Essential reading about how the world is sleepwalking into fascism

I have been making my way through Carol Off's excellent 2024 book, At a Loss For Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage. 

It is ostensibly a book about words and how they have been changed, redefined and weaponized. But it is also a pretty comprehensive (and rather depressing) look at how the alt right has become such a force in Canadian, American and worldwide politics, and how the Overton window has been shifted so far to the right that outright fascist views are being openly espoused by mainstream politicians.

Along the way, she looks at Donald Trump, Pierre Poilievre, SteoehnHarper, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Radovan Karazdic, Ron DeSantis, and several lesser-known, but equally influential and blameworthy, names like Arthur Finkelstein, Christopher Rufo, James Buchanan, Leonard Leo and Tamara Lich, not to mention a cornucopia of well-funded, largely secretive, organizations whose single-minded purpose is the imposition of anti-woke autocratic rule and the permanent destruction of caring liberal democratic governance.

The book is replete with literally hundreds of interlinked anecdotes about how the extreme right has employed disinformation, exaggeration, doublethink, and outright barefaced lies to achieve its ends, and how successful it has been at it. "Dystopian" and "Orwellian" don't even cover it. So confident are they that they make little or no attempt to dissemble, and there is oodles of publicly-available evidence of their Machiavellian machinations.

The chapters are named after words that have been co-opted by the hard right in many different countries: Freedom, Democracy, Truth, Woke, Choice, and Taxes. But what Ms. Off does really well is outline how interconnected the right is throughout the world, and how they learn from each other, sometimes indirectly, but often surprisingly directly, to an extent that the left has never been able to. 

Clearly, the hard right, and in many cases - let's not beat about the bush - openly fascist, regimes see their opportunity, their moment in history, like at no other time since the 1930s and 1940s.

It's only when you read all of this, together in one place, that you realize the enormity of what is going on under our very noses. It makes truly scary, but essential, reading.