Donald Trump is out, but his style of politics remains. Even before that he was elected in 2016, observers debated whether his style should be called fascism.

This is the email that I sent to Sen. Marco Rubio, Congressman Carlos Giménez, Congressman Mario Díaz-Balart, and Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar on March 17, 2021.

Is the GOP a far-right party?

In the first third of the 20th century the far-right achieved its apotheosis in the regimes of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In Europe today, parties such as France’s National Front, United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and the Austrian Freedom Party are identified as far-right movements, which aspire to an ethnically homogeneous society. France’s National Front changed its name to Rassemblement National or National Rally in January 2018.

Until 2015, the Grand Old Party (GOP) had an uneasy relationship with the far-right. Prior to the 2016 presidential election season, only a handful of political die-hards followed the machinations of a new political ideology called the alternative right, or Alt-Right.

Before the extraordinary presidential election of 2016, the Alt-Right went unnoticed by the general public and was of interest primarily to observers of right-wing extremism. That situation changed when in the heat of the campaign, Donald Trump chose Stephen “Steve” Bannon, former executive chairman of the far-right website Breitbart News, as his campaign CEO. Bannon himself described Breitbart News as “the platform for the Alt-Right.” Breitbart’s critics say the site promotes populists, nationalists, racists and xenophobes.

On November 13, 2016, President-Elect Trump said that Stephen “Steve” Bannon will serve as his chief strategist and senior counselor. Bannon left the White House in August 2017 after months of reported power struggles with Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. During the 2016 presidential campaign and in the White House, Bannon had a direct line to President Trump — who seemed to be his ideological soulmate. 

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen tweeted on Nov 20, 2016: “Si Clinton avait gagné, les conséquences pour la France auraient été désastreuses.” In English, “If Clinton had won, the consequences for France would have been disastrous.” French far-right leader was spotted in Trump Tower. She declined to say whether she was there to see President-elect Donald Trump but the Trump team said there would be “no meetings”.

Marine Le Pen has called Trump’s election “an additional stone in the building of a new world.” Then President Trump expressed support for French far-right leader. The two leaders share much, including nationalism, populism and protectionism. Critics of Le Pen have accused her of xenophobia, a familiar critique of Trump. On March 1, 2017 the Finalcial Times’s chief foreign affairs commentator compared the movements behind then president Donald Trump and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

Marion Marechal-Le Pen, the niece of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen and former rising star of France’s National Front, railed against Muslim immigration during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, after Vice President Mike Pence. 

Feb 22, 2018. Far-right politician Marion Maréchal-Le Pen calls for “France First” at CPAC summit

In 2018, Illinois Republicans botched four opportunities to stop an Nazi from representing their party in a Chicago-area congressional district. “First, it’s morally wrong and I think it’s really harmful to the party. The guy’s a complete nutcase. He’s a Nazi,” said conservative GOP state Rep. David McSweeney. “This is an absolute political disaster.”

On March 10, 2018, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon re-energized France’s struggling far-right National Front party by speaking at a party congress and telling Marine Le Pen’s nationalist supporters: “History is on our side.”

The congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene represents an ascending far-right movement within the Republican ranks that carries the banner of Trump’s grievance politics — and the support of his loyal supporters who are now critical to the party’s future. “We’re thankful for her,” said Dianne Putnam, chair of the Whitfield county Republican party, which is situated in Greene’s district. “We’ve been waiting to have a congressman that would take a stand for conservative causes and be a voice for us that we felt we’ve never had.”

CNN reported that the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene “repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress.”

Everything seems to indicate that Republicans are unwilling to purge far-right radicals from their party, despite some Republicans leaders’ best wishes. GOP leaders should know that Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. His book The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon.

According to Fascism Today, published by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College,

Samuel Moyn recently argued in these pages against comparing Trump’s policies to fascism, because his administration is “pursuing causes with roots deep in American history. No analogy to Hitler or fascism is needed to explain these results.” But this presumes that fascism does not have its own deep roots in American history. It is arguable — not to say, exceptionalist — to presuppose that anything indigenously American cannot be fascist; this begs the question of American fascism rather than disputing it. Experts on fascism such as Robert O. Paxton, Roger Griffin, and Stanley G. Payne have long argued that fascism can never seem alien to its followers; its claims to speak for “the people” and to restore national greatness mean that each version of fascism must have its own local identity. To believe that a nationalist movement isn’t fascist because it’s native is to miss the point entirely.

