Revenge of the Zombie Populists: How a new breed of right-wingers has emerged from conservative mass suicide

'Conservatives are committing suicide by turning into radical revolutionary parties'

A long time ago in a political climate far, far different than today, an acrid stench of chemicals burned eyes and throats as it lingered above the intersection of 4th Avenue and Union Street in downtown Seattle. 

White clouds of aerosolized irritant from police tear-gas grenades or sprayed from canisters was trapped between office towers, just as thousands of us were. 

It was Tuesday, Nov. 30, 1999.

The “us” were journalism students on a field trip of sorts. Half of a dozen new friends drove the 230 kilometres from Vancouver to the Pacific isthmus that is home to the largest U.S. city between British Columbia and California.

We went to record the events of the day as practising journalists because we knew something big was going to happen. We knew it would be newsworthy thanks to large protests planned by students, unions, environmental activists and others coinciding with the World Trade Organization ministerial conference.

It turned out to be the largest ever demonstration in the United States against economic globalization. Approximately 40,000 protesters flooded the streets, shut down meetings, shocked residents and uninvolved people who worked in the buildings in the economic centre of the city.

Officers in riot gear from the King County Sheriff’s Office and Seattle Police Department used the aforementioned tear gas canisters, stun grenades, and also fired pepper spray in the faces of protesters to attempt to clear blocked streets to allow delegates from around the world to get through.

This was the Battle in Seattle. 

The conference was meant to launch a new millennial round of global trade negotiations. This anarchic protest was a loud angry opposition to not just the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

This was America's organized and disorganized left protesting against the perceived injustices on the horizon from the neoconservative right and their international global trade agreements.

Ronald Reagan is dead

That was a quarter century ago, back when union members and students and hippies and other left-wingers fought against the establishment. Meanwhile, the conservative establishment was doing what neoconservatives at the time did, they created global trade entities and in the face of opposition, they defended the system.

Now in 2025, it’s time to write an obituary for the mostly Baby Boomer conservatives and neoconservatives of the late 20th century into the 21st century. 

The Ronald Reagans and Brian Mulroneys and Margaret Thatchers are no more. The responsible righties of your parents and your grandparents who just wanted to keep taxes low and their feet on the brakes of change to maintain the international order have died off as so many old men shaking their fists at clouds. They didn’t die of natural causes, however. They weren’t killed. This was the conservative suicide.

Or to use a more accurate metaphor, this was a self-inflicted transformation into something much, much worse and progressives were not ready for it.

The death and zombie revival started well before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, but was exacerbated by it. Small ‘c’ conservatism morphed into populism with it’s distrust of society’s institutions: the judiciary, academia, media, government itself. This had more in common with Marxism than conservatism.

The term populism comes from the latin “populus” or people, but has come to mean, ironically, the opposite. The new populists involve leaders and government factions who claim to speak for "the people" while smashing the walls of established systems to claim power for themselves.

“Conservatives are committing suicide by turning into radical revolutionary parties,” as historian Yuval Noah Harari puts it in his 2024 book Nexus.

This is leaving progressives to protect the institutions and they aren’t great at it. Not trusting the establishment used to be what progressives did. That's what they were doing on the streets of Seattle in 1999.

This is, however, not entirely new as it resembles paleoconservatism, a term coined by Paul Gottfried as opposed to the neoconservatives we all know and love or loathe. The term neoconservative was created in the 1960s to define the hawks, those who supported the U.S. invasions of Vietnam too defend against the scourge of communism. The lesser-known paleoconservatives, mostly forgotten in history books, were isolationists who rejected American intervention in foreign conflicts. 

These paleoconservatives were anti-immigration, fighting against changes in domestic demographics. In addition to being anti-interventionist, they wanted free trade to be restricted. They were hyper-nationalists who wanted the U.S. to mostly go it alone. 

Starting to sound familiar? They wanted to keep America great.

The populist new/not new power-to-the-people brand of right-wingery, however, is not exactly paleoconervativism. It’s similar but it is more revolutionary and fearful as it longs to “drain the swamp” in Washington and declare “Canada is broken” in Ottawa. 

