[timun]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

They’re taking over at the nomination level, where a small fraction of citizens participate. Only something like 25 per cent of Albertans were opposed to vaccine mandates. So being antivaxx is not mainstream in Alberta. But there are enough of them that they could take over a party at the nomination level.

Same with abortion in the U.S. The policies pushed by the Republicans aren’t very popular even in the U.S. - less than 15 per cent of Americans believe abortion should be illegal in all cases.

Ideally, holding unpopular ideas would make those parties unelectable in a general election. But in our polarized political culture, people often vote against a party, rather than for a party. And if the stuff the other party stands for is even more outside your comfort zone, then you’ll hold your nose and vote for the kooks on your side rather than the kooks on the other side.

And so we get governments that promote all sorts of non-mainstream policies.

Eco's 13th essential characteristic of fascism: "selective populism".

Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view — one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples” — “maniples” being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

This is precisely what groups like Take Back Alberta are doing, and why they're doing it.