https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-17-2023
"It seems that former president Donald Trump is aligning his supporters with a
global far-right movement to destroy democracy.
On Saturday, in Durham, New Hampshire, Trump echoed Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s
attacks on immigrants, saying they are “poisoning the blood of our
country”—although two of his three wives were immigrants—and quoted Russian
president Vladimir Putin’s attacks on American democracy. Trump went on to
praise North Korean autocratic leader Kim Jong Un and align himself with
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the darling of the American right wing,
who has destroyed Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship.
Trump called Orbán “the man who can save the Western world.”*
Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a professor of religion and anthropology at
Northeastern University, explained in
The Conversation what Trump is talking
about. Autocrats like Orbán and Putin—and budding autocrats like Trump—are
building a global movement by fighting back against the expansion of rights to
women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people.
Russian leaders have been cracking down on LGBTQ+ rights for a decade with the
help of the Russian Orthodox Church, claiming that they are protecting
“traditional values.” This vision of heteronormativity rewrites the real
history of human sexuality, but it is powerful in this moment. Orbán insists
that immigrants ruin the purity of a country, and has undermined women’s
rights.
Riccardi-Swartz explains that this rhetoric appeals to those in far-right
movements around the world. In the United States, “family values” became tied
to patriotism after World War II, when Chinese and Soviet communists appeared
to be erasing traditional gender roles. Those people defined as
anti-family—LGBTQ+ people and women who challenged patriarchy—seemed to be
undermining society. Now, as dictators like Putin and Orbán promise to take
away LGBTQ+ rights, hurt immigrants, and return power to white men, they seem
to many to be protecting traditional society.
In the United States, that undercurrent has created a movement of people who
are willing to overthrow democracy if it means reinforcing their traditional
vision. Christian nationalists believe that the secular values of democracy are
destroying Christianity and traditional values. They want to get rid of LGBTQ+
rights, feminism, immigration, and the public schools they believe teach such
values. And if that means handing power to a dictator who promises to restore
their vision of a traditional society, they’re in.
It is an astonishing rejection of everything the United States has always stood
for."
*EDIT AT 9:30 PM ON DECEMBER 18, 2023. A READER POINTS OUT THAT ORBAN SAID
TRUMP WAS THE MAN WHO CAN SAVE THE WESTERN WORLD, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
