Thread by @paulgknox

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher I haven’t read Woodard but it recalls Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America, 1981, with geography, economy and culture but of course lacking populism. Not an entirely new idea.

Right-wing populism is a century old in Canada. United Farmers and Progressive parties ...

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 2 ... weren’t right-wing at first; they were forerunners of both left & right-wing currents. All with an anti-elite foundation based on resentment of Eastern capitalists. The sequel in Alberta was Social Credit, which dominated politics, was heavily influenced by evangelical 2/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 3 ... Protestantism and had elements sympathetic to the Nazis. It influenced the political right in BC, which eventually coalesced into Bennett’s version of Social Credit. That too had strong populist, anti-Eastern-elite and religious elements. In Ontario populism died out ... 3/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 4 ... with Hepburn’s Liberals and wasn’t revived until the mid-1990s with Mike Harris’s takeover of the PCPO. By that time populism was alive on the national stage in the shape of Reform - whose appeal was largely restricted to the West and pockets of Ontario. All of which ... 4/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 5 ... is to say that right-wing populism tinged with fascism is not at all new in Canada. Anti-immigrant sentiment wasn’t such a significant feature, perhaps because POC weren’t as big a proportion of immigrants.

While right-wing populist majorities have been recorded in ...5/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 6 ... BC and AB, and recently in SK, this has never happened in ON. Ford’s PV last year was 40.5%; he owed his victory to relatively small shots in ridings on the GTHA periphery. Even Harper’s national victories were won despite low PV totals. There’s little evidence of ... 6/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 7 ... deep widespread national support for far-right white supremacist, anti-immigrant populism in electoral results. (We’ll see what happens, again, in Alberta.) Urban under-50 Canada has time and again demonstrated little patience with it.

The apparent prominence of ... 7/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 8 ... fat-right populism and its apparent prominence in Conservative ranks is due partly to the growth of social media and partly to electoral traditions that privilege rural over urban votes. Both these phenomena amplify the presence & messages of these populist currents. ... 8/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 9 ... It’s easy to forget that Twitter in particular is a small slice of the political universe & one particularly suited to reinforcing a sense of belonging among partisans. As for elections, it’s easy to confuse their results with sociology. The populist right never wins ... 9/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 10 ... a national majority in Canada. Or, to put it more strongly, its message is consistently repudiated by a majority of Canadians. Outside of Alberta, it has not demonstrated a convincing multi-term hold on a provincial electorate. All of this could change, and it’s... 10/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 11 ... noteworthy that Trudeau at the moment seems to be running against the Nazis. But there’s good reason to believe that what has hitherto been a reliable anti-right-wing majority will hold.

An important caveat, & an important difference in today’s right-wing populism ... 11/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 12 ... is that it’s growth in the early to mid-20th century took place among people who were relatively isolated from the rest of their country and the world, with poorly developed mass media and opportunities for travel. Today the great majority of Canadians are globally ... 12

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 13 ... well connected, with an abundance of news media and a wide range of political opinion available to them. This makes the penetration of hateful, fascist, racist and nativist messages both within and outside Canada far easier than it was 20 years ago, let alone in ... 13/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 14 ... the 1930s. The same should be true of opposing ideas, but liberals and the left have often found it harder than the far right to craft messages with the same pithiness or gut appeal. The reasons are debatable, but they may not matter so much. For every vile Twitter ... 14/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 15 ... account there’s a group of Facebook friends or buddies on other platforms who can take it upon themselves to raise consciousness about the presence of hateful elements among us, and repudiate their attempts to penetrate the electoral process.

Our system and our ... 15/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 16 ... matrix of political ideas have many flaws, some of them foundational. But we have resilience in the face of hate politics. We are not like the United States or the United Kingdom in this respect. Nor are we like the European nations whose vacillation in the face ... 16

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 17 ... of Neo-fascist resurgence is rooted in zombie histories once thought dead and buried. We are not like those societies. We have burning unresolved histories that must be attended to, and we fight continually against systemic inequality. But there is no reason why ... 17/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 18 ... the resilience we’ve shown previously against against these far-right ideologies and manifestations can’t be harnessed again. In fact it is being harnessed, on these digital platforms and in flesh-and-blood demonstrations of resistance against the Fords, Kenneys and ...18/

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher 19 ... Scheers. They have been with us for a century, in many guises. But so has the resistant majority. If called on it will respond. If counted on it will deliver. These unacceptable ideologies of hate have been crushed before; they can be defeated again. 19/19 fin

@VoiceOfFranky @MikeMcPickles @cforcese @stphnmaher @threadreaderapp unroll pls