In the tranquility of your home, surrounded by your loved ones, you took the revelation with astonishment: we were living in one of the most tyrannical dictatorships in the world. It was FreedumGuy, fictitious name, live from his 18-wheeler in Ottawa, who revealed it last week. There, you said to yourself that one of you lived in a parallel universe…
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
In time immemorial, a dividing line structured our debates: sovereignism/federalism. Since 2012, other axes have appeared: left/right, generational, center vs. regions. In two years of pandemic, they have widened. But we also saw the emergence of a totally new fracture, which jumps out at us today: the rational/irrational axis. If the majority adapts to the chaotic reality, a solid minority lives in a parallel reality. We saw them in Ottawa, in Quebec. We read them on social networks where they flourish. Ordinary people, others less, 10 to 15% of the population, depending on how you calculate them, from the fearful antivax to the convinced trumpist. Among them are citizens who are sincerely worried, or in distress. From fanatics who have found an outlet, evangelists, PayPal gurus, to power-hungry manipulators, backed from the outside.
Their interests and their fights are diverse, but the bases of their universe, common. They have their information networks, their beliefs, their vision of society, their idols, their leaders, support in the United States and, more recently, very local politicians who woo them.
The irrational is very well organized, and aims to destabilize democratic institutions. Why is this new divide worrying? It is no longer a question here of different visions which clash, but of reality against a parallel world.
In 2012, during Maple Spring, Quebec society was divided, but it was debating! The same reality was evoked on both sides. Here, how to discuss when FreedumGuy denounces the Canadian dictatorship in a whirlpool in front of the parliament? There is no longer a common base, any possible dialogue. On the alternative reality and misinformation front, the United States has had a head start since 2016. The Trump virus has taken a firm hold in American life, and it has stung Canada and Quebec.
It generates largely foreign funding for the “freedom convoy”, and support from Candace Owens, a commentator close to Trump, who implores American troops to intervene in Canada to defeat “the tyrannical regime of dictator Justin Trudeau Castro or Carson Tucker of Fox, who says without laughing that Canada is under martial law, a dictatorship worse than China. For them, the real is a fake news, and their lies, reality. They believe themselves. In the South, these media are no longer alternative at all, and the fact checkers block against a delirious ocean. This is how we arrive at a misguided concept of FREEDOM, roared like a mantra by the inhabitants of a rich, free and privileged country.
It is a minority part of the population that has shifted, but this phenomenon occurs in weakened, atomized, resigned societies, where the ideological camps look at each other and defy each other. Populists against radical left, Montreal against the rest of Quebec, millennials against boomers. The truth is that we have less and less society, less and less trust in the elites, in elected officials, in the media.
Fractures dominate the social landscape, at the end of the fifth pandemic wave. Somehow, the world of alternate realities, with its certainties, is reassuring for its followers. It offers purpose and comfort.
This breach opened with the pandemic will not close. February 2022, Ottawa: the date and place of founding a movement. Certainly, the actors of the seat of the federal capital returned to their homes, to their communities in New Brunswick, Alberta or Quebec, by truck or van, with their flags and common memories. But they will swarm. Because they have SEEN their strength. They know they have allies, that they can obtain funding, occupy all the space in the traditional media, that they can paralyze a city, a parliament, even threaten power.
Once the sanitary measures are lifted (thanks to them, they will believe), they will turn to a new cause, already designated: climate change. We are not done with the irrationals. Ottawa signed their official birth certificate.
Let’s not repeat the error and affront of ignoring them, underestimating them or mocking them. They are dangerous, toxic for democracies already very poquées. Because here is the paradox: they are in the unreal. But they are very real.