Great article, highly recommended reading. Bold in excerpts mine.
As governments across Europe and the United States have been taken over by far-right parties, it becomes increasingly clear that centrist and progressive politics have failed to address the expanding inequality of the last four decades. This inequality has been effectively documented by scholars, including Thomas Piketty and Mark Blyth.
Here in Canada, the governing Liberals and New Democratic Party continue to tinker around the edges of inequality. This was alluded to by Freeland in her resignation letter. All the while, the Liberal brass fail to recognize what voters really need are new financial approaches that will stem the tide of the movement of wealth upward.
During the last decade, however, centrists and progressives alike continually fail to grasp that many voters have reached the point of ‘anything must be better than this.’
With all due respect to Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, they have been fiddling while Rome burns. Canada is home to some of the worst corporate concentration in the world in the food sector. Little to nothing has been done to address this.
Housing costs have become untenable due to poorly planned immigration policies, designed to give the corporate world access to a cheap army of reserve labour. Voters of all stripes and demographics feel this in their pocketbooks and when they cannot sleep at night.
The far-right is happily engaging in populism. The closest thing we’ve seen to a real left-wing economic populism on the North American continent has been Bernie Sanders. Notably, the Vermont Senator’s candidacy was stamped out by the Democratic Party establishment in the United States.
In 2024, American Democrats actually ran on being the party of democracy while failing to hold a real presidential primary. Kamala Harris then proceeded to seek Republican endorsements, rather than address the concerns of the Democrats’ historical working-class base.
It is no longer sufficient to blame these problems on global conditions. Frankly, to do so looks weak at a time when voters are looking for bold moves. Getting there will require politicians who are willing to draw their power from working- and middle-class voters, rather than corporate donors. It is no longer enough for Liberal politicians to just say they are for Canada’s middle class and those working hard to join it.
Expecting fascism to solve inequality is like expecting a boulder to help you swim. I’m curious how many people actually just want society to essentially collapse because they feel left out. That’s where we’re kinda headed.
Agreed. And I think not seeing any major political party earnestly working for everyday people, versus corporate overlords, is a key ingredient to that hopelessness, carelessness, and nihilism/accelerationism
The NDP is pretty earnest, they’re just not very effective.
I’m convinced that a large portion of them actively want the world to burn because they don’t care and want to sit on the sidelines watching reality TV.
Really wish that in order to vote you need to log a certain number of volunteer hours per year to thin out the selfish pricks.
People who vote for fascists don’t believe it will solve inequality. They believe it will make them the benefactors of inequality. They don’t want to get rid of societal hierarchy, but to be placed closer to the top.
Nobody expects the far-right to solve inequality.
When you think about it, Conservative governments are about what can be TAKEN from people, not what can be GIVEN to them.
The right to marriage equality, a woman’s choice to dictate her own reproductive future, disability rights, environmental protection, transportation accessibility, etc.
None of those issues are championed by the far-right, but they certainly are fought to be restricted or taken away.
We are so, so fucked if both Canada and the US have far-right governments in power for the foreseeable future. We will not recover from it.