Right Wing "Fascism"/"Authoritarianism" - a time for Choosing

[TGHusker]

Michael Gerson is one of my favorite opinion writers.  This oped, copied below,  is one for the ages - or at least for this age.   I wanted to start a new thread on the topic because I think this is a very important discussion

that Gerson brings up.  Progressive Wokeness vs right wing fascism.  It seems that our country has once again come to a 'Time of Choosing"  - borrowing the title of Reagan's famous 1964 speech. 

Gerson places the choices into clear view.  A conservative, like I, he hates what he sees happening within the GOP party and what it has become.  The party has been taken captive by science denying,

anti-intellectual, and conspiracy driven forces with a bent towards fascism.  

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/14/wokeness-fascism-nightmare-threatens-democracy/

 

Quote

 

America is in a contest of contending nightmares.

The dreams of conservatives are currently troubled by “wokeness” and critical race theory. As with most nightmares, there is a grain of truth within such terrors.

For most people, wokeness involves being mindful of the cruel and oppressive portions of American history, being alert to persistent structural racism, and being determined to right past and present wrongs. This is the theory that attracted many people to street protests last summer. By this standard, count me as woke.

But there is an academic version of critical race theory that goes a great deal further. In this variety of postmodernism, all power structures are rotted to the core by white supremacy. The ideals of democracy — pluralism, freedom, the rule of law, even reasoned debate itself — are myths or narratives serving the privileged. In this view, politics is no longer a contest of ideas. It is a fight for power, a zero-sum struggle between oppressor and oppressed. This type of wokeness involves seeing through the pretensions of a free society and favoring the oppressed in every instance.

The distinctions here are not minor. There is a difference between using critical race theory as a tool to understand unjust power structures and believing that every outworking of Western democratic theory is inherently unjust. There is a difference between examining the disturbing truths of American history and denying the existence of objective truth and the possibility of persuasion.

In contrast, the nightmares of progressives are currently dominated by the growth of right-wing authoritarianism and fascism. In these fears, there is more than a grain of truth.

 

 

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Large elements of the American populist right mythologize the nation’s past rather than face its failures. They dismiss real news as fake and embrace obvious propaganda. They are anti-intellectual to the point of denying lifesaving scientific truths. They fear diversity and target racial, ethnic and religious minorities for resentment. They cultivate a sense of victimhood by warning of arrogant elites and vast conspiracies. These are not isolated ailments; they are the textbook symptoms of a fascist political infection.

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Some on the left want to use these trends to discredit the entirety of modern conservatism. They contend that authoritarianism and fascism are the logical, necessary outgrowth of the political approach that emerged with the presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater. In this view, Goldwater is Richard M. Nixon, who is Ronald Reagan, who is Jack Kemp, who is George W. Bush, who is John McCain, who is Mitt Romney, who is Donald Trump. This is a raving, slanderous absurdity. The existence of a principled, tolerant, constructive party of the right in American politics is not only a possibility; it is a crying need.

 

 

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In comparing the right’s fear of extreme critical race theory and the left’s fear of fascism, it is not really useful to ask which horror would be worse if implemented. Both ideologies are ultimately at war with liberal democracy — the pursuit of a common good, the practice of incremental reform, the cultivation of social trust and the acceptance of democratic outcomes.

But it is crucial to ask which nightmare is currently most likely to be implemented. And here there is no question.

 

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Extreme wokeness — the enforcement of ideological sameness through intimidation, the illiberal silencing of competing voices, the canceling of human beings for relatively minor infractions, the forced, ritual renunciations of previous views — is a problem on some college campuses, in some newsrooms and within some corporate cultures. And I don’t want to minimize such excesses.

 

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But seriously now. Only one of these nightmares has taken over a major political party, which is in the process of purging all dissent. Only one of these delusions is the governing vision of a former president who just might be president again. Only one of these developments has turned the backbones of the minority leader of the House, the minority leader of the Senate and almost every other Republican leader into gelatinous goo. Only one of these ideologies produced a crowd that sacked the U.S. Capitol and threatened violence against political leaders. Only one of these movements is working in state legislatures across the country to make electoral systems more vulnerable to manipulation and mob rule.

