The following is but one of hundreds of newspaper articles I might use to make my point.
On Oct. 28 of this year, my local newspaper printed an article by two Canadian university professors who had just published a book entitled “Has Populism Won?: The War on Liberal Democracy.”
Implicit in the article is the notion that recent victories by “conservatives” in Western nations around the world are in fact victories for ignorance, racism, hatred, etc., all of which are definitive characteristics of Populism. Populists, we are told by Daniel Drache and Marc Froese, “stoke their base” and refuse “to tone down their rhetoric.” Citing the hard right’s “animal spirits” and “toxic messaging,” their article, ironically, is but one relentless screed of toxic generalizations.
England’s membership in the E.U. left it powerless to reject immigrants who had entered Europe through the open-door policies of “liberals” such as Angela Merkel whose nation admitted more than a million migrants per year through the second decade of this century. Its departure from the Union was basically prompted by its government’s desire to regain control of borders.
Now, our two “intellectuals” lament, Sweden has succumbed to the same populist extremism, its recently elected “far-right” Democrats likely to expel thousands of immigrants and refugees in the near future. But is it mere racial intolerance that has led this Nordic country to reconsider the wisdom of its immigration policies, or is the issue far more complicated than our brilliant social commentators would dare admit?
A Sept 22 article by Paulina Neuding, posted on the website Common Sense with B., is entitled: “Two Bombings in One Night? That’s Normal Now in Sweden.” By way of explanation we are told: “My country just voted in a right wing government. The almost 500 Bombings since 2018 may have something to do with it.” What one learns, and these statistics are validated by the country’s law enforcement community, is that Sweden, aside from these bombings, is now the site of more fatal shootings than any other country in Europe, 85% of the suspects being first or second generation immigrants. The approximately 40 criminal gangs now terrorizing the country are similarly constituted. Do Sweden’s tolerant, peace loving people not have the right to be outraged by these developments? Was their election of a government determined to screen its immigrant population for possible predilections to violence, a mere expression of racism?
Populists, we are told, “erode the legitimacy of liberal institutions and undermine the authority of law.” Canada’s trucker convoy, apparently, was its “populist big bang.” But its impact, ironically, was due not to the violence of its participants but to their sheer numbers. Yes, the streets of Ottawa needed to be cleared. The Liberals’ willingness to discuss the convoy’s concerns might very well have achieved that end. But Trudeau, as do the authors of the article we are examining, with no evidence whatsoever, simply dismissed it as an expression of racism and misogyny. The irony of the demonizing of the thousands of Canadians who came across their country to peacefully protest what they saw as the dictatorial nature of their government’s Covid mandates, is that it was they who were denounced as threats to Democracy! But what of those who have been breaking the Law for years now on behalf of causes beloved by the hypocritical Left?
Our two university professors make no mention of the multiple acts of violence committed by radical environmentalists against various legally sanctioned energy projects over the last couple of decades; nor of the burning of fifty or so Canadian churches by “protesters” appalled by the injustices of our Residential Schools; nor of the over two billion dollars of property damage, including several deaths, perpetrated by B.L.M. in response to the alleged “systemic” racism of contemporary America. None of these brazen violations of the Rule of Law, violations tacitly endorsed by many on the Left, represent genuine threats to the integrity of our Western Democracies according to our two sanctimonious academics. But OMG, how horrid were those populist idiots who took to the streets of Ottawa eight months ago, waving their flags, honking their horns, singing and dancing while feeding the poor, all in an attempt to overthrow the Canadian government? The absurdity of their brazenly biased assessment of that crowd was surpassed only by that of our Prime Minister who, sharing the same bias, declared it to be both racist and misogynistic though it in fact included thousands of women and a significant number of people of color.
Populism has of course also been invoked to denounce the tens of thousands who marched through the streets of Washington on Jan. 6. That their absolute loathing of Donald Trump, a loathing they never stop venting, might have led devout Democrats around the country to engage in questionable tactics to assure his defeat is something only a gullible simpleton would apparently believe. Such is the populist stereotype relentlessly endorsed by those on the Left. Their hypocrisy is no more evident than in their assertion that Republican skepticism regarding absentee voting was racially motivated, though studies from both sides of the aisle, as I have already noted, have affirmed the dangers of such practices. Dan Bongino recently cited a N.Y. Times article from 2012 which basically equated absentee balloting with voter fraud. A Toronto Star article by Edward Keenan from Sept. 27, 2020, laments that Trump might steal the pending election because “the system is shockingly weak.” Yet when the Trump supporters who took to the streets of Washington made the very same argument, they were denounced by the “enlightened” Left as a mob of simpletons naively prone to conspiracy theories!
There are no doubt those deemed to be populists who are worthy of our contempt. But this is a simple given of human nature, there being just as many people of color, for example, who embrace the notion of systemic racism because they hate White people. The ultimate irony of academics who suggest that victories for “conservatives” in nations such as Sweden represent a threat to our Democracies, is that it is they who are actually that threat, their arrogant assumption being that the fundamental Democratic principle of “majority rule” ceases to matter when the majority fails to vote in line with their ideological bias.
And oh, while I wish no violence on anyone, I cannot help but wonder if Messieurs Drache and Froese, were they citizens of Sweden, might not alter their views on immigration had any of their loved ones been victims of the unprecedented violence that has plagued that country over the last several years. Life in the Real World differs radically from life as seen from an Ivory Tower. It’s a fact quite pertinent to the nonsense spewed by academics who never need to confront the real-world results of their naive vision of the species.