According to the portal, the Republicans were already authoritarian during Clinton's time, but since they worship Fidesz, it is absolutely impossible to make a compromise with them.
Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman drew attention in the columns of the New York Times yesterday to the fact that the Republican Party of the United States, which is otherwise in opposition in terms of both executive and legislative power (someone tell him - ed.), is increasingly authoritarian, and plays from Viktor Orbán's score.
Citing a 2006 study, the author indicates that Republicans were authoritarian long before Donald Trump's candidacy, "the party has become a 'rebellious fringe' that rejects 'facts, evidence and science' and does not accept political opposition's legitimacy". According to Krugman, the situation became even more serious in the 2010s, as a 2019 international survey showed that the GOP "is nothing like the center-right parties of other Western countries.
What it is more similar to are the authoritarian parties, such as Fidesz in Hungary or AKP in Turkey".
Krugman doesn't even want to believe that now, "when the Republicans show open admiration for Viktor Orbán's one-party system, I meet people who say that the GOP cannot be compared to Fidesz", while "the Republicans are rewriting the borders of the member state constituencies in order to secure their power , regardless of how much they lose the vote,
and this is straight from Orbán's score". (Incidentally, Fidesz won an absolute majority in terms of the number of votes in the 2022 election.)
The NYT columnist gives further examples of how authoritarian the Republicans really are: there was the siege of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which was “part of a top-down, broader plan to invalidate the election” while in part under President Trump the Supreme Court of appointed judges "made purely partisan decisions regarding abortion and the right to bear arms."
That's why Krugman asks, "where does this extremism really come from?" The economist ponders the obligatory Nazi parallel, but ultimately dismisses it, saying "comparisons with the rise of European fascism are inevitable, but not particularly useful."
According to him, the appropriate analogy is therefore the Ku Klux Klan, which reorganized in 1920.
Finally, the author reminds his readers that "the Republicans started to turn towards extremism already in the 1990s", since then - also in the opposition - they harassed the administration of the Democrat Bill Clinton with "witch hunts and wild conspiracy theories" and "tried political concessions from Clinton extort by shutting down the state”. However, Krugman also offers a solution to the extremist authoritarians, which is to completely overthrow the Republicans: "because the extremism of the GOP is fueled by hatred of all the things that I see as truly great in America - our diversity, our tolerance for differences - to appease or compromise it can't be with him. Just beat it.”
2022Plusz: By the way, the economist has tried to kick Fidesz several times in the columns of the NYT as a well-known liberal scientist! It is likely that his current article would give the weakening, war-provoking Biden administration a little ammunition against Trump and his party, but the most that can be said is that the excellent United States and its allies mutilated a large part of Hungary 100 years ago, but they did not know the spirit of the nation.
It's still alive today, so be careful!
The Americans may be able to follow the example of a small country that they destroyed, among other things, today and make it big! That's what Krugman is afraid of!
Source: mandiner.hu
Featured image: YouTube
