Fashioning himself as a champion of “illiberal democracy” and a defender of Christendom against Muslims, progressives and the “LGBTQ lobby,” Orbán hosted the Republican Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest this May. The two-day CPAC fascist-fest, the second in Hungary in as many years, featured segments titled “Make Kids Not War” and “No Country for Woke Men.” A sign over the venue entrance read “No Woke Zone,” assuring Republicans they would be in a safe space.

CPAC chairman ( who has been accused but not convicted of  sexual harassment) Matt Schlapp echoed Orbán’s view that Western media is all-leftist and unsuccessfully tried to keep “liberal” journalists out of the conference. As reported by the Associated Press, Schlapp said that CPAC had decided to “go Hungarian” in their approach to the media, deciding for themselves “who is a journalist and who is not a journalist” when determining which outlets to allow into their events.

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NATIONAL HARBOR, MD – MARCH 02: Chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Matt Schlapp speaks during the annual conference at Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center on March 2, 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland. The annual conservative conference kicks off today with former President Donald Trump addressing the event on Saturday. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Orbán re-shaped the Hungarian political system not through a Soviet-style police state — though he has been accused of using Israel’s Pegasus spyware to tap the phones of opposing journalists, lawyers, and businessman — but rather through quasi-constitutional changes. He and his Fidesz Party seized control of the judiciary, turned elections into a sham, passed racist immigration laws, crushed dissent, and demolished independent media outlets. He has further enforced his power over cultural, educational, and religious institutions to promote his Christian nationalist vision and reject “gender insanity,” “multiculturalism,” and “hegemonic liberalism.”

The GOP in most red states already bears striking similarities to Orbán’s Fidesz party: from targeting migrants to whipping up nativist conspiracies, from packing the courts with right-wing extremists to rigging elections through purging voters and gerrymanders, from outlawing most abortions to discriminating against LBGTQ people, and from stoking white religious grievance to supporting Christian supremacy. 

In a recent survey, more than half of Republicans support Christian Nationalism. Pushing the faulty notion that conflates American and Christian identity, the ongoing “Reawaken America” Tour is a fanatically pro-Christian circus of MAGA lunatics like Mike Flynn, Eric Trump, Roger Stone, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell alongside various conservative Christian pastors and Trump acolytes. They are promulgating Qanon conspiracies, anti-vaxx misinformation, and anti-Semitism along with an anti-democratic Christian Nationalist ideology that discriminates, excludes and persecutes non-Christians, immigrants or individuals who don’t align with their dogmatic, bigoted understanding of religious identity.

Reaching beyond the MAGA fringe and the red states, Orbán and the GOP have their sights set on converting the federal government. Various contemptible Republican politicians have expressed support for Christian Nationalism, including Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Mike Pompeo, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Just as Republicans aspire to federalize an abortion ban, Trump, DeSantis, and the GOP want to inflict Orbánism on all of America.

Image by Tibor Janosi Mozes from Pixabay

The Hungarian “soft fascism” strongman told the CPAC audience, to a standing ovation: “Hungary is actually an incubator where experiments are done on the future of conservative policies. Hungary is the place where we didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it.” Orbán dispenses that dictatorial dopamine hit that Republicans so desperately crave, but without Putin’s poisoned corpses and war crimes.

At CPAC, Orbán bragged that conservatives have “occupied big European sanctuaries,” which he listed as Budapest, Warsaw, Rome and Jerusalem. He complained that Washington and Brussels were still in the grip of liberalism, which he described as a “virus that will atomize and disintegrate our nations — migration, gender, and woke: these are all just variants – variants of the same virus.”

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban addresses a keynote speech during an extraordinary session of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Balna cultural centre of Budapest, Hungary on May 19, 2022. – The two-day CPAC meeting is being held in Europe for the first time. (Photo by ATTILA KISBENEDEK / AFP) (Photo by ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP via Getty Images)

Orbán wants to exterminate what he calls “that virus” in Europe and has dedicated himself to showing Republicans how to do the same here. An early Trump-influencer, Orbán was the first European leader to endorse the sex abuser for president and was celebrated by Steve Bannon as “Trump before Trump.” During the refugee crisis of 2015, Orbán built a huge, militarized, barbed-wire fence along Hungary’s southern border.

In 2021, Tucker Carlson — still hosting his white-power-hour on Fox —  became Orbán’s premier American fluffer. He hosted a week of shows from Hungary that broadcast Orbán’s “fascist light” poison directly into American homes, depicting Hungary as a conservative paradise with strong pro-family, Christian policies that had conquered the migrant “onslaught” with a border wall.

Orbán expelled almost all asylum seekers from the country in defiance of both European Union law and the Geneva Conventions. He even locked up refugee children in cages with the enthusiastic support of Hungarian white supremacists. The Helsinki Human Rights Committee condemned this as ”cruel and inhuman.” In true fascist style, Orbán declared, “Immigration brings increased crime, endangers the continent’s Christian culture and identity, and lets in the virus of terrorism.”

Apishly following his vile example, Trump and his advisor Steven Miller devised American jail camps for migrant families. Citing their similarities, Trump lavishly praised Orbán in a 2019 oval office meeting.

Exploiting images of Syrian refugees fleeing Russian violence, Orbán’s state-controlled media amplified or fabricated migrant criminality for shameless fearmongering just as Republicans and their MAGA propaganda outlets regularly ramp up the “horror of a migrant invasion.” Inflicting a Hungarian hell of persecution, racism and xenophobia upon racial, ethnic, and religious minorities: Orbán refused to denounce the founder of the Fidesz Party when he branded the Roma, the largest minority group in Hungary, as “animals, unfit to live among people.”   

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BICSKE, HUNGARY – SEPTEMBER 04: Migrants protest outside a train that they are refusing to leave for fear of being taken to a refugee camp from the train that has been held at Bicske station since yesterday on September 4, 2015 in Bicske, near Budapest, Hungary. According to the Hungarian authorities a record number of migrants from many parts of the Middle East, Africa and Asia are crossing the border from Serbia. Since the beginning of 2015 the number of migrants using the so-called Balkans route has exploded with migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey and then travelling on through Macedonia and Serbia before entering the EU via Hungary. The massive increase, said to be the largest migration of people since World War II, led Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban to order Hungary’s army to build a steel and barbed wire security barrier along its entire border with Serbia, after more than 100,000 asylum seekers from a variety of countries and war zones entered the country so far this year. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

In what may be his most influential demagogic fabrication, Orbán provided Trump, DeSantis and Republicans with an all-purpose, scapegoat — an omnipotent demonic figure to be blamed for Hungary’s and, in fact, all the world’s evils: George Soros. The Holocaust survivor is the Hungarian billionaire whose Soros Foundation financed Orbán’s own Oxford education as it did for many others. Soros also funded health, human rights, and pro-democracy projects.