As Harari puts it, 18-century Irish politician Edmund Burke, the godfather of the traditional conservative movement, would not recognize modern Republicans in the U.S. or Conservatives in Canada or right-wing movements in Brazil, France, Hungary, Turkey, Israel. 

Implosion of conservative politics

The emerging populists on the far right sound more like Marxists than traditional Burkean conservatives. Not only would a Burkean conservative be shocked to see modern conservativism, but progressive parties and their supporters have suddenly become the guardians of order and established institutions, and they don’t know what they are doing.   

It's a topsy-turvy world

In traditional politics as we have known if for the last few decades in North America, liberals tend to say that things are messed up and only they can fix them with big changes. Conservatives tend to say things are messed up but they aren’t that bad, it was better before, and things should only change slowly.

The new populists are highly suspicious. They generally reject the traditional respect that existed for science and academia, let alone civil servants and the media. 

Think of how this populism flourished in the pandemic with anti-science and anti-expert ramblings by anti-vaxxer podcasters and social media influencers who, in B.C., rejected Dr. Bonnie Henry and in Canada, Dr. Theresa Tam. They grew angry and even more mistrustful of politicians who followed scientific advice in an attempt to protect vulnerable populations. And they raged against media outlets that dared report what was really happening. They used the ever-expanding network of social media apps and ways of communicating to engage in confirmation bias creating silos of people.

The new Trump-Poilievre style populists are convincing their base that those with opposing views aren't just political adversaries. They are the enemy. If scientific papers or academic conferences or expert opinions violate the tenets of the “true” party’s message of “the people,” then they must be destroyed. They do their own research.

There is also a distrust of elections as we saw in the U.S. after Trump lost in 2020, and echoes of that as Poilievre in Canada repeated a narrative in the Canadian election that rejected expert opinions and polling numbers, claiming it was some sort of left-wing conspiracy against him. At a Conservative rally in Brampton, Ontario, in early April supporters donned sweatshirts that said "Do you believe the polls?" implying the media was lying. As we found out on April 28, unsurprisingly, they were not.

“If some party other than the populists wins elections, it does not mean that this rival party won the people’s trust and is entitled to form a government,” Harari writes in Nexus. “Rather, it means that the elections were stolen or that the people were deceived to vote in a way that doesn’t express their true will.”

As is made obvious with Trump, we see Poilievre’s Conservatives echoing the language, and in advance they seemed to be preparing to deny the April 28 election results if they do not end up with a Conservative win. There was less of that than some expected on April 29, but some are blaming the media and academics for tricking the public, and some January 6-style conspiracies are circling about rigged voting, ballots supposedly not being counted, even a claim that Poilievre was sabotaged in his own riding with a massive list of candidates. (This was more of a protest to push for proportional representation.)

But while Donald Trump is waste deep in the hot tub of populist machinations the likes of which have lead to fascist governments around the world throughout history, Poilievre is just sticking his toe in the water.

Populism's global rise

Just as radical religious organizations such as Christian evangelicals or the reformed church believe only they have the true understanding of the Bible and of God’s plan despite two thousand years of different interpretations, so too do populists in thousand-dollar suits believe only they are the true voice of “the people.”

We see this in North America but it is widespread with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Alice Widel in Germany, Victor Orban in Hungary, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, among others.

National populists prioritize their countries and claim to give voice to the people who have long been neglected by elites. Populism emerges as a virulent force in response to liberal policies of diversity, inclusion, secularity. 

A key element that you see across populist movements rising from the ashes of the conservative suicide is fear-mongering that, for example, support for the LGBTQ community will destroy the family; increasing immigration will dilute the white race (or whatever ethnic group is preaching it); international co-operation economically or militarily will dilute domestic power. 

The conservatives-cum-populists love short easily repeatable slogans as we saw in the election in Canada with “Canada is Broken” shifting to “Canada First” (identical to MAGA’s “America First”), or “Axe the Tax” or “Stop the Crime.” 

