We're dealing with a Fascist America. When are we going to understand that?
If it walks like a fascist, talks like a fascist, and acts like a fascist, then chances are it’s a fascist.
Happy Friday! I started writing today’s Reading Roundup, but I realized there was only one thing I wanted to talk about, so I’ve just run with it. I think this is a conversation we need to have.
We're dealing with a Fascist America. When are we going to understand that?
Yesterday saw the narrow passage of Trump’s budget bill through Congress. It includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, primarily for the mega-rich and corporations. To somewhat balance these giveaways, it also includes $1.2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, and slashed support for green energy, though even then, the result is an increase in the deficit of trillions of dollars.
It is a bill that very explicitly takes from the poor to feed the rich, while further setting fire to our planet in the process. It will be nothing short of a death sentence for many of America’s most vulnerable people.
A key plank of the bill is a massive expansion of funding for border security and deportations, particularly for ICE. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has highlighted, ICE now has a budget bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA and others combined. Perhaps even more astounding, it now has a budget that is only just shy of Canada’s entire military budget:
This is a huge expansion of what is essentially acting as a paramilitary brownshirt organization that is being turned against the domestic population of the US. This funding is going towards constructing what Florida Rep. Angie Nixon has very accurately called “modern-day concentration camps.” It is being used to disappear people off the streets, including 55 Canadians. It is being used to suppress political opposition, such as through calls to strip Mamdani of his citizenship, through trumped-up charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver stemming from her congressional oversight visit to an immigration detention centre, and beyond:
This is all on top of the devastating cuts to US Aid that new research from the Lancet estimates will directly result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, a third of those being children. On top of assaults on trans rights and book bans. On top of ongoing attacks against science and medicine. On top of the US’s essential governmental and industry support for Israel, underpinning an “economy of genocide” against Palestinians.
I don’t think policymakers, or most of the commentariat, in Canada have internalized the kind of United States that we are now dealing with and its implications for us and the world. Amid the hand-wringing and debates over whether scrapping the DST was a sensible concession to maximize our chance of getting some kind of tariff deal, the essential truth of what America is under Donald Trump seems to be missing.
This is not the US of years past. We need to call it what it is. The United States in 2025 is a fascist country.
We can only have the conversation we need to have about responding if we recognize that reality.
Yes, Canada is uniquely vulnerable due to our economic dependence on the US. But it isn’t like we haven’t known that risk for a long time. From Sir John A. MacDonald in Canada’s early days through Ed Broadbent and John Turner in the 1980s and more recently voices such as Jim Balsillie and Naomi Klein, many people who might agree on little else have agreed on the threat of greater economic integration with the US. And that threat was from a flawed US, but not a fascist one.
So, let’s call this what it is. We’re dealing with a fascist America. Contorting ourselves to secure a trade deal that is not worth the paper it is written on will do nothing to protect Canadians and Canadian jobs from this new reality. Nor will overriding rights, regulations, and the principles of Reconciliation to speed up how fast we can extract raw materials and send them south of the border.
I’ve made the case that we need politics and policies that focus on real outcomes for real people. That are rooted in genuine care. That means going beyond a focus on the economic impact on jobs, important as that undoubtedly is. It means getting to the heart of the kind of world we live in, what kind of country we are, and what role we want to play in this moment in time.
Will we join the disgraced ranks of states and individuals who have appeased fascists? Or will we seek to join the ranks of those clear and consistent principles, who took a stand even when that came with real costs?
We once asked for many sacrifices from our country to fight a fascist threat. Until we are honest with ourselves about what the US is and what that means for us, we can’t have the debates we need to have and what sacrifices we might be willing to make now.