I neither know nor care why George Santos, the newly elected Republican Congressman from Long Island, NY flashed a white supremacist sign while voting for Kevin McCarthy to become Speaker of the House. I care greatly, however, that none of the House Republicans seem to think that because he did they should immediately eject Santos from their caucus. I’m not surprised by their lack of action or even comment, since they all knuckled under to avowed white supremacist, anti-semitic fellow Republicans to eventually make McCarthy Speaker. Representative Matt Gaetz, who spearheaded the effort to block McCarthy and was eventually appeased with concessions, is an adherent and popularizer of the so-called “Great Replacement Theory.” This theory “essentially maintains that elites and Jews are in the midst of a campaign to threaten the status and power of white people and plan to eventually eliminate the white race by drowning them out with immigrants and people of color.” Other Republican holdouts against McCarthy with their own histories of white nationalist racism include Representative Lauren Boebert and Representative Paul Gosar.
The avowed white supremacism and anti-semitism in the Republican Party isn’t restricted to those members of the House Republican Caucus who resisted McCarthy’s bid to become Speaker. One of his most visible supporters was Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a well-known anti-semite and white supremacist. But the fact that Kevin McCarthy and his supporters explicitly caved to a group of Republican members dominated by white nationalists and anti-semites so that McCarthy could become Speaker of the House highlights just how much power these American Nazis have in the lower house of the American legislature.
This Nazi rise to mainstream political power in the national legislature has happened in another Western liberal democracy – Germany in the 1930s. German Nazis were not some sort of extrapolitical, fringe group. They gained power via formal electoral politics, just like Gaetz, Boebert, Greene, and Gosar have in America today. We must not remain blind to the institutionalization of American Nazi power in the U.S. Congress. German Nazis never had a majority in the parliament; however, they had enough members to bring Hitler to power, ending parliamentary democracy in Germany until after the Holocaust and the conclusion of World War II.
[Information about the photo: “The Field of Stelae” by tiexano is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.]