”Orbán devised a conspiracy theory, painting George Soros — who was born in Hungary but hasn’t lived there in decades — as the global orchestrator of the refugee crisis, a nefarious international puppet master,” writes Hungarian author and politician Zsuzsanna Szelényi, in her 2022 book, Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary.  As part of his 2010 election campaign, “Orbán’s concocted ‘Soros plan’ served as a faithful reprise of every single trope of anti-Semitic hatred, which casts powerful Jewish actors as the embodiment of all social and political ‘diseases’ while creating an illusionary basis for the Hungarian war against migration.”

Orbán named his draconian anti-immigration bill the “Stop Soros” law. Among other things, it outlawed helping  immigrants claim asylum and apply for residence in Hungary. The Fidesz media machine trumpeted Orbán’s conspiracy theory and magnified it a thousand times. Ads and billboards screamed “Soros wants to influence the whole world!” and “Soros may have killed his mother!” Orbán’s political enemies became “Soros hirelings,” says Szelényi. “Nobody could escape hearing Soros’ name every day.”

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DAVOS, Switzerland: George Soros, Chairman of Soros Fund management speaks during the “Riding the Next Democratic Wave” conference, 23 January 2004 at the Congress Center during the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. In a speech prepared for the WEF, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announced Today he was convening a new business summit in June In New York, to help refocus attention on development issues that have been overshadowed by the Iraq war and the US-led drive against terrorism.AFP PHOTO Philippe DESMAZES (Photo credit should read PHILIPPE DESMAZES/AFP via Getty Images)

American vilification of Soros exploded after the Nazi brutality in Charlottesville. U.S. right-wingers claimed the violence was orchestrated and financed by Soros to tarnish the reputation of Trump, as if his despicable reputation could be tarnished any further. Before Tucker Carlson’s unceremonious dumping from Fox, he made a “documentary” called “Hungary vs. Soros: Fight for Civilization.” Carlson’s film accuses Soros of trying to undermine Hungary’s migration success story by funding pro-refugee propaganda, opposing the border fence, and lobbying governments to open their borders.

For years now, Republicans have demonized George Soros for anything they perceive as malevolent, ”woke,” or corrosive to their cherished “values.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called the NY District Attorney who indicted Trump, “Soros-backed.” Just last week, the malicious conspiracy-monger, Twitter owner Elon Musk — a Trump fanboy who presided over the globally humiliating, technically disastrous DeSantis presidential launch crash — asserted that “Soros wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.”

Bringing the slanderous Soros fiction to lizard-eating-its-own-tail absurdity, MAGA darling Kari Lake — still denying she lost the Arizona governor’s race and auditioning to be Trump’s VP sycophant — trashed Ron DeSantis by tweeting “The Kiss of Death — Florida Governor Ron DeSantis endorsed by George Soros.” Trump mocked the DeSantis’ presidential launch debacle by posting a monumentally stupid, fan-made video insinuating that DeSantis garnered support from Soros, Hitler, and Satan. Though it again exposed the unserious meaninglessness of the Soros accusations, the propaganda remains irresponsible and dangerous: Soros has endured countless death threats, including from Qanon crazies who have urged his execution.

While continuing to flog Soros, Orbán in 2022 went beyond his dictator-curious approach and openly embraced ethno-nationalistic racism. In an inflammatory speech in Romania, he denounced immigration from outside the existing boundaries of Europe, saying it was an effort to impose a “mixed-race” society on Hungary. One of his own close advisers Zsuzsa Hegedus resigned in protest, calling the speech “worthy of Goebbels” and “pure Nazi.”

Though Orbán’s hatred of migrants — as well as academics, “globalists,” and the Roma — is the central Orbán message, he and the Fidesz party, as part of their heterosexual pro-family Christian agenda, initiated attacks on “gender ideology” as early as 2010. The Orbán government prohibited gay marriage via constitutional amendment and banned transgender people from receiving legal recognition.

In public campaigns, Orbán conflated homosexuality with pedophilia while his government defunded gender-studies programs at universities. In 2020 the Orbán government criminalized any positive portrayal of LGBTQ people on TV and passed a law banning sex education involving LGBTQ topics in elementary schools.

Nine months later,  DeSantis — as Florida governor — slavishly signed a similar law, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. DeSantis’ press secretary, talking about the inspiration for the law admitted, “We were watching the Hungarians.”

Convinced that teachers are brainwashing kids to be left-wingers, Orbán wields state power to suppress academic freedom and dictate forbidden education topics from grade school to college. Orbán’s party railed against teaching multiracialism and racial tolerance, instead rewriting elementary school textbooks to proclaim that refugees entering the country are a threat because “it can be problematic for different cultures to coexist.”

Education policy is the latest of Orbán’s obsessions passed along to Trump, DeSantis, and Republicans. Parroting Orbán, Trump mendaciously denounced “pink-haired communists teaching our kids” and “Marxist maniacs” running our universities; Florida senator Marco Rubio called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination;” Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo predicted that “teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids” will “take this Republic down.”

Beyond the disingenuous words, Republicans are acting on these rhetorical fantasies. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed. Emulating Orbán, Republicans are seizing control of the American classroom, seeing it as the ultimate battleground upon which this country’s future will be determined.

Early in his career, Orbán identified the universities as the primary institutional source of opposition. Extending his political rule, Orbán placed most state universities under the control of close allies as part of his lamentably successful campaign to dismantle Hungary’s liberal democracy and advance nativist ideology.

DeSantis’ education advisor and anti-“woke” chatbot Christopher Rufo recently spent a month in Budapest as a fellow at the pro-Orbán Danube Institute where he reportedly met with Orbán’s government. After returning from Hungary, he excoriated American schools as “hunting grounds” for pedophile teachers and suggested that “parents have good reason” to worry about “gender, grooming and trans ideology in schools.” Last September, Balázs Orbán (no relation), the political director for the Hungarian prime minister, visited Florida where he praised DeSantis and likened his governing style to that of his own boss.

DeSantis is imitating Orbán’s ideas to turn Florida into a MAGA utopia. The similarities between the two politicians have been embraced by the Hungarian media with headlines such as: “Following Orbán, the Republican governor of Florida.”

Replicating Orbán, DeSantis’ House Bill 999 does more than repress academic freedom, it obliterates academic freedom. Admiring the legislation, The American Conservative called it “Florida’s ‘Orbán’ Renewal Project.” Free expression and education advocate at PEN America Jeremy Young described it as “almost an apocalyptic bill for higher education,” one that is “orders of magnitude worse than anything we’ve seen, either in the recent or the distant past.”

An abhorrent synthesis and expansion of previous unconstitutional Stop-“Woke” laws, House Bill 999 forbids Florida’s public colleges and universities from offering majors or minors in CRT (critical race theory), “intersectionality,” or gender studies as well as any subject that “engenders beliefs” in those ideas. The bill also bans campus activities that “espouse diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric.”  Even the teaching of subjects like slavery and Native American genocide is restricted.   

The Republican campaign to dominate the ideology of schools will not remain confined to state law or the public sphere. Mainlining Orbán, hard-right Representative Dan Bishop — a member of the GOP insurrection caucus — and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton — who urged Trump to use military force against the George Floyd protests — have put forth a bill that would deny federal funding to public and private universities that promote CRT concepts.

