The Fraying Far Right in Europe, A Potential Shift Away from Fascism as Hungary Ousts Orban

If there's any good news for western liberal-democratic systems, it's that elections still matter. Hungary just held a parliamentary vote with huge turnout and even bigger global ramifications (via NPR):

Hungarian voters turned out in the greatest numbers since the fall of communism in the 1990s to turn away from Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party, with exit polls indicating possible "super-majority" victory for Péter Magyar's Tisza movement. The movement rallied various opposition forces around the themes of fighting corruption and re-integrating the European mainstream. 

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán congratulated Magyar in a concession speech less than three hours after polls closed. Ballots continue to be counted but the trend suggests a possible two-thirds majority for Magyar and his Tisza movement. If that happens, he would be able to undo constitutional changes made by Orbán to weaken the independence of the judiciary and entrench the Fidesz party's control of political life.

I don't blog much about Orban, but he's been a major figure in the anti-democratic movement across most of the western world since the 2010s. As part of a "populist nationalist" ideology, Orban has really been a dictator in all but name: shutting down free speech and political opposition within Hungary, rewriting laws to keep himself and his party in power, pushing an anti-immigrant agenda that openly relied on racism, and basically providing a blueprint to every other Far Right autocrat seeking absolute rule (SEE trump, Bolsonaro, trump again, wannabe rules like Le Pen and Farage, and more trump).

Orban has been held as a model for success among the Far Right factions across most of what we'd call the western world. As Isaac Chotiner documented in 2021 at New Yorker:

Still, over the past decade, Orbán has become something of a hero to conservatives throughout Europe, and has piqued the interest of the American right wing as well. Last week, Tucker Carlson visited Hungary and, over dinner, lauded the Prime Minister as someone that the West could learn from. On Sunday, in the Times, the conservative columnist Ross Douthat explained some of Orbán’s appeal. “It’s not just his anti-immigration stance or his moral traditionalism,” Douthat wrote. “It’s that his interventions in Hungarian cultural life, the attacks on liberal academic centers and the spending on conservative ideological projects, are seen as examples of how political power might curb progressivism’s influence...”

The likes of Seb Gorka has been pushing the US government under trump to pursue a partisan hunt against "left-wing terrorism" like Antifa (which is, by the by, Anti-Fascism something Gorka and other wingnuts don't want you to realize) based exactly on how Orban attacked center-left and far left parties in Hungary. Orban's efforts to stifle his nation's media - through intimidation and allies buying up outlets - mirror the same efforts happening here in the United States.

Tied up into all this is how tied up all of these nationalist movements are to each other: Not just moral support but also money and influence backing each other's attempts to win elections so that the Far Right can control more nations to fulfill a global agenda. Orban is - well, was - a keystone among the other Far Right factions; ironically trying to seize control by promoting isolationist pro-nativism hatreds within their own nations, using international support to do so.

For Orban to fall, and to fall so openly and decisively (losing by double-digits!) even after rigging the electoral system wtih gerrymandering - is a harsh rebuke to the Far Right ideologues convinced they were an unstoppable juggernaut across the globe. Making it harsher - well, funnier to the rest of us - is how trump and his administration panicked over how poorly Orban was doing in the polls leading up to the election, to where JD Vance visited multiple times in person to campaign for Orban and where trump openly tried to bribe Hungarians with promises of boosting their economy.

The hilarious thing is that Orban's polling sank lower after Vance's visit and after trump's promises, proving that Europeans even in conservative-leaning nations really HATE trump.

There's also the reality that a lot of Hungarians got tired of inept corrupt rule by an inept corrupt autocrat. Under Orban, their economy suffers to high inflation and worsening conditions. For all of Orban's railing against migrants, refugees, dread Others, and liberals; after 16 years the people understand the problem has been Orban and his cronies all along.

Orban's loss is a sign that for all their efforts to rig the game in their countries, the other Far Right parties and factions across Europe have no guarantee of winning and holding onto power. Whatever appeal the nationalist/populist/racist groups offer to the angrier sections of their populations, they cannot expect inevitability or winning over any moderates that modern-day fascists can be effective if they control high office.

