If it walks like a duck…

After watching the inauguration of Donald Trump, I am eerily reminded of the famous story from the Titanic when the band kept playing as the ship sank.

There is a certain moral responsibility to scream fire when a blaze has emerged, or in the case of the dance band, to keep playing its tune to the end.

There has been serious obfuscation of two overt Roman Salutes (also known as the Nazi Salutes) by Elon Musk. The salute was created in Fascist Italy and was adopted by the German Nazi Party as well. The handwringing about this is unacceptable. At this stage, he has talked like a duck, and now he walks like a duck. It’s become undeniable.

I am not one to thrust the sins of the family upon its children. But condemning those sins is still necessary. The grandfather of Elon Musk was a prominent Canadian fascist and anti-semite who left Canada to live in South Africa as a major supporter of Apartheid.

Musk repeatedly avoids discussing the politics of his grandfather and how it affects his family by calling his history “quirky.” The bar is set quite low, to disavow a family member you disagree with, but there remains a bar to be met. That remains the condemnation of their views.

I retain a similar opinion for Chrystia Freeland. She is by no means a Nazi supporter or an ideological fascist because her grandfather was one, but it remains unacceptable that she has repeatedly failed to publicly disavow his views. But unlike Musk, Freeland isn’t parroting fascist talking points like eugenics or the “great replacement theory.” Musk has even gone so far as to argue the eugenicist position that smart people create smart children.

In stark contrast to Freeland, Musk’s politics very clearly echo that of his grandfather, and is now clearly affiliated with the incoming US administration.

He has also cozied up to prominent neo-fascist movements such as the German neo-fascist AFD in recent months and has on multiple occasions echoed support for Tommy Robinson, a well-known British fascist, or Italian Prime Minister and Mussolini sympathizer Giorgia Meloni.

Musk has re-activated the X (Twitter) accounts of prominent fascists and has, in the past, personally intervened to protect people who have shared child sexual abuse material on the platform.

But why this is happening is EQUALLY important. Our political leaders must take notice and change course, or we too will hit the iceberg.

Musk’s sentiments are concerning and greatly amplified by his wealth, power and reach. Western societies are uniquely ripe for fascism.

Academic scholarship is deeply divided on the “definition of fascism”, however, a variety of scholars have narrowed in on a couple key pre-conditions that help make fascist thinking acceptable to average voters. Notably, they include trauma, socioeconomic conditions, and environmental stressors such as community resistance to fascism.

The first key precondition I list is economic anxiety. This is a very nebulous term, but it can be best summarized as the average person struggling to make ends meet. Workers are grappling with extreme inflation, high costs of living, housing and declining working conditions. Economic anxiety can also be reflective of what is felt in the middle class as well; they might not be under the same risk of poverty but can still observably notice rising costs of living.

The second precondition, according to psychologist and Holocaust survivor Gabor Maté, relates to how psychological trauma on a societal level is a prerequisite for fascist tendencies in the mind. If you are so anxious about getting abused, you will be more willing to permit abuse to others to protect yourself. We all just experienced the collective trauma of a global pandemic, whether we like to admit it or not.

The last precondition I narrow in on is political normalization. This is discussed by Holocaust survivor and intellectual Hannah Arendt. Arendt heavily discusses how the normalization of fascism helps convince the general public not to outright reject such types of politics. It is the “banality of evil,” as she coins, or a certain boringness and unoriginality, that hides the venomous nature of what is being advocated for. Like a frog in slowly boiling water, we gently get used to the fascism around us. We eventually stop questioning why we see our neighbours being rounded up. Seeing one of the largest social media platforms become headed by a prominent fascist and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes being allowed on the platform normalizes such politics. 

The fact that we are even debating whether someone with fascistic tendencies did a fascist salute is emblematic of that normalization.

Another titan of industry, Henry Ford, was also one of the most important propagators of fascism. Before the Second World War, he owned a widely distributed newspaper that propagated anti-semitic conspiracies, eugenics, and ran defense for fascism. He was such a prolific fascist, that Nazi party officials cited him as inspiration and shared what he published with the German Republic. Big business as well has never been anti-fascist or anti-authoritarian, they see authoritarianism as the state using its violence to enforce a stable economy. It happened with Coca-Cola when their German subsidiary refused to stop production during the second world war (and created Fanta) or when Ford’s factories continued to operate in Germany and successfully sued the US government for damages to their German factories.

How does this affect us?

It’s easy to pretend this will not bother us in Canada, and more precisely in New Brunswick, however we have slowly witnessed the Americanization of the Federal Conservative Party.

The Conservatives have adopted language decrying “woke” systems and attacked vulnerable groups like the LGBTQ+ community while issuing vague appeals to the working class. With the corruption of one party, its sister parties will fall prey to the same rhetoric and talking points. We already began to witness the beginning of this process when the provincial Progressive Conservative party attacked transgender children, promised to reduce sales tax, and solicited support from extremist groups like The Campaign Life Coalition. Musk’s endorsement of Pierre Poilievre is only another deepening sign of this extremist backslide by conservative organizations across the country.

Despite Susan Holt’s victory, the Progressive Conservative party’s new approach to solicit the support of some of the most radical groups in the country is a deep warning of its slide into extremist politics, one that is shared by other provincial conservative parties and its federal equivalent.

If Holt’s government does not take serious steps to alleviate the core systemic failures of our system here in New Brunswick, I deeply fear that such politics espoused by the PC party and the likes of Blaine Higgs will increasingly be seen as viable by the public as desperation for serious change grows.

Fascism grows within that vacuum, where radical change becomes necessary, but political establishment figures refuse to acknowledge the problem.

Alex Gagne is a progressive organizer of over ten years, a former student activist, and committed anti-fascist. A liberal arts graduate from St. Thomas University, Alex studied political science.