What the left calls a far-right attack on democracy is just voters pushing back against years of progressive authoritarianism

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The year-end political rumblings in Canada, the United States and around the world have been filled with a familiar modern theme: Democracies are in crisis and at various crossroads. In media, academic and activist circles, one of the most common arguments is that democracies are under threat from rising “far-right” political actors out to destroy democracy.

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A typical media take on the crisis from The Associated Press warned just before Christmas that the return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency is part of a global trend. The writer managed to drag Canada into the corral of nations moving to the anti-democratic right. “The fall of Germany’s government and possible collapse of Canada’s could just be democracy in action, giving voters a chance to elect new leaders. Or they could usher in more authoritarian regimes.”

Departing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau raised the right-wing authoritarian scare during his resignation comments on Monday. Asked about the coming election, Trudeau said he looks forward to the fight against Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and the “tremendous pressures” around the world “to veer to the hard right” and away from the big ambitions favoured by his government.

A more sophisticated but parallel outline of the democracy crisis appeared just after Christmas in the Globe and Mail with a claim that a global trend through 2024 of “voting against democracy” had produced “parties of intolerance” and ”autocratic-minded leaders” who gained “immediate credibility” across Europe, the Americas and Asia. Thanks to the election of Donald Trump, many democracies “have more or less freely chosen an anti-democratic strongman figure.”

There’s a certain Greta Thunberg/Extinction Rebellion quality to claims that voters are dangerously imbecilic endorsers of authoritarian “far-right” lunatics fostering “democratic backsliding.” The extreme Thunberger aspect of the democracy-in-decline movement has been on display across the academic world for some time. Dozens of books and papers have argued in recent years that “illiberal democracies” are on the rise and threaten the fundamental foundations of society.

No academic has been more Thunberg in his messaging than Timothy Snyder, a professor of history and global affairs at Yale University and prolific author who has managed to manipulate and distort economic history and theory. One of his greatest ideological tricks has been to claim that the principles of free-market capitalism are no different than those of Marxism. Both assume, Snyder argues, that the state will cease to matter and that “a vanguard of intellectuals is needed to bring about a utopia that can be known in advance.”

What rubbish! No free-market economists, from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman, ever even remotely suggested the world should be run by a vanguard of intellectuals. Snyder’s argument is, as