Orban's loss is also a huge blow to Putin: the Hungarian prime minister had been the Russian dictator's most useful ally puppet in European affairs. Hungary's position within both the EU and NATO gave Orban the means to disrupt and sabotage those organizations to serve Putin's needs. In the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, Orban routinely denied stronger EU / NATO support for Ukraine and even withheld funds - literally stealing it in a heist - Ukraine was supposed to get for their war effort.

The incoming prime minister, Peter Magyar, hasn't openly committed to supporting Ukraine in full - I saw a social media post he was willing to return the stolen funds, but I can't verify it - but he does want closer relations to the rest of the EU (in order to fix Hungary's failing economy), which should mean getting on the rest of Europe's good side. Magyar shouldn't be fully obstructionist the way Orban was. 

This election ousting Orban is - simply put - a huge punch in the face to fascists and dictators across the globe.

This is why turnout matters, Americans.

Fun times, people.

Quick update: Europeans really have a knack for partying when authoritarian/totalitarian regimes fall:

went to check out the techno rave outside Parliament and I don't think I have the data allowance to share a video from it but let me tell you: there sure is a techno rave outside Parliament right now, celebrating Orban getting ousted

[image or embed]

— Marie Le Conte (@youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com) April 12, 2026 at 3:57 PM

There Is No Bottom to the Horrors of the Modern Republican Party (w/ Update)

I haven't blogged much about the recent craziness in North Carolina, but now this is unavoidable. The wingnut Republican candidate for the governor's office there is going off the rails in the biggest train wreck since JD Vance said more demeaning stuff about immigrants yesterday. CNN has all the gory details about Mark Robinson (via Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck):

Editor’s Note: This story contains offensive language.

(CNN) — Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.

Okay, just on this lede alone, this is a disaster for the state national GOP. Their preferred candidate in North Carolina - voted in by a primary process, and who had been elected currently as Lt. Governor - was posting stuff on a porn website. The next part is about Robinson openly claiming to be a Black Nazi (!), which used to be a career ender in 98 percent of the American states. And the topper - at this point in the story, which is still the first fcking paragraph - is having a black man supporting slavery in a former Confederate state.

But wait, it gets worse.

Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”

The comments, which Robinson denies making, predate his entry into politics and current stint as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor. They were made under a username that CNN was able to identify as Robinson by matching a litany of biographical details and a shared email address between the two.

Many of Robinson’s comments were gratuitously sexual and lewd in nature. They were made between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa,” a pornographic website that includes a message board. The comments were made under the username minisoldr, a moniker Robinson used frequently online...

That Robinson is publicly hateful towards trans people and yet fetishizes them as porn subjects is part and parcel of the Far Right hypocrisy when it comes to sex and power. This should be shameful except the modern conservative elites no longer have shame.

And the fact that Robinson kept using a common online moniker for going into the kinky stuff underscores not so much his idiocy in leaving behind easily-tracked clues to his identity years later, it's that he likely believed he would never get caught or held accountable for it.

That said: There are a handful of Witty Librarians out there on social media, so do be aware I'm only responsible for like 37 percent of the crazy stuff coming from a Witty account, I swear... I have to admit, I've been insanely active on the Internet since 1994 - when I got into the Usenet chats for the X-Files television show - so I know if I ever get into politics or become a public figure there's going to be a lot of... ahem, interesting things I've posted. 

In my defense, I've made it a personal policy to speak my mind to what I believe and know. My belief: You better be able to say in public what you say in private, and you better say in private what you've said in public. And I try to avoid saying mean or derogatory things towards people who don't deserve it. The mean and derogatory things I say about goddamn conservative wingnuts is that they DO deserve it. So there.

Enough about my bad habits. Back to the report:

Many of Robinson’s comments on Nude Africa stand in contrast to his public stances on issues such as abortion and transgender rights.

Publicly, Robinson has fiercely argued that people should use bathrooms only that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth. He’s also said transgender women should be arrested for using women’s restrooms...

Yet privately under the username minisoldr on Nude Africa, Robinson graphically described his own sexual arousal as an adult from the memory of secretly “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a 14-year-old. Robinson recounted the story as a memory he said he still fantasized about.

“I came to a spot that was a dead end but had two big vent covers over it! It just so happened it overlooked the showers! I sat there for about an hour and watched as several girls came in and showered,” Robinson wrote on Nude Africa...

In other comments on Nude Africa, Robinson discussed his affinity for transgender pornography.

