Canada’s Conservatives Have Become the New MAGA Republicans
Canada is not immune from U.S. style anti-trans culture wars
The genesis of this article was a comment that was left for me on one of my social media posts. It was a throwaway post of mine on the Bluesky app, cross-posted to Instagram: an observational riff at the expense of the then-upcoming Conservative Party of Canada policy convention in Québec City on the weekend of 9–10 September, 2023. More on the comment later.
Conservatism is by its very nature — and name — a reactionary and typically regressive political and social ideology. It seeks to maintain the status quo wherever possible, at least insofar as the status quo lines up with the inherent traits and characteristics of the dominant class. It is inimical to democratic and individual freedoms, despite the desperate insistences of those who promote it.
Conservatism attracts like-minded ideologies like nationalism, populism, demagoguery, and fascism as it seeks to force a wholesale societal crackdown on progressive policies and individual autonomy, subverting the gains of broader civil rights to the narrow views of conservatism’s most extreme and vocal adherents. That these narrow views are almost universally seeded by religious fundamentalism is no accident; it is an inevitability.
