In a speech last week, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has successfully stifled democratic institutions in Hungary and advanced an authoritarian regime, declared on behalf of Hungary and Europe, “we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.” He added a comment (interpreted as a joke referencing Nazi gas chambers) about an EU proposal to ration gas: “the past shows us German know-how on that.”
His remarks were met with disapproval across Europe and elsewhere. Among his critics was a longtime Orbán advisor who explained her resignation by observing that the speech was “a pure Nazi text worthy of Goebbels.”* In contrast, prominent American conservatives, many of whom have come to look at Orbán as a role model (chief among them Tucker Carlson), were unruffled by the evident racism.
Orbán will deliver a keynote speech at CPAC this week. When asked about his remarks, conference organizer Matt Schlapp shrugged them off:
“Let’s listen to the man speak,” Schlapp said in an interview at the America First Policy Institute summit in Washington following Orban’s speech, according to Bloomberg. “We’ll see what he says. And if people have a disagreement with something he says, they should raise it.”
It was not that long ago that the Republican Party would have distanced itself from such a figure. As recently as 2019, national Republicans repudiated Iowa Congressman Steve King, refused to fund his campaign, and stripped him of his committee assignments in Congress. That would never happen now, a mere three years later.
Today, Republicans – led by the man who rose to political prominence with birtherism, who in campaigns and in the White House demonized Mexicans and Muslims (among others unwelcome in the MAGA GOP), and who continues to undermine democratic institutions by promoting the big lie – have welcomed white supremacists into their coalition.
In Pennsylvania, a major swing state with a closely divided electorate, the Republican Party’s gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has defended his financial ties to a website founded by Andrew Torba, who exults in his anti-Semitism.
"We're not bending the knee to the 2% anymore," Torba said, a reference to the general estimate of the Jewish population in the United States. "We're not taking it anymore, bud. We are taking back our culture. We're taking back our country. We're taking back our government. So, deal with it."
Asked Thursday about the criticism over his relationship with Mastriano, Torba told CNN, "I only speak to Christian news outlets. Repent and call on the name of Jesus Christ."
Marjorie Taylor Green, who is hawking Proud Christian Nationalist t-shirts on her campaign website, said last week on conservative Next News Network:
I think Republicans really need to recognize the people they represent. Okay, the voters. Not the lobbyist donors, not the corporate PACS, not those people. That’s not who the Republican Party should represent.
We need to be the party of nationalism. And I’m a Christian and I say it proudly: We should be Christian nationalists.
While Donald Trump's life and character bear no resemblance to Christianity as portrayed in the Gospels, and prejudice against Jews is hardly as prominent as his contempt for other minorities, he embraces white evangelical Christian support and, more significantly, he caters to the haters among his supporters. And while not all Republicans harbor hostility toward religious minorities, dark skinned immigrants, or other groups that Donald Trump has reveled in disparaging, we have reason for concern at the unmistakable direction the Republican Party has taken.
From dog-whistle to bullhorn
In the decades as the Solid South shifted from Democrats to Republicans and eventually came to represent the ideological center of the Republican Party, dog-whistle politics (often audible to political observers who cared to notice) have become part and parcel of the Republican playbook. However, the party’s messaging conformed to constraints of civility, principle, and what was viable politically. As the balance of what’s viable politically has shifted, the party has let hate rise in its ranks without much protest and, mostly, with silence.
Ronald Reagan made a commitment to states’ rights in a speech near Philadelphia, Mississippi near the beginning of his 1980 campaign for president. Jesse Helms’ 1990 ‘Hands’ TV ad criticized his black opponent for favoring Ted Kennedy’s racial quota law. Pete Wilson’s ‘They keep coming’ ad, in support of Proposition 187, boosted his 1994 reelection campaign.
Did these appeals seek to draw in voters who harbored racial prejudice? Whether or not this was true in any specific cases, plausible deniability was always available in response to criticism. The party could always look to principles not grounded in fear or hatred of any racial or ethnic groups to defend public utterances, campaign ads, and public policy initiatives.
Even Donald Trump’s Muslim ban could be defended (albeit unconvincingly) as essential to national security, while ‘family values’ could be invoked (without mention of Christianity, gay communities, or abortion) as a traditional staple of Americana.
But with Trump’s ascension to leadership of the Republican Party, overt appeals to prejudice and hate of the other (including a broad swath of run of the mill political opponents of the GOP) have become commonplace. As the party has brought white Christian nationalism into the mainstream, white supremacists have become a critical faction of the GOP coalition. And this has elicited no more than murmurs of disapproval from the party leadership, which is focused on the practicalities of winning elections.
The United States of 2022 is multiracial, multiethnic, with a decreasing proportion of Christians, increasing acceptance of sexual and gender diversity, and it is certainly less white than in previous eras. These facts discombobulate and distress many folks who count themselves as white (even decedents of, for instance, Irish or Italian or Catholic immigrants who were not regarded as equally ‘white’ or as real American stock when they arrived on our shores).
After the last half dozen years, explicitly open appeals to fear and hate and exclusion – based on the notion that white Christians have always had and ought to continue to have a privileged place in the nation – have come to the fore. Disparaged groups are regarded with contempt, as are our democratic institutions that would give them all a voice. The leadership of the Republican Party has made the choice that, if taking this path is a prerequisite to their party gaining and maintaining power, so be it. In making this choice, they have failed the country.
I noted in a previous post, "Political parties and their leaders have a special role to play in safeguarding democratic institutions," and I quoted from Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's How Democracies Die:
Potential demagogues exist in all democracies, and occasionally, one or more of them strike a public chord. But in some democracies, political leaders heed the warning signs and take steps to ensure that authoritarians remain on the fringes, far from the centers of power. When faced with the rise of extremists or demagogues, they make a concerted effort to isolate and defeat them. Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters.
Republican leaders have failed to keep authoritarians on the fringes. Instead, they have acquiesced to Trump and his followers. They have chosen political expediency, taking the path of least resistance. No matter what democratic norm the MAGA GOP trashes, there is never a bridge too far.
The current direction of the Republican Party is antithetical to American democracy.
* Later, after Orbán issued a statement denying anti-Semitism, his advisor withdrew her criticism.