The GOP's Global Race To The Bottom

 The standing joke on Twitter about American political parties is 1) There's no policy difference whatsoever between the GOP and the Dems, and 2) in any other country, Democrats would be considered right-wing hardline conservatives. Neither one is true, neither one is funny, and the real problem is that in the developed world, the GOP is a straight up fascist white supremacist party with more in common with actual European fascist hate groups than the rest of democratic societies. 

 

Experts on comparative politics say the GOP is an extremist outlier, no longer belonging in the same conversation with “normal” right-wing parties like Canada’s Conservative Party (CPC) or Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU). Instead, it more closely resembles more extreme right parties — like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey — that have actively worked to dismantle democracy in their own countries.

The Supreme Court saga can’t be considered in isolation. It is symptomatic of a profound brokenness in American politics, one party dragging us away from the developed-world political standards we aspire to and towards a fight over the most basic of democratic principles: whether power should be shared. And that’s a disaster for American democracy.

“The only way we move forward is when Republicans reform, and cease to be an increasingly authoritarian white nationalist party,” says Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor and the co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die.

A 2019 survey of nearly 2,000 experts on political parties from around the world asked respondents to rate political parties on two axes: the extent to which they are committed to basic democratic principles and their commitment to protecting rights for ethnic minorities. The higher the number, the more anti-democratic and intolerant the party is.

The following chart shows the results of the survey for all political parties in the OECD, a group of wealthy democratic states, with the two major American parties highlighted in red. The GOP is an extreme outlier compared to mainstream conservative parties in other wealthy democracies, like Canada’s CPC or Germany’s CDU.

Its closest peers are, almost uniformly, radical right and anti-democratic parties. This includes Turkey’s AKP (a regime that is one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists), and Poland’s PiS (which has threatened dissenting judges with criminal punishment). Experts rate the GOP as substantially more hostile to minority rights than Hungary’s Fidesz, an authoritarian party that has made demonization of Muslim immigrants into a pillar of its official ideology.

The US Democratic Party on the ol' racism/fascism scale is a relatively excellent 1.5 or so on racism and just over 2 on the authoritarianism.  Plenty of parties are more liberal, but the Dems are very cool on minority rights.  They're still more liberal than the median, which is pretty damn classically liberal at 2.5.

And then the GOP is way out there in no-shit dictator territory with over 8 on both the authoritarian and racism scales, putting them in the same general realm as Poland's fascist Law and Justice Party (PiS), Spain's far-right "Out of the EU" Vox Party, Slovakia's "gypsy terror" Romani hunting L'SNS brownshirts and Estonia's card-carrying actual neo-Nazi EKRE party.

So yeah, there's a clear choice here in November and people need to figure it out within the next six weeks.