Yates Sexton: To Defend Western Civilization: The Right's Call To Arms is a Precursor to Oppression

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Jared Yates Sexton
@JYSexton
All right.

We need to talk about the Right, their embrace of authoritarianism, how the call to "defend Western Civilization" is cover for destroying democracy and violent oppression, and how the GOP and Fox News prepared their base for years.

1/

To Defend Western Civilization: The Right's Call To Arms is a Precursor to Oppression
It had to be Hungary. For years the Right had discussed its developments in shielded environments. Think-tanks. Any of Steve Bannon’s summits where globalism, esoteric Traditionalism, and neo-fasci...
jaredyatessexton.substack.com
7:35 AM · Aug 12, 2021

https://jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/to-protect-western-civilization-the

It had to be Hungary.

For years the Right had discussed its developments in shielded environments. Think-tanks. Any of Steve Bannon’s summits where globalism, esoteric Traditionalism, and neo-fascistic concepts of volk and the breaking of cycles are blended together in a postmodern, dangerous stew. In the depths of online groups that lionized authoritarian violence as the only means forward.

As I documented in a recent article for The Daily Beast, it wasn’t a coincidence that the presidency of Donald Trump, with its appeals to “culture” and dependence on the “crisis at the border” were echoes of the playbook that had effectively drug Hungary years and years back and into the murky waters of illiberal democracy.

The rise of Viktor Orbán and his triumph over the political structure in Hungary was a roadmap of how a Right Wing movement could use the structures of government to counteract pluralism and democracy in the age of cratering globalism.

But to what end? If the lionization of Orbán and the week-long boot-licking by Tucker Carlson was effective in introducing Hungary and its state of illiberal democracy to Fox News viewers, what was the purpose? What might that actually achieve anyway?

*snip*