Thursday, Nov. 10, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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It wasn’t so long ago that the U.S. election process was the inspiration for aspiring democracies.
These days, U.S. elections still provide an example worldwide — for all the wrong reasons. Far-right parties in other democracies have adopted a MAGA pattern of election denial and/or antidemocratic behavior. The malevolent impact can be observed in recent elections from Israel to Brazil.
Yet large segments of the Republican Party appear even more willing than their foreign imitators to tolerate election violence or reject the results unless they are named the winners.
“The 2020 election had a huge impact on the world’s view of the U.S. democratic model,” said Steven Levitsky, coauthor of the excellent and sadly predictive 2018 book, “How Democracies Die.” “Donald Trump made election denial legitimate. His bad behavior was a model.”
The former U.S. president set a stunning precedent for established democracies by calling on his followers to march to the U.S. Capitol and undo the results of a free and fair election by violence.
Nothing like this had ever happened in post-World War II Europe, where countries have traditionally looked to the United States for leadership (although Hungary, whose leader Viktor Orbán is a GOP favorite, has shrunk democratic freedoms). This is the stuff one expects from weak democracies that are susceptible to coups.
America now inspires the world for the wrong reasons: nationalism, conspiracy theories and attacks on the press.
“When a political party stops accepting the results of elections, it is a flashing red light,” warned Levitsky. “When you see political violence tolerated, sometimes condoned, this is what happened (in past decades) in Latin America.”
That’s why, on Oct. 30, when Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was narrowly defeated by leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, observers expected the populist leader to reject the result and call in the army. After all, Trump had referred to the far-right Brazilian as “the Donald Trump of South America.” The conspiracy-mongering Bolsonaro, who labels his opponents criminals and communists, had been insisting for months that the election would be rigged.
Yet something very different happened. Brazil’s top legislative officials, Supreme Court justices and the heads of the electoral agency announced the winner together on television. The House speaker, the president’s top ally, announced that the people had spoken and other right-wing politicians followed suit. The business community backed them.
Although Bolsonaro did not concede and took two days to break his silence, he then vowed to respect the constitution. When thousands of bolsonaristas demonstrated outside army barracks and diehard supporters staged highway blockades, their idol called on them to stand down.
Although no one can be certain how Bolsonaro will behave in the future, his performance was totally different than that of his former role model in the White House. Brazil’s political circuit breakers held.
The Trumpist denigration of free elections, however, has degraded the image of democracy worldwide.
When one U.S. political party will only accept election results if it wins, the foundation of democracy is broken. Trumpism has legitimized the idea — in the United States, in some newer democracies, and in Russian and Chinese propaganda — that democratic elections are a fraud.
Equally insidious, the MAGA model has normalized marginal candidates and election violence that would have been shocking just a few years ago. Other democracies are taking notice.
Of course, this is not just because America is doing it, but because there is a rising illiberal trend across the West. The recent victory of a neo-fascist party in Italy, a first since the days of Benito Mussolini, was part of that trend. But the new Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni seems committed so far to operating by democratic rules.
However, when one U.S. political party throws up far-right election deniers, violence promoters, white nationalists, quack doctors, wild conspiracy theorists and promoters of antisemitism as candidates for election officials, Congress, governor and president, the world certainly takes notice.
What was once unthinkable in a democracy becomes the new norm and is copied elsewhere.
“Similar circles feed off each other,” Levitsky said. “No question, there is a growing illiberal nationalist right in many parts of the world, including India and Israel.”
Indeed, the results of Israel’s elections fit the new pattern. The winner was one of Trump’s closest overseas allies, former Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. He will form a far-right government that includes extreme religious nationalist adherents of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party was banned from Israeli politics in the 1980s as racist and antidemocratic and put on the U.S. terrorist list.
In parallel with the United States, the fringes have become normalized in Israel. It isn’t just America that is in jeopardy. The rest of the world is watching.
If the results of the 2022 midterms are rejected and further normalize chaos, with a promise of worse to come in two years, our elections will offer the example of what other democracies must avoid for survival. Far better to look for election lessons (if only the MAGA crowd would do so) from Brazil.
Trudy Rubin is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