“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote. “And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!...”

He's against "trans" going into ladies' restrooms but for himself - like other deviant narcissists - he wants to retain his privilege to invade safe places and demean women. It's all about his lusts getting satisfied, after all.

Robinson, who would become North Carolina’s first Black governor if elected, also repeatedly maligned civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., attacking him in such intense terms that a user accused him of being a white supremacist.

“Get that f*cking commie bastard off the National Mall!,” Robinson wrote about the dedication of the memorial to King in Washington, DC, by then-President Barack Obama.

“I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” Robinson responded...

In the pornographic forums, Robinson revealed his unvarnished thoughts on issues such as race, gender and abortion.

Writing in a forum discussing Black Republicans in October 2010, Robinson stated unprovoked: “I’m a black NAZI!”

That same month, Robinson wrote in another post that he supported the return of slavery.

“Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few,” he wrote.

In March 2012, Robinson wrote that he preferred the former leader of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler over the leadership in Washington during the administration of Barack Obama.

“I’d take Hitler over any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!” he wrote.

Robinson’s comments on Nude Africa often frequently contained derogatory and racial slurs directed at Black, Jewish and Muslim people...

Robinson's sell-out over the fight for civil rights for African-Americans is already a public matter. He's made it clear he's a hater - and a sadistic control freak - in the worst way. That he displayed this much vitriol for a respected historic figure like Reverend King under his online handle shouldn't be a surprise. Painful, but not a surprise.

CNN’s reporting on Robinson’s comments comes a few weeks after The Assembly, a North Carolina digital publication, reported that Robinson frequented local video pornography shops in the 1990s and 2000s. The story cited six people who interacted and saw him frequent the stores in Greensboro, North Carolina. A spokesperson for Robinson called the story false and a “complete fiction...”

There's too much consistent bad behavior here to think these reports are in error. CNN is risking a lot posting this report if they didn't have receipts, and so they're backing up these allegations with what they've researched:

On the Nude Africa website in both comments and his profile, minisoldr offered numerous details that align precisely with Robinson’s personal history.

In his profile, minisoldr listed his full name as “mark robinson” and disclosed a private email address Robinson used elsewhere online. In 2012, a user responded to a comment by calling minisoldr “Mark.”

Minisoldr mentioned in 2008 being married for 18 years, which corresponds with Robinson’s marriage to Yolanda Hill in 1990. In 2011, minisoldr wrote he had been married 21 years. Minisoldr wrote in a 2011 post that he lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, the same town where Robinson lived at the time and currently lives.

In a post in 2012, minisoldr said he served in the Army in the 1980s, during the same time period as Robinson. In his sexually graphic comments detailing watching women in the showers in 2011, minisoldr wrote that his mother worked at an Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Robinson’s mother worked as a custodian at North Carolina A&T State University, an HBCU located in Greensboro.

Both minisoldr and Robinson often posted about the same topics online, including reviews for remote-controlled helicopters, their attraction to specific celebrities and their favorite “Twilight Zone” episode.

The email address associated with minisoldr on Nude Africa was also used by Robinson elsewhere online and social media. On the commenting platform Disqus, a user who joined in April 2011 features Mark Robinson’s photo under the username minisoldr.

Usernames and email addresses from Disqus were publicly leaked online in 2017, according to the company. CNN confirmed that Robinson’s username minisoldr on Disqus shared the same email address as the one used on Nude Africa...

If Robinson isn't minisoldr, there's a hell of a lot of coincidences involved.

Robinson has frequently used the username “minisoldr” elsewhere on the internet. On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Robinson once used the minisoldr username, according to a screenshot he shared on Facebook in 2018 and data in Robinson’s old tweets.

A YouTube playlist for a user named “minisoldr” features exclusively videos of Robinson. On Pinterest, a user “minisoldr” lists his name as “Mark Robinson.”

People online rarely mix up their Internet handles - in order to avoid confusing themselves - and "minisoldr" is unique enough that I doubt there's others fighting for that persona. The odds of this being the same Mark Robinson are pretty fcking solid.

Tonight there's been a wave of denials, dismissals, and evasions by Robinson's campaign and by the Republican Party at the state and national level. How they respond to this - either by pushing Robinson off the ballot before he drags the whole ticket down in a key battleground state, or doubling down on the racism and sexism and fascism to keep the wingnut base appeased - depends on how they gauge the loss of moderate independent voters who will recoil from these revelations.

