By David K. Shipler
In the
mid-1990s, a conservative named Joseph Overton devised a brochure with a
cardboard slider showing how the parameters of acceptable political
possibilities could be shifted. Called the Overton Window, it has helped
explain the changes over time in society’s views on women’s suffrage,
prohibition, racial segregation, gay rights, and the like. And now the window has
been slid open to the flow of monstrous ideas from the white supremacist right
into the public square of political discourse.
The conduit is the Republican Party,
which is serving to normalize radical visions by reshaping them just enough to make
them seem slightly less shocking. “Ideological beliefs once thought of as
extreme have—with relative speed--become more widely accepted by the general
public,” writes Cynthia Miller-Idriss in her book Hate
in the Homeland. “Mainstreaming
is critical to the growth of far-right movements globally, because it helps
them recruit, radicalize, and mobilize individuals toward violence, while
reducing the likelihood that the public will raise the alarm about their
efforts.” She was prescient: Her book was published even before the January 6
invasion of the Capitol.
A professor of education and
sociology at American University, Miller-Idriss has made a specialty of
studying right-wing extremism in Europe and the United States. Her catalogue of
far-right themes, theories, fantasies, fears, and apocalyptic remedies offers
an instructive lens through which to see the mainstream arguments of many
Republicans and their supporters. Conservatives’ statements that initially look
merely controversial jump into focus as menacing once your eyes adjust. You can
see in many Republican declarations the features of dangerous extremism.
Those features include:
anti-government and anti-democratic ideas; exclusionary beliefs that dehumanize
“others” such as Jews, blacks, Muslims, Asians, Latinos, and immigrants;
geographical identity that attaches historical purity to a land; existential
fears of “white genocide” in a “great replacement” of Christian whites by non-Christian
nonwhites; hypermasculinity; and conspiratorial fantasies culminating in
violence to accelerate the rise of a new order.
When these convictions are taken
from the margins and reshaped by Republicans into policy positions and
political assertions, they slide into the public square in a pattern of ominous
normalization. By placing Miller-Idriss’s depiction of far-right movements next
to Republican and conservative themes, the symbiotic relationship becomes clear:
Anti-government, anti-democratic: The far right’s distrust of
government was echoed by former President Trump’s repeated sloganeering against
Washington corruption (“Drain the swamp!”) and his denunciation of governmental
actions and agencies, including trade deals, the Iran nuclear agreement, the
judiciary, the intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, and the FBI.
Then, exploiting the far right’s anti-democratic suspicions, he assailed a
Congress controlled by his own party and undermined faith in the legitimacy of
the electoral process itself. That appealed to far-right beliefs that the
system must be destroyed. The alternative--gaming the system—is being advanced nationwide
by state Republicans, bent on power above all, who are flooding legislatures
with bills to reduce access to the ballot box. That approach coincides with far-right
goals of exclusion.
Of course railing against Washington
is a perennial campaign theme with such a long tradition that decades ago,
James Reston quipped that politicians who excoriate Washington often end up
living there after retirement. Yet Trump took the polemics to unprecedented
levels, channeling a populist antipathy for government. In this he led less than
he followed; he heard and amplified the resentful chants of his supporters.
“Drain the swamp, look at that sign. Drain the
swamp in Washington, DC.” Trump said at a 2016 campaign rally. “I didn’t like
the expression, drain the swamp in Washington. So I said it three days ago. The
place went crazy. I said, you know what? I’m starting to like that expression.”
It did not seem to matter to the far right that Trump wallowed in the swamp.
The slogan inspired.
Exclusionary beliefs and white ethno-states: “Places and spaces are fundamental to a sense
of belonging and identity,” Miller-Idriss writes, “and are imbued with
emotional attachment and meaning.” That has been true historically of Nazism
and other far-right movements into the present. “Space and place are constant
backdrops to contemporary far-right fears of a ‘great replacement’ and
conspiracies about Europe turning into Eurabia.”
At the extreme right, she notes, “issues
of territory, belonging, exclusion, race, and national geographies are
foundational for imagining collective pasts as well as anticipated futures.”
The remedies of “border walls, along with language about national defense,
incursions, and invasions” reinforce the sense of existential threat. The 2017
white supremacists’ march in Charlottesville, Virginia, included chants of “Jews
will not replace us.”
Those themes play harmoniously into
the Trump Republican anti-immigration rants. They have gone way beyond rational
policy arguments. Instead, they ignite far-right fervor by demonizing
immigrants as mortal dangers to the very nature of America. “This is an
invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” Trump tweeted as
convoys of Central American families approached the border in October 2018. On
another occasion, he declared, “If we can save American lives, American jobs,
and American futures, together we can save America itself.” At a rally
in Panama City Beach, in the Florida Panhandle, he wondered aloud what to do,
cleverly suggesting violence while rejecting it. “We can’t let [border
officers] use weapons,” he said. “We can’t. I would never do that. But how do
you stop these people?”
“Shoot them!” a woman yelled. The
crowd cheered. Trump gave a slight smile, then said, “Only in the Panhandle you
can get away with that.” Cheers, applause. “Only in the Panhandle.”
In accord with some of his staff’s
affinities for the far right, Trump also fed the yearning for a white
ethno-state by explicitly naming the racial and religious components of his
anti-immigration stand. He banned entry from seven Muslim countries. He derided
immigrants from Haiti and Africa. “Why are we having all these people from
shithole countries come here?” he asked. Nigerians won’t ever leave, won’t ever
“go back to their huts.” He expressed preference for immigrants from countries
like Norway. He went as far as to tweet
that four congresswomen of color, three of whom were born in the US, should “go
back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
Republicans did not object to the tweet.
