Washington Post
By Ishaan Tharoor
August 28, 2015
Inside
a recent New Yorker article on Donald Trump and the politics behind his
rise, there's a curious nugget worth contemplating. (To be sure, the
entire lengthy story
is worth the read.)
The
article's author, Evan Osnos, watched the first Republican debate in
early August alongside Matthew Heimbach, a well-known young white
supremacist, and a group of
his friends. Heimbach, who claims Trump's barnstorming, nativist
rhetoric has brought disaffected white youth "out of their slumber," is
not just another basement-dwelling extremist. He's a regular on the
far-right radical lecture circuit and "has met with
European Fascists, including members of the Golden Dawn, in Greece,"
Osnos writes.
The
Golden Dawn is an influential political party in Greece, and came in
third in the country's last round of parliamentary elections, buoyed by
nationalist voters disenchanted
with Greece's dysfunctional status quo and angry about immigration.
Though
its members bristle at the characterization, the party is pretty much a
neo-Nazi organization (and has been deemed a "criminal gang" in an
ongoing court case).
The Golden Dawn has staged fascistic ceremonies that bring to mind
rallies of an earlier era; its members frequently perform Nazi salutes.
The group's logo itself appears to be a not-so-subtle nod to the Third
Reich's infamous insignia.
And
its rise has been watched with approval by giddy far-right extremists
in the United States, including, it seems, those who support Trump. Just
see this image, spotted
by WorldViews on an American neo-Nazi Web Site, beneath a post this
week deriding Osnos as "a super-Jew."
The
point, as Osnos stresses in his piece, is not that Trump himself is a
fascist or a neo-Nazi. But that his particular brand of politics -- what
conservative Post columnist
George Will, in a rather baleful lament, describes as a "volcanic
phenomenon" -- has excited a coterie of far-right Americans who have in
the past rejected the Republican cause.
"I’m
sure [Trump] would repudiate any association with people like me,"
Jared Taylor, an editor of a white-nationalist magazine, tells Osnos,
"but his support comes from
people who are more like me than he might like to admit."
That
sort of support -- from people like Taylor -- reflects populist
political trends that we're not all that accustomed to seeing in the
United States, at least in its
political mainstream. As Osnos observes, Trump is cresting a wave that
has already swept through Europe:
When
Trump leaped to the head of the Republican field, he delivered the
appearance of legitimacy to a moral vision once confined to the fevered
fringe, elevating fantasies
from the message boards and campgrounds to the center stage of American
life. In doing so, he pulled America into a current that is coursing
through other Western democracies—Britain, France, Spain, Greece,
Scandinavia—where xenophobic, nationalist parties
have emerged since the 2008 economic crisis to besiege middle-ground
politicians. In country after country, voters beset by inequality and
scarcity have reached past the sober promises of the center-left and the
center-right to the spectre of a transcendent
solution, no matter how cruel.
The
anger of two Bostonian siblings, who cited Trump as inspiration after
they beat up a homeless Latino man, or Trump's own invocation of the
"silent majority" -- a leitmotif
that some argue has clearly racial overtones -- would be familiar
expressions of xenophobic, far-right European populism. It would be
familiar to anybody who has watched the Golden Dawn.
"Trump
himself doesn’t hold a populist radical right ideology," writes Cas
Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, "but his
political campaign clearly
caters to populist radical right attitudes, and his supporter base is
almost identical to the core electorate of populist radical right
parties in (Western) Europe."
Mudde elaborates further over at the Monkey Cage blog on the similarities with movements across the pond:
First
studies show that Trump is particularly popular among young, lower
educated, white males. This is exactly the same group that constitutes
the core of the electorate
of populist radical right parties in Western Europe. The gender gap is
particularly striking. Just as European populist radical right parties
have a much larger gender gap than mainstream right-wing parties,
attracting roughly two men for every one woman,
Trump has the largest gender gap among the GOP candidates, particularly
among likely Republican primary voters. And while Trump has claimed
that he is the only Republican who can win the Hispanic vote, surveys
show that he is by far the least liked GOP candidate
among Hispanics.
How
this all plays out in the weeks and months ahead is anyone's guess. The
raucous spectacle of the Trumpian present has transfixed the media and
captured national attention.
But it's playing on a set of emotions and politics that -- if seen in a
larger context -- ought to make quite a few Americans uncomfortable.
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