A vision of the Republican future, Victor Orbán is Trump or DeSantis with 13 years in command. As authoritarian Orbán clones, Trump, DeSantis and GOP politicians goose-step in unison with his policies in a 21^st century crusade to make America Hungary — a Christian nationalist autocracy steeped in racism, xenophobia, and the corruption of democracy.

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The damning Jan. 6 public hearings revealed a plethora of historical detail, but they also shed light on character. Some of these revelations were profiles in pusillanimity.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), one of the slimiest creatures ever to crawl into the halls of America’s legislature, gloried in a raised fist toward the assembled fascist hordes of the far right summoned by the lunatic-in-chief. A member of the DC police told the committee that she found the gesture deeply offensive, more especially since Hawley thought himself safe in the halls of Congress after having riled up a crowd she had to face (and which gave Officer Brian Sicknick two fatal strokes after nearly crushing him to death in a doorway to the Capitol– while injuring 146 other policemen).

When the crowd he had helped instigate invaded his supposedly safe space, did Hawley greet them with another raised fist? Did he join them in their mission?

No.

He lit out like a craven poltroon, whose frantic flight is impossible to watch without a melancholy hilarity. The mirth wells up from the Warner Brothers cartoon-like reversal that led to his frenzied retreat, the melancholy from watching a benighted fool to whom the misguided people of Missouri had unwisely entrusted their fates.

I propose that we alter the American idiom “to haul ass” from now on, substituting “to hawley ass.”

Trump himself, having lit the fuse, allowed himself to be squirreled away back at the Fox News situation room in the White House, rather than leading the crowd, as he had promised to do. One does not lead from a vehicle, and Trump knew his Secret Service agents would never let him be driven into the midst of a mob, so whatever drama he staged was a mere matter of protesting too much. He could have gone to the Capitol if he had really wanted too. He was still the most powerful man in the world. He chose to let his useful idiots take the heat, and has not gone to visit any of them in jail after they were quite rightly convicted of every crime from seditious conspiracy to trespassing.

There were the Republican members of Congress, who, having been spirited away into tunnels and undisclosed locations, fleeing with all the alacrity of a panic-stricken hawleyism from the QAnon Shaman and other assorted gun nuts, turned around and voted to overthrow the US government by refusing to certify Joe Biden’s win, and ever after suffered the vapors, wrist to pasty forehead, at the very thought of censuring the Apricot Adolf.

Then, take Steve Bannon– please! Here is a blowhard who urged on Trump and the insurrectionists and blew off a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. When he was indicted and faced a courtroom, he thundered, as Jose Paglieri points out at the Daily Beast, that he would make the trial “the misdemeanor of hell.” In the event, he did did not take the stand to denounce the perfidious proceedings for his three-sheets-to the-wind geriatric YouTube audience. He did not have his attorneys even put on a defense, and skipped attending himself, too bashful to withstand the stern gaze of the judge. T.S. Eliot in The Hollow Men, observed, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” Eliot was haunted by the figure of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novel of the European colonial rape of the Congo, The Heart of Darkness. The Hollow Men of the black shirt Trump insurgency have also dwindled from a roar at their predation upon the nation to the mewling of broken clowns hawking snake oil at a brigade of gullible washouts. The horror, the horror, indeed.

The gallery of the yellow-bellied goes on, including Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, who briefly found their cojones somehow with a flashlight under the covers after four years of suffering from cryptorchidism, and managed to at least protest that Trump had nearly succeeded in having them lynched. After this momentary brush with manhood, they quickly turned choirboy in the church of Trump, praising him and seeking his approval, for all the world as though the Munich city elders had sucked up to Hitler after the failed beer-hall putsch.

Most Republican senators refused even to meet with Brian Sicknick’s mother Gladys when she lobbied them to form a commission to investigate Jan. 6. Even the dozen, out of 50, GOP senators who did meet with her voted against the commission. If it hadn’t been for the courage of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, with whom I likely agree on very little else, in joining Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 Special Committee, the entire exercise could have been dismissed as Democrat (that’s what they call them) partisanship.

Much of the Republican Party has been reduced to quivering protoplasm, whimpering under the lash of Trump’s whiny invective, alternating between morbid algolagnia and contemptible dastardliness.

Republicans were different back then, less prone to crazed conspiracy theories, more decent, more tied to concrete reality. Nowadays opinion polls show that Republicans believe twelve false things before breakfast every day and you can’t convince them with mere logic and concrete evidence. There have been other parties in the past century who were similarly not open to the truth and which similarly subordinated mere facts to party interests, exemplified by the interests of their great leader. Both Stalinism and Germany’s National Socialism were like that. It is pretty scary that so many Republicans now have the goose-stepping mindset.

Regardless of the imperviousness of the Trump base to mere facts, Trump is in trouble. I certainly hope that the Department of Justice has the courage to indict him.

Dana Bash, Jake Tapper and Jeremy Herb at CNN elicited from a Jan. 6 Panel member a precise list of the seven parts of Trump’s plan, which Cheney referred to but did not present in detail. The stages were, they say:

“1. President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.
2. President Trump corruptly planned to replace the Acting Attorney General, so that the Department of Justice would support his fake election claims.
3. President Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to count certified electoral votes in violation of the US Constitution and the law.
4. President Trump corruptly pressured state election officials, and state legislators, to change election results.
5. President Trump’s legal team and other Trump associates instructed Republicans in multiple states to create false electoral slates and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archives.
6. President Trump summoned and assembled a violent mob in Washington and directed them to march on the US Capitol.
7. As the violence was underway, President Trump ignored multiple pleas for assistance and failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol.”

Ken Dilanian at NBC News makes crystal clear that each of the seven points is indictable. It isn’t only point 6, unleashing the Oath Keepers and Proud boys on the Capitol that was illegal.

When Trump pressured Mike Pence not to certify Biden’s win on January 6, that was obstruction of an official proceeding.

That is a real crime, to which some of the insurrectionists have already pleaded guilty. It comes with as much as a 20-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine. The fine would mean nothing to Trump, but if he was convicted and got the max, he’d die in jail.

Some of Trump’s other actions constitute attempted fraud. One court judge has already said in a ruling, as Dilanian points out, that Trump is probably guilty of both of these offenses.

Dilanian ends his excellent discussion by bringing up the difficulty of proving intent. Did Trump genuinely believe he won the election? In that case it is harder to prove fraud. But Trump has been caught on camera on more than one occasion admitting that he lost. Imagine what he told Mark Meadows and others around him. I suspect it would be possible to show that Trump knew very well that he lost and that it wasn’t because the election was rigged. Even the way he demanded that Secretary of State for Georgia Brad Raffensperger find him enough votes to swing the state to himself and away from Biden shows criminal intent. He didn’t say, “The votes were there but the Democrats hid them, so go ferret them out.” He gave the number of ballots he wanted discovered– one more than Biden had.

So I think the intent to fraud is clear.

