It’s a warm autumn evening and Jason Stanley is walking through downtown Toronto, his home of a fortnight, discussing his view that America is sliding into fascism, and its global and historical parallels.
“But the far right is everywhere,” he tells the Guardian. “There is a chill of fear everywhere.”
As if on cue, a man emerges walking in the opposite direction wearing a bright red T-shirt bearing the slogan “Canada First”, a nationalist political movement promoting the mass deportation of migrants.
“You can feel the sense of threat,” Stanley says. “Fascism begins with immigrants and national minorities, and it moves quickly to political opponents.”
The trend is a global one, Stanley argues; the United States is just further down the path than other places. It is descending more quickly – and, as the events of past days have shown, more violently.
When we speak, it is a week since rightwing provocateur Charlie Kirk was murdered at a university campus in Utah. In the days since, Kirk’s death has been weaponised by some supporters to attack political opponents. In an address from the Oval Office, the US president, Donald Trump, specifically blamed “radical left political violence” for Kirk’s death.
A website has been established to dox anyone the site’s creators believe has “celebrated” Kirk’s assassination, or made comments they deem insufficiently orthodox on his legacy. People’s names, phone numbers, home addresses and places of work have been listed online, accompanied by threats and acts of violence.
A thread on X is celebrating people losing their jobs for making comments about Kirk’s death: the thread lists dozens of cases of journalists, teachers, even hamburger cooks and Secret Service agents, summarily fired.
“And JD Vance, the vice president of the United States, has encouraged ordinary citizens to report people for their negative comments about Charlie Kirk,” Stanley says.
“That was a real signal saying, ‘We’re going to police your speech at every level’ … It’s a terror campaign against ordinary citizens’ speech.”
Stanley made global headlines in March this year when, as a Yale professor specialising in the study of fascism, he announced he was leaving the US because he believed it was at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship”.
Now a fortnight into his exile, he says he is not surprised by the worsening political climate in the US, “but it’s always terrifying when it comes”.
He does not regret the move, arguing he can “fight better” from outside the US.
“Right now, walking through the streets of Toronto, I feel safe. Given that the president of the United States said we’re going to target the people who call us fascists and Nazis, I probably wouldn’t feel safe in the United States. A lot of people don’t feel safe in the United States.”
There is historical resonance, too, in Stanley’s exile from a rising tide of fascism. His German Jewish forebears, including both his parents and grandmother (who rescued more than 400 Jews from concentration camps) fled a Nazi regime that had them marked for extermination.
As we speak, Stanley is partway through writing an article on America’s current moment, drawing from his grandmother’s memoir of the Kristallnacht, a Nazi-coordinated, nationwide antisemitic riot in 1938.
He cites a quote (mis)attributed most often to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.”
“I find myself asking: ‘Is this moment exactly Kristallnacht? Is it exactly the Reichstag fire?’ It’s like it’s these jigsaw puzzles … it’s a piece of one and a piece of another.”
Stanley says he sees elements of Kristallnacht in the current conflagration after Kirk’s killing – the tumult exploited to expand the target of hostility from immigrants to political opponents.
There is parallel too, he says, in the militarisation of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) – echoes of the Sturmabteilung, Ernst Röhm’s feared brownshirts.
Much of the US’s political upheaval is idiosyncratic to its own history and political moment, but Australia, far distant, perhaps, with a different political culture, is not immune from a descent into fascism, Stanley insists.
In fact, he argues, Australia’s history makes it acutely vulnerable to precisely that.
“You guys are probably next, right? The first domino to go.
“You guys had a White Australia policy until the 1970s. That’s a terrible sign. And you attacked your universities ages ago.”
Stanley cites, as well, Australia’s history of Indigenous displacement, its “performatively vicious” treatment of asylum seekers and the fierce “anti-woke” rhetoric that pierces public discourse.
“A lot of what you’re seeing in the United States must seem familiar to you, even though you’ve come nowhere close to what we’ve seen in the last few months; but the ideological preconditions are certainly familiar to you.”
The response to this might be that Australia has just re-elected a centre-left government with a commanding majority, rejecting anti-immigration rhetoric and division to such an extent that the leader of the opposition – who ran on these campaign platforms – didn’t just lose the election, but his own seat in parliament.
Australia’s institutions, too, can be argued to be more robust: the public service and judiciary are far less politicised, voting is independently overseen and compulsory (driving parties towards a more moderate centrism), political violence is rare (and not fuelled by a firearm epidemic).
But Stanley points out that fascism often comes cloaked in the language, the institutions and the processes of democracy: an insidiousness that lies in seeking to appear democratic.
“Fascism conceals its anti-democratic nature by representing itself as the general will of the people, where ‘the people’ are the dominant racial or religious group.
“It will say ‘the majority of people want this’, but that’s not the core idea of democracy. The core idea of democracy is not the tyranny of the majority. Democracy is a system based on freedom and equality.”
Fascism is not a binary question either, nor one of an absolute threshold. Democracy and fascism are concepts that exist on a spectrum – a country can be more or less democratic, more or less fascist.
“Yes, the United States is quite fascist now. It’s much less of a democracy. But, officially, at least, the United States is a democracy living under an emergency.
“And this emergency allows the government to scoop people up into unmarked vans; perhaps you can stay indefinitely as a democracy under emergency?”
A nation’s slide into fascism carries obvious consequence for the nation itself, but Stanley argues that when the country in question possesses the strongest military on Earth, is the global superpower and dominates international politics, it carries immense ramifications for the entire world.
“It normalises and legitimates fascist movements everywhere,” Stanley argues. “So you’re going to see more of that dynamic, I suspect. All the remaining democratic countries are going to face surging anti-democratic, ultranationalist movements.”
For Australia, the consequence of America’s descent is particularly acute.
Since the end of the second world war, Australia has depended on the United States for its defence and security (including sheltering under its nuclear umbrella). The postwar “international rules-based order” (to use the parlance so loved by Australia’s foreign policy establishment) is, some argue, more accurately characterised as a US imperialist one.
But Australia’s “great and powerful friend” (another particularly Australian foreign policy nomenclature) is no longer a reliable or consistent ally. Perhaps it never was, only now it is more nakedly so.
Trump’s second administration has an exposed record of treating allies with worse than indifference – rather with contempt.
Here, Stanley has perhaps his strongest note of caution. “Undoing fascism is very, very hard,” he says. Democracy is not some natural default.
“We shouldn’t be surprised if, very soon, there are no more democracies, or very few. Democracy wasn’t a thing for a long time: we had monarchies and we had empires, and other forms of government, but we’re now in a situation where India, Russia, the United States and China are not democratic countries. So you have to ask: what will remain?”
• Jason Stanley appears in Curious at the Sydney Opera House on 28 September and in Melbourne on 2 October, presented by The Wheeler Centre.
