Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada

In My Humble Opinion
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Jason Stanley, who says grandmother fled Berlin with his father in 1939, says US may become ‘fascist dictatorship’

Jason Stanley, who wrote the 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Stanley told the Daily Nous, a philosophy profession website, that he made the decision “to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship”.

He said in an interview that Columbia University’s recent actions moved him to accept the offer. Last Friday, Columbia gave in to the Trump administration by agreeing to a series of demands in order to restore $400m in federal funding. These changes include crackdowns on protests, increased security power and “internal reviews” of some academic programs, like the Middle Eastern studies department.

“When I saw Columbia completely capitulate, and I saw this vocabulary of, well, we’re going to work behind the scenes because we’re not going to get targeted – that whole way of thinking pre-supposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don’t want to be one of those universities, and that’s just a losing strategy,” he said.

Stanley added: “You’ve got to just band together and say an attack on one university is an attack on all universities. And maybe you lose that fight, but you’re certainly going to lose this one if you give up before you fight.

“Columbia was just such a warning,” he said. “I just became very worried because I didn’t see a strong enough reaction in other universities to side with Columbia. I see Yale trying not to be a target. And as I said, that’s a losing strategy.”

Now I don’t know this professor and this very well may be a publicity-seeking move, but if we take him at face value, the line that was crossed for him was the reaction of Columbia / Yale / US Universities.

That got me wondering. What are your concrete lines in these tricky boiling frog situations?

Here are some examples of concrete lines I can think of that have already been crossed.

  1. becoming GOP candidate in 2016
  2. winning 2016 elections
  3. repeal of federally protected abortion rights for women
  4. Failed impeachment votes
  5. becoming GOP candidate in 2024 post-presidency crimes & felonies
  6. winning 2024 elections
  7. Politically motivated purge of top military commanders
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Stanley is a well known political philosopher and his research is specifically focused on the rhetoric and vernacular of authoritarian, totalitarian, and fascist regimes. In addition to How Fascism Works (an excellent short primer that everyone concerned about recent political developments in the United States and elsewhere) he also wrote The Politics of Language with linguist David Beaver about the political use of language to compel and manipulate people into a unifying ideology or worldview even if it is at odds with their supposedly deeply held beliefs and values. Stanley is a tenured professor at Yale and holds the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy, so he is abandoning significant achievement and academic stability to go to the University of Toronto, so no, this isn’t a “publicity-seeking move” on his part.

The American public has been primed to abandon democratic ideals and to embrace authoritarianism for over thirty years now, starting with the 1994 Contract With America and Newt Gingrich advising GOP leaders on the use of language and explicitly fascist rhetoric, and have been so successful at it that many Democratic politicians have unthinkingly copies the vernacular and even many basic ideals surrounding “American exceptionalism”. This certainly didn’t start with Donald Trump, who likes the pageantry and pomp of fascism and is sufficiently canny to embrace its appeal but has never had any ideology or deep conception in his vacuous head.

We crossed a line not in January 6, 2021 or November of 2016, but when we spastically responded as a national polity in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks to granting unprecedented authority to whomever was in power (and those behind them) to subvert civil liberties, engage in mass surveillance, detain and torture suspected “enemy combatants” indefinitely, and launch into a series of unilateral invasions and undeclared (and often covert) wars around the globe under the banner of “The Global War on Terror”, an agenda that all Republicans and the vast majority of Democrats voted for just as they voted in favor of the cleverly named Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001 without questioning how such an extensive bill which so comprehensively undermined civil liberties, independent oversight, and ceded so much legislative and judicial authority to the executive came to be drafted almost overnight. Almost nobody has really probed the true agenda of the twin invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq (even though looking at a map should give you a clue), or why 9/11 ‘truther’ conspiracies spread so broadly even though they are obvious nonsense, or the permeation of paramilitary sentiment and military hardware into law enforcement and the public at large.

When George W. Bush landed a fighter jet on the USS Abraham Lincoln with a giant “Mission Accomplished!” banner in the backdrop to distract from the actual failures and erosions of civil liberties and independent oversight over military and covert actions, that should have been a giant waving flag that the United States wad heading down an authoritarian path and using appeals to patriotism and classic political misdirection to keep the public gaze from peering too deeply into the shadows of corporate and ultra-wealthy interests supporting this direction. And it is not, despite pretensions of being the leading force behind democracy and freedom worldwide, as if the United States has ever really been very far from this; in foreign policy we’ve always been willing to cozy up to and support—with massive fiscal and military aid, and often with direct force of the world’s most powerful and far-reaching military—dictators, despots, and yes, even fascism regimes when they served our interests.