As for obstruction of an official proceeding, his beliefs would be irrelevant. If somebody tried to stop a vote in Congress because he believed the representatives were Martians who had taken over the congressmen’s bodies (and who could blame him for thinking that in some instances?), no judge would take these convictions into account when sentencing him.

Finally, the Jan. 6 committee has made clear that the Oath Keepers were in direct contact with someone in the White House. Very likely, that staffer was an intermediary with Trump. It could yet come out that Trump ordered the insurrection. Once the staffer is identified, we may come to know exactly what the president knew and when he knew it.

Many figures on the new right sold their already discounted souls to Vladimir Putin over the last decade. Now, after the invasion of Ukraine revealed Putin’s true political colors to almost everyone who’d previously been in denial, it has been grimly amusing to watch these right-wing opportunists try to explain away all the fawning quotes and damning pictures.

Some of the greatest offenders—Marine Le Pen in France, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the UK’s Nigel Farage—have spent the last three weeks trying to reinvent themselves as staunch defenders of Ukraine. A select few have doubled down on their idiocy, chief among them Thierry Baudet in the Netherlands and Tucker Carlson from the land of Fox News. White nationalists aside, Putin’s once formidable alliance of global sympathizers has been hemorrhaging support by the day.

Putin’s overreach in Ukraine may ultimately prove his political demise. But has the alt-right, in losing a massive political gamble, also earned a return ticket to the fringes from whence it came?

The Far Right’s Dilemma

Moscow used to be the Mecca of the far right. Any figure with hopes of making a name in right-wing politics was once desperate to shake hands with Vladimir Putin, snag a photo, and establish some kind of tie with Putin’s political party, United Russia.

Matteo Salvini, for instance, used anti-immigration sentiment to transform Lega from a splinter group of northern separatists to a far-right force in Italian politics. In 2017, Salvini traveled to Moscow to sign a cooperation agreement with United Russia, which included a pledge to work on removing sanctions against Russia for its seizure of Crimea and actions in the Donbas. Putin’s plan at the time: funnel oil money into Lega to amplify its voice as a Russian mouthpiece.

Today, Lega has fallen from its top position in the polls last April to third place. The neo-fascist Brothers of Italy is still number two, behind the social democrats, so the far right is still strong in Italian politics. But Salvini’s pro-Russian tilt may well spell the end of his political career.

Another casualty might be Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. Elections are coming up on April 3, and the opposition is hot on Orbán’s heels. Quite a few members of Fidesz, Orbán’s party, have had a hard time pivoting from their knee-jerk pro-Putin positions. Supporters of opposition leader Peter Marki-Zay have gotten traction with their posters that urge voters to choose between “Putin or Europe.” Anti-Russian sentiment, which Orbán used to fuel his own rise to prominence in the late 1980s, may prove in the end to be his undoing.

If Orbán falls, it will be a major defeat for the alt-right, which flocked to Budapest to pay homage to Putin’s water-carrier in the European Union. Tucker Carlson broadcast a full week of his show from Hungary last summer with one episode on Orbán’s anti-immigration policies entitled “Why Can’t We Have This in America?” Later this month, the Conservative Political Action Committee is scheduled to descend on Budapest to give a Orbán a final, pre-election boost, but it might be too late.

India’s Narendra Modi threw his fortunes in with Putin in part because of their shared distaste for liberalism—Modi also befriended Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro— but also because of India’s longstanding military and economic ties to Russia. The invasion of Ukraine has forced Modi to choose between his Russian ally and pretty much the rest of the world. So far, Modi has held off on sanctions and criticism of the invasion. But like China, India will come under increasing pressure to fall in line with the economic pressure on Putin or face an ostracism of its own.

Brazilian elections aren’t until October, and Lula continues to poll well ahead of Bolsonaro. The war in Ukraine won’t help Brazil’s strong-arm president. While virtually all other world leaders were distancing themselves from Putin in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine, Bolsonaro traveled to Moscow in a very public display of support. Since the invasion, he has declared Brazil’s “neutrality.” Being tarred as Putin’s “man” in Latin America may not do as much damage to the Brazilian far right, however, as the economic fallout from the war, which will hit the country hard and make it very difficult for Bolsonaro to catch up in the polls.

In the United States, meanwhile, the far right faces a dilemma. White nationalists still support Putin. Witness Nick Fuentes, the head of the America First Political Action Committee. At AFPAC’s recent gathering, held just days after the invasion, Fuentes appealed to his audience: “Can we get a round of applause for Russia?” The crowd chanted back: “Putin, Putin.” Then there’s Tucker Carlson, who hasn’t stopped shilling for Putin after the invasion, which has earned him much love from Russian state television. The far right that has nested in the Republican Party has condemned the invasion, more or less, but has been decidedly lukewarm about providing aid to Ukraine.

There are of course some Putin sympathizers on the left, but they are both ignorant and ignorable. In the United States, only Tulsi Gabbard has any political following, and it’s miniscule. Given the number of her appearances on Tucker Carlson’s show and her recent participation in CPAC, I wouldn’t be surprised if she switches parties.

What About Neo-Nazi Support for Ukraine?

Some neo-Nazis are heading to Ukraine to join their brothers-in-arms in far-right military units. As Rita Katz writes in The Washington Post:

Their goal is not to defend Ukraine as we know it — a multiethnic, democratically minded society led by a Jewish president. Some neo-Nazis simply see this new war as a place to act out their violent fantasies. For others, though, the force pulling them toward the conflict is a shared vision for an ultranationalist ethno-state. They see Ukraine as a golden opportunity to pursue this goal and turn it into a model to export across the world.

But let’s not exaggerate their influence. The vast majority of those volunteering to fight in Ukraine have no ties to the extreme right.

Nevertheless, there has been speculation that the war in Ukraine will be a boon for the European far right, which will acquire combat experience fighting Russian troops.

“With a steady flow of military assistance from NATO nations, Ukraine will soon become awash in weapons and ammunition. Given the presence of Ukraine’s far-right military regiment the Azov Battalion and its foreign supporters, these Western-supplied arms could easily land in the hands of violent white supremacists and far-right insurgents,” writes Benjamin Young in World Politics Review. “In a bitter irony, Putin’s war of ‘denazification’ in Ukraine may actually produce a more emboldened and insurrectionist global far right movement.”

It’s true that the far-right Azov Battalion acquired considerable political capital from its initial participation in the fight in the Donbas. But that political influence faded to such an extent that far-right political parties no longer have representation in the Ukrainian parliament.

So, yes, the far right will inevitably seek to exploit the current conflict. But residual affections for Putin and the limited appeal of far-right sentiment in Ukraine will hamper this effort to take over the country.

A Double Death?

Putinism is dead outside of Russia.

His ideological assault on democracy, which is the core of his worldview, is revealed as morally bankrupt every time a photo of a bombed apartment building in Kyiv appears on the news or civilian casualties from a destroyed hospital somewhere in Ukraine are tabulated.

