When, in September 2025, Prof. Jason Stanley announced his move from Yale University to the University of Toronto, he framed the decision in stark, almost existential terms. The United States, he warned, was sliding toward fascism. He explained that his exodus to Canada was like leaving Germany during Adolf Hitler’s rise. By comparing his departure from the United States to Jews fleeing Germany in the 1930s, Stanley transformed a university appointment into a dramatic indictment of America.
Questioning the Narrative
For some observers, his relocation reinforced a comforting narrative: that Canada remains a stable democratic refuge while the United States drifts toward something darker. Yet Stanley’s assessment — and the analytical framework underpinning it — deserves much closer scrutiny. The issue is not so much whether democratic erosion exists south of the border, but whether the language used to describe it preserves critical distinctions or severely undercuts them.
False Equivalence
This concern becomes more acute in light of Stanley’s broader claims. He has repeatedly characterized the United States as a “fascist state,” adding in a February Globe and Mail article that, “As with Russia, we must expect that it is possible the United States will remain fascist far into the future.” The problem is one of profound false equivalence: if “fascism” is stretched to encompass fundamentally different political realities — cancelling the immense distinction between the United States and regimes such as Russia or Iran — it ceases to function as a meaningful analytical concept.
Comparing Political Realities
The tension becomes clearer when considering how Stanley treats these other regimes. Elsewhere, he has described Russia as “explicitly fascist” and even “genocidal.” Yet in the Globe article, he places the U.S. and Russia in the same category of “fascist” powers for the purposes of geopolitical advice to Canada. On any reasonable scale, the gap between the United States and regimes such as Russia or Iran — particularly with respect to freedom of expression, political opposition and civil liberties — is substantial to say the least. Americans openly criticize their leaders, organize politically, contest elections and challenge authority in courts and public discourse. In Russia, such opposition is often systematically constrained and, at times, eliminated. In Iran, recent years have brought killings, mass arrests and violent crackdowns on dissenters, including women protesting state repression. Even with severe challenges, when democracies like the United States are placed in the same conceptual frame as Russia and Iran, it reeks of demagoguery.
Impact on Public Perception
The erosion of such obvious distinctions matters beyond academic debate, because public perception is often shaped by the language used by thought leaders. Polling by Leger in March suggests that some younger Canadians hold more favourable views of countries such as China (33 per cent) and Cuba (54 per cent) — hardly beacons of democracy — than of the United States (22 per cent), which ranks only somewhat ahead of Iran (12 per cent). This outcome reflects not merely an imbalance in perception versus reality, but a troubling degree of moral incoherence.
Stanley's Middle East Commentary
A similar pattern can be discerned from some of Stanley’s commentary on the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. In a Guardian column last month, he wrote about what he describes as the under-reported and pernicious role of Israel in shaping American decision-making around the war with Iran. He argues that the failure to foreground Israeli influence constitutes a form of media-driven propaganda by omission.
Yet Stanley’s thin analysis provides no context whatsoever regarding the centrality of the nefarious Iranian regime — its ideological orientation, eliminationist discourse and long-standing reliance on terrorist proxy actors such as Hezbollah and Hamas to do its military bidding. By focusing almost exclusively on Israeli influence while largely bracketing Iran’s role as a primary strategic actor, his framework in the Guardian column advances a misleading and deeply decontextualized account of the war.