Historically, fascist movements were also marked by opportunism, a willingness to say almost anything to get into power, rendering definitions even murkier. Trying to identify its core, the unsplittable fascist atom, has proved impossible; we are left with what Umberto Eco called fascism’s “fuzziness,” others its “hazy and synthetic doctrines.” There are good arguments against attempting through taxonomies to establish what’s become known as a “fascist minimum,” as if a checklist could qualitatively differentiate fascism from other authoritarian dictatorships. Some think anti-Semitism is a litmus test; others genocide. Does colonialism count? Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James, and Hannah Arendt, among many other notable thinkers who lived through the first fascisms, certainly thought it did, arguing that European fascism visited upon white bodies what colonial and slave systems had perfected in visiting upon black and brown bodies.

In recent years, the number of democracies has fallen, and democracy has retreated in virtually all regions of the world. At the same time, many authoritarian countries, led by China and Russia, have become much more assertive. Some countries that had seemed to be successful liberal democracies during the 1990s — including Hungary, Poland, Thailand, and Turkey — have slid backward toward authoritarianism.

One academic study, the largest ever of its kind, shows that the GOP has followed a similar trajectory to Fidesz, which under Viktor Orbán has evolved from a liberal youth movement into an authoritarian party that has made Hungary the first non-democracy in the European Union. Hungary’s governing party pulled out of its conservative group in the European Union’s legislature following years of conflict over the rule of law and European values.

The move on the illiberalism scale pushed the GOP further away from its traditional European equivalents and towards more autocratic groupings. “What we see is that the disrespect of political opponents, the encouragement of violence and also the violation of minority rights ... they have all clearly increased with the Republican Party in recent years, since [President Donald Trump] came in the leadership but also before that.”

Is the Republican Party a far-right party?

American Democracy can’t survive unless

the far right is marginalized. Here’s how to do it

Lee Drutman

March 19, 2021

As our nation comes to grip with the horrific events of January 6 and watches the Republican Party descend further into Trumpism as it pushes hundreds of restrictive voting laws across the country, the obvious question is how does American democracy come back from all this?

There is a path forward: The super-majority of Americans across the political spectrum who reject the extremism need to come together. This includes the pro-democracy right. But for the pro-democracy right to thrive, we need to reform the U.S. voting system to allow for new parties to emerge outside the existing two-party system. Without electoral reform, third parties are likely to fail as spoilers. But only a new small “l” liberal Republican Party—distinct from the increasingly illiberal Trumpist GOP, can establish a new partisan identity that gives center-right voters a meaningful home. Only a new party can create a distinct pathway to elected office that avoids the combatively hyper-partisan Republican primary voters. A party faction cannot do these things. Left to fight a losing battle in the Republican Party, as the recent CPAC confirmed, the withering pro-democracy faction is up against frightening odds.

Electoral reforms that make space for more parties may seem unlikely. But urgent times call for big changes. And American democracy has done big things before.

First, we need to understand the urgency of the problem. By international standards, the current Republican Party is an illiberal anti-democratic nativist global outlier, with positions more extreme than France’s National Rally, and in line with the Germany’s AfD, Hungary’s Fidesz, Turkey’s AKP and Poland’s PiS, according to the widely respected V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute.

This is not a new problem. The GOP has been sliding into authoritarianism over two decades, using increasingly demonizing rhetoric against its opponents. But it got worse under Trump’s leadership, and the failure of center-right factions to push back. We are running out of time. What happens in a hyper-polarized party system when a major party turns against the entire system of legitimate elections? Historically, democracy dies.

And yet, if recent months and weeks have highlighted the dangerous extremism of the current Republican Party, they’ve also shown how broadly unpopular such violent extremism actually is. Three-quarters of Americans disapprove of the January 6 mob’s actions, and Trump’s seemingly immovable approval floor dropped by about more than six points. In the days after, only 13 percent of Americans considered themselves “Trump Supporters” while another 16 percent considered themselves “Traditional Republicans.” If “Trump Supporters” were their own party, they’d be about as popular as Germany’s far-right AfD, which polled at about 15 percent for 2019, though their support more recently dropped off to 11 percent.