Putin could once claim to “own” the leaders of the United States, India, Hungary, Brazil, and Austria. He is now a political liability to virtually everyone outside of Syria, Belarus, and Nicaragua. He has forfeited the title of spiritual head of the Euroskeptical movement. He can no longer count on support from illiberal leaders in Eastern Europe. His effort to establish a beachhead in the United States ended when Trump left office.

Without Putin, the alt-right lacks an international leader. Subtract Trump from America, Orbán from Hungary, Salvini from Italy, and Bolsonaro from Brazil, and Steve Bannon’s Nationalist International looks about as robust as Bannon’s own reputation.

The alt-right’s demise does not, however, mean that democracy will thrive in its wake. The Ukrainian debacle is a sad commentary on the fragility of international law and international institutions as well as the long odds that democracies face against determined and ruthless authoritarians. The hypocrisies of the West—around NATO expansion, immigration, economic inequality, and climate change—certainly don’t help.

But maybe, just maybe, if Ukraine can survive this conflict with its political structures reasonably intact, it will inspire people everywhere to fight for democratic principles. From the Euromaidan protests on, Ukrainians have wanted democracy in their own country and an opportunity to join with other European democracies. An possible compromise—a neutral Ukraine on its way toward EU membership—would preserve its democracy from both Putin’s real, existing militarism and NATO’s encroaching militarism.

Putin’s primary target has been the democratic will of a sovereign people. The alt-right, with its racist authoritarianism, has a similar aim to undermine democracy. Let’s hope that Ukrainian resistance drives a stake through the heart of both Putinism and the alt-right once and for all.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

With the US public now angry at Putin over his military aggression and President Biden getting a bump in the polls for his leadership on this issue, some Establishment Republicans appear to fear a backlash if the party goes on being perceived as pro-Putin or soft on Putin.

Some ambitious Republicans may even see an opportunity to dethrone the leader of the party, Donald Trump, over his dalliances with Putin. Mike Pence told party donors in New Orleans Friday night that there is no room in the Republican Party for apologists for Putin. This was seen as a swipe at Trump, and a shot across the former president’s bow regarding the 2024 Republican primaries.

Pence has a lot of convincing to do within his party. Andrew Romano reported that a Yahoo News/ You.gov poll a few weeks ago found that 62% of Republicans believed that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is a “stronger” leader than Joe Biden. Only 4% of Republicans said that Biden is stronger. Some 72% of regular watchers of Fox Cable News among these Republicans say Putin is stronger.

Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, is in the mold of the Russian oligarchs, plumping for Putin with ill-gotten billions, and keeping Putin toadies like Tucker Carlson on the air. Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi notes that Carlson’s addlepated defense of Putin was, ““Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? … Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions – and the answer to all of them is no.” No pate on a major network is more addled.

Romano notes that Trump actually campaigned on Putinism in the fall of 2016, saying that “Putin has been a leader far more than our president,” referring to Barack Obama. He points out that in a Politico poll of last summer, Republicans gave Putin a higher favorability rating over Biden by as much as 22%.

Veteran security affairs correspondent James Risen pointed out that the author and Trump-annointed senatorial candidate for the GOP in Ohio, J.D. Vance said, “I think it’s ridiculous that we are focused on this border in Ukraine.” He later called the situation “tragic,” which is a way of avoiding assigning any blame for it.

The roster of Putinists in the party is long. Now-retired 3-term California GOP congressman Dana Rohrabacher was so deep in Moscow’s back pocket that he was viewed as a security threat by the FBI and GOP leader Kevin McCarthy once said, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump. Swear to God.”

Illinois Trumpist congresswoman Rep. Mary Miller has declined to condemn Putin for his Ukraine invasion.

As for the common Republican fingering of Putin as the Great White Hope, it is of course misguided. Putin claims to have started wearing a crucifix his mother gave him in the 1990s, hinting at a conversion from Soviet atheism to Eastern Orthodoxy. I’m not sure KGB field officers really have religious convictions, however. He certainly has been willing politically to weaponize Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Ukrainian church’s 2018 secession from the Moscow branch of the religion seems to have stuck in his craw. But 14 percent of Russians are atheists, 26% say they have no religion (they may believe vaguely in God), and 7% are Muslim. So while a slight majority identifies at least somewhat with Eastern Orthodoxy, it isn’t an overwhelmingly Christian nation.

It was the moment that could have brought US democracy to its knees. One year ago, around noon on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump gave the concluding speech to a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington DC. Within an hour, protesters attacked and then breached barricades around the Capitol Building, seat of the US Congress. By 1.30pm, they had invaded the building itself. And by the time they left, five people had died.

To what extent were the two events related? Did Trump’s words incite his followers to assault the Capitol? Or did the rioters act independently and of their own accord? These were the questions on which Trump’s second impeachment trial turned.

More specifically, the debate centred on whether Trump’s words contained clear instructions that guided what happened next, with special attention given to a specific sentence in the speech:

If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

For the prosecution, this was the smoking gun. For the defence, the word “fight” was a mere metaphor, akin to “fighting for one’s principles”. To quote from the opening statement of Trump’s lawyer, Michael van der Veen:

This is ordinary political rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from the language that has been used across the political spectrum for hundreds of years.

In the end, interpretation split clearly along party lines. In the Senate, 48 Democrats voted for impeachment, none against, while 43 Republicans voted against impeachment and seven for. The total in favour failed to reach the two-thirds threshold, so Trump was acquitted as not guilty.

But whatever one thinks of the outcome of the debate, the greater problem lies in the terms of the debate that contained two flawed assumptions.

Leaders and followers

The first flawed assumption is that influence can be reduced to instructions. This means that the focus on specific sentences obscures the way Trump’s speech as a whole was structured to impel extreme antagonism and action.

The other is the view of the leader-follower relationship which implies that leaders either manipulate their followers like puppets (as the prosecution alleged) or else followers act entirely independently of leaders (as the defence responded).

Over the past year, we and our colleagues have addressed both assumptions, drawing on our previous work on leadership in general and Trump’s leadership in particular. We argue that Trump is a consummate “identity leader”, who sets up an opposition between “the American people” and a corrupt “establishment” and then construes himself as a representative of the former against the latter.

That is why his political gaffes, his crudity, even his misogyny strengthen rather than weaken him – by establishing him as the rough and ready everyman in contrast to the conventional establishment figure. He is a prototypical anti-political politician, speaking as and for “us” against “them”.

In his Washington speech, Trump extended and moralised this narrative in a way that created the core conditions for intergroup hatred. And this involved four key elements.

1) A powerful restatement of the populist “people v establishment” categories.

2) A moralisation of these categories. The people become American patriots characterised by love and loyalty to one another and their country. The establishment becomes a traitor, willing to stoop to any depths to defraud true Americans.

3) The spectre of destruction. The establishment is not just an outgroup to American patriots; they are a threat to American values, institutions and symbols. And they are not just any old threat; they are an existential threat to the very existence of America. That (rather than any specific instruction) is the true message of and motivator behind Trump’s warning that “you’re not going to have a country anymore”.

