Fascism is in the air, on television and print. We read about American progressive celebrities and academics fleeing to other countries like the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada to exercise their notion of a free society. In her campaign, after all, Kamala Harris called Donald Trump a "president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist."
To be sure, Trump's hysterical antics remind one of Benito Mussolini, but the long-term undermining of such things as free speech comes not primarily from MAGA land but in the favoured precincts of the progressives. The defenders of democracy, like Anne Applebaum, a brilliant analyst of Communist repression, and noted fascism scholar Timothy Snyder, now at the University of Toronto, focus their current angst almost exclusively on Trump, the nationalist and religious right.
What they ignore is the more fashionable fascism of the respectable establishments in both Europe and North America. This left-of-center authoritarianism is particularly evident in Europe, where established "moderate" and left parties in places like Germany, Romania and France have worked to keep populist candidates off the battlefield. In the U.S., progressives even tried to prevent Trump from running, although unsuccessfully.
In Keir Starmer's Britain, you can go to jail for violating speech codes and also experience "two-tier" law enforcement, one for native Brits and another for newcomers, including the undocumented. And just wait till they pass their definition of "Islamophobia" which no doubt concerns them far more than antisemitism, which has been growing at a much faster pace.
Then there's Ireland, where anti-Israel sentiments are strong, and where officials have pushed for censorship of online speech, most of it taking place on U.S. platforms. This drew opposition from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
But perhaps nowhere is the hypocrisy greater than in Canada. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada attempted to pass an online harms bill widely seen as draconian. Mercifully, it has not yet been passed. Trudeau, particularly during COVID, repressed basic rights, and during the truckers' protests froze the fundraising efforts of dissidents. In a country that seems unwilling to arrest antisemites and rampaging Islamists, opposing government policy by middle-class Canadians risks jail time.
As in much of the western world, censorship and what one Wilfrid Laurier University president once called "better speech" finds its spiritual home in academia, once a bastion of unfettered discussion. California, perhaps rehearsing for a future role as China's 23rd province, is also now considering draconian legislation which would monitor and control speech on the platforms.
The roots of this new "woke" fascism have their origins not in the supposedly repressive Trump years but during the Obama-Biden era. Jacob Siegel, author of the upcoming book The Information State, pointed out the cozy collaboration between tech companies and the federal bureaucracy, including the Department of Defense, that sought to regulate and surveil internet communications.
Over the past two decades, the Obama-Biden team has seized on the platforms, many run by their political allies, as a means to control debate and limit discussion. "They want a censorship regime characteristic of a corporate state," Siegel told me last week. "Everything has to be approved by the state, and that is now the progressive handbook."
In the runup to the 2020 election, for example, the Democrats brazenly colluded with the intelligence community to shield then-candidate Joe Biden from association with the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, labelling reports of the computer's contents falsely as "Russian disinformation." The platforms even repressed a story by the New York Post, America's oldest newspaper, while working to demonetize fairly obscure, and hardly neo-Nazi, right-wing sites like The Daily Skeptic.
This alliance between government, the giant platforms and a host of non-profit players represents, as Siegel suggests, a greater long-term threat to personal freedom and democracy than Trump's chaotic and sometimes disturbing assaults on constitutional norms. To be sure, Trump certainly appeals to common fascist themes -- nationalism, xenophobia, cultural conservativism -- but on the crucial issue of speech, he represents something of a small step against it.
Similarly, all the rising right-wing parties -- in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, France and the U.K. -- are now less fascist, at least on speech issues, than the seemingly respectable "democratic" forces that oppose them. "We live in a crazy world," former U.S. Ambassador to Italy Ron Spogli joked a few months back, "where only the fascists believe in free speech."
To be sure, right-wingers can be repressive, as we see in Viktor Orbán's illiberal Hungary. But there's a critical difference. Traditional conservatives, having lost out for much of the last half-century, seek to salvage the tattered remainders of family, religion and the nation-state, all in some form of decline. When in power, they sometimes overreach on such things as book bans in schools and calls to bring religion back into public education.
For their part, the progressives adopt a more radical, transformative agenda, seeking to upend society and impose radical racial, gender and environmental agendas. Conservatives once favoured loyalty oaths but today it's progressives who demand conformity on a host of issues, including climate and racial preferences. The right's antics are disturbing, but those of the progressives more closely emulate fascist practices, reaching into everyday life to shape the mentality of the masses.
The progressive way of repression benefits from control over the universities, the mainstream media, and the art and cultural worlds: those institutions that historically shape perceptions of reality. Once Trump is gone, he will leave a convenient blueprint for repressing opponents; once the right self-destructs, the progressives will feel empowered to wage an all-out war on their hated opponents.
In contrast to the progressives, MAGA lacks ideological rigour or political organization, reflecting the incoherence of its leader. The Art of the Deal is far from being Mein Kampf. The Trumpistas remain a fundamentally unstable klatch of reactionaries, political opportunists, populists and, of course, shameless grifters. Unlike the Italian fascists and Nazis, they have minimal support in the judiciary and among the professional elites, who now overwhelmingly favour the progressives.
Trump's ill-considered statements, over-the-top prosecutions and constant purges of his own people may prove useful to progressives when they return to power. His missteps and exaggerations could well provide the rationale for a future progressive consolidation of power.
If they regain power, expect, among other things, a greater emphasis on race consciousness, an odd recasting of Nazi ideology, and an ever more passionate defence of gender politics. They would likely impose a strict climate regime allowing the state to monitor and control what happens inside your house, how much energy and water you consume and even what kind of neighbourhood or housing you can live in. The climate catastrophists' agenda, as establishmentarian mouthpiece Foreign Policy has noted, is clearly incompatible with any traditional sense of democratic and property rights.
Once the Trumpian stain is removed, maybe then the academics and celebrities hiding in other countries can bring back with them the wonderful repressive tools being deployed in Ottawa, London and Brussels -- instruments for a fashionable fascism to be employed when the current populist revolt runs out of steam.