Jonathan Chait writes:

A recent international YouGov/Global Progress survey, which came to my attention via the Liberal Patriot, framed the political choice facing the public in an interesting way. It asked which position comes closest to the poll taker’s own belief: “We need to be vigilant against groups trying to impose new cultural values and views about religion, gender, immigration, or race that don’t reflect our society’s traditional values” or “We need to be vigilant against groups that undermine democracy by attacking judges, questioning election results, and promoting societal unrest based on conspiracy theories, racism, and anti-scientific claims about vaccines and climate change.”

The question, in other words, is whether threats from the social and cultural left are more serious than threats from the conspiratorial and illiberal right. What is perhaps even more revealing was the split among voters in different right-of-center parties. Supporters of the British Conservative party were split almost evenly between fearing cultural change and fearing right-wing extremism. Supporters of the Christian Democratic parties in Germany deemed the far right a much larger threat. But Trump voters, on the other hand, took a dramatically more conservative stance, deeming the cultural left a bigger threat than the far right by overwhelming margins.

Indeed, if you want a comparison to the Republican perspective, you can only find it in a far-right party like Germany’s AfD, an extremist faction that has combined attacks on immigration with unsettling revisionism around the condemnation of the Third Reich that has been a foundation of Germany’s postwar political consensus.

The Republican party is an extremist outlier in comparison with major conservative parties in other democracies. That radicalism has been most evident in the GOP’s unique anti-statism: No other mainstream party categorically opposes new taxes under any circumstances, universal health insurance, or government action to limit greenhouse gas pollution. This poll illustrates a dimension that has come to the fore in the Trump era: a fixation with politics as a venue for existential cultural conflict. [Continue reading…]