4) Trump makes standing up to “the steal” a criterion of group membership for “American patriots”. Those who accept the election result or even waver are “weak” and “pathetic”. Even if they are not quite traitors, they certainly lack the qualities of true Americans.

In combination, these four elements invoke a reality in which inaction would enable the triumph of evil over good and in which the preservation of good requires “stopping the steal”. Strong and immediate action becomes an existential necessity and a moral obligation.

But what action? Here, the very absence of a fifth element (explicit instruction), which has occupied so much attention to date, arguably strengthens rather than weakens Trump’s impact.

By setting out a general obligation without determining exactly how it should be achieved, Trump arguably induced his followers to compete among themselves to go furthest, best prove their loyalty, and most dramatically burnish their patriotic credentials in meeting the goal. Such a strategy engenders a cycle of radicalisation – with the added advantage of providing deniability if people go too far.

The historian Ian Kershaw provides a similar analysis of Hitler’s responsibility for the holocaust. Indeed, the fact that there was no written order for it from Hitler was characteristic of the Fuhrer’s general tendency to define general destinations rather than specific pathways. It induced what Kershaw called “working towards Hitler” and what here we can call “working towards Trump” – albeit in relation to very different destinations, for however toxic Trump might be, it would be invidious and inaccurate to link the assault on the Capitol with the Holocaust.

Leaders and followers

The debate around the Capitol assault has also misconstrued the relationship between leaders and followers. This is not a zero-sum game. It isn’t a matter of either followers having agency and leaders being irrelevant or leaders having agency and followers being mere ciphers. It is a matter of dual agency.

In fact, the invocation to “stop the steal” was well-established before Trump’s speech – in December 2020 alone, messages including this term received over 40 million engagements on social media – and some began to breach the Capitol barriers even as Trump was speaking.

But Trump legitimised the protestors’ actions, gave them a sense of unity and empowerment and provided them with a sense that they were only doing what their community and its leader wanted of them. In the words of one of them: “Our President wants us here.”

But just as Trump empowered and emboldened the crowd to act, so they emboldened him. Many, including key insiders, have written of the central place that rallies played in Trump’s progress and of how the size and enthusiasm of these crowds were used as a measure of his political power.

Journalist and author Michael Wolff makes a similar point about the events of January 6, arguing the crowd’s enthusiasm pushed Trump further than he might otherwise have gone – “not … that he would incite the crowd but the crowd would incite him”. Most concretely, it may have led Trump to add in the infamous remark: “After this, we’re going to walk down – and I’ll be there with you”, which was not in the scripted text.

Ultimately, what happened on January 6 was a genuine co-production between Trump and the crowd.

Consequently, to reduce the Capitol assault to a question of whether Trump did or didn’t “incite” or “instruct” the crowd is far too simplistic. It limits our understanding of the events that happened a year ago. It limits our understanding of Trumpism more generally and of the critical role of mass events in developing the movement. It also limits our understanding of leadership and of collective dynamics. Last, but not least, it suggests that we have been looking in the wrong place to understand Trump’s responsibility for the assault on American democracy.

Stephen Reicher, Bishop Wardlaw Professor in the School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St Andrews; Alex Haslam, Professor of Psychology and ARC Laureate Fellow, The University of Queensland; Evangelos Ntontis, Lecturer in Psychology, The Open University, and Klara Jurstakova, PhD Candidate, Canterbury Christ Church University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – This critical moment takes place before a civil war breaks out or an official ceremony of dissolution is held. At some point, the citizens of the country stop thinking of themselves as members of a common association. At some point, the mystic chords of memory transmogrify into mutual disgust and incomprehension.

At that moment, the us is over.

For Yugoslavia, that moment came sometime in the late 1980s when the ubiquitous phrase “brotherhood and unity”—bratstvo i jedinstvo—no longer held sway among the majority. Nationalist populists were coming to the fore in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and other republics. Economic gaps between those republics were growing untenable. Cultural practices increasingly diverged, and buried resentments resurfaced.

Actual civil war would come later, in 1991. But before Yugoslavia ceased to exist on paper, before it was extinguished on the battlefield, it disappeared from people’s hearts.

Here in the United States, we’ve not yet reached another Fort Sumter moment. But perhaps we’re at the Harpers Ferry stage with the January 6 insurrection serving the same function as John Brown’s thwarted raid on a federal arsenal in 1859.

Brown’s raid came 18 months before the start of the Civil War. We are now observing the one-year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection.

Is there no longer an us in the U.S.?

Deep Divisions

This country is no stranger to deep divisions, which culminated in the Civil War and have persisted ever since: North-South, urban-rural, Black-white, rich-poor, coasts versus heartland, liberal against conservative. In the 2000s, these divisions crystallized into Red vs. Blue, which was more than just predominantly Republican states squaring off against largely Democratic ones. Political polarization was coming to resemble nothing less than the Blue vs. Grey standoff that tore the country apart 150 years earlier. Barack Obama’s appeal to a Purple America seems impossibly quaint in light of what has happened since.

Indeed, what had once been a matter of partisan competition has become something a great deal more serious. It is no longer simply a question of disagreements over what proportion of the federal budget should go into which pot or who should be empowered to make those decisions. It isn’t a matter of governing ideology or judicial philosophy.

The current debate is not actually a debate. The two sides don’t even share a common political language or understanding of recent events.

The defeat of Donald Trump in 2020 was supposed to put an end to America’s official foray into delusional politics at the national level. The quashing of the January 6 insurrection—and the brief, near-unanimous revulsion among members of Trump’s party for that violence—provided some hope that the fever dream of an illiberal takeover had passed.

The last year has demonstrated quite the opposite. Trumpism, which started out as a simple-minded rejection of the liberal status quo, has become something else: a thorough rejection of democratic procedures and a darkly conspiratorial hatred of federal power. This corrosive ideology is now orthodoxy within the Republican Party, and that party remains popular enough—and ruthless enough—to win back control of Congress this year and, potentially, the White House in 2024.

Those who adhere to Trumpism have recast the insurrectionists as heroes—“patriots who love their country,” in the words of Virginia State Senator Amanda Chase—and are determined to block all efforts to determine who was ultimately responsible for what happened that day.

Consider the recent congressional debate over the investigation into the events of January 6 and whether Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows should be charged with criminal contempt for refusing to showing up to testify. Once a member of Congress, Meadows is now flouting the institution’s authority.

But that act of disrespect pales in comparison with the support Meadows’ refusal has generated among congressional members of Trump’s party. When the issue came up for congressional debate, Trump’s lapdogs talked about immigration, Hunter Biden, mask mandates, in short everything but Meadows’ contempt of Congress.

“When the Republican members did address the matter at hand,” Amy Davidson Sorkin writes in The New Yorker, “it was in startlingly vitriolic terms.”

Representative Mary Miller, of Illinois, said that the committee’s work is “evil and un-­American.” Yvette Herrell, of New Mexico, said that it is setting the country “on its way to tyranny.” Jordan called the committee an expression of the Democrats’ “lust for power.” And, inevitably, Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, said that its proceedings prove that “communists” are in charge of the House. It’s tempting to dismiss such rhetoric as overblown, but Congress has become an ever more uneasy place. Last week, Steny Hoyer, the House Majority Leader, sent the Capitol Police Board a letter asking for clarification on the rules about where representatives can carry weapons in the Capitol.

