How the Republican Party is changing

A new survey plus a new National Security Strategy paint a frightening picture

This is a brief post to bring attention to important new research.

The Manhattan Institute is a conservative think tank which recently conducted a survey looking at ideas and attitudes within the Republican Party. But the central purpose of the survey was to distinguish between long-time Republicans and the many new entrants Donald Trump has attracted to the party — “new” whether because they are younger or because they come from demographics, like blacks or hispanics, which traditionally haven’t supported the GOP — and compare the two groups. The “traditional Republicans” were about 70% of the total, the “new entrants” 30%.

The results were released December 1st. You can read the full report here. I want to highlight some of what I think are key findings.

I find them genuinely shocking and don’t understand why they haven’t received greater attention. This is strong evidence that the Republican Party — which dominates power in the world’s richest and most powerful nation — is rapidly turning into something undeniably dangerous.

In 1991, former Nazi and Klansman David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana as a Republican. He looked like he could win, so President George H. W. Bush fiercely denounced Duke as a racist and a “charlatan.” Duke lost.

Would today’s GOP do the same?

That question was raised when Tucker Carlson, the most influential conservative commentator in America, conducted a long, credulous, tell-me-more interview of Nick Fuentes, who once summed up his own views thusly: “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise.” Fuentes is the sort of man who, in 1988, would have called David Duke a “cuck” for pretending to disavow racism and anti-Semitism. Many conservatives denounced Carlson for treating Fuentes as a respectable figure and giving him invaluable publicity. But many others, notably the enormously influential head of the Heritage Institute, refused to do so, on the grounds that there are “no enemies to the right.”

So which side better represents today’s GOP?

From the Manhattan Institute survey:

The Institute tries valiantly to portray this as a clear rejection of racists and anti-Semites.

A majority of the Current GOP rejects openly racist or openly antisemitic individuals as part of their political coalition. For racism, the margin is 52%–37%: 36% say such individuals are not welcome at all, and another 16% say they may be voters but should not hold positions of leadership. Views are even stronger regarding antisemitism, with the Current GOP rejecting openly antisemitic individuals by nearly 2 to 1 (60%–31%), including almost half (48%) who say they should not be welcomed in the coalition under any circumstances.

“Even stronger”? The Institute includes those who say “we can try to get their votes if it is useful, but they should not be in positions of power or leadership” among those emphatically rejecting racists and anti-Semites. That’s silly. Anyone willing to shrug and say, “sure, let’s get the David Duke vote” to a survey-taker is, at best, remarkably comfortable rubbing shoulders with racism and anti-Semitism.

It makes much more sense to put category one (“I am a racist/anti-Semite”) together with category two (“I don’t care”) and category three (“let’s get those votes.”) Do that and you see that a little more than half of the Republican Party is at least somewhat comfortable with racists and 43% at least somewhat comfortable with anti-Semites.

That’s frightening. But those are the results for Republicans as a whole. What happens when you compare traditional Republicans with newcomers?

Age divides are substantial. Among the Current GOP under 50, a notable minority report that they themselves openly express racist (31%) or antisemitic (25%) views. Among those over 50 in the Current GOP, these figures drop to just 4% for each.

New Entrant Republicans are far more likely to fall into the “tolerator” category. One in three New Entrants (32%) say they openly express racist views, compared with just 8% of Core Republicans. These tolerators are also significantly more likely to believe multiple conspiracy theories and to support political violence. Consistent with their higher likelihood of falling into the Anti-Jewish Republican category, roughly one in three self-identify as either racist or antisemitic.

One-third of new Republicans say, “I’m with David Duke.”

Nick Fuentes, American Nazi.

But along with racism and anti-Semitism, the most troubling element in the witches brew of modern Republican politics is conspiracism.

Have a look at the following chart from the survey.

I don’t know why the COVID “lab leak” question is there. Yes, there were progressives who called it a “conspiracy theory” in the feverish depths of the pandemic but I think it’s now established among reasonable observers that it is at least a matter of legitimate discussion. So let’s set that aside.

Look at the rest.

