The Far-Right Threat in the United States: A European Perspective

Abstract

The rise of Donald Trump has weakened the dominance of the “American exceptionalism” paradigm in analyses of U.S. politics, but the pivot to views of the United States as part of a global trend toward democratic backsliding ignores important, uniquely “American” cultural, historical, and institutional attributes that make the country more at risk for democratic erosion than most other established democracies. This short article puts Trump, and his Republican Party, into the broader comparative perspective of (European) far-right studies. I argue that Trump in many ways fits the “fourth wave” of postwar far-right politics, lay out the unique challenge that the United States is facing in terms of democratic erosion, and draw on the case of Viktor Orbán in Hungary to learn lessons for the United States. The article ends with some suggestions of how democrats (not just Democrats) should address the far-right Republican challenge to U.S. democracy.

Politics as Usual? Measuring Populism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism in U.S. Presidential Campaigns (1952–2020) with Neural Language Models

“…In a country plagued by persistent racial inequality in access to political, civil, and social rights (Marshall 1950), such acts of compliance with liberal democratic norms enable the continued pursuit of greater justice-however frustrated and circuitous-via the institutional channels of formal politics. In contrast, radical-right (or far right) parties and politicians seek to foreclose such opportunities and confine political power in perpetuity to the ethnoracial majority (Mudde 2019(Mudde , 2022Pirro Forthcoming).…”

“…The classification of specific candidates aside, these binary categories should be understood as ideal types; we rely on them precisely to demonstrate that empirically, there is more discursive continuity between actors conventionally assigned to the two categories than is often acknowledged. Finally, it should be noted that scholars have recently advocated for the use of the descriptor “far right” instead of “radical right,” but this has not altered the characterization of Donald Trump as an outlier from the historical mainstream when it comes to U.S. presidential politics (Mudde 2019, 2022; Pirro Forthcoming).…”

Compared to what?: Setting American political development in comparative context

“…Do they stem from defects in our own constitutional order, as some have suggested, or from the dangerous leadership of a single dangerous individual, as many believe (Dahl 2002; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2023)? Or do they reflect a broader cross-national phenomenon of right-wing authoritarian populism and democratic backsliding to which the United States is not uniquely susceptible (Weyland and Madrid 2019; McCoy and Somer 2022; Mudde 2022)? More generally, comparative-historical analyses have been able to consider ways in which American political development is systematically subject to the same forces that have long bedeviled other democratic systems (Lieberman et al 2019; Kaufman and Haggard 2019; Mettler and Lieberman 2020).…”

“…For example, the unexpected juxtaposition of Latin American and the United States has illuminated the critical role of subnational authoritarianism has played in the tortured path of American democratic development (Gibson 2012; Mickey 2015). Similarly, comparative analyses drawn from Hungary (Mudde 2022), Latin America (Roberts 2019), and Southeast Asia (Slater 2022) have revealed how American democracy has been subject to forces of populism, centrifugal partisan alignments, and destabilizing democratic careening. Finally, it is worth noting that this comparative approach tends to focus on national units (such as nation-states) as distinct and analytically independent political formations (although some works do consider transnational influences on national politics [Rodgers 1998; Katznelson and Shefter 2002; Thompson 2016]), and it thus cuts somewhat against the grain of recent approaches to global politics that emphasize connections across borders and overlapping sources of order, sovereignty, and contention throughout world history (Bhambra 2014; Zarakol 2022).…”

Deglobalization and the political psychology of white supremacy

“…The link between liberal democracy and globalization, envisioned in terms of liberal internationalism, is constantly exploited by persuasive emotional governors: far-right parties, autocrats, right-wing populists, and white supremacists. This “democratic backsliding” is widely accepted as one of the more explicit features of the process of deglobalization (see, e.g., Kelemen & Blauberger, 2017; Mudde, 2022), with political leaders from Xi and Putin to Brexiteers and Trump, to Modi, Bolsonaro, Erdoğan, and Orbán pursuing “alternative” (autocratic) political visions. Far-right leaders thus link liberal democracies, and the political actors that support them, to the grievances, resentments, and fantasies experienced by their supporters and society at large.…”