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.

• Origins
• Hoover to Nixon
• Ford to Gingrich
• "W" to the Tea Party
• Trump and Beyond

To read the ABC News headline you'd think the nation was awash in vast protests decrying the stay-at-home orders implemented in many states. From a survey of protests over the weekend, however, Forbes found relatively few participants. For example, in Austin TX, a city of approximately one million people, only a few dozen showed up to protest. In Franklin, KY, Raleigh, NC, and Columbus, OH, about 100 protesters each appeared. And in New York City only about 30 protesters could be found. Protests such as that in Lansing, MI, which attracted several thousand cars and around 100 people on the state Capitol lawn, were apparently the exception....

In the aftermath of the violent Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, VA, Trump's noncommittal statement has come under criticism from across the political spectrum, with the exception, of course, of white supremacists. As noted on our home page, the Weekly Standard's Kelly Jane Torrance, appearing on Fox News, condemned Trump's refusal to identify white nationalists as the perpetrators of the Charlottesville violence, or label it domestic terrorism. Also on Fox News, former George W. Bush adviser, Karl Rove, derided Trump's statement as defensive and inadequate.

The neo-Nazi web site the Daily Stormer praised Trump's comments on Charlottesville. "No condemnation at all," the Stormer wrote.

Last week's news was dominated by Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, which Trump admitted to NBC News was related to what he called "this Russia thing with Trump." Pushed somewhat into the background, but with as much or greater potential to affect national politics was the executive order establishing the so-called "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity." Heading the commission with Vice President Mike Pence will be Kansas Secretary of State Kurt Kobach, who gained national attention for his hysterical allegations of widespread voter fraud, despite there having been only four documented cases in the entire 2016 election.

"I am the least racist person," Trump told CNN's Don Lemon on December 9, 2015. Two days earlier, Trump had proposed "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." In his campaign kickoff speech on June 16 of that year he had infamously characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. On February 28, 2016, in a television interview with CNN's Jake Tapper Trump declined repeated opportunities to distance himself from expressions of support from former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, later blaming a bad earpiece. It was also Tapper who interviewed Trump on June 3, 2016 when Trump declared that Indiana born judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was handling two Trump University lawsuits, was ruling unfairly because "He is a Mexican." (Trump eventually settled the fraud case for $25 million.)