 

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It is important to confront every source of illiberalism in American life. Social justice leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis shared a common belief. They saw solutions to America’s worst sins in the more radical application of America’s highest ideals, not in their abandonment.  But this does not mean that all such challenges to democracy are equal. Right-wing authoritarianism is the force that could undo the American system. In a contest of nightmares, it is not even a contest.

 

[knapplc]

Equating "wokeness" with fascism is bizarre.

 

Fascists are authoritarian dictators, most well-known for murdering millions in death camps.

 

People who practice "wokeness" want you to not be racist, or culturally appropriative. 

 

The opinion piece this comes from is ridiculously equating the two for political reasons. They are as alike as a cupcake and an atom bomb. 

[DevoHusker]

Good read, thanks @TGHusker an interesting point of view. 

Good thing we can tell the difference between a cupcake and an atom bomb...but realize that both might impact our health/well being and way of life in negative ways. 

[knapplc]

Just now, DevoHusker said:

Good read, thanks @TGHusker an interesting point of view. 

Good thing we can tell the difference between a cupcake and an atom bomb...but realize that both might impact our health/well being and way of life in negative ways. 

 

Good thing! 

 

But they're not remotely the same thing, so why equate them in any way? Because there's an agenda in such an equation. 

 

What's the worst thing that can happen if "woke" culture spreads rampant in our society? 

 

What's the worst thing that can happen if fascists take over the country? 

[DevoHusker]

2 minutes ago, knapplc said:

 

Good thing! 

 

But they're not remotely the same thing, so why equate them in any way? Because there's an agenda in such an equation. 

 

What's the worst thing that can happen if "woke" culture spreads rampant in our society? 

 

What's the worst thing that can happen if fascists take over the country? 

 

from the article. 

 

Some on the left want to use these trends to discredit the entirety of modern conservatism. They contend that authoritarianism and fascism are the logical, necessary outgrowth of the political approach that emerged with the presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater. In this view, Goldwater is Richard M. Nixon, who is Ronald Reagan, who is Jack Kemp, who is George W. Bush, who is John McCain, who is Mitt Romney, who is Donald Trump. This is a raving, slanderous absurdity. The existence of a principled, tolerant, constructive party of the right in American politics is not only a possibility; it is a crying need.

[knapplc]

5 minutes ago, DevoHusker said:

 

from the article. 

 

Some on the left want to use these trends to discredit the entirety of modern conservatism. They contend that authoritarianism and fascism are the logical, necessary outgrowth of the political approach that emerged with the presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater. In this view, Goldwater is Richard M. Nixon, who is Ronald Reagan, who is Jack Kemp, who is George W. Bush, who is John McCain, who is Mitt Romney, who is Donald Trump. This is a raving, slanderous absurdity. The existence of a principled, tolerant, constructive party of the right in American politics is not only a possibility; it is a crying need.

 

None of this is remotely true. trump was a hugely different animal than Romney or Bush, et al. That's another false equation, and an attempt to normalize a person who tried to overthrow - is trying, actually - a legitimized American election. trump is fascist in the way that Mussolini was fascist. Mitt Romney is fascist in absolutely zero way - and no credible source on the left is accusing him of that. 

 

"Woke" is the new "PC" culture. It's annoying and goes too far at times, but the worst that can happen is we can't use racial slurs like jokes. 

 

People either are ignoring or forgetting what fascism is. And that's sad and dangerous. And it's doubly sad that we're giving credible discussion to these kinds of comparisons. 

[TGHusker]

1 hour ago, knapplc said:

Equating "wokeness" with fascism is bizarre.

 

Fascists are authoritarian dictators, most well-known for murdering millions in death camps.

 

People who practice "wokeness" want you to not be racist, or culturally appropriative. 

 

The opinion piece this comes from is ridiculously equating the two for political reasons. They are as alike as a cupcake and an atom bomb. 

I don't think he is saying their an equivalency - actually just the opposite.  I take it this way - "The big out cry by the right is 'Wokeness" as expressed by progressives.  This is like the right is getting upset about spilled milk.  The big cry on the left is fascism expressed by the right. This in more like spilled blood.    He makes that clear in the last sentence I highlighted in bold.   It is the right wingers who make the equivalency and not the oped. 

