It’s always a pleasure to talk with Jason Stanley, who was diagnosing our current crisis as fascism long before it was trendy, and who now teaches in Toronto.
We started with Canada, where Jason worries that the push for sovereignty from the U.S. could just trade one dependency for another. He pointed out that billionaires like Elon Musk are their own empires now, and any economic dependence on them is an opening for political control.
From there we turned to last Tuesday — when Southern voters themselves, especially Black Southern voters, were finally able to put a real dent in their region’s one-party authoritarianism. (I published a deep dive last week, “The Confederate Realignment,” on the resurgence of that one-party rule.) Jason traced the old alliance between capital and white supremacy, from Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction to Vance Muse’s racist campaign for right-to-work laws.
We also talked about why elite institutions caved so quickly to Trump: they were taking cues from their donors and boards. This is another reason unions are so important, and why authoritarians always attack them first. They’re funded only by their members, and those members learn first-hand how to exercise collective power.
And we noted what’s missing in the “moderation” debate: any discussion of what these candidates should actually do once they’re in office. Whether someone wins by three points or eight tells you nothing about whether they’ll take on concentrated power or maintain the same status quo that voters reject.
One test for Senate Democrats in 2027 will be abolishing the filibuster to reform the Supreme Court on day one, because the Court acts with impunity knowing Congress can’t overrule it.
Make sure to check out Jason’s new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.
