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While Democrats go center-left, Republicans drift into extremism akin to Germany's neo-Nazis
Jul 04, 2019 11:30am MDT by Kerry Eleveld, Daily Kos Staff
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The Republican Party as it stands today is now ideologically closer to a neo-Nazi party in Germany than it is to the political center internationally, according to data analyzed by the Manifesto Project. At the same time, the Democratic party has moved moderately left of the global center.
The project reviewed every line of party manifestos and platforms in Western Europe, Canada, and the U.S., comparing the groups' policy agendas to formulate a continuum by which to judge their ideological positions, according to
an opinion piece in the
New York Times. That resulting graphic is telling.
Sahil Chinoy writes for the
Times:
According to its 2016 manifesto, the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany — mainstream right-leaning parties — and closer to far-right parties like Alternative for Germany, whose platform
contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.
The Republican platform does not include the same bigoted policies, and its score is pushed to the right because of its emphasis on traditional morality and a “national way of life.” Still, the party shares a “nativist, working-class populism” with the European far right, said Thomas Greven, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin who has studied right-wing populism. These parties position themselves as defenders of the “traditional” people from globalization and immigration, he said.
But one of the big differences between the impact of far-right parties in Europe, for instance, and that of the Republican Party is that because the GOP is one of just two major parties in the U.S., the party's agenda is immediately mainstreamed here.
“That’s the tragedy of the American two-party system,” Greven said. “Nowhere in Europe do you have that phenomenon."