Apocalyptic Imagery and the Great Replacement: The far right’s
fears that minorities will replace whites through demographic change or
genocide were cited by Robert Bowers, who killed 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh
Synagogue, and Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 at an El Paso Walmart frequented
by Latinos. The anxieties have found resonance in some Republicans’ remarks and
retweets.
Speaking at the 2020 Republican
convention, Charlie Kirk, the 26-year-old head of Turning Point USA, declared: “Trump
is the bodyguard of Western civilization. Trump was elected to protect our
families from the vengeful mob that seeks to destroy our way of life.” (Kirk
founded a think tank with Jerry Falwell, Jr., then president of Liberty University.)
The country’s demographics are a grave
concern. One of the far right’s goals, Miller-Idriss says, is to get whites to
have more children, a theme picked up by Representative Steve King of Iowa in a
2017 tweet about immigration: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody
else’s babies.” In a follow-up CNN interview, he declared,
“You’ve got to keep your birth rate up and teach your children your values and
in doing so, you can grow your population and you can strengthen your way of
life.”
King’s record is significant. He flirted
with the far right for years before the Republican establishment and its
funders finally had enough. In 2018 he gave a long interview to the magazine of
the rightist Austrian Freedom Party. He retweeted
comments by Lana Lokteff, a white nationalist who argued for a white
ethno-state, saying, “Alt-right is the
fight for a white future and white lands, free of invaders and traitors who
actively seek to ruin us, to make us feel guilty for the success and might of
our ancestors as a means to conquer us.”
He also endorsed a Canadian white nationalist, Faith Goldy, for mayor
of Toronto. She had recited “the 14 words,” a catechism that reads: “We must
secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
After a long history of this, King began to lose corporate campaign donations,
but only some. In October 2018, Land O’Lakes stopped contributing, but others
continued, including AT&T, Nestle Purina, the National Beer Wholesalers
Association, Citizens United, the National Association for Gun Rights, the National
Association of Convenience Stores, the American Association of Crop Insurers, and
the American Soybean Association.
He won reelection in 2018, though barely, but was stripped of his committee
assignments by fellow House Republicans in 2019 after saying in a New York
Times interview, ““White nationalist, white supremacist, Western
civilization—how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in class
teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?” He lost the
2020 primary, 45.7% to 36%.
Of course there’s a lot of rhetoric at both ends of the spectrum about
saving or losing America, and Republicans have no monopoly on specters of Armageddon.
The difference is that Trump and Republicans have spoken to a set of far-right
movements that sees a race war as essential to a new world order very much like
the ISIS drive to recreate the Caliphate, Miller-Idriss writes. “In this sense,
Islamist and far-right extremists share a similar apocalyptic vision and use
the same kinds of violent terrorist strategies in an effort to accelerate the
process toward the end times.” The fastest path, according to the most extreme
believers, is by “speeding up polarization and societal discord as a way of
undermining social stability overall.”
Whether Trump was acting deliberately or instinctively or inadvertently
in fueling the far right through polarization and instability is an open question.
But he did it nonetheless by hyperventilating right to the end of his
administration. Two days before the Senate runoff elections in Georgia last
January, Trump told
a rally, “America as you know it will be over, and it will never—I believe—be
able to come back again.” Three days later, at the Save America March, an
insurrection of Trump supporters broke into the Capitol and halted the
Electoral College vote count in Congress.
Hypermasculinity: Gyms and mixed martial arts centers are important
youth recruitment sites for the far right, Miller-Idriss reports, and physical
fitness, strong masculinity, bravery, and toughness are promoted as central
values of patriotism and ethnic purity. Trump has keyed into these themes. He
tweeted a doctored video showing him body-slamming a man who had a CNN logo
over his head. He posed as the tough guy recovering from Covid-19. Back in 2000,
he effectively rescued from bankruptcy the organization sponsoring mixed
martial arts competitions, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, by inviting them
to hold two tournaments at his Atlantic City hotel. “Today,” Miller-Idriss
writes, “the UFC broadcasts in over 150 countries to more than a billion
households.” The far right champions such combat sports “as a perfect way to
channel ideologies and narratives about national defense, military-style
discipline, masculinity, and physical fitness to mainstream markets. Hitler himself
had advocated for the importance of combat sports for training Nazi soldiers.”
In the vein of faux masculinity, the right-wing Fox News host Tucker
Carlson recently disparaged
women in the military: “Pregnant women are gonna fight our wars. It’s a mockery
of the US military. While China’s military becomes more masculine, as it’s
assembled the world’s largest navy, our military needs to become, as Joe Biden
says, more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore, since men and women no
longer exist.”
All this huffing and puffing might be written off as comical fringe
warfare if it weren’t reflected in real-life attitudes on a broad scale. Some
of the crazies are now in Congress—and they didn’t get there by breaking in past
Capitol police. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has bought
into the conspiracy theories that school shootings were faked and space lasers
owned by the Jewish Rothschild family started the California wildfires. Before
her election, she had also endorsed the notion of executing Democrats. But only
11 Republicans joined Democrats in removing her from committees.
Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, who spoke at a white-nationalist
conference last month, was “scheduled to appear on a QAnon
conspiracy-supporting talk show,” MSN News reported.
The Arizona Mirror said
that the conference organizer, 22-year-old white nationalist Nick Fuentes, followed
with a speech calling the Jan. 6 riots “awesome” and demanding that Gosar and
others pass legislation to protect America’s “white demographic core.’”
The penetration of the far right’s ideas was documented in a Vanderbilt survey taken in
2020 before the election. A slim majority (50.7%) of Republicans agreed with
the statement, “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast
that we may have to use force to save it.” A plurality (41.3%) agreed that “a
time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own
hands.” Others said they were unsure, and only 20 to 25% registered disagreement
with those statements, which can be read as prescriptions for insurgency.
