Polarisation, polarization.
#Polarisation,
#polarization.
A professor has abandoned his privileged job at Yale University, left the United States and moved himself and his family to Canada. His take: If you think “the country is simply polarized”, you're getting it completely wrong. This is not about two sides that disagree. There is the embrace of authoritarianism on one side, and others being told “you gotta calm down”.
This comes from a youtube short and this is most of the transcript:
Jason Stanley is one of the world’s leading experts on fascism. He wrote the book “How fascism works”. And he has left the United States because of Donald Trump.
Stanley was a professor at Yale University. Tenured, prestigious… kind of as protected as it gets in American academia. And even he decided it wasn't safe or honest to stay.
And so he has moved his family to Canada, and is now teaching at the University of Toronto. Why? Because in his words, the Trump administration has carried out a coup […]
Stanley says the Trump regime believes it has enough control over the levers of power that it doesn’t need public support anymore. That is a chilling sentence. And according to Stanley, universities are being targeted first, funding threats and political pressure and demands for compliance. And he believed that if he stayed at Yale, the institution would feel pressure to tone him down […] , that the message would have been very clear: “do not do anything to provoke retaliation from Donald Trump, don't bring heat, normalize what is happening”, and he refused, and so he left. And from outside the Country, he is now saying what many institutions in the United States are too afraid to say, which is that Trump is using classic fascist tactics: a cult of the leader, scapegoating immigrants, LGBTQ people, political opponents, they all get scapegoated, delegitimizing your opposition, criminalizing protests, turning law enforcement and the military inward.
Stanley says that when people frame this as “Oh, the country is simply polarized”, that they're getting it completely wrong. He says this is not about two sides that disagree. There is the embrace of authoritarianism on one side, and others being told: “you gotta calm down”. He makes the point very bluntly: “History will not remember this as polarization”. History, if you look at other examples, remembers who normalized fascism while it was happening. And the part that really should land is that he doesn't believe the fight is over. He thinks Trump may have moved too fast, that the cruelty and the corruption and the illegality are becoming obvious to too many Americans, because he moved too quickly. And he is really making me think, you know, when a global scholar of fascism looks at the US under Trump and says, I must leave the country and doesn't just say: “Oh, I might move to Canada”. He did it. He moved to Canada. That is not something that Americans should be shrugging off.
Seen on
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p3n22ZvFpe0
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