People’s Party of Canada: How a Desire for Freedom Leads to Fascism
The trouble with the so-called “People’s Party” is that it uses big-tent libertarianism to drag people Rightward — and even if they don’t win a single seat it will shift the entire political landscape toward fascism.
By this I mean that they appeal to a wide range of libertarian motivations, but imply a particular agenda that their voters might not otherwise subscribe to. Anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine mandate sentiment is the main motivator of the current surge in PPC support, but they also draw folks that favour unrestricted free markets, and those who might otherwise be considered progressive or Left with small- or anti-government views. While I overall disagree with most of these positions, they are at least compatible with small-L liberal democratic society — in which at least the *intent* is to provide equality of opportunity to all.
At this point it’d be easy to turn to the demonstrated intolerance and anti-immigrant policies of the PPC, call them racists, and be done with it, but that’s not the root problem. Despite their split from the Conservatives, this is still a deeply conservative, Right-wing party. And at its core, conservatism is about hierarchy. Economic conservatism reinforces hierarchies by opposing taxation and social spending on programs that raise up lower classes, and encourages the continued accumulation of capital in the upper echelons of society. Social conservatism purports to support personal freedoms, but consists mainly in an unwillingness to intervene in support of the common good. In the absence of an egalitarian state or the collective will of the people to ensure social justice and equity, existing relations of domination and oppression intensify — cementing hierarchies of power beyond the reach of political intervention.
The worldview this ideology generates has each individual as the central figure — the hero of the story — competing in a zero-sum struggle for position within the socio-economic hierarchy. Since maintaining one’s position in this hierarchy sometimes means making sure nobody else gets ahead, the rational self-interested course can slip into antisocial behaviour: racism and other intolerances, and a general misanthropy — both readily exploitable by charismatic extremists. Those who started with a reasonable concern with state-mandated pandemic control measures are being recruited into a political movement with Trump-style exclusive hyperindividualism as its core ontology.
I’m obviously at risk of a slippery slope fallacy here — that single-issue PPC voters won’t *necessarily* be drawn down the garden path to radicalization — but without a meaningful anti-authoritarian movement on the Left in Canada, this is the only option for libertarian-minded folks and I can’t help but worry about the influence of the company they’re forced to keep.
All this is to say: don’t discount PPC voters as bigots, anti-vaxers, and credulous fools, nor downplay the danger this movement poses to Canadian society. Current polling places the PPC ahead of the Greens (which is as much a statement of that party’s fundamental failures, but I digress) making them a potential spoiler in this election. If we’re to combat this form of extremism from the Left, we need to understand it and propose a viable alternative to the centrist sausage party at the ballot box.
So yeah. Fuck the PPC.
