Have the Republicans Always Been Authoritarian?

That question comes from reading Democracy or apocalypse? by David Dyzenhaus and published in Aeon. I know I promised no more political posts until I got my short story typed up, but this was too interesting (and not likely to be overtaken by the TV news) to pass by.

The article focuses on one Austrian philosopher who came to America to avoid the Nazis:

Eric Voegelin (1901-85) was the most influential member of this group, which gravitated to the intellectual circle around William Buckley and his magazine National Review, and which laid the basis for the toxic and complex blend of militant Christian conservatism, libertarianism and anti-liberalism that drives the Republican Party in the Donald Trump era. Voegelin was German, but studied at the University of Vienna, where he became a professor in the Faculty of Law in 1929. In 1938, he escaped to Switzerland then left for the US. He spent much of his career at Louisiana State University, later at the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. The website of the Eric Voegelin Institute at Louisiana State claims him as ‘one of the most original and influential philosophers of our time’.

Except this fellow did not favor liberal democracy:

It is this bond between the leader and the people that Voegelin designates as ‘existential’, one that is corrupted if it is mediated by the institutions of representative democracy. Kelsen argues that the bond is ‘fascistic’ in nature, though he recognises that this is an implication rather than anything Voegelin directly states. And he makes it clear in a footnote that in his view there is no distance between Schmitt’s fascist theory of democracy advanced in late Weimar and Voegelin’s ‘science of politics’. Such a theory holds that only a strong leader unfettered by institutional constraints – a dictator – can existentially represent the group that counts authentically as ‘the people’.

And unto this day:

Unlike Voegelin, they do not see the need to ‘veer towards Mussolini’ since they have learned a lesson about democracy that was unavailable to the likes of Voegelin and Schmitt in the 1930s. Their main teacher is Hungary’s Orbán, and he has taught that the political space need not exclude democracy as long as the version of democracy is ‘illiberal democracy’. This is a democracy whose institutions have been hollowed out or captured so that, first, the return of the ruler in periodic elections is guaranteed to the extent possible and, second, institutions such as parliaments and the judiciaries are disabled from mediating the promulgation of the common good by the ruler. There is then, they suppose, no need to put in place fascism because illiberal democracy suffices for what the US Senator Joshua Hawley, in a Voegelin-inspired essay, called ‘A Christian Vision for Kingdom Politics’.

It is because Kelsen saw clearly the content of that dream, as set out in his article in Ethics, that he was impelled to try to expose Voegelin’s agenda. As our world today tragically shows, he was all too prescient. The enemies of democracy are not just Russia’s Putin and wacky extremist groups. They have been for some time within our gates, indeed, the gates of our academies. They are the true gnostics. They are realistic enough to know that the return of theocratic rule according to the dictates of their own militant version of Christianity is not realisable in practice. So they make a pact with whatever anti-liberal forces share enough of the tenets of their ideology to make for some common ground; and they disguise their hatred of the achievements of liberal democracy under the pretext of saving us from the control of cosmopolitan, rootless elites, a rhetoric with a frightful past.

But I think the problem existed before this Austrian arrived in America. At least in Indiana, the Republicans made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan after WWI. The Southern Democrats had their Klan affiliations before WWII, too. Is there something in the idea of conservatism that requires it to shift from a slower forward motion to reverse? 

 

European authoritarianism has its American fans, but those fans came into being on their own. Europeans may have given an n intellectual polish to the authoritarian idea, but we had our own would be dictators. Now we either confront their ideas or let them dominate and then destroy what we thought of as the American Way.

sch 9/24/22

Updated 9/26/22.

 

The Guardian reviewed a new book on the Proud Boys under the headline We Are Proud Boys review: chilling exposé illuminates Republicans’ fascist turn. This seemed relevant to what I had already written:

 Regardless, the New York brawl became another opportunity for the Republican establishment to normalize fascist behavior. Immediately after the attack, Fox News quoted Ed Cox, the Republican state chairman (and son-in-law of Richard Nixon) as “calling on Democrats to cease inciting these attacks”.

As Campbell writes, the event at the Republican club was “a jumping-off point for the GOP into what would eventually become a full embrace of domestic extremist violence”.

Kelly Weill, a reporter who covers domestic extremism, explained, the Proud Boys “really embody the political violence the GOP needs just a little bit of a proxy for. They can’t personally be out there doing it, so they have the Proud Boys”.

Updated 9/28/2022

Christian White Supremacy Rising: The Fascist Connection:

White Republican officials are explicitly calling on the United States to embrace Christian nationalism. Republican House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene sees the GOP as “the party of Christian nationalism.” Doug Mastriono, Big Lie election propagandist and Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate, calls the separation of church and state a “myth,” announcing that “In November we are going to take our state back” from the secularist Democrats and that “my God will make it so.” Fellow Big Lie propagandist, January 6 insurrectionist supporter, and Republican Representative Josh Hawley announces that “we are a revolutionary nation because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible – without the Bible, there is no America.”

Republican rhetoric channels eliminationism by assaulting those identities that do not fit the Christian nationalist ideal elevated by the GOP. This is most clear in Hawley’s claim that “no America” exists outside of a Christian fundamentalist identity.

The GOP’s pronouncements don’t occur in a vacuum. They’re part of a larger embrace on the Republican right of Christian nationalism and zealotry. For example, a University of Maryland poll from mid-2022 finds that support for fundamentalist principles in the Republican Party is pronounced, venturing into authoritarianism. While 57 percent of Republicans believe the U.S. Constitution doesn’t allow for “the government to declare the U.S. a Christian nation,” 61 percent favor doing so anyway. Differences within the party are pronounced by age, with 71 percent of Silent Generation and 54 percent of Baby Boomer Republicans wanting to declare the U.S. a Christian nation, compared to 49 percent of Gen X and 51 percent of Millennial and Gen Z Republicans respectively. This sentiment threatens to undermine longstanding requirements under the First Amendment mandating that Congress (and government more generally) “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” and that individuals have the right of “free exercise” of whatever religion or denomination they wish independently of government, and Article 7, which states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Christo-fascism relies on the fusion of white supremacy, authoritarianism, contempt for the rule of law and religious minorities’ rights, and the eliminationist effort to delete non-Christian identities from the national consciousness and from what it means to be “American.”

Either you are anti-fascist or you are pro-fascist. History does not show a middle ground, except for those buried by the fascists of our past. Cemeteries will be the future of those who do not oppose fascism.

 

sch