Writing in the Washington Post four years ago, journalist Michael Kinsley gave this blunt assessment of the man about to become president:
“Donald Trump,” Kinsley wrote, “is a fascist.”
Four years later, it’s fair to ask: Is the Republican Party fascist?
It’s an incendiary question. It’s also a serious one. Even after the assault on the U.S. Capitol, eight Senate Republicans and 138 Republican members of the House of Representatives still voted to overturn a free and fair presidential election. It is just the latest example of a party that is well to the right of most conservative parties in the democratic world.
That alone wouldn’t make the Grand Old Party fascist. The word itself is hard to characterize. As one of Adolf Hitler’s biographers has put it, “trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”
But it’s also real, as I learned working for an English-language newspaper in Rome in the mid-1980s. There, I attended a neo-fascist rally in the Piazza del Popolo complete with searchlights and elderly men, all wearing the same berets, a sign, my interpreter told me, that they once belonged to Benito Mussolini’s infamous Blackshirts.
While no two fascist movements are entirely alike, during fascism’s heyday in the 1920s and 30s, they shared several common themes. All of those themes are present in today’s Republican Party.
Fascists are anti-democratic
All inter-war fascist movements took part in elections with one goal in mind: to destroy democracy and create a one-party state.
That’s happening today in Poland, in Hungary, in Turkey.
Here, it is the idea that only Republicans can legitimately win at the ballot box. While this goes to the heart of the attempt to overturn November’s presidential election, the claim isn’t new.
The same was said of Barack Obama’s elections (he wasn’t really born in this country) and Bill Clinton’s victories (he only won because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacies). If the elections aren’t legitimate, neither are the presidencies. The same strategy will be used to undermine Joe Biden.
More than that, Republicans believe only they deserve to win. As far back as 1984, Ronald Reagan declared the GOP is “America’s party.”
Such thinking leads in one direction. If Republicans are “America’s party” then Democrats are the “anti-America party.” From there it’s a small step to believing that only Republicans can legitimately win at the ballot box, that Democrats only win by cheating. If saving the country from such a party means resorting to strategies like voter suppression — or violence — so be it.
Never mind that this turns the American experiment in self-government on its head. If democracy means anything, it means your side sometimes loses.
That simple fact ought to be clear to every American. Yet it, and Wednesday’s attempted insurrection, did not stop Congressional Republican diehards from voting to reject the electoral votes of several states for no reason other than the fact that they didn’t like the outcome of the presidential race.
https://brewminate.com/will-republicans-continue-pursuing-trumps-fascist-ideology/