Look to Europe to understand why Ivanka Trump is more dangerous than her father
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If you want to see the Republican Party of 2024, look to France.
National Front president Marine Le Pen in Frejus, southern France in September. CREDIT: AP Photo/Claude Paris
The year is 2024. It has been nearly a decade since Donald Trump lost his bid for the White House, and the party that nominated him has moved on.
Overt white supremacists like former senate candidate David Duke are no longer welcome to carry the party?s banner. Republican officials caught making racist statements are swiftly punished. The party?s official platform still bears all the hallmarks of Trump?s candidacy ? hostility to undocumented immigration, reflexive anti-internationalism, support for more aggressive policing of the ?inner cities,? and broad indifference to social issues ? but the presentation is glossier.
And the party has a new face: Trump?s eldest daughter, Ivanka, is now the Republican nominee to succeed President Clinton. While the younger Trump?s platform is remarkably similar to her father?s, she has far more message discipline and none of his penchant for confrontation. In fact, when Trump senior declined to relinquish his habit of making statements embarrassing to downticket Republican candidates, Ivanka expelled him from the party.
Under the Ivanka Trump campaign, right-wing nationalism has a kinder, gentler face. And it is gaining in the polls.
If the above scenario sounds far-fetched, consider that it is already happening in France. Fourteen years ago, far-right nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen made it past the first round of voting in France?s presidential election, only to be smashed by incumbent Jacques Chirac in the second round. Eight years after that, Le Pen?s daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as leader of the party he founded: the National Front.
Marine Le Pen promptly went about overhauling the party?s image, distancing herself from the party?s overtly racist and anti-Semitic old guard while continuing to take a hard line against immigration and multiculturalism. In 2015, after Jean-Marie referred to the Holocaust as a mere ?detail of history,? his daughter had him booted from the party. The National Front is now once again favored to place in the first round of next year?s presidential election.
Across Western Europe, far-right parties are winning historic victories. In Germany, the most recent regional elections saw Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) pull ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel?s Christian Democratic Union in Merkel?s own home state. In Sweden, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats hold the balance of power between the center-left government and the center-right opposition in parliament. And in Great Britain, the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), in partnership with with the right wing of the Conservative Party, has engineered an unprecedented vote to secede from the European Union.
Right-wing nationalists in the United States are poised to mimic these successes and deepen their ties to the new European right. The Trump campaign has already imported former UKIP leader Nigel Farage to serve as an adviser. On September 18, as AfD Germans headed to the polls in another regional election, prominent Trump surrogate Rep. Steve King (R-IA) tweeted a photo of himself palling around with AfD head Frauke Petry and Dutch Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders. Breitbart Media, which already has a branch office in London, could soon open more bureaus on the continent.
?Wishing you a successful vote,? King tweeted, addressing Petry. ?Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end.?
Nationalism lite
Early this year, when it became apparent that Donald Trump was a serious contender for the Republican nomination, multiple news outlets published articles asking whether he could be considered a fascist. The consensus: ?No, but.?
Fascism is a revolutionary ideology. It is explicitly anti-democratic and anti-individualist. And while Trump may violate basic democratic norms with alarming frequency, he is neither of those things.
The same could be said of European far-right parties like the National Front and the AfD. Marine Le Pen is not a fascist. But.
?These parties are very critical of how the democratic system functions and they?re very critical of the elites that are seen as running it,? said Sheri Berman, a scholar of European politics at Barnard College. ?But they don?t advocate a whole political ? much less social or economic ? revolution.?
Instead of setting themselves up in opposition to individual liberty, some of these parties portray themselves as its defender. Wilders, for example, advocates banning Muslim immigration on the grounds that Islam would compromise the Netherlands? progressive, secular culture.
Granted, not all right-wing nationalist parties are so socially libertarian; the AfD and National Front both oppose same-sex marriage. ?The general argument that these parties represent, or claim to represent, a defense of traditional values is clearly a part of their appeal,? said Berman.
The rise of the far right in Germany doesn?t bode well for refugees
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read more PROOF here:
https://thinkprogress.org/europe-far...a30#.83nng1qo3
Here's some PROOF that the SCUMBAG apple doesn't fall far from the SCUMBAG tree. DRUMPF IS DONE |
