“If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.” Anyone who read these lines in 1949, when George Orwell published his dystopian novel “1984,” would have had ready reference points for the totalitarian world it describes: Soviet Russia, where Stalin still ruled, or perhaps the recently vanquished fascist regimes in Italy and Germany.
A big driver of that transformation has been the consolidation of Donald Trump’s election fraud “big lie” into Republican Party dogma.
America will never resemble those dictatorships, in part because one-party states are less common today. Russian President Vladimir Putin may erect statues in honor of Stalin, but he keeps a veneer of democracy alive. He holds elections, which he games to get the results he needs (for example, by jailing Alexei Navalny and other competitors), and he allows other parties to exist as long as they don’t challenge his kleptocratic policies.
Yet Americans are witnessing, in real time, the transformation of the GOP into an authoritarian party. A big driver of that transformation has been the consolidation of Donald Trump’s election fraud “big lie” into Republican Party dogma — a process of collective corruption similar to the one Orwell describes.
The Jan. 6 coup attempt, which this falsehood justified, accelerated the party’s descent. A year later, with the House investigation of the Capitol riot proceeding, a new wave of extremist party loyalists — at the federal, state and even local level — want to help ensure Trumpism’s success in the midterms and beyond.
Four years of being governed by Trump, a skilled propagandist whose portfolio of criminal allegations includes fraud, tax evasion, inciting an insurrection, money laundering and sexual assault (he denies them all, of course), has already highlighted the true believers at top levels.
Leaders who come into office with a criminal record, like Mussolini, or just under investigation, like Trump, know that making the party a refuge for those with flexible moral scruples hastens the acceptance of dogma and can help spread corrupt behavior.
The devolution of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., now House minority leader, is typical. There’s no trace today of the McCarthy (then House majority leader) who worried in a June 2016 conversation with then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that Trump was on Putin’s payroll. In his place is a party apparatchik and keeper of the personality cult flame who has voted in Congress 97.3 percent of the time in accordance with Trump’s wishes.
But the GOP needs grass-roots support as well. According to a tally compiled by HuffPost, 57 local and state GOP officials attended the rally that preceded the assault on the Capitol. According to CBS News, more than 30 Republicans who were either at rallies outside the Capitol or breached its walls are now running for office, and 11 of them already enjoy Trump’s endorsement. According to a Washington Post analysis, a total of 163 Republicans who publicly espouse the big lie are running for state positions, including 69 candidates for governor in 30 states and 55 candidates for the U.S. Senate. No matter the true number, this group will provide momentum in the quest to turn falsehoods into party truths.
Ryan Kelley, a long-shot candidate running for governor in Michigan, has the proper extremist credentials to thrive in the GOP of today. He’s co-founder of the American Patriot Council militia organization, which came to public attention in 2020 when he and his armed associates breached the Michigan state Capitol, occupying the upper gallery. Kelley’s claim that some people will vote for him because he’s viewed as an “insurrectionist” — he denies entering the Capitol on Jan. 6 but videos show him among the crowd outside — may not be unfounded. The need to police party dogma about Jan. 6 has produced authoritarian spectacles like Tucker Carlson’s recent public humiliation of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on his Fox show. Cruz came on to apologize for calling Jan. 6 a “violent terrorist attack,” a comment that contradicts Republicans’ false narratives of the event as a patriotic act or a “legitimate protest.” The need to police party dogma about Jan. 6 has produced authoritarian spectacles like Tucker Carlson’s recent public humiliation of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Carlson treated Cruz with disdain, interrupting him and refusing to accept his explanations for his transgression. Carlson is known as a producer of disinformation, but here he was acting as an enforcer of the party line. When a political culture is built on lies — a big lie, in particular — questioning party dogma in public is a violation that necessitates equally public punishment, no matter who you are. We don’t need to read Orwell’s fictional work to know it never ends well when lies become party doctrine and violent acts, inspired by those lies, become signs of patriotic fervor. The history now being made in America connects to a century of authoritarianism. And depending on who gets elected this year, we may see even more loyalists become newly emboldened by state-sanctioned power.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian and commentator on authoritarianism and propaganda. She is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright and other fellowships and an adviser to Protect Democracy. She is a regular contributor to MSNBC, CNN and other media outlets. She publishes Lucid, a newsletter about threats to democracy. Her latest book, "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present" (2020), looks at how illiberal leaders use propaganda, corruption, violence and machismo and how they can be defeated. 
