Are We Fascist Yet?
Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of
Dictatorship
by Ken McGoogan
Douglas & McIntyre
308 pp.
You are familiar with the meme: “Ever wondered what you would have done during the rise of fascism? You’re doing it right now.”
An ascendant right rejects the very idea, and with prejudice. To them, this is typical of leftist hysteria, always resorting to the most extreme accusations. Racist. Homophobic. Fascist.
From Donald Trump and Elon Musk to Pierre Poilievre and Stephen Harper, the people on the ascendant right at this moment in history do not see themselves as fascists, and they’re getting tired of the comparison. They see themselves as the necessary re-architects of the 21st century.
The old order didn’t work. That is why it is being replaced. So, everything it valued should be called into question, made to answer for itself, and either rejected or re-engineered.
This applies especially to the infrastructure of civic institutions the old order insisted were off-limits. The Bank of Canada. Regulatory agencies. The Supreme Court. The CBC. The Canada Pension Plan. For the ascendant right, it’s the infrastructure they’re after. The more sacred the cow, the sharper the knives.
Does this make them fascist?
Ken McGoogan’s Shadows of Tyranny is a calm work born of panic. Subtitled Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship, it is deeply worried about a political turn the West may be about to take, and it was written before Trump won re-election and Musk endorsed the German AfD. If you’ve ever wondered how you would have behaved in the late 1930s, the last time the world pitched toward authoritarianism, Shadows of Tyranny is an almanac of character sketches of people who saw it coming and tried to stop it, or took up arms to try to end it.
The book begins with Churchill, and ends by asking, “Where is our Churchill?”
In 1929, a decade before Hitler invaded Poland, Winston was boozing his way across Canada on a speaking tour, and his central message was the peace dividend. After the atrocity of the Great War, he argued, it was unthinkable that the great powers would ever go to war again, and to make sure that never happened, they should all disarm. No more dreadnoughts.
By 1933, four years later, he was warning against German militarism and clamouring for British rearmament. So, Churchill got it wrong at first, was denounced as a war monger when he got it right, and in the end turned out to be the war monger the free world needed.
McGoogan is a splendid storyteller, the author of 16 previous books, on subjects ranging from the Highland clearances to the history of Arctic exploration. What they have in common is that they tell stories about strength of character in the face of hardship and hopelessness. This is his first political book. The stories he tells here keep the pages turning.
There are portraits of novelists and war correspondents, resistance fighters and underground agitators. People who stood up to tyranny. Some of them are famous even today: George Orwell, André Malraux, Norman Bethune, and we need to be reminded of why.
Matthew Halton is here, the CBC radio correspondent who landed with the first wave of troops at Juno Beach on D-Day. And Farley Mowat, who fought in Sicily in a brutal campaign and went on to become one of Canada’s most beloved authors.
Others died in extermination camps and Gestapo prisons, and McGoogan reminds us of their stories too. One of the chapters, trigger warning, is titled “A Young Mother Survives Torture.”
Still, it’s only half the book we need. We know why young volunteers parachuted into occupied France with Sten guns and plans to blow up railway bridges. We need to know why people chose the other side, the side that was so plainly on the wrong side of history and morality.
What made a 20-year-old Spaniard take up a rifle for Franco? Who would join a political party’s private army and carry out something like Kristallnacht? Who informs on their neighbour to an occupying military or compliant police? What type of person tortures a young mother?
We tell ourselves that democracy is the thing worth dying for, because democracy is the thing that keeps the autocrats at bay. But when the free world went to war with Nazi Germany in the name of democracy, Great Britain was a colonial empire run by autocrats. The United States, the “arsenal of democracy,” was a virulently racist society that disenfranchised its citizens of colour. In France, women didn’t have the right to vote – it was something promised to them over the radio by de Gaulle, four years into Nazi occupation and six weeks before D-Day.
Was that democracy? It wasn’t even human decency.
And today? It’s difficult to defend America as a democracy when its voting regimes are so gerrymandered and beholden to the massive expenditures of money that buy influence and outcomes. The type of money only autocrats have.
Democracy no longer works if we, the people, no longer believe in it. If we begin to see politics as a false and manipulative regime, if our tiny expressions of preference at the ballot are absorbed by a political structure that has other ideas, why bother voting?
All this works for the autocrats, who only need a veneer of democracy to provide the mandate for the exercise of power.
In a free society, the thing that prevents autocracy is not the ballot, at least not all by itself. It is the system of laws, regulations, institutions and precedents designed to prevent authoritarianism, and that up until now has been doing a pretty good job.
McGoogan argues that we stand today at a historical juncture, where an ascendant right has had enough of this system of laws, regulations, institutions and precedents, and means to rewrite it.
If the non-Poilievre parties were all sufficiently frightened of what’s about to happen to Canada – if they genuinely believed we are pitching over into authoritarianism – then they might put their differences aside and work together, as though on a war footing. The way Churchill ran a cross-party War Ministry from 1940 until the defeat of Nazi Germany. The way the otherwise splintered French centre-left parties coalesced this summer to prevent Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national from forming a government.
But the non-Poilievre parties are not sufficiently convinced that the threat amounts to authoritarianism. They can’t put their differences aside, they won’t work together, and it probably wouldn’t make much difference if they did. Power is coming to the Poilievre Conservatives. They will be elected months, possibly weeks, into Trump’s second coming.
Poilievre knows it. Trudeau knows it. You know it and I know it. Trump doesn’t seem to care one way or another. He said so at his press conference. A reporter opened a question by pointing out that Conservative leader Poilievre rejected the very idea of Canada joining the United States. Trump shrugged. “Maybe he won’t win, but maybe he will. I don’t care.”
To the ascendant leader of the Free World, we are a resource-rich Saxon-Gallic province on the outskirts of the empire but also strangely right next door. Our petty internal political squabbles are beneath his attention. But he expects us to do what we’re told.
Political authority wielded against the will and the interests of subjects whose reaction is irrelevant and whose compliance is compulsory – yes, that’s fascism. Now, what are we going to do about it?
The Hill Times January 9, 2025