Evil, tyranny, lust for power, communists: that’s just the kind of language that prompted a pro-Trump rally on January 6 to become a mob intent on upending an election and re-installing a president determined to rule until the end of days. Nor is the rhetoric marginal within the Republican Party. In the vote on the House floor to charge Meadows, only two Republicans supported the measure: Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who will be retiring after this session, and Liz Cheney, who has practically been drummed out of the party for her stand against Trump.

Republican lawmakers take these positions because they can safely count on the support of their constituents (those that haven’t fled the party already because of Trump). According to recent polling, nearly 70 percent of Trump voters think that Biden was not legitimately elected president in 2020. Worse, 40 percent of Republicans believe that violence against the government can be justified. It’s no surprise that, in 2021, DC authorities recorded nearly 10,000 threats made against members of Congress and the Capitol itself, the highest number to date.

It’s no longer a war between Democrats and Republicans, one Republican voter told The Washington Post: “It’s a war between good and evil.”

Outright Defiance

A war of this nature requires a very clear drawing of lines. That has taken place in Congress, with the Republicans united in their opposition to anything Biden proposes. The divisions are even starker at the state level where the defiance of the administration goes well beyond the procedural.

The most egregious example of state pushback has been around the Biden administration’s attempts to boost vaccination rates against COVID-19. Republican-led states have banned vaccine mandates in defiance of Washington. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt even went so far as to fire the four-star commander of his state’s National Guard who supported the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate and replace him with a one-star lackey who shares the governor’s spirit of resistance.

By mid-December, 19 states had pushed through 34 laws restricting access to voting, setting up a confrontation with a federal establishment committed to ensuring free and fair elections.

Texas has led the way in criminalizing abortion, passing a bill that deputizes individuals to enforce the law by filing civil suits against abortion providers. More than 20 states have prepared legislation to ban abortion as soon as the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, which the Trump-packed Court seems increasingly likely to do next summer.

The residents of Florida and Massachusetts speak the same language, use the same currency, and salute the same flag. On practically everything else, from gun control and environmental standards to immigration and schooling, they could already be living in different countries.

Let’s be clear: the refusal to accept federal authority doesn’t come only from one side. During the Trump years, California rejected a number of federal policies, most notably on environmental issues. Liberal constituencies also defied Trump’s deportation orders, efforts to undermine Obamacare, and attempts to reopen the economy even as the pandemic continued to rage. At that time, plenty of liberals—myself included—agreed that a hitherto political confrontation had become a stark stand-off between good and evil.

It’s hard to imagine any presidential candidate taking office in 2024 and healing this rift. As long as the two parties continue to aspire to take control of the federal bureaucracy—and, more to the point, federal resources—one side won’t kick over the game board and walk away from the match. The problem arises when a major party, like the Republicans, develops such a disgust for federal authority that it decides not to play the game any longer.

Too Little, Too Late

In 1990, the Yugoslav government legalized opposition parties. It authorized democratic elections at the republic level. New efforts were underway to liberalize the federal government. Here was an opportunity to reinvent the country, to infuse bratstvo i jedinstvo with a new participatory energy. Membership in the European Union beckoned, as long as the country could get its act together. Previous Yugoslav governments kept the country from spinning apart through sheer force. In this hypothetical democratic future, the citizens would voluntarily cleave together.

Instead, the citizens voted to cleave apart. Those democratic elections at the republic level produced governments in Croatia and Slovenia committed to seceding from the country. Democracy ended up being a brief prelude to civil war and the end of Yugoslavia. Some of the successor states would join the EU, while others are still waiting in line 30 years later.

You can blame the short-sighted decision to hold democratic elections at a republic level before the federal level. Or you could argue that Yugoslavia fell victim to much larger forces that were irresistibly centrifugal.

The current polarization of political attitudes in the United States can also be seen as a reflection of much deeper demographic and cultural shifts in this country. Whites are increasingly anxious about their loss of dominant status as the white population dropped for the first time ever in the 2020 census. Religious conservatives decry creeping secularization as church membership dropped below 50 percent in 2020 for the first time ever. Poverty remains endemic in rural America, with extreme poverty counties existing only in the countryside, while Blue states have only gotten wealthier over the years.

The Democratic strategy has been to try resolve this last issue of economic inequality through targeted stimulus spending. The party is also fighting to promote voter access in the hopes that greater turnout boosts its electoral chances. If the Democrats can appeal to enough voters on economic grounds, they can win just enough elections before demographic and cultural changes shift the ground permanently in their favor. This is the promised land, the equivalent of EU membership for Yugoslavia: a liberal future for the United States with a strong social safety net.

But that’s what Republicans want to stop at all costs. That’s what makes the next few years so critical for the United States. Yugoslav liberals thought that their reforms would keep the country together, that the promise of a European future would be sufficient for Yugoslav voters to keep thinking of themselves as Yugoslavs. Instead, these voters opted for independence, greater polarization, and war. Yugoslavia had already died in their hearts.

The same can be said about all those who broke into the Capitol on January 6, who have threatened lawmakers over the last year, and who embrace the multiple “big lies” of Trumpism. Of course, they think of themselves as Americans. They even say that they love America.

Energized by all their MAGA mania, however, they may end up hugging America to death.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

An attendee at an October 2021 political rally hosted by right-wing activist Charlie Kirk asked: “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”

The attendee was referring to the baseless allegation that Joe Biden stole the 2020 U.S. presidential election and that he unfairly denied Donald Trump reelection.

Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA, condemned the question. But one year after the Capitol insurrection that was fueled by Trump’s claims of a rigged election, Kirk, other commentators and politicians – and, of course, Trump himself – continue to fuel false beliefs of widespread election fraud. Embrace of the “Big Lie” that Trump really won the election has become an article of faith for many Republican politicians. It is also widely believed by conservative Americans; in an October, 2021 poll, 60% of Republicans said the 2020 presidential election results should definitely or probably be overturned.

This creates a potentially dangerous situation for the United States. Acceptance of electoral defeat, something political scientists call “loser’s consent,” is essential for stability and order in democracies.

‘Sore losers’ can drive terrorism

Democracy is based on a compact: Election losers agree to accept the results and encourage their supporters to do the same.

In exchange, losing politicians get a chance to run, and win, in a future election.

However, loser’s consent is fragile. And when it is broken the risk of political violence increases. In a recent study I published, I conclude that when election losers in democracies reject election results, becoming “sore losers,” trust in political institutions is eroded, political polarization and tribalism grows and mistrust thrives.

This produces a situation where political violence is no longer seen as taboo, particularly among supporters of the losing political party. My research shows that when losing politicians in democracies refuse to accept election results, citizens begin to see terrorism as more acceptable and domestic terrorism increases.

Here in the U.S., outrage over the Big Lie helped fuel the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It has also driven domestic terrorism plots.