But even if the state GOP succeeds in dismissing Robinson if they could, the next question ought to be "who the hell can they get next to replace him?" This unapologetic, hypocritical racist/sexist was the top choice of the party voters in the primary: They're not going to find a rational or less openly racist/sexist candidate to replace him.

We've been seeing it ever since the start of the modern Republican era of "attack politics" forged by Newt Gingrich, where the conservatives took over the party mechanics and the party choices to where there are no true moderates - the more congenial, the less racist/sexist - surviving among the ranks. It accelerated during the Tea Party movement against Obama - less because he was Center-Left and more because he was a Black Man who dared to win high office - to where open rudeness and public hostility by the GOP elected officials are now the norm.

With trump's takeover of the party voting base in 2016 with his anti-immigrant, Mexico-bashing and China-bashing, anti-women antics, this is where the Republicans are today: A roster filled with religious hypocrites, grifters, and sexual predators. This is no longer a party of Ronald Reagan or the Bush dynasty or John McCain, with whatever fidelity to the nation and to public decency they would display. This is now the party of Roy Moore, of Jim Jordan, of Matt Gaetz. It's a Republican party of idiot hypocrites like Tommy Tuberville or Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene, exposing their fears and hatred on the rest of the nation.

It's a Party of Trumps - grotesqueries - all the way down.

For the love of GOD, stop voting for them. 

Update 9/28/24: Just spotted this Peter Wehner article in The Atlantic, and he uses the same word - grotesque - that I used here (read the whole article to get an idea how deep and widespread the rot is):

The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party...

The Republican Party today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that makes them uniquely dangerous to the republic. Since 2016, they have been at war with reality, delighting in their dime-store nihilism, creating “alternative facts” and tortured explanations to justify the lawlessness and moral depravity and derangement of their leader.

None of this is hidden; it is on display in neon lights, almost every hour of every day. No one who supports the Republican Party, who casts a vote for Trump and for his MAGA acolytes, can say they don’t know.

They know.

We as voters need to hold them accountable. The whole Republican Party has got to go.

The Far Right War Against the Rule of Law Reaches Israel

I've only recently noticed in the past month that Bibi "Bribe Guy" Netanyahu had returned to political power as Prime Minister of Israel, during the end of 2022 when I was distracted by the holidays.

And my first thought finding out he was back was "What the hell? I thought they kicked you out of the damn house!" 

My second thought was "What the hell? Isn't he STILL on trial over bribery charges???"

Anyway, the reason why I even noticed Netanyahu was back in power was because Israel is currently racked by massive protests over Netanyahu's plans to gut Israel's legal system to ensure his authoritarian rule never ends. Via Jonathan Guyer at Vox:

Hundreds of thousands of Israeli protesters have been demonstrating against the extreme-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since January. The protests have become some of the biggest in Israeli history and are drawing out the country’s most famous faces.

On Thursday, protesters plan to disrupt Netanyahu’s travel to Rome in a sign of defiance of his ultranationalist, illiberal government. They’re calling it a “day of resistance to the dictatorship.” This builds on two months of mass mobilization across Israel that have been squarely focused on the Netanyahu government’s set of judiciary overhauls, which would weaken the independence of the country’s high court and create the conditions for unchecked majoritarian rule.

The backlash to these proposals has reached even staunchly establishment groups in Israel: A group of fighter pilots are on strike, tech workers staged a work stoppage, and former prime ministers have joined the protests...

Netanyahu was elected to a sixth premiership this November, but this time with the most extreme, nationalistic, and exclusionary government in Israeli history.

From the get-go, the Israeli government has sought to make significant changes to the high court that would hollow out its independence and its power to serve as a check on the Israeli parliament, or the Knesset. The several bills put forward would restrict the court’s ability to overturn laws it sees as unconstitutional and allow a simple majority in the Knesset to reject its decisions. It would also give government lawmakers and appointees effective power over the committee of nine individuals that appoints judges, and rescind key authorities from the attorney general. These and other changes would weaken the independent judiciary’s power in a parliamentary system that otherwise lacks checks.

