It’s Not Just Us

The world over, authoritarianism is on the rise as democracy takes it on the chin.

Initially, it defied description: An apparently disconnected synchronicity, this worldwide stampede to the right being led by authoritarians and national populists. I’ll show my work:

•An anti-immigrant, fringe right-wing political party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), once a laughing stock, gained ground when the Syrian civil war created a great diaspora of pain and immigrants;

•Marine Le Pen, a sanitized and toned down version of her racist, antisemitic father, is now the leader of his National Front party in France. Rechristened National Rally, it represents the growing far-right, populist movement there. It and she have only gained support in the face of mass immigration, the ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks of 2015, and the ongoing attacks on Jewish temples and businesses there.

•Rodrigo Duterte, the vigilante president in the Philippines who condones—even encourages—extra-judicial murders in the name of law and order (I know: irony lives in the weirdest places);

•In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, a conspiracy theory-loving, anti-vax social conservative who was fined R$150,000 for hate speech targeting gays and indigenous people, advocates political violence;

•Viktor Orban, the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, beloved by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, has been deadly to press freedom and the independent judiciary. He calls his brand of government, “illiberal democracy.”

•In China, a military adventurist who is building aggressive weapons of war, Xi Jingping has staked out the South China Sea, an international body of water, as his own, threatening neighbors from Vietnam to the Philippines. He is conniving to remain General Secretary of the Communist Party for life. Xi routinely threatens Taiwan and anyone who comes to her aid, including the U.S. He abrogated the agreement for Hong Kong to remain autonomous, and has imprisoned and enslaved much of the Uyghur ethnic minority;

•Of course there’s Vladimir Putin, the Russian president with dreams of restoring the Soviet empire. He’s already taken Crimea, and is a hair’s breadth away from taking Ukraine by force;

•He supports Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, who is currently antagonizing Poland and by extension, NATO, by flooding his eastern border with Middle East migrants;

•And finally, an American president without a policy portfolio whose thumb-in-your-eye defining characteristics are insults and defiance of whoever disagrees.

What they all have in common is the desire to control the press, the courts, and religion. Here at home, Qanon hero, indicted, pardoned, disgraced, and retired former General Michael Flynn is a burgeoning theocrat who says we need one religion. Obviously anti-constitutional, since our founding document explicitly decries a state religion.

This kind of talk threatens Jewish people for whom words like that instill fear. Many of them vote Republican. You can guess they’re more than a little concerned at what’s happening here and abroad. It does invoke a sense of cognitive dissonance to know that they supported Donald Trump even as his movement put their very lives in jeopardy.  

It’s a frightening sense of déjà vu as we see the forces of white Christian men seeking to reverse cultural changes that brought about the inclusion of women, gays, and people of color in our political and economic systems.

I’ll be the first to tell you that some of the cultural warriors on the left have gone too far and are trying to go to fast. But that in no way excuses the fascistic, antisemitic, anti-gay, misogynistic, and xenophobic tendencies of these men (and their sympatico women—but make no mistake: it’s a male-driven phenomenon) who are feeling their backs against the wall of change.

Two leading traditional conservative lights, Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, left Fox News rather noisily last week. The last straw for them was the channel’s airing of Tucker Carlson’s January 6th documentary, Patriot Purge, that is full of innuendo and conspiracy theories, but is light on logic and facts. In their statement, Carlson’s former colleagues said, “We sincerely believe that all people of good will and good judgment—regardless of their ideological or partisan commitments—can agree that a cavalier and even contemptuous attitude toward facts, truth-seeking, and truth-telling, lies at the heart of so much that plagues our country.”

We need to be very careful. The right-wing is so focused on culture wars and “owning the libs” that they’re not paying attention to China’s adventurism in the South China Sea and Taiwan, or Russia’s military build-up on their Eastern front with Ukraine.

We spent four years so focused on Donald Trump’s willingness to destroy institutions and traditions (that turned out to be much more fragile than we had ever imagined) in order to keep himself in power, that we didn’t realize—or at least didn’t pay much attention to—the fact that we’re witnessing a worldwide drift toward authoritarianism.

It’s cold comfort, but it’s not just us.

©2021 Jon Sinton