For example, federal authorities announced charges in July against two men who planned to bomb the California Democratic Party headquarters. The two men were radicalized by the Big Lie and expressed hope on social media that the attack would “start a movement that could keep former President Donald J. Trump in office.”

Understanding the data

In my study I examined domestic terrorist attack data in over 100 democracies from 1970 to 2018. I also looked at public opinion on whether people view the use of terrorism as justifiable in 30 democratic countries from 2017 to 2020. I based my definition of domestic terrorism on the one used by the Global Terrorism Database. Finally, I used data to measure whether politicians who lost recent national elections in democracies refused to accept the results. I limited my analysis to democracies that were free from electoral irregularities.

I also accounted for other factors that might make domestic terrorism more common or acceptable in my analyses. These include the country’s economic state, ethnic diversity and political violence history, as well as the government’s strength and stability.

For public opinion on terrorism, I weighed the effects of factors such as the age, gender, income, education level, political ideology and religious and ethnic identity of the survey respondent and the amount of terrorism in the country over the previous three years.

When contested results lead to violence

Here is what I found.

First, when losing political parties in democracies reject election results, domestic terrorism increases and gets more intense. By how much depends on how many, and what types of, political parties were sore losers.

Countries where all political parties, including the losers, accepted the election results experienced only one domestic attack about every two years. However, countries where one of the main political parties lost the election but refused to accept the official results – the situation most like what the U.S. currently faces – subsequently experienced around five domestic terrorist attacks per year. Finally, countries where all losing political parties rejected the election results subsequently experienced more than 10 domestic terrorist attacks per year.

Second, the sore-loser effect also boosts acceptance of terrorism. Only around 9% of citizens of democracies where all losing parties accepted election results regard terrorism as justifiable behavior. This percentage increased to around 27% in democracies where the main, losing opposition party or parties rejected the election – the category most approximating the United States after the 2020 election. Finally, around a third of citizens in democracies where all losing parties rejected election results also tolerated terrorism as a tactic.

These results show that when politicians refuse to accept a free and fair democratic election’s outcome, and instead choose to promote a popular narrative of a stolen or dirty election, they place their people in physical danger. Popular tolerance for terrorism grows, and so does terrorist activity itself.

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James Piazza, Liberal Arts Professor of Political Science, Penn State

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Featured photo h/t Wikimedia Tap the Forward Assist via Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Americans had to confront a new reality when an angry mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: Some of their fellow citizens were in the grips of a false reality and had resorted to violence to support it.

Conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and the strange alternate universe of QAnon helped drive the attack, which has prompted concerns about further domestic upheaval.

In the year since, a flurry of studies and analyses have tried to gauge the American appetite for conspiracy theories and the likelihood of more violence – even civil war. As someone who has studied the conspiracy theories that followed the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I keep revisiting a May 2013 poll about gun control that found widespread doubts about that shooting and shockingly high support for armed rebellion.

Jan. 6 committee reveals new details on Capitol attack l GMA

Almost eight years before the Capitol was attacked by partisans bent on reversing the results of an election, nearly one-third of Americans surveyed – and a whopping 44% of Republicans – said in a 2013 PublicMind poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University that armed rebellion might soon be necessary in the U.S. to protect liberties.

The finding was so disconcerting that the poll was dismissed by some prominent political observers as too unbelievable to be true.

Motivated reasoning

I recently interviewed the political psychologist who designed the poll, as well as a journalist who blasted its conclusions and now writes about the fallout from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Daniel Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University and director of the FDU poll, said the 2013 survey sought to gauge the impact of motivated reasoning around gun policy. Motivated reasoning is the emotional bias that can influence judgment or cause someone to dismiss facts that don’t align with their beliefs.

“If reality doesn’t fit what you want it to be, you have to change what you believe – or you have to change reality,” Cassino explained.

That’s where conspiracy theories come in. If you oppose firearm restrictions, then the slaughter of 20 first graders and six adults at an elementary school with an AR-15 is a real problem for you. Cassino explained: “It’s easier for people who believe strongly in gun rights to say it didn’t happen rather than change their minds” about guns.

One in four people surveyed in the 2013 poll said they believed the truth about the school shooting was being hidden to support a political agenda. Many others were unsure. People who opposed new gun control measures were more likely to have doubts about the shooting.

Cassino said the question about armed rebellion explored a belief that is normally attributed only to members of militias and extremist groups. The finding didn’t necessarily indicate that regular people would pick up arms, but it did show this notion was becoming part of the Republican partisan identity, Cassino said.

“That is scary because once something becomes part of that belief structure, it becomes self-fulfilling,” he said. The notion of a possible armed rebellion has since spread through the Republican Party and has been espoused by party leaders and elected officials.

“The actual armed insurrection that happened in January [2021] showed us this is a real strain in American politics that has gotten stronger and is not going away,” Cassino said.

Motivated coverage

When the poll came out, some commentators used it to ridicule Republicans. Comedian Bill Maher, for example, tweeted about the study: “So … 44% of Rep.s think an ARMED REBELLION might be necessary in the next few years. So if u say most Rep.s r f–king nuts u’d be off by 7%.”

Others dismissed the findings entirely. The Atlantic slammed the “doozy” of a poll as “highly questionable.”

“The poll is at-best semi-scientific and should probably not be taken seriously,” Philip Bump wrote. “It certainly should not be written about by other media outlets.”

Today, Bump is a national correspondent at the Washington Post who specializes in the numbers behind politics and has written about the Jan. 6 insurrection.

In a recent phone call, he told me he thinks his reaction to the 2013 poll was “over the top.” He still thinks Cassino’s numbers seem high compared to some recent findings, but Bump said he would not dismiss the poll today like he did back then.

“It obviously takes on a much different light given the last eight years,” he told me.

A second Civil War

After the 2013 poll, Cassino said he was inundated with phone calls from people accusing him of being part of a conspiracy to take away guns. Many of the calls were made to his home number and were threatening. The calls, along with the negative media coverage, dissuaded him from asking about armed rebellion in future polls, he told me. Now, he wishes he had collected that data.

Just after the 2021 insurrection, a Zogby Poll found nearly half of Americans – 46% – thought another civil war was likely. The American Enterprise Institute found that 4 in 10 Republicans thought political violence may be necessary. A more recent survey published in November 2021 by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute found that nearly one-third of Republicans – 30% – agreed with the statement “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

Even the pragmatic folks at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution recently cautioned that the possibility of a second civil war should not be dismissed: “We should not assume it could not happen and ignore the ominous signs that conflict is spiraling out of control,” Brookings fellows William G. Gale and Darrell M. West warned.

Opposition to vaccines in the face of a global pandemic and obstinate belief in Trump’s debunked claims about the 2020 presidential election have shown journalists and the public just how much strongly held beliefs can shape the perception of reality, Cassino said.

“People’s beliefs about reality are infinitely malleable,” he said. “I wish it wasn’t the case, because it is really bad for society. I wish I had been wrong.”

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Amanda J. Crawford, Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of Connecticut

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.