But the obvious difference is that in Germany, the popular center-right CDU Party, headed by Angela Merkel, was able to form of a  governing coalition with the center-left, keeping the AfD far away from power. In the U.S., where governing power can fall to a mere plurality of a plurality, the center-right has been overwhelmed by the far-right in the Republican Party. And because the U.S. has a two-party system, the center-right is largely homeless. If fighting for a place in the GOP is pushing a heavy rock up a steep hill, fighting for a place in the Democratic Party is pushing an even heavier rock up the side of a cliff.

But why is the United States a two-party system? It’s not because voters want just two parties. For decades, majorities of Americans have told pollsters they want more parties to choose from, and registered their dissatisfaction with the two-party system by increasingly identifying as independents. Rather, it’s because the U.S. uses a system of first-past-the-post single-winner plurality elections for Congress. In such a system, votes for third parties are “wasted” and third parties are dismissed as “spoilers.” All ambitious politicians, thus, set their sights on one of the two major parties. And because anybody can run in a party primary, parties have very little control of their candidates. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, was not selected by Republican Party leaders. She simply won her primary, with the support of just 43,813 voters in a district of almost 700,000 residents. Instead of being a minor party candidate, she is now an increasingly prominent Republican.

The U.S. is the only advanced democracy to give voters full control over party primary nominations. In every other advanced democracy, party leaders control nominations. The U.S. is also the only genuine two-party system among advanced democracies—and absent major reform, that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

Historically, the U.S. two-party system functioned reasonably well only because it operated more like a four-party system, with liberal Republicans (largely from New England and the West Coast) and conservative Democrats (largely from the South and the mountain west) elected alongside conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. In this four-party system, parties operated like overlapping coalitions, instead of opposing armies. Politics was more local, and less national. These overlapping parties rooted in more local political cultures meant more bargaining in Congress. And because both parties had liberal and conservative wings, they wound up both being moderate overall, reducing the stakes of national elections and the potential for demonizing the other side as radical. Take the 1990 Clean Air Act, one of the last major truly bipartisan bills that came out of Congress, which brought together Democrats environmental activists with pro-market Republicans for a bill that passed overwhelmingly.

But as the two parties began sorting more clearly along liberal-conservative lines as “culture war” issues starting in the 1970s, and as American politics nationalized around these cultural issues, and, starting in the 1990s, as the long-time Democratic control of the House ended, every election became a high-stakes all-or-nothing fight for control of federal power. In this high-stakes nationalized context, the liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, who had been the hinge groups in shifting policy coalitions, were the casualties. The differences between the parties became sharper as the overlap vanished.

With its liberal wing marginalized, the GOP became much more conservative and rural—dominated by evangelical whites who saw their social status declining and whose hold on political power increasingly came to depend on counter-majoritarian institutions like the Senate, and on voting rules that limited the franchise of Democratic constituencies. Fueled by grievance, dominated by reactionaries, the party became more anti-system, more distrustful of the “establishment,” and more receptive to the racist demagoguery and wild conspiracies that now dominates the party and led to the rise of Donald Trump. Even if most Americans may reject this extremism, the constrained geography of the right gives this ideology a firm hold on the Republican Party. And in a two-party system, the Republicans still remain the only alternative for those uncomfortable with the Democrats.

The only way to elevate the moderate Republicans is for Congress to use its constitutional authority (Article I, Section IV) to change how we vote, and create electoral opportunities for a center-right to rise again. In the House, this would mean multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting. Combine existing districts into larger ones (ideally five members), let voters rank candidates, and send the top five winners to Congress. Massachusetts and Maryland could start sending more Charlie Baker and Larry Hogan-type center-right representatives to Congress. And Kansas and Oklahoma could start sending more center-left representatives to Congress.

In the Senate, elections could operate like Maine and Alaska now do, with ranked-choice voting. This will encourage more moderate, coalition-minded Senators to emerge. The combination of these two electoral reforms will open space for more parties, and especially for a new center-right. Ideally, we should also pass a constitutional amendment to elect the President in a two-round system using the national popular vote. But the Congressional election reforms require only legislation, so they should have top priority.

The threats to American democracy are terrifying. But the good news is that a super-majority of Americans consistently reject the tear-it-all-down extremism. The bad news, however, is our two-party system presents a major obstacle to that super-majority asserting itself. Electoral reform to allow multiparty democracy is an urgent necessity. If it’s Democrats vs. Republicans, American democracy is deep trouble. But if it’s small “l” liberals vs illiberal extremists, we might yet survive. And the most likely way to achieve this urgent realignment is to change the voting system to break up the two-party binary.