[TGHusker]

1 hour ago, knapplc said:

 

None of this is remotely true. trump was a hugely different animal than Romney or Bush, et al. That's another false equation, and an attempt to normalize a person who tried to overthrow - is trying, actually - a legitimized American election. trump is fascist in the way that Mussolini was fascist. Mitt Romney is fascist in absolutely zero way - and no credible source on the left is accusing him of that. 

 

"Woke" is the new "PC" culture. It's annoying and goes too far at times, but the worst that can happen is we can't use racial slurs like jokes. 

 

People either are ignoring or forgetting what fascism is. And that's sad and dangerous. And it's doubly sad that we're giving credible discussion to these kinds of comparisons. 

Knapp, I don't want to belabor the point - but I don't think there is a comparison.  It is more in contrast not comparison. Perhaps Gerson could have worded it a bit differently, but in reading his OPEDs over a several years - I really believe there is no moral equivalency being communicated in his oped.  He knows who Trump is and has stated it many times.  Trump does not = Romney or the Bushes or Reagan.  He is a totally different radical right authoritarian fascist - who if left to his own desires would destroy the nation as we know it. 

[knapplc]

6 minutes ago, TGHusker said:

Knapp, I don't want to belabor the point - but I don't think there is a comparison.  It is more in contrast not comparison. Perhaps Gerson could have worded it a bit differently, but in reading his OPEDs over a several years - I really believe there is no moral equivalency being communicated in his oped.  He knows who Trump is and has stated it many times.  Trump does not = Romney or the Bushes or Reagan.  He is a totally different radical right authoritarian fascist - who if left to his own desires would destroy the nation as we know it. 

 

Then I would suggest a less comparative title for this thread. It reads as a direct choice - as do the poll questions - based on this Op/Ed. 

 

It would also be beneficial to have public polls, so the people responding in the thread can be clear about their stance. 

[TGHusker]

1 minute ago, knapplc said:

 

Then I would suggest a less comparative title for this thread. It reads as a direct choice - as do the poll questions - based on this Op/Ed. 

 

It would also be beneficial to have public polls, so the people responding in the thread can be clear about their stance. 

I'm open to that - what do you suggest and I'll make a change

 

[TGHusker]

1 minute ago, TGHusker said:

I'm open to that - what do you suggest and I'll make a change

 

Perhaps It was I who could have a better job in communicating than Greson.  (I wasn't a communications major!)

 

[BigRedBuster]

Question #2 doesn't have enough options.  Actually, didn't like the options in #1 either.

[TGHusker]

26 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

Question #2 doesn't have enough options.  Actually, didn't like the options in #1 either.

Ok - so how would you do the poll -  I may not have thought it though and did it quickly

[TGHusker]

A Vox article supporting the main idea of the OP.  Copied in part below, the article notes the rise of authoritarianism within the GOP (OP worded as fascism)

 

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/6/15/22522504/republicans-authoritarianism-trump-competitive

 

 

 

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American democracy is in a bad way, and the Republican Party is the reason why.

Blocking an inquiry into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, embracing Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen, making it easier for partisans to tamper with the process of counting votes: These are not the actions of a party committed to the basic idea of open, representative government.

It’s common to call this GOP behavior “anti-democratic,” but the description can only go so far. It tells us what they’re moving America away from, but not where they want to take it. The term “minority rule” is closer, but euphemistic; it puts the Republican actions in the same category as a Supreme Court ruling, countermajoritarian moves inside a democratic framework rather than something fundamentally opposed to it.

It’s worth being clear about this: The GOP has become an authoritarian party pushing an authoritarian policy agenda.

There are many kinds of authoritarian systems, and many ways to become one of them. In the United States, the threat that looms is a slide into what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”: a system that still holds elections, but under profoundly unfair conditions that systematically favor one side. That process, of one party stacking the deck in its favor over the course of years, isn’t unique — we’ve seen it in countries across the world in recent years, in places as diverse as Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela.(TG: Not good company to be compared to)

Understanding what’s happening in the US as something fundamentally similar to what’s happened elsewhere — using the a-word, unflinchingly — helps us not only diagnose the most dangerous policy steps the GOP is taking, but also truly appreciate the gravity of the situation in which America has found itself.