This is all complicated by the fact that Israel doesn’t have a constitution, but a set of regulations passed as the Basic Law. The proposal’s backers, like a group of Israeli academics who recently published an open letter in support, say the court has grown too powerful. But, according to a recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, “66 percent of Israelis think the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down a law if it is incompatible with the Basic Laws...”

I'd also question Netanyahu's motivations for backing these efforts against a legal system that's poised to hit him with felony convictions that could dash his efforts to stay in power for life. But then, this is what dictators do: Break the Law so that the Law only benefits themselves.

This is all part of a disturbing trend the past 10-20 years where even the most stable and respectable democratic nations - some of them having gone through decades of Cold War tensions to establish genuine rule of law - suffering the indignity of organized, deep-funded Far Right conservative movements taking control of their governments - through legal elections no less - and then for their own benefit gutting the legal systems they abused to gain power in the first place.

It's only when these Far Right politicians take a sledgehammer to the courts - where every nation's system of justice plays out - do the voters realize they've given power to dangerous demagogues. The protests will be massive, the majority of the citizens will be outraged... but the bastards now in power will hear none of it and happily wreck their nation's foundations all so they can hold onto that power a little while longer (before their own corruption collapses on them like a ruined house).

We're suffering it here in the United States as well, where extreme gerrymandering and a power structure that skews towards small-populated states has us in the grip of a Minority Party (hint: Republican) rule, even with Democrats (currently) in control of the Presidency and half of Congress. Israel may lean Conservative/Right in terms of politics, but even they have extremist factions - all of them now in power as Netanyahu can't form coalitions with anyone else - that do not honestly speak for the interests of the Israeli people.

The effects of the Far Right Israeli efforts to weaken their legal system is coming with a wave of violence and disenfranchisement of the Palestinian population that makes up a significant portion of Israel's voting base, and yet are getting driven out of their communities in Gaza and the West Bank with annexation efforts that threaten global efforts to resolve centuries of Jewish/Palestinian conflicts over the land they both claim as home. We're looking at the reality that yet other uprising by disenfranchised Palestinians re-sparking the horrors of Middle East violence will flow across the entire region and drag the United States (and other allies) into that mess all over again.

All because a goddamned crook kept getting elected back into the Prime Minister's office.

What the hell, Israeli voters. You let Bibi back into that house. What the actual hell.

DeSantis Can't Read the Snowflakes

Posted on social media over the weekend, we have proof that Republicans are idiots and that Ron DeSantis is a moron (via Ellen E Clarke at Tampa Bay Times (paywalled)):

In Iowa on Friday to promote his new book, Gov. Ron DeSantis posed with a gift from a supposed supporter.

The gift, a framed cutout of an intricate snowflake, features the word “fascist.” Steven Goffman, whose profile says that he works for the Washington Post, tweeted that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, also a Republican, posed with a copy of the gift, too.

DeSantis was visiting Iowa, introducing himself to expectant audiences of Republicans ahead of a likely 2024 presidential bid...

Lemme get a copy of the photo:

 

pulled from Twitter

The second I saw the photo of the snowflake, I spotted the "asci" part of the word immediately. It quickly became a puzzle-solving matter of figuring out the rest of the word (The "F" is done with a cursive flourish in order to tie the mirror shape of the snowflake together). Considering DeSantis' public behavior - of bullying and censoring his critics, his hostile takeover of Florida politics, and eager willingness to use these methods to move upward in politics to the Presidency - the only word it could have been is "Fascist".

The symbolism of the snowflake - as a political insult - can't be overlooked.

That Ron DeSantis - he with the Ivy League education going to both Harvard and Yale - failed to notice the hidden word in the snowflake, and that he failed to recognize the deliberate insult given to him, tells me that DeSantis is unaware, that he's unthinking, that he can't perceive words or symbolic images that any intelligent person can. In short, he can't read.

I went to both Universities of Florida (which was a top-flight institution until DeSantis showed up to ruin the state's higher education) and South Florida (commuter college, but not shabby), but I could see it where he couldn't.

This makes some sense for all of DeSantis' recent attempts to raze Florida's public university system to turn them into broken-down partisan cesspools. For all the prestige he got from attending the top universities in the nation, DeSantis does not respect education at all because he personally remains uneducated and ignorant. And he desires to drag the rest of our state - our children and future generations - down into the cesspool with him and his fellow wingnut hacks. 

