Right-wing leaders are riding democracy like a bus, until they get to an authoritarian destination
There is a renewed slow creep towards totalitarianism in the world & Pierre Poilievre is watching closely
“Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off,” Recep Erdogan said in the mid-1990s as mayor of Istanbul.
Erdogan is now the president of Turkey.
It's no revelation to say that there is a renewed slow creep towards totalitarianism in the world. In some countries it is more obvious than others just as it has been more evident in certain times in history than others.
The historic blueprint for fascism used by strongmen ends with complete control but often starts slowly, usually with a twofold attack on the judiciary and the media. First, foment fear to hobble the justice system by openly criticizing decisions. One easy way for a democratically elected leader to take that step is to promote policies that satisfy a vindictive base but that you know would violate your nation’s constitution so that when judges strike it down, you can say, "See, the woke global elites have taken over."
Next you have to discredit the free press by declaring news coverage that isn't favourable to you or reporters who accurately present the truth behind what you are doing as biased. Then, directly defund state broadcasters and indirectly leverage advertisers of private ones. Then, ensure only sympathetic outlets repeating the party line are heard by the public, eventually reinstating the public broadcaster as a mouthpiece for the regime.
This is how Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin got started.
Back to the Erdogan metaphor of democracy being like a tram you ride until you are at the place where you don't need it anymore. Vladimir Putin got off the tram a long, long time ago. Erdogan landed at his destination in the late 2010s and Turkey is now under his thumb.
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are eyeballing their tram stop up ahead and are ringing the bell, the former maybe more fervently even than the latter. He recently used his authority to get comedians cancelled, following the script of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who banned comedians in early 1939, Russian President Vladimir Putin who did it in 2000.
Meanwhile in Canada, Pierre Poilievre watches these strongmen on the world stage with school-boy admiration. But he has role models in Canada. Remember when Stephen Harper pushed mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, which any first-year law student knew violated the Charter? That's the script: Do it anyway, test your luck, then when the courts strike the laws down, claim that judges are “soft on crime” and when judges and prosecutors follow the law and the Charter with bail policies and sentencing that follows precedents, more squishy wokeness. Break out the “revolving door” cliché.
Along these lines recently, Conservative MPs followed their dutiful leader PP with social media posts and flyers declaring their demand for a “three strikes and you’re out” law. Maybe Harper could be forgiven for pushing mandatory minimums with some uncertainty if they would stand the legal challenges. But now that they’ve been struck down, deemed violations of section 12 of the Charter (namely, the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual treatment or punishment) PP and his gang know a three-strikes law would be illegal. But that’s OK. The point is to latch on to raw emotion and uneducated “common sense” tropes overlooking the truth, including inconvenient nuances of criminal justice and human behaviour.
PP has seen what dictators in the past got away with. He’s seen Erdogan and Putin, he’s surely watching Bibi and Donald closely. I picture him as the ubiquitous grinning popcorn-eating Michael Jackson meme taken from the Thriller video, smiling, admiring the show, thinking, “Hmmm, if they can do it…”
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Paul J. Henderson
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