Trump's legacy may be an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party
I hope that President Trump’s outrageous attempt to overturn the results of an election that he lost by 74 electoral college votes and more than 6 million popular votes will be the last gasp of a pathetic presidency in its dying days. But I fear that it might represent only a middle chapter in the Republican Party’s transformation, as a Swedish research institute has warned, into an authoritarian party similar to the Fidesz party in Hungary, the Law and Justice party in Poland, the Justice and Development Party in Turkey and the Bharatiya Janata Party in India.
The impetus for the GOP’s growing aversion to democracy is clear: It has lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections. That is a streak of futility unmatched in U.S. history. To maintain power — and avert the Venezuela-style apocalypse that many conservatives fear will result from Democratic dominance — the GOP must rely on institutions such as the electoral college and the Senate that give outsize weight to red states. That, in turn, has allowed Republicans to fill the federal courts with judges who will perpetuate their policy preferences for decades to come.
The problem is being exacerbated by the tendency of the U.S. population to cluster in a handful of large states that are either already blue (California, New York) or moving that way (Georgia, North Carolina). “By 2040,” as my colleague Philip Bump noted, “the 15 most populous states will be home to 67 percent of the U.S. population and represented by 30 percent of the Senate.”
The Republican Party could respond — and still may — by retooling its message to appeal to a more diverse electorate. But so far the GOP has instead moved in a more populist direction that leaves it increasingly incapable of governing (the past two Republican presidencies ended in economic meltdowns) or appealing to most voters outside its core constituency of Whites without college degrees. Even before Trump came along, Republicans had shown their willingness to use any means necessary to exercise power. Look at the bare-knuckle efforts in the 2000 election — from the “Brooks Brothers Riot” to a blatantly political Supreme Court decision — to stop the Florida recount and avert a possible Al Gore victory. Or look at the refusal by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky) to give a vote to President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016 on the grounds that it was an election year, while rushing through the confirmation of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee just days before the 2020 election.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/23/trumps-legacy-may-be-an-increasingly-authoritarian-republican-party/?utm_source=bootfriends&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=FriendsBoot2020Nov24
GOP leaders’ embrace of Trump’s refusal to concede fits pattern of rising authoritarianism, data shows
“The Republican Party in the U.S. has retreated from upholding democratic norms in recent years,” said Anna Lührmann, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and a former member of the German parliament. “Its rhetoric is closer to authoritarian parties, such as AKP in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary.”
Lührmann is deputy director of the university’s V-Dem Institute, which compiled the data. For the project, researchers recruited more than 600 political scientists around the world to make annual assessments of political parties’ adherence to a number of key small-D democratic values.
The Democratic Party, by contrast, hasn’t changed much. This is a prime example of what political scientists call asymmetric polarization — a growing partisan gap driven almost entirely by the actions of the Republican Party.
While V-Dem’s data only runs through 2018, that asymmetry has only become more apparent in the aftermath of this election, Lührmann said: “It is disturbing that most leading Republicans are still not objecting to President Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud and attempts to declare himself the winner.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/12/republican-party-trump-authoritarian-data/
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