The United States crossed a lot of lines before Donald Trump did the escalator slide to being the atavistic candidate the GOP has been searching for over decades but didn’t have the balls to create, and it crossed them in a pretty bipartisan matter, dismissing anyone who critiqued things like the invasion of Iraq or detaining and torturing people in Gitmo as cranks or unpatriotic, even while ridiculous and unfounded conspiracy theories ran wild, and fascistic movements like Christian nationalist movements grew and infiltrated municipal governments, local institutions, and statehouses.

Stranger

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All you’re saying is true, but I specifically was talking not about the line that starts the slide towards fascism, but the line after that, when the consequences have already come home to roost. The line that makes you flee for Canada like Stanley.

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Well, for my part, I will never flee to Canada. Anymore than, were I German unhappy with developments in 1937, I would flee to Poland. But worse. America’s reach truly is global.

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That settles it; I am going to flee to Mars. Maybe Neptune.

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As he described in an interview with the CBC, and as I understood it, he wouldn’t be allowed the freedoms to fully investigate fascism and teach anti-fascism in the US because his students will be victimized by the state. American officials are quite open in their attacks of foreign students on political grounds.

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Ad astra. To the stars!

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I’d like to buy a seat.

As to the professor this seems more for performance than a need to flee. I assume he is an American citizen and, so far, we still have rights. The Secretary of State cannot kick us out of the country. Trump cannot imprison us without due process.

I worry we are headed that way though but even MAGA would (probably) object if it got that far.

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Cite?

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Seriously? Just a guess. I thought that was obvious.

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Thank you for another excellent post.

Moving to Toronto is not a terribly retrograde step. Canadian universities punch above their weight, and UBC, Toronto and McGill are world class. One of the strengths of Canadian universities is that most schools are very good, including ones like Western, Dalhousie, Waterloo, Queens and Calgary.

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Of your list, #3, “repeal of federally protected abortion rights for women” made it clear American civil rights were no more for fully half the population. I’m geographically close enough to Canada that I’d be happy to move there, but don’t have the financial resources to manage it.

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They absolutely can. They can just claim you’re not a real citizen and send you of to a prison in El Salvador.

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Do not like you world of ours,
Rather live on plant Mars,
Die from lack of oxygen,
Than breathe the air of other men.

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I do not think we are there yet. I think the current administration is working towards that but they can’t get that far just yet.

Maybe…maybe?..if Sec State says they deem you (any “you”) a terrorist they get to do whatever. Bit of a reach though, even now.

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Depends on your last name and skin color

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And very foolish from an academic standpoint. If you’re convinced that the U.S. is in the early stages of fascism (or has already reached it), what better laboratory could there be for study?

William Shirer got a lot of education and experience by being a correspondent in Nazi Germany before being expelled, leading to a best-selling book. This poor slob won’t get much of a reputation by scolding from the perceived safety of Canada

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It is not “more for performance”; Stanley is genuinely concerned about academic freedom, and specifically in the area of political speech which is his particular research area. Even if his personal rights are protected, the use of government funds to coerce a university to restrict funding or presentation of such research unfavorable to the current regime is a serious concern; even more is the literal persecution of international students or other non-citizens, such as Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia or Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts. Stanley is going to the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, which Stanley himself describes as “…centers of excellence and in particular in this fight for democracy.” This isn’t just about having a job or whether he can be arrested for saying things that the Trump regime doesn’t like; it is about continuing the valuable work he is doing in terms of characterizing and revealing the impact of propaganda and linguistic manipulation in political speech, which he is willing to do despite the financial hit and disruption to his family, and as a keen observer of authoritarian use of language should be considered a harbinger. Characterizing the move has performative is an obtuse statement, particularly as other historians and experts on authoritarianism and fascism from Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Chris Hedges, and Heather Cox Richardson are voicing the same concerns about not only the clear intent of this regime to drag the US into an authoritarian (and potentially theocratic) state, but how fast this has moved since Trump’s second inauguration.

Here is a CBC interview with Stanley on why he is leaving Yale and going to University of Toronto:

One common refrain in tyranny is how it begins slowly, and how people assume that ‘someone’ will put a stop to it before it goes to far, and how incremental but progressive advances of government interference into academic freedoms, media independence, personal conduct, and business is tacitly accepted as people just try to get on with their lives, until suddenly they wake up and find that they effectively have no rights or protections whatsoever. But don’t take my word for it:

Stranger

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Oh…I get that. The frog in the slowly heating water.

But selling my house and finding another country to move to and keeping my job are HUGE hurdles to deal with. Where is the line drawn? When do I bail?

And, of course, many people can’t bail. I might just be able to do it but it would be a massive effort to pull off.

I think this professor is performing and not fleeing out of a need to escape.

Please PM me when I need to flee.

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You probably don’t need to ever worry about it. Plenty of people in fascist states don’t feel any consequences. Maybe you’ll benefit if you play your cards right and you can laugh all you want at this silly professor and his performance.