Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
Strongmen are winning elections, from Putin in Russia, to Orban in Hungary, to Bolsonaro in Brazil, with an anti-LGBTQ agenda: Republicans here are implementing the same strategy
Ron DeSantis, the most likely GOP candidate for president in 2024, has gone to war with trans people and Disney, saying he's doing so to protect Florida's children. It's a slick trick that seems to be working for him and his Republican colleagues, and is thus spreading to other states.
Authoritarian politicians in electoral democracies typically exploit people's fear to gain political power, and then use that power to destroy the democracy itself from within. But first they have to create that fear by building up a straw-man villain.
Republicans today are running that strategy to try to turn America, like Hungary, into a strongman oligarchy.
All they need to run the con is to identify a minority group and convince people they're a threat to the nation:
-
Hitler began his rise to power by demonizing Jews and promising to "solve the Jewish problem," as he laid out in his book Mein Kampf.
-
For Mussolini it was communists and gays that he claimed he would stop from harming Italian society.
-
Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy also promised to protect Americans from communists, although there was a strong anti-gay and antisemitic undercurrent to their criticisms.
-
Margaret Thatcher promised to liberate the United Kingdom from the tyranny of labor unions, as did Ronald Reagan for America.
-
Rodrigo Duterte says he's ridding The Philippines of drug users through extrajudicial murders.
-
India's Narendra Modi claims he's "protecting" his country's Hindu majority from its Muslim minority by stirring up assaults in Muslim areas.
Pick a country, anywhere in the world, and 100% of the time you'll find "strongman" leaders or wannabee leaders claiming to protect the country from a minority. This goes as far back as written human history; protecting "us" from a minority "them" is a consistent and sure-fire path to political power.
In America the groups most easily targeted have historically been racial minorities, particularly descendants of formerly enslaved people, migrants from south of the US border, and from Asia. But racial minorities are now approaching parity with whites in much of America, and have acquired considerable financial, social, and economic power over the past sixty years.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