All the results are awful. A substantial majority believes the 2020 was stolen, despite Donald Trump’s countless failed efforts to prove anything like that in courts of law. Forty-one percent think 9/11 “was an inside job.” A third think vaccines cause autism. More than a third think the moon landing was faked!

Worst of all, by far, 37% reject historians’ account of the Holocaust.

But break those results down and the same unsettling pattern emerges.

A stark divide emerges between newer and long-standing Republicans: 34% of New Entrant Republican voters believe most or all of the theories, compared with 11% of Core Republicans.

Nearly four in ten in the Current GOP (37%) believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe. Younger men are especially likely to hold this view (54% of men under 50 vs. 39% of women under 50). Among men over 50, 41% agree, compared with 18% of women over 50. Racial divides are particularly striking: 77% of Hispanic GOP voters; 30% of white GOP voters; 66% of black GOP voters.

More than half of men under 50 in the Republican Party are Holocaust deniers. Let that sink in.

The obvious next issue when confronted with such extremism is the threat of violence.

The Manhattan Institute asked, in American politics, is “the use of political violence sometimes justified?” The top line number is nicely bipartisan. Which is to say, it is equally unsettling: 30% of both Republicans and Democrats say yes.

But among “new entrant” Republicans? That number is 54%. Among new Republicans who embrace conspiracies, it is 70%.

The trend line couldn’t be clearer: Donald Trump’s Republican Party is rapidly becoming the home of racists, anti-Semites, and conspiracists flirting with political violence.

To be clear, reasons for sane people to worry can be found across the political spectrum. One poll, for example, found 41% of young people thought the cold-blooded murder of a healthcare executive was justified.

But the GOP isn’t just any organization. What sets these results apart from anything else is power.

The Republican Party controls all the branches of the federal government and the Trump administration is busily re-making American institutions in its own image. So which GOP is in charge? The old GOP? Or the growing fascist wing?

The answer will vary from place to place, issue to issue. But it is absolutely clear that the fascists are numerous and influential.

Just this week, the United States issued a new National Security Strategy that stunned European leaders by framing Europe and the European Union as a threat to the United States which the American government would aggressively act against. How so?

The ideology expressed by the NSS is, if nothing else, admirably clear: Thanks to immigration, European countries will soon be “majority non-European,” the US government declared. Although the NSS talks about nations and national identities, note that the US government’s concern isn’t, say, Romanians living in the Netherlands. No, it’s “non-Europeans.” Which is to say non-whites.

I’m sure David Duke agrees completely.

And what happens if a majority of people living in a European country are not white? That would mean “civilizational erasure.” It doesn’t matter if those people integrate perfectly. It doesn’t matter if they embrace and embody the culture of the country. Once you get too many people with the wrong melanin levels, poof! Your civilization vanishes.

To forestall this calamity, the US government says it will support “patriotic” parties in Europe — which is to say, far-right, anti-EU parties. It is effectively an open declaration that the United States intends to subvert the European Union and fracture Europe.

Until a few years ago, all this sort of talk was routinely heard in neo-fascist circles — David Duke’s hangouts — where books like Jean Raspail’s 1972 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints are canonical. Anywhere else, it was the barking of the lunatic fringe.

In 2025, it became the official policy of the government of the United States of America.

That much is new. But the ideology itself? It is not remotely new.

Decades ago, I completed a masters degree in modern European history, with a focus on fascism. At the time, fascism was history. My degree was not supposed to have immediate political relevance. It does now.

Anyone even slightly familiar with the original fascism of the first half of the twentieth century knows that racism and “cultural despair” — a sense that Western civilization was in decline and in danger of extinction — was the soil from which fascism sprang. They also know that when the fascists sent their armies rampaging across Europe, they did not do so in the name of mere conquest. No, the fascists said they were saving Western civilization. When Nazi Germany and its puppet governments sought volunteers for the war in the east, they repeated that theme constantly. It was a grand “crusade.” For Europe’s freedom. For Western civilization.

Of course it was all a lie.

“Western civilization” is a diffuse term but to the extent it can be pinned down to certain principles worth saving, Western civilization stands for reason, science, the rule of law, pluralism, and liberal democracy. Fascism crushes them all.

The fascists weren’t saving Western civilization. They were stamping it out.

And that hasn’t changed one damned bit.