RESEARCH SHOWS THAT THE GOP IS BACKSLIDING INTO AUTOCRACY

 

                                           …Is this where Trump was headed?

 

Many GOP leaders are going along with Trump’s claims of voter fraud

 

Tied up in all this noise about the election loss of Donald Trump is one area that I have become concerned about.  My concern is that it seems that a portion of this nation is leaning toward approving the concept of authoritarianism.

There are areas where in watching President Trump’s attacks on our democracy, that seems perfectly OK with portions of the country including a number of individuals within the GOP.

Some political researchers agree that there are drivers inside the Republican party that are helping its drift toward authoritarianism.  These signs are visible in the Republicans demonization of their political opponents.  These same political researchers are saying that it started back in 2006 with the rise of the Republican’s Tea Party, and that was the turning point.  Today’s angry protesters have frequently made claims ranging from blaming Obama’s ‘socialist intentions’ to making explicit Nazi comparisons.  They have even suggested that, “President Trump has been defying or subverting the Constitution, and that’s OK.”

By 2016, that sort of rhetoric had become the norm among some GOP leaders as they have continued to make their attacks in demonizing the Democratic Party.

Today, taking a cue from President Trump, several leading Republican lawmakers and officials have refused to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory and they indulge in Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.  In Georgia, two GOP senators called on the state’s Republican secretary of state to resign, alleging irregularities and mismanagement without offering any evidence. Only four of 53 Senate Republicans have congratulated Biden on his projected victory.  Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin recently told reporters “there’s nothing to congratulate [Biden] about,” while Missouri’s Roy Blunt said the president “may not have been defeated at all.”

This is just the latest sign of the party’s lurch away from democratic ideals and practices, a shift that predates Trump but one that has accelerated since.  Now, that is according to data released by an international team of political scientists before the Nov. 3 election.  It is now possible to quantify the extent to which the Republican Party no longer adheres to such principles as the commitment to free and fair elections.  This is regarding the respectful treatment of political opponents and the avoidance of violent rhetoric.

“The Republican Party in the US 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. “The rhetoric is closer to authoritarian parties, such as AKP in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary.”

For the Republican Party project, researchers recruited more than 600 political scientists around the world to make annual assessments of the US political parties’ adherence to a number of key small-D democratic values.

Those assessments are combined into the main measure which tracks parties’ overall commitment to democracy.  The researcher’s pointed out that the Republican Party score started to edge downward during the Obama administration, but it fell off a cliff in 2016 with the ascent of Trump.  The scholars warned that the United States, especially the GOP, has been backsliding into autocracy under Trump.

The data that runs through 2018, states that this asymmetry has only become more apparent in the aftermath of this latest election.  The researchers stated: “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.”

The Democratic Party, by contrast, hasn’t changed much. This is a prime example of what political scientists call “asymmetric polarization.”  This is a growing partisan gap driven almost entirely by the actions of the Republican Party.

While the data only runs through 2018, that conclusion has only become more apparent in the aftermath of this election.  “It is disturbing that most leading Republicans are still not objecting to President Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud and his attempts to declare himself the winner,” : stated Ms. Lührmann.  As a result, she says, GOP scores are likely to sink further when the 2020 data is released.

Daniel Pemstein, a political scientist at North Dakota State University who helped develop this methodology, acknowledges that the project “seeks to measure things that are inherently difficult to observe.”

It’s tempting to write off these worrying trends as Trump-era aberrations that will subside after he leaves office.  Joe Biden had predicted a post-Trump “epiphany” among the GOP, for instance. There are some in the Republican Party who are critical of Trump’s efforts to undermine the election.  Former national security adviser John Bolton warned in a recent Washington Post op-ed that the party may suffer “permanent damage to its integrity and reputation because of President Trump’s post-election rampaging.”  Two moderate Republican governors also criticized Trump’s efforts to stymie the transition.

But the data underscores how much of the Republican Party has adopted the authoritarian beliefs and tactics of the president.  Many of the GOP leaders are going along with Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud which will still be in office after he leaves.

“That leading Republicans are not willing to defend the electoral process, shows that Trump is not the only GOP politician who has a problem with key democratic norms,” Ms. Lührmann said.

Hopefully the Biden-Harris team will help bring the country back to more overall democratic ways.  But the real work has be achieved within the Republican Party.  Hopefully they will eventually come back to a better level of civility and democratic thinking.

Copyright G. Ater 2020