What populists also do is find scapegoats for all of society’s problems. Corporate greed or wealthy tax avoiders are never mentioned. Elon Musk’s DOGE isn’t going after the fact that the four branches of the U.S. military each have their own air forces, trillion-dollar redundancies, but instead goes after bureacratic waste in health-care, for example. Affordability for regular folks and our other problems is the fault of immigrants and hug-a-thug judges and eco-fascists. 

PP’s sloganeering rallies

Poilievre also expresses his admiration for John A. MacDonald as if he were some hero. He either uses Canada's first prime minister as a dog-whistle for racists or simply by overlooks the fact that MacDonald was a cruel and genocidal prime minister to First Nations.

“As the party of confederation and John A. Macdonald, we will restore the promise of Canada and our founding leader,” Poilievre told a crowd at a Feb. 15, 2025 rally.

The roots of this sloganeering and scapegoating style of populism, which seems to be forgotten by many conservatives is. of course Adolf Hitler in the 1930s with “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer.” 

One People. One Country. One Leader.

“If some German citizens disagreed with the leader, it didn’t mean that the leader might be in the wrong,” Harari explains. “Rather, it meant that the dissenters belonged to some treasonous outsider groups – Jews, communists, liberals – instead of to the people.”

While democracy has several self-correcting mechanisms such as the courts, the media, academia, these are seen as the enemy of “the people” as defined by people such as Trump and Poilievre, the man who almost became prime minister. 

Poilievre's support for the criminal trucker convoy and their “Fuck Trudeau” stickers is a great example of jumping on the populist movement to try to ride it to power. It backfired on him, but only just.

If the medical establishment says we should reduce large gatherings to protect people with vulnerable immune systems, that if that truth inconveniences "the people" or appears to be taking away our "freedom," so goes the populist pandemic anti-mandate rhetoric, Dr. Bonnie Henry must be a liar part of the global elite. 

If judges sentence people in ways that align with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms but those sentences seem too lenient to “the people” and their “common sense,” then the judges are “woke” and are making life more dangerous.

If economic experts point out that cutting government programs while cutting taxes on the wealthy does not spur growth and is a false economy to appease wealthy Conservative Party donors, the experts are socialists looking to take away the freedom of “the people.” 

In a global context of course, new Conservatives and their populism look downright reasonable compared to Trump or some of the rising far right extremists in Europe.

Zack Beauchamp called Poilievre a “tame populist” in a 2024 Vox article arguing that he doesn’t fit the true far right because "on policy substance, he's actually considerably more moderate than Trump or European radicals.”

Not ‘reductio ad Hitlerum’

Populism doesn’t necessarily lead to authoritarianism but it’s a first necessary step.

Godwin’s Law goes: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

In that vein, the ‘reductio ad Hilterum’ logical fallacy, similar to the genetic fallacy, is one used to supposedly invalidate another’s argument by comparing them to Hitler. If you are a vegetarian you must be a Nazi because Hitler was too. Bad logic.

That is not what is going on here. There are actual parallels to how Hitler rose to power in the 1920s and 1930s and what Donald Trump has done in recent months. And in Canada, there are tiny shadows of it all. 

These are five steps to transform a democracy, like Germany in the 1930s, to a fascist dictatorship:

1. Create a cult of personality 

Either embrace an already well-known person or create and build one from within.

2. Find or invent an enemy to scapegoat and denigrate 

This can be adjacent nations-states and/or competing ideologies and/or a vulnerable demographic within the nation.

3. Take control of the media and the other democratic self-correcting mechanisms

Start with snide comments about the judiciary, the media, academia and other institutional experts. Then move to direct insults, then ostracize and start to tear down the institutions slowly.

4. Stoke an existential crisis

Invent an internal economic catastrophe or seize on one that already exists and use fear-mongering to inspire the uneducated

5. Seize control

Finally, the infallible leader created in step 1 seizes on the emergency created in step 4 by using control gained in step 3 over the judiciary, media, academia, to further the campaign begun in step 2, which will worsen 4 to the point of a national emergency. And bingo, declare martial law or the equivalent.

Will democracies around the world learn from history’s lessons, and how the Nazis turned a strong democracy into a fascist dictatorship starting with a populist movement that slowly picked apart and eventually usurped the nation's institutions? Time will tell.

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Paul J. Henderson
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