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.
Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: William F. Hertha, under CC 4.0 License.
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