As the country continue to put together a full picture of the events of January 6, and grapples with the undeniable existence of far-right groups and ideologies aimed at overthrowing the U.S. government, an additional perspective needs to be added to the mix: the fact that such far-right extremism is growing across much of the western world. Indeed, as this New York Times report makes clear, the assault on the Capitol was viewed with glee and is being studied for lessons by various European extremists. German neo-Nazis and other extremists cheered on their American counterparts from afar; and January 6 has them dreaming of a violent future, seeing the assault “as a teaching moment — about how to move forward and pursue their goal of overturning democratic governments in more concerted and concrete ways.”
The United States was not the first country to have its seat of government assaulted by far-right extremists in recent years; last August, far-right protestors tried to break into the German parliament building, the Reichstag. As Cas Mudde writes at The Guardian, “In the past decades rightwing politicians and pundits have opportunistically pandered to the far-right electorate by defining them as ‘the real people’ and declaring this loud minority to be an allegedly victimized silent majority.” As in the United States, this willingness by major political parties to rhetorically split nations into the authentic populace and a grab bag of moochers, liberals, and immigrants has provided plentiful fuel to movements that take such de-humanizing, zero-sum thinking to its eliminationist conclusions.
Americans should be aware of this international perspective as an urgent reminder that how the United States handles this crisis will very likely influence the fates of democracies around the world. When neo-Nazis storm the American Capitol, German neo-Nazis celebrate, and are energized to pursue their depraved goals of overthrowing their own democracy.
But understanding the international phenomenon of right-wing extremism also provides corroborating evidence that the Republicans’ far-right turn is actively encouraging violent white nationalist and other forms of far-right extremism in the United States. And this, in turn, offers a damning perspective on the GOP’s general refusal to come to grips with the seriousness of the Capitol assault. The party rejects any connection between the attack on the Capitol in the name of overturning the election results, and the votes by 140 of its representatives and 8 of its senators later the same day to . . . overturn the election results. In other words, some two-third of Republican representatives voted to sustain a lie that incited the most extreme reaches of the American populace to commit violence in the name of that lie. The GOP has made itself an inciter of armed insurrection aimed at toppling American democracy; that right-wing militants across Europe are celebrating the attacks gives an additional, damning measure of the Republican Party’s descent into authoritarian madness.