If the United States is 'fascist,' what on Earth are Russia and Iran?
Jason Stanley’s academic equivalence of world powers deserves closer scrutiny
When, in September 2025, Prof. Jason
Stanley announced his move from Yale University to the University of Toronto,
he framed the decision in stark, almost existential
terms. The United States, he warned, was sliding toward fascism. He explained
that his exodus to Canada was like leaving Germany during Adolf Hitler’s rise.
By comparing his departure from the United States to Jews fleeing Germany in
the 1930s, Stanley transformed a university appointment into a dramatic
indictment of America.
For some observers, his relocation
reinforced a comforting narrative: that Canada remains a stable democratic
refuge while the United States drifts toward something darker. Yet Stanley’s
assessment — and the analytical framework underpinning it — deserves much
closer scrutiny. The issue is not so much whether democratic erosion exists
south of the border, but whether the language used to describe it preserves
critical distinctions or severely undercuts them.
This concern becomes more acute in light
of Stanley’s broader claims. He has repeatedly characterized the United States
as a “fascist state,” adding in a February Globe and Mail article that, “As with Russia, we must expect that it
is possible the United States will remain fascist far into the future.” The
problem is one of profound false equivalence: if “fascism” is stretched to
encompass fundamentally different political realities — cancelling the immense
distinction between the United States and regimes such as Russia or Iran — it
ceases to function as a meaningful analytical concept.
The tension becomes clearer when considering how Stanley treats these other regimes. Elsewhere, he has described Russia as “explicitly fascist” and even “genocidal.” Yet in the Globe article, he places the U.S. and Russia in the same category of “fascist” powers for the purposes of geopolitical advice to Canada.
On any reasonable scale, the gap between the United States and regimes
such as Russia or Iran — particularly with respect to freedom of expression,
political opposition and civil liberties — is substantial to say the least.
Americans openly criticize their leaders, organize politically, contest elections
and challenge authority in courts and public discourse. In Russia,
such opposition is often systematically constrained and, at times, eliminated.
In Iran, recent years have brought killings, mass arrests and
violent crackdowns on dissenters, including women protesting state repression.
Even with severe challenges, when democracies like the United States are placed
in the same conceptual frame as Russia and Iran, it reeks of demagoguery.
The erosion of such obvious distinctions
matters beyond academic debate, because public perception is often shaped by
the language used by thought leaders. Polling by Leger in March suggests that
some younger Canadians hold more favourable views of countries such as China
(33 per cent) and Cuba (54 per cent) — hardly beacons of democracy — than of
the United States (22 per cent), which ranks only somewhat ahead of Iran (12
per cent). This outcome reflects not merely an imbalance in perception versus
reality, but a troubling degree of moral incoherence.
A similar pattern can be discerned from
some of Stanley’s commentary on the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. In a
Guardian column last month, he wrote about what he describes as
the under-reported and pernicious role of Israel in shaping American
decision-making around the war with Iran. He argues that the failure to
foreground Israeli influence constitutes a form of media-driven propaganda by
omission.
Yet Stanley’s thin analysis provides no context whatsoever regarding
the centrality of the nefarious Iranian regime — its ideological orientation,
eliminationist discourse and long-standing reliance on terrorist proxy actors
such as Hezbollah and Hamas to do its military bidding. By focusing almost
exclusively on Israeli influence while largely bracketing Iran’s role as a
primary strategic actor, his framework in the Guardian column advances a
misleading and deeply decontextualized account of the war.
A related tension appears in Stanley’s
treatment of antisemitism. At a time when antisemitism is not only visible but
rising across North America and Europe, including on university campuses, he
has shown greater concern for what he characterizes as its political
instrumentalization or “weaponization” than for its real and growing prevalence. He
often frames contemporary antisemitism as largely reducible to legitimate
criticism of Israel that is being mischaracterized or overstated.
In an interview with Zeteo in 2024, Stanley argued that “the
claim of antisemitism is just today’s excuse” for crackdowns on protesters by
authoritarians. In doing so, he risks minimizing the concerns of many Jewish
people who experience current manifestations of antisemitism as both genuine
and alarming.
Stanley at times appears to bolster this
position by invoking his background as
the child of survivors, implicitly lending his argument a particular moral
authority. Yet that appeal does little to resolve the issue, especially given
that many other children of survivors — along with a broad spectrum of Jewish
communities — have reached markedly different conclusions about the seriousness
and character of contemporary antisemitism. Over the past two years, both
the Anti-Defamation League in the United States and B’nai Brith Canada have reported record-high numbers
of antisemitic incidents in their respective countries.
Taken together, these patterns return us
to the core issue raised by Stanley’s move to Canada. If the United States is
indeed a fascist country, the decision to leave rather than remain — and to do
so from the vantage point of a prominent Canadian academic platform — leads us
to ask if his time at the University of Toronto is temporary and/or
conditional? If, in the next U.S. presidential election, American voters were
to reject the unlivable fascism Stanley describes, will he head back to
“democratic” life south of the border?
National Post
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jack-jedwab-if-the-united-states-is-fascist-what-on-earth-are-russia-and-iran
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