The Populism to Fascism Pipeline

Parsing Populism and Umberto Eco’s eternal fascism (part 1 of 3)

The populism to fascism pipeline

The results of the recent United States election has many people, myself included, wondering how we — North America — got here. A presidential candidate has openly expressed admiration for authoritarian leaders, and has been accused of praising Adolf Hitler by multiple former members of his staff, yet was still elected to the most powerful political office in the world.

Here in Canada our largely now-unpopular Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, finally announced his intention to step down, after months of his own party publicly expressing their lack of confidence in his leadership. An extremely weak Liberal party leaves Canada extremely vulnerable to electing a Conservative government with Pierre Poilievre as their leader, a man who doesn’t know the difference between a neoliberal and a communist and has an extremely poor grasp of social systems and economics (among many other politically important concepts).

The focus of this article will be the slippery slope from populism to fascism, as such I won’t delve into the laundry list of allegations and crimes which follow the American president-elect, nor do I wish to spend any more time thinking or writing about him than necessary. Instead, I will examine the overlap in symptoms between populism, authoritarianism, and fascism to develop a clearer picture of how a society can gravitate from one end of this political spectrum to the other, almost undetected by the general public.