Gaine
AgelessThrival™
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Article from Issue #55 (March 7, 2023)

Fascism Will Destroy Itself, Part 3: The United States and Canada

by Mark Hall

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We've looked at how many different countries have descended into fascism, but now let's look at Canada and the US. Both countries are democracies, but both have begun to crack. It's important to recognize the signs before it gets too late.

The United States

As I mentioned in the first article of this series, the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021 was an unprecedented assault on democracy that shocked the world. Most worryingly, the attack was initiated and encouraged by the sitting US president at the time.

Prior to January 6th, Trump had tried many different ways to force the election in his favor. He was calling foul on the election long before the first vote had even been cast. He was recruiting an "army" of poll watchers in a thinly-veiled attempt at voter intimidation. He was trying everything within his power, using every dirty trick in the book available him to try to twist the election in his favor and discredit the results, and when none of that worked, the capitol riot was his last, most desperate act. And thankfully that also failed, but things could have easily ended up much worse.

However, Trump is not the only one to blame for this situation. The entire US election system has massive flaws which lead to millions of votes being essentially thrown away. The primary issue is the format of the electoral college. This was the reason Trump got into power in the first place in 2016, despite getting almost 3 million less votes than Hilary Clinton. In fact, I was able to find someone who had calculated a mathematical worst-case scenario of votes over here, in which two theoretical candidates run for presidency and one of them wins with just 21.3% of the votes to the loser's 78.7%. That particular situation is almost impossible in practice, but it does outline the basic brokenness of the system.

The electoral college issue is also commonly affected by the process known as gerrymandering, in which the people in power strategically choose the boundaries of electoral districts to game the system and tilt the balance in their favor. This is undemocratic because in a democracy, the voters should choose the government and not the other way around.

And last year, as a lingering result of partisan court-packing by the Trump administration, the supreme court struck down Roe v Wade and instantly restricted abortion rights to women in many different states. It's a broken system when instead of being representatives of the people, the highest level of courts in the country is subject to the partisan lean of whichever government is currently in power at the time that a supreme court judge dies or steps down.

Canada

Canada ranks much higher than the US on many democracy indices. However, there have been some problems recently which show that we must remain vigilant to keep it that way.

In early 2022, the "Freedom Convoy" of truckers occupied Ottawa for 32 days, in protest of Canada's pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates.

I'll say this so my position on the issue is clear: I do not support the Freedom Convoy, and I think their requests were unreasonable in the face of a very real and dangerous pandemic. I also don't think their methods were reasonable. It absolutely needed to be brought under control in some way. But the government's response could be considered a major overreach of power. In order to bring the situation under control, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, which gave them more power to shut down the protests, including freezing the bank accounts of protest leaders.

The matter is still under investigation and the facts are still being sorted out, but this really feels like the Canadian government dipping their toes into authoritarianism. It sets a precedent which lowers the bar for invoking the Emergencies Act. The government was also considering invoking the Emergencies Act in its COVID-19 response earlier, though they ultimately decided not to.

In both Canada and the US, polarization has been steadily on the rise. The middle ground of shared beliefs between conservatives and liberals is eroding, radical notions are becoming more normalized, and the discourse between the two sides is getting less civil as time goes by.

We've seen in other countries just how bad things can get, so we really need to make sure to address problems with democracy before they get worse.