The Republican Party in the U.S. has evolved into an American equivalent of Europe’s far-right neo-fascist political parties, displaying more in common with xenophobic European far-right parties such as, for example, Alternative For Germany” than with traditional “conservative” or merely “right-leaning” European or Canadian political parties, according to The Manifesto Project, a German initiative financed since 2009 by the German Science Foundation.
The project examines and compares the political platforms (or manifestos) espoused by each political party in a substantial, peer-vetted database, with the support of coders from 50 separate countries. Over 1,000 political parties from those countries are included in the database. The project continues the work of similar German groups dating back to the late 1970s.
Sahil Chinoy, a graphics editor at The New York Times, visually depicts where the Republican Party falls among political parties from Western Europe and Canada, based on platform topics from those parties taken from the database.
[The graphs] are one way to answer a difficult question: If we could put every political party on the same continuum from left to right, where would the American parties fall?
According to its 2016 manifesto, the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany — mainstream right-leaning parties — and closer to far-right parties like Alternative for Germany, whose platform contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.
In fact, the only significant difference between the U.S. Republican Party and the far-right neo-fascists is that the Republican platform does not directly and explicitly espouse bigotry as policy. Instead, it uses culturally coded dog whistles.
The Republican platform does not include the same bigoted policies, and its score is pushed to the right because of its emphasis on traditional morality and a “national way of life.” Still, the party shares a “nativist, working-class populism” with the European far right, said Thomas Greven, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin who has studied right-wing populism. These parties position themselves as defenders of the “traditional” people from globalization and immigration, he said.
The Republican platform does not directly embrace bigotry because it does not need to. A party that actively seeks to suppress the vote of racial minorities; actively works to weaken anti-discrimination laws; actively seeks to undercount minorities and noncitizens to determine congressional representation and how the country’s revenues are spent; and has enthusiastically embraced a leader whose policies invoke and stoke white grievance and racism does not need to be explicit about its leanings. Because there are only two major parties in this country, their followers and voters know fully well what they are voting for. Some may hold their noses and claim that they are voting for “fiscal responsibility” or some other “conservative” trope, but the reality is that they are voting for exclusion and racism.
The most striking aspect of these comparisons is that in Europe, such extremist parties are perceived as alternatives to the mainstream. In the United States, however, as Chinoy points out, “the Republican Party is the mainstream.”
“That’s the tragedy of the American two-party system,” Mr. Greven said. In a multiparty government, white working-class populists might have been shunted into a smaller faction, and the Republicans might have continued as a “big tent” conservative party. Instead, the Republican Party has allowed its more extreme elements to dominate. “Nowhere in Europe do you have that phenomenon,” he said.
The practical effect of having one party skewed so far to the right is that the Democratic Party occupies the center and near-center by default (Chinoy notes that this is also due in part to there being no comparable left-wing extremist party in the U.S.). But from a political standpoint, because the parties are nearly evenly divided in terms of numbers, a stark choice presents itself to American voters—as the project’s conclusions illustrate, in this country voters must pick either Republican neo-fascism or something that is not neo-fascism. There is no available middle ground, nor is there likely to be in the immediate future. Chinoy quotes professor Richard Bensel of Cornell University.
[T]here’s “something very strange happening in recent American politics”: Theory says that two-party systems generate “moderate, unprincipled parties,” but the Republicans and Democrats have grown more distinct.
“Democracy doesn’t work with that kind of polarization,” he said.
A fact of which all of us by now have become painfully aware.
