Trump and Kaczyński
The impossible has happened: an issue has emerged on which nearly the entire American political spectrum can agree. During a time when it seems that the left and the right in the US live in completely different realities, so that arguments are usually about disputed facts as much as about differing values or ideals, a point of consensus has been found. In the wake of the evisceration of the constitutional tribunal and the transformation of the public media into a government propaganda agency, the PiS government has been denounced by both The Nation and The Wall Street Journal (and everyone in between). The justifications for these condemnations differ, but both clearly see that the Polish government is dismantling democracy and undermining a quarter century of Polish accomplishments. To be sure, if we read the comments section to the Wall Street Journal article we are reminded that there are American parallels to Kaczyński, but the comparison is illuminating. Donald Trump has risen to fame by tapping into the same sort of constituency that votes for PiS, but the nature of the US electoral system makes his path to power extraordinarily difficult. Though popular within the Republican base, Trump evokes loathing in everyone else, and is mistrusted by about the same number of people as mistrust Kaczyński. It would require an extremely convoluted and unlikely series of events to bring Trump to the White House: the Democrats would have to nominate someone as far to the left as Trump is to the right (and no, even Bernie Sanders isn’t far enough out there–not by a long shot), and a third-party candidate would have to siphon votes from mainstream Democrats and mainstream Republicans alike. Then a fragmented electoral college would send the election to the House of Representatives, and the Republic establishment would have to decide to put Trump in office. It is true that both Hitler and Mussolini rose to power because of key enabling decisions by the center-right, so I wouldn’t rule out that nightmare scenario for the US either. But it is, to say the least, unlikely. The Polish political system, in contrast, is structured in a way that allowed a party with 38% of the votes to take just over half the delegates in the Sejm. Even that result was only possible because of the self-induced implosion of SLD, and even that wouldn’t have happened had SLD constituted itself as a party (with a 5% electoral minimum) instead of a coalition (with 8%). Anyway, the bottom line is that the social phenomenon driving the movements behind Trump and Kaczyński are comparable, but for the time being, we can take some comfort in the fact that (at least for now) even the mainstream right in the US finds this horrifying.