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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 4/13/21

Like the Nazis & Fascists, the Republican Party Must Be Purged

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President Joe Biden has largely given up on trying to negotiate anything with Republicans. There's a good reason for this: the GOP is no longer a legitimate political party.

One of the most comprehensive and well respected surveys of political parties worldwide is called the Global Party Survey and came out of work done at Harvard in the US and Sydney University in Australia. The researchers note: "Drawing on survey data gathered from 1,861 party and election experts, the study uses 21 core items to estimate key ideological values, issue positions, and populist rhetoric for 1,127 parties in 170 countries."

What they found was that the Democratic Party in the US is fairly solidly within the norms for political parties in fully developed countries around the world. It resembles normal and legitimate parties in Canada and most of Western Europe.

The Republican party, however, both behaves and is ideologically most similar to Hungary's Fidesz party, Turkey's AKP party and Poland's PiS party.

All three are, essentially, fascist parties. As Zach Beauchamp of Vox notes, Turkey is one of the world's leading jailers of journalists, Poland's party has threatened judges who don't rule the way they like with criminal punishment, and Hungary scapegoats immigrants as a strategy to gain and grow political power.

Victor Orban's Fidesz Party is particularly worth examining, because it sometimes appears that Donald Trump was using it as a model for his own rise to power.

For twenty years Hungary was a functioning democracy; today it's a corrupt oligarchy.

In ten short years since he was first elected in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orba'n, now fabulously wealthy by Hungarian standards and an oligarch himself, succeeded in transforming his nation's government from a functioning European democracy into an autocratic regime of single-party-rule.

Orba'n took over the Fidesz Party, once a conventional "conservative" political party like our GOP pre-Reagan, with the theme of restoring "Christian" purity and "making Hungary great again." His rallies regularly draw tens of thousands.

He campaigned on building a wall across the entirety of Hungary's southern border, a promise he has largely kept.

He altered the nation's constitution to do what we'd call gerrymandering and voter suppression, ensuring that his Party, Fidesz, would win more than 2/3rds of the votes in pretty much every federal election well into the future.

He's now packed the courts so thoroughly that legal challenges against him and his Party go nowhere.

His Party has rewritten elementary school textbooks to say that refugees entering the country are a threat because "it can be problematic for different cultures to coexist." Using this logic, he has locked up refugee children in cages.

When the Hungarian Helsinki Committee said "the indefinite detention of many vulnerable migrants, including families with small children, is cruel and inhuman," Orba'n said the Syrian refugees seeking asylum "pose a security risk and endanger the continent's Christian culture and identity." He added, "Immigration brings increased crime, especially crimes against women, and lets in the virus of terrorism."

Five years to the week before American Nazis rallied in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer, a group of some 700 right-wing "patriots" held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary's largest minority group, chanting "We will set your houses on fire!" Orba'n's police watched without intervening. Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orba'n's party, provoked the demonstration when he called the Roma "animals"unfit to live among people." Orba'n refused to condemn him or the anti-Roma violence.

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle (more...)
 

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