Introduction
“The Republican Party is an authoritarian outlier,” wrote Vox’s Zach Beauchamp in September 2020. Beauchamp was writing in the context of the rush to confirm Federalist Society darling Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court justice following the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite several Republicans having refused to consider a nominee to the court “in an election year” during the Obama administration. Citing experts on comparative politics including Harvard’s Steven Zilitsky, who with Daniel Ziblatt authored New York Times bestselling How Democracies Die, Beauchamp writes that the GOP should no longer be considered in the same category with traditional conservative political parties such as Canada’s Conservative Party (CPC) or Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU), but rather as an extremist party like Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, or Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey, which “actively worked to dismantle democracy in their own countries.”
In this series of articles we’ll trace the evolution of today’s white nationalist authoritarian Republican party from its origins in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, through the party’s nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and his “Southern Strategy” appealing to racial fears of southern white voters, to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” to the Tea Party, and Donald Trump. In conclusion we’ll look at predictions by Zilitsky and Ziblatt and others, and their prognoses for the Republican Party and American democracy.