I seriously call on Yale and Harvard to rescind his college degrees and release his transcripts for public transparency. DeSantis' current disdain for higher education - and his clear lack of comprehension skills - proves he didn't learn a goddamn thing from your institutions.

This is what the Republican punditry and leadership wants as their standard bearer going into 2024.

Gods help us.

It Can Happen Here. It's Happening Now.

Political rhetoric can reach - often - for the extreme when discussing a troubling issue or political figure.

Especially during campaign/election cycles, when the mudslinging kicks in and the demonization of a political opponent is a quick-and-easy way to stir up your base to stick to your side.

As this happens often, it's a little hard to convincingly point at a political figure on the national stage and scream ZOMG he's a fascist. Everyone else can just glare at you and say "Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man"

Sometimes, though, you've got no choice. Sometimes, a person on the national stage running for high office will go so far to the extreme that defines Fascism - as Merriam-Webster does as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition" - that you have to point a finger and say "oh dear f-cking God he's a f-cking Fascist."

Such as Donald Trump. Going after immigrants and refugees while exhorting nationalist fervor. Argues for a "strong" Executive who can bully all opposition. Holds campaign gatherings that are starting to resemble brown-shirt rallies. Yup. Talks very much like a raging Fascist.

Scholarly work, however, suggests Trump is a more American variant of fascism: that of the Native Populist. Which is just as dangerous as Fascist, but we're getting into technical details here.

And why do I say Native Populism is a uniquely American version of this -ism? Because we've been here before, and other people have documented the atrocities then too.

Sinclair Lewis' classic work It Can't Happen Here may be a fictional title but it's based on real-world observations of our national mood of the 1930s. Lewis wrote this novel at the peak of the Great Depression when the national mood was dour, a quarter of the people were starving and poor, and the potential for a rabble-rouser to rally the masses to form a dictatorship was high. That last part wasn't paranoia: FDR himself opined that if his first term had failed, his would be the last tenure of a truly elected Presidency.

Lewis based the novel on the tensions of the day, and in particular based his early villainous figure - Buzz Windrip - on real-life political boss Huey Long, a governor/Senator from Louisiana whose bullying political style and censoring of any public criticism were well known across the nation... and did little to damage his appeal to the masses because Long effectively scapegoated his opponents and authored economic policies to attack hated banks and seek mass redistribution of wealth.

Huey Long - and his literary doppelganger - may display some of the historical trappings of fascist leanings, but they are in fact an aspect of a similar -ism: Populism. Where in Fascism the dictatorial absolutism works its way Top-Down (from the power money elites), Populism goes the other way (from the angered masses raging against elites).

Merriam-Webster's definition of populism is lacking (it just refers to "populist" as a "believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people") so a more detailed definition is needed. A recent Newsweek article has something of note:

But populism, during the farmers’ revolt of the 1890s, was also a cultural insurgency—a kind of self-administered political wake for the beleaguered middle American Protestant soul, newly adrift in an urbanized, capitalist nation of immigrant laborers and international bankers, and yearning for the folk egalitarianism of an idealized Jeffersonian republic. This is how populism has come to double as a synonym for modern cultural conservatism. Historian Richard Hofstadter famously branded the Gilded Age agrarian uprising as a precursor to McCarthyism: an outpouring of economic resentments that gave aggrieved farmers license to scapegoat any and all available elites—Jewish bankers, British titans of industry, American robber barons—for their declining cultural influence.

That helps a bit. Populism is basically a mass movement of lower-income groups driven by economic woes but expressing their outrage towards other groups that can be easily defined as "Other" by how they don't fit the majority identity (White Christian Protestant that are not of the cities). Back in the 19th Century, that meant Jews and business owners (and in the South, Blacks). In the 21st Century, that means Muslims, Mexicans and Wall Street bankers (and now Blacks across the nation).

What makes Populism dangerous is that there's little wisdom or patience to it. Relying more on the force of the majority to impose will, and eager for solutions to come immediate and absolute, there's little of the spirit of compromise or respect for the other viewpoints - of either the minorities or even the differing opinions of fellow majority members - to allow for a consensus towards a working solution. Because the quick solution - usually not well-thought, impulsive, and reckless - isn't always the correct one.