We are suffering from the same rot that has brought down democracy in other countries: a party that has decided it no longer wants to play by the rules and that would instead prefer to rule as authoritarians rather than share power with its opponents.

“All of us, as citizens, have to recognize that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one bang. It happens in a series of steps,” former President Barack Obama said in a CNN interview last Monday.

We’re not where Hungary is, thankfully. Democrats can and still do win power, as they did in 2020.

But the playing field is indisputably tilted against them — and only growing more so. The escalation in authoritarian behavior since January 6, from both national and state Republicans, shows that things are worse than even some pessimistic observers have feared.

It’s happened elsewhere. It can happen here, too.

The varieties of authoritarianism

When people think of authoritarian governments, they typically think of police states and 20th-century totalitarianism. But “authoritarianism” is actually a broad term, encompassing very different governments united mostly by the fact that they do not transfer power through free and fair elections. Some of these governments, like modern China, are violently and nakedly repressive; others control their population through subtler means.

Competitive authoritarian governments fall into the latter category — so closely resembling a democracy on paper that many of their own citizens believe they’re still living in one.

The concept was first developed in a 2002 paper by Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and the University of Toronto’s Lucan Way, two leading scholars of democracy. They identified competitive authoritarian systems as ones that hold elections but ensure that they’re fundamentally unfair — stacked in the incumbent party’s favor so heavily that the people don’t have real agency over who rules them.

“Incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, and in some cases manipulate electoral results,” Levitsky and Way write. “Regimes characterized by such abuses cannot be called democratic.”

Yet competitive authoritarian systems survive in part by convincing citizens that they are living in a democracy. That’s how they maintain their legitimacy and prevent popular uprisings. As such, they do not conduct the kind of obvious sham elections held in places like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria (he won the 2021 contest with 95 percent of the “vote”).

 

 

 

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The GOP and competitive authoritarianism

Happily, the United States still passes the most basic test of whether a system is democratic: whether the public can vote out its leaders. But it is hard to deny that the Republican Party has begun chipping away at that baseline principle, using the flaws in our political system to entrench their power.

Republicans already have unfair structural advantages, due to our outmoded Constitution. The nature of the Electoral College means that the key battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania, are considerably redder than the country as a whole. The Senate is so biased against dense urban states that under half of Americans control 82 percent of Senate seats. The combination of anti-urban bias and intentional gerrymandering means that, by one measure, the GOP has had a leg up in House elections since 1968.

The current Republican campaign builds on these inherent tendencies of the US constitutional system toward minority rule to push us toward something more properly termed authoritarian. It combines intentional state-level election rigging with the abuse of countermajoritarian institutions at the federal level to ensure GOP control of the nationwide levers of power, all the while working to delegitimize the press and other non-state institutions that could challenge it.

 

 

 

 

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In 2021, the GOP has started subverting election agencies in earnest; a new report from three pro-democracy groups found that 14 Republican-controlled states have passed a total of 24 bills this year interfering with election administration. Georgia’s SB 202 is perhaps the most egregious, allowing the Republican-dominated state legislature to take over the vote-counting process from county officials.

Another important Orbán tactic has been abusing regulatory policy to punish businesses that threaten the party’s hold on political power.

In 2021, the GOP embraced this idea at both the state and federal level. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a leading 2024 presidential contender, recently signed a flagrantly unconstitutional bill that levies heavy fines on platforms that ban politicians like Donald Trump. In April, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that “corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.” Three GOP senators proposed a bill stripping Major League Baseball of its antitrust exemption as an explicit punishment for its decision to pull the All-Star Game out of Atlanta to protest SB 202.

 

 

 

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And then, of course, there’s the January 6 uprising and the Republican embrace of its fundamental premise: that the 2020 election was somehow illegitimate.

All competitive authoritarian regimes need some kind of ideological justification for anti-democratic politics, something to rally its supporters against their enemies. In Hungary, it’s a combination of nationalism, xenophobia, and a defense of traditional gender norms. The GOP has long employed elements of all of these but now has united around a more straightforward cause: American elections are corrupt, and Republican efforts to make elections unfair are actually efforts to fix them.

