Wingnuts and Fascists

Comparing the crazy right-wingers in Israel with the crazy right-wingers in the US.

from the Israeli News site Haaretz.

In Both Israel and the U.S. Congress, Lunatics Are Taking Over the Asylum: From Itamar Ben-Gvir in Israel to Matt Gaetz in Washington, the virulent antidemocratic rhetoric is identical: anti-elites, anti-education, anti-science, anti-diversity, anti-anything different

On the face of it, it would be a fallacy to even begin the analogy, which is why Israel’s contemporary trajectory is immediately compared to Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Yet the confluence of the two political processes, the forming of Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government and the farcical election of Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, on top of a “Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” insurrection attempt in Brazil, illuminates a very similar antidemocratic, demagogic threat to democracy from the right.

The ingredients are almost identical: delegitimization of government, dismissal of facts or fake facts, denial of election results, xenophobia, caustic anti-elite rhetoric, nationalism and fear.

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Take Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Scott Perry, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the phenom just called up from the GOP’s minor league team on Long Island, George Santos. They’re just six of approximately 53 members of the Republican Party's Freedom Caucus sect that makes up 25 percent of the party in the House. But most of the other 75 percent are Trumpists, of which nearly 140 are election deniers, including incoming committee chairs.

They call Joe Biden and illegitimate president, they call Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a “traitor,” they call Donald Trump their president, they blame Italian satellites and “Jewish laser guns” for America’s problems. And they love guns, God and spewing lies and disinformation. Black people, Hispanics and Jews they love less.

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Politically, the phenomenon is expressed by the disappearance of center-right parties. Devoid of ideas and constituencies, they merge, but in reality they’re incorporated by the hard right – as has happened with the GOP in the United States and Likud in Israel, with a similar process taking place in Italy, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere. But the most striking similarity remains the language, the outrageous lying, the simplemindedness and the reduction of political discourse to incendiary, menacing, antidemocratic populist slogans.

With all due respect for the differences, all have been abundantly expressed in Washington and Jerusalem this week.