Which is what happens in Lewis' novel. Windrip wins the election and imposes his populist will on the nation, acting the bully using his not-so-secret police force called the Minute Men (yes, irony is lost on the real-world modern Far Right) and enacting his wealth redistribution programs to curry favor with the masses, but none of it works out. Suppressing criticism against his regime does little to stop it, and the economic woes that propelled him to office aren't answered by his knee-jerk policies. The novel ends with Windrip suffering an ouster via coup and the nation descending into a series of military takeovers that still do not resolve the problems that the reigning Populist ideology can't solve.

Lewis wrote it as fiction but based it on fact: at the time he wrote it, Huey Long was a legitimate threat to run as a third-party candidate against FDR and whomever would represent the Republicans. Some of the worst traits attributed to Windrip - the silencing of critics, the demolition of political institutions so that Long could swiftly pass his own laws - came from Long's actions as Governor (and then as party boss of Louisiana as Senator using a puppet Governor he controlled). Through that quirk of history, Lewis' novel never came true because Long was assassinated by a relative of a political opponent whom Long was attempting to drive out of power that very day. Without Long's ambitions, his movement faltered and fell more into the racial animus (anti-Semitism) that made it unacceptable by World War II and our nation's fight against the Nazis.

And then there's Alexis de Tocqueville and his seminal work Democracy in America (two volumes). Even though he wrote that back in the 1830s, he perfectly documented the American (Caucasian) mindset and cultural norms of the era and one that has not changed much over the centuries.

While Tocqueville had kind things to say about the American character, the differences in American to European world-views, he also sounded a warning against what he labeled "tyranny of the majority". Chapter Fifteen, if you looked it up:

...I am therefore of opinion that some one social power must always be made to predominate over the others; but I think that liberty is endangered when this power is checked by no obstacles which may retard its course, and force it to moderate its own vehemence...

...Democratic republics extend the practice of currying favor with the many, and they introduce it into a greater number of classes at once: this is one of the most serious reproaches that can be addressed to them...

That is the impulse towards which Populism strives: forcing critics into silence and allowing the representatives of the masses to impose their will in the name of that -ism. To continue:

...Governments usually fall a sacrifice to impotence or to tyranny. In
the former case their power escapes from them; it is wrested from their
grasp in the latter. Many observers, who have witnessed the anarchy of
democratic States, have imagined that the government of those States was naturally weak and impotent. The truth is, that when once hostilities are begun between parties, the government loses its control over society. But I do not think that a democratic power is naturally without force or without resources: say, rather, that it is almost always by the abuse of its force and the misemployment of its resources that a democratic government fails. Anarchy is almost always produced by its tyranny or its mistakes, but not by its want of strength...

...If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation, and oblige them to have recourse to physical force. Anarchy will then be the result, but it will have been brought about by despotism...

I need to re-read Tocqueville again to find the more specific elements, but one of the things he warned against was how a political figure would rise up with a mandate from that "tyranny of the majority" to enact policies that punish the minorities. Which is something that came about during the era of Andrew Jackson, someone who did rise up on an anti-elite agenda of demolishing a lot of federalized institutions such as the national bank. And someone with open hostility towards The Other in the form of Native American tribes and foreign influences.

There's been other moments when Populism arose - notably in the 1890s in response to the greed of the Gilded Age - and when Nativism unleashed our darkest demons - the Jim Crow era of lynchings, the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor - all of which came after Tocqueville but which he predicted - as both eras were driven by majority fears of The Other - with unerring accuracy.

A lot of that Populism echoes today in the platform and campaign style not just of Trump but with nearly every Republican candidate. Even Jeb (?) with his attempts and re-marketing himself as a down-to-earth fixer is playing to a Populist message (which honestly a rich elitist like Jeb can never sell).  It's just that Trump - with his open calls against Mexican immigrants, his blatant Islamophobia based more on paranoia than historical fact, and his uncompromising bullying of others - is the most overt about it.

And he's the one garnering most of the early polling support.

This is happening now. This isn't fiction, and this isn't a historic review. This is all in real time on our news channels and web sites. And it ought to wake everyone up to the horror that our worst impulses - our nation's terrifying history of racial animus against Blacks, Natives, women, Hispanics, Asians and now Middle Easterners - are being inflamed by a Populist movement spiraling out of control.

This will not end well, unless more of us turn to the better angels of our nature and not our base instincts.