GOP Conference has refused to hold themselves or their leader accountable. Peddling Trump’s election lies has become all but a prerequisite for Republicans, with Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger facing censure in their home states over their attempts to hold Trump accountable.
The United States’ institutional structure makes the complete fracture of the GOP unlikely. The new radicalization of the Republican Party, however, is distinct from previous party system shifts.
Instead, it is part of a global phenomenon that has risen in prominence in the last two decades. Once a country’s window of mainstream political discourse shifts far enough to the extreme, it passes a point of no return, when right-wing figures will rise and fall not based on effectiveness or electability, but rather on ideological purity. This “race to the right” has enabled a rebirth of right-wing authoritarianism in ostensibly liberal democracies at an unprecedented scale, calling the future of the democratic order into question.
The Normalization of the Far-Right
In my last article, I attributed the recent rise of right-wing authoritarian parties in liberal democracies to the decline of leftist parties that could successfully mobilize the working class. As elaborated in earlier installations in this column, without a central leftist organizing force, solidarity will not be built, and middle- and working-class voters will be more vulnerable to manipulation by extremist ideologues.
That being said, in each country where an authoritarian party or politician has gained prominence in recent years, their popularity has more often than not been catapulted by changing demographics. As countries’ populations change, members of declining majority groups appear to lash out and support more traditionalist politics, which tend to lean in favor of authoritarianism.
In the United States, mass immigration has produced this demographic change. High rates of immigration from non-European countries have produced an American population that was 13.7% foreign-born in 2018. That year, 37% of new arrivals were Asian, and 31% were Hispanic. Non-Hispanic Whites make up a declining share of the population, which many White voters, consciously or not, take as a threat.
Immigration, especially from the Middle East, is the driving factor for many far-right European parties: French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has proposed a referendum to drastically curtail immigration if she is elected in 2022, Italian nationalist Giorgia Meloni called for a naval blockade to block migrants from North Africa in 2015, and Spanish far-right leader Santiago Abascal called for a “reconquest” of Spain in 2018. Growing Muslim populations in Europe are viewed as threatening to the region’s security.
All of these fears are, quite simply, racist and incorrect. Yet, they have woven their way so deeply into far-right rhetoric that many White supporters of these parties do not see the explicit racism of statements asserting that a majority nonwhite population will “weaken American values.”
There are two statistics that are important to note here. First, majority groups almost always overestimate the scope of demographic change. A 2016 study found that French respondents estimated that 31% of the French population was Muslim. The real number was 7.5%. In the U.S., the average guess was around 17%, with reality sitting at 1%. This exacerbates the fears and makes the oppression they fuel much more dangerous.
Second, these racially-motivated fears bleed over into policies unrelated to race. It has been asserted that the U.S. is on track to become a “majority-minority” country, where “non-Hispanic Whites” make up less than 50% of the population, in the coming decades, and as arbitrary as that term might be, it holds significant weight. A 2018 study found that just knowledge of this demographic shift correlated to increased support for Donald Trump, the Tea Party, and conservative values in general among White Americans. Fear of demographic change has, in no small part, driven Whites in the U.S. toward the radical wings of the GOP.
The Authoritarian Expansion
Simply becoming aware of demographic changes will not drive a self-described “somewhat liberal” member of a majority group to fascism instantaneously. If exposed to the right circumstances, however, that same individual may fall victim to the fearmongering of far-right authoritarians over the course of several election cycles.
There are two main ways this can come about, depending upon the party system a country uses.
In multi-party systems, especially in Europe, far-right authoritarian parties can generally be viewed as a constant. Italy represents a prime example of this. Following the end of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, his supporters regrouped under the banner of the Italian Social Movement, rallying behind the “tricolor flame” in the colors of the Italian flag. Today, the Movement lives on as the Brothers of Italy, who polled first in the country for the first time in August 2021.
In two-party or two-party-plus systems, radicalization is less visible, but more insidious. Here, the dominant conservative party will gradually succumb to its extremist element. This has become most apparent in the United States in the past several decades. According to a 2015 statistical analysis, around 90% of members of Congress from both parties were “moderates” in 1979. By 2015, while that number had remained the same for Democrats, it had dropped to only 10% for Republicans. This is the environment in which 147 House Republicans could vote to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election. Party loyalty has become paramount.
Many countries see a mix between the two means. Hungary’s far-right authoritarian party, Fidesz, has shifted to the right itself, even supplanting existing far-right parties and forcing them to the middle. The U.K., despite being a two-party-plus system, saw Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party seize a large victory in the country’s last EU Parliament elections in 2019.
Most importantly, in each of these cases, any candidates ideologically past a certain point are effectively engaged in a free-for-all, where ideological purity is held up above all else. Once Marine Le Pen had normalized the far-right with her strong showing in the 2018 French presidential race, she jeopardized her own chances by allowing Eric Zemmour a platform. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s re-nomination chances in 2022 have been jeopardized by the candidacy of David Perdue almost exclusively because of an endorsement from Donald Trump. The Brothers of Italy themselves arose in a political environment dominated by the hard right League, with the center-right Forza Italia stagnating at a distant fifth.
The Denialist Death Spiral
2022 will be a vital year for the survival of democracy. Elections in the United States, Hungary, and France will play a major role in determining how long democracy has left to survive in those countries. This is because in addition to being often anti-immigration, far-right parties have an undercurrent of authoritarianism that may undermine the democratic process if exposed to power.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has become a darling of the right-wing American media complex in recent months, demonstrates what a post-democratic “liberal democracy” may look like. With a political system designed to turn Fidesz’s minority support into just enough of a supermajority to grant them complete control of the government, Fidesz has effectively cemented their power. They now wield that power to harm minority groups, including immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community, and attack institutions which they view as overwhelmingly “liberal”, including the judiciary and the media. This desire to mimic Hungary’s voter suppression has been found across the United States in 2021, where Republican-led states with large Democratic populations, including Arizona, Texas, and Georgia, have passed restrictive voting laws designed to disenfranchise minority voters.
Silencing opposition has become par for the course among these parties. In Spain, the far-right Vox has railed against fact-checkers, comparing one leading fact-checking website to the Gestapo. The National Rally, then called the National Front, repeatedly threatened journalists during Marine Le Pen’s 2018 presidential campaign. Far-right parties in an alarming number of countries have risen to prominence believing themselves to be the only legitimate power, therefore justifying any action taken against their opponents.
It has become not a question of “if,” but “when” fascism will re-emerge in the twenty-first century, and the answer may well be that it already has. If democratic institutions are to survive, they must be defended. Voting rights, civil liberties, and the independent media must be vigorously protected by an anti-fascist coalition if they are to outlast the movements that cast their futures into doubt.
In this fight, it is not an exaggeration to say that the future of democracy itself is at stake.