The point here is not that the GOP’s anti-democratic inclinations are completely new: In fact, they’ve evolved over decades. But the crucible of the Trump presidency and the January 6 election have forged these inchoate notions into an actual competitive authoritarian agenda.

Authoritarianism is as American as apple pie

Of course, the United States is different in many important respects from a place like Hungary. One important difference: our decentralized electoral system.

The US Constitution devolved election administration to the states, giving local legislatures control over the rules around elections and the process of actually tallying up the votes. State governments are what political scientist Phil Rocco calls “the infrastructure of democracy” — the place where the terms of political competition at the national level are set.

In theory, this should serve as a bulwark against the emergence of competitive authoritarianism, preventing one faction from rewriting the rules in their favor in one fell swoop. Historically, Rocco points out, it’s often worked the opposite way: The decentralized system enabled the creation of Jim Crow, which turned Southern states into authoritarian enclaves marked by one-party Democratic rule for decades.

“Racial apartheid in the South constructed a ‘Jim Crow Congress’; insulated from electoral competition, Southern committee chairs became the fulcrum of national policymaking — foreclosing the New Deal’s social democratic aspirations,” he writes in a 2020 essay. “Episodes of democratic collapse at the state level have had profound reverberations for national politics.”

 

 

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The threat in the United States is the reemergence of this sort of bottom-up, state-level authoritarianism that has national electoral repercussions. It’s a subtle threat, one that comes into being quietly and incrementally — as is often the case when a democracy devolves into competitive authoritarianism.

“If people think that there is one day that you wake up and you’re in a competitive authoritarian system, that’s not the case,” says Hadas Aron, a political scientist at New York University who studies weak and failing democracies. “It’s actually complicated and a very, very long process.”

Experts disagree on how close we are to crossing the line. Levitsky, for example, thinks that Republicans could fatally undermine the democratic system as soon as 2024, using a combination of state-level interference with vote counts and congressional action to illegitimately block a Democratic victory.

Aron, by contrast, thinks we’re still quite far from the point of no return — that American democratic institutions are far more vibrant than their Hungarian peers were just before their collapse. 

But even Aron, a longtime skeptic of the idea that America is on the path to authoritarianism, is rethinking her views in light of the GOP’s increased commitment to anti-democratic politics since January 6.

“I can’t say anything good” about Republican behavior, she tells me. “They want to stay in power and they want to change the system so it will benefit them as much as possible.”

 

 

 

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This view is approaching a consensus among experts. A recent letter by 100 leading scholars of democracy warned that “Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures. ... Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.”

Yet many of our elected officials — including key Democrats — do not recognize the urgency of the crisis.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told Forbes last week that “if democracy were in jeopardy, I would want to protect it. [But] I don’t see it being in jeopardy right now.” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), in an op-ed justifying his decision to vote against the democracy reform bill HR 1, equated the bill with Republican efforts to undermine democracy.

“Today’s debate about how to best protect our right to vote and to hold elections, however, is not about finding common ground, but seeking partisan advantage,” Manchin writes. “Whether it is state laws that seek to needlessly restrict voting or politicians who ignore the need to secure our elections, partisan policymaking won’t instill confidence in our democracy — it will destroy it.”

This is why it’s vital to be open about what’s happening — to raise the specter of authoritarianism. Because the slide toward competitive authoritarianism is incremental, it’s easy to fall into complacency, to overlook what’s happening in front of our eyes.

When I visited Hungary three years ago, I met with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former member of the Hungarian parliament from Fidesz who left out of disgust with Orbán’s authoritarian instincts. She told me that the European Union, which has immense financial and diplomatic leverage over the Hungarian government, largely ignored the country’s authoritarian drift after it started in 2010.

“Five years later, they understood who this person was,” she told me. “But by that time, Hungary was completely changed.”

 

 

[BigRedBuster]

37 minutes ago, TGHusker said:

Ok - so how would you do the poll -  I may not have thought it though and did it quickly

#1. Even though not equal, both can have a long term negative affect on society. 
 

#2. Both. 
 

they aren’t equal. But, I can’t say one is good and one is bad.