Episode Transcript
Anti-Fascist Dad Podcast
Episode 16, Part 2: Mark Carney Is Not Your Anti-Fascist Dad
Matthew Remski:
Welcome, Patreons, to part two of episode 16, “Mark Carney Is Not Your Anti-Fascist Dad.” I’m really grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your work and your days.
In part one, I examined Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech as a sophisticated liberal confession concealing a deeper loyalty to capitalism.
Carney admitted that the rules-based international order was always a useful fiction, applied unevenly, protecting the powerful while subordinating weaker nations. While that sounded radical to some, I argued that it serves an old liberal purpose, which is to reassure elites that capitalism can be stabilized with better optics rather than transformed.
Carney’s prescription for avoiding fascist chaos is more of the same conservative capitalism that accelerates tax cuts, deregulation, fast-tracked investment in oil, AI, and minerals, and new trading blocs with more stable middle powers, as he calls them.
He’s not talking about or taking action domestically to support labor unions, redistribution, social safety nets, or anti-racist and democratic protections. He wants to offer strength through capital mobilization, not social policy.
But today I want to focus on how Carney’s calm paternal style makes this vision emotionally appealing, especially to frightened liberals seeking stability, but how ultimately his view of the world is not structurally different from the one he opposes.
In my view, antifascism cannot be a gentler version of domination.
We don’t need a kinder patriarch inside the sweatshop. We need politics and parental figures that lead us out of it.
Living with Trump, however closely, is like living with a malignant narcissist or alcoholic who is constantly volatile and keeps people under their boot through disorganized attachment, which is that chaotic feeling when a person experiences the same figure as both a source of comfort and a source of fear.
Now this is a subject I return to often, and so I’ll just do a small review here.
Initially, disorganized attachment as a category and phenomenon emerged in relation to the work of psychotherapist John Bowlby in the 1950s as part of his general theory of attachment. He was looking at caregiver–child relationships, and after generations of this theory being worked on and developed and nuanced, cult theorist Alexandra Stein used it in her 2016 book *Terror, Love, and Brainwashing* to analyze cults and totalitarian systems.
She basically argued that high-demand or cultic groups function by generating disorganized attachment patterns en masse in relation to the leader and the leader’s group. Now how does this work?
Stein says that cults set the leader and group up as the sole safe haven for the follower by separating followers from other sources of support.
So in Trump land, this is “don’t trust the fake news, just trust the plan.” You know, keep your eye on the prize, whatever they say to each other.
And once that sole safe haven is set up, the group spirals into a cycle of love and terror, because the leader or leaders will alternate between offering care or love-bombing and instilling fear through threats, criticism, or warnings of disaster. And so the result is a mass trauma bond, a powerful entangled connection rooted in fear and the desperate need for comfort all mixed up together. And the effect is to make the group and the leader appear to be indispensable.
If you subject yourself, or are subjected, to this level of stress for a certain amount of time, you can get dissociative, which means you feel like there’s a disconnection between your thoughts and feelings and the social reality provoking them. It’s a very disoriented feeling.
This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to reflect critically on your relationship to the group. And all of this is gold for a fascist movement, which at its core is driven by emotions that grow more powerful to the extent they are unexamined.
So here’s a key graph from Stein’s book.
The caregiver is at once the safe haven and also the source of threat or alarm.
So when the child feels threatened by the caregiver, he or she is caught in an impossible situation.
Both comfort and threat are represented by the same person, the caregiver.
The child experiences the unresolvable paradox of seeking to simultaneously flee from and approach the caregiver. This happens at a biological level, not thought out or conscious, but as evolved behavior to fear.
The child attempts to run to and flee from the caregiver at one and the same time.
He or she makes movements to approach the frightening or frightened parent at the same time as trying to avoid the fearful stimuli coming from the caregiver.
However, in most cases, the need for proximity, for physical closeness, tends to override attempts to avoid the fear-arousing caregiver. So usually the child stays close to the frightening parent, while internally both their withdrawal and approach systems are simultaneously activated and in conflict.
So if you are trying to figure out Karoline Leavitt or the psychology of any MAGA supporter who seems to remain devoted to Trump no matter how much scorn or abuse he pours in their direction, the concept of disorganized attachment might help out.
And now that Trump is degenerating into a walking amyloid brain plaque with a catheter, he is becoming more cruel and more unpredictable. These impacts, these affects, will increase.
As the world has watched this unravel since 2016, Trump has understandably thrown a lot of people into a frantic search for alternative patriarchs. Who expected so many people to turn their hopes to Ottawa and the office of the Canadian prime minister?
Trudeau was youthful. He seemed to be a wholesome dad. He seemed to be a feminist. He was pro-immigration. He was climate-oriented. Now, he fell gravely short in all of these aspirations and promises, but he countered Trump’s rage with an empathetic vibe. And he seemed to emphasize diversity over nativism.
And then enter Mark Carney. He’s warm, measured, soft-spoken, nonreactive, fluent in multiple environments, including on the ice. As an accomplished hockey player, he’s a really good skater. He has that fluid Gretzky vibe on the rink, giving the impression of effortless confidence, the feeling that no one can touch him, and that playing is just a simple, pure pleasure. His whole demeanor seems to offer secure attachment.
As I pinged in part one, both Trudeau and Carney exhibit liberalism’s greatest advantage in psychosocial terms: the ability to speak to the yearning for continuity, for the reassurance that things will be okay.
So I heard these sighs of relief from my fellow Canadians who were so happy that he was on that dais in Davos, that he showed dignity and poise, and that through his presence he exposed Trump for the rotting and demented fascist he is.
And listening to them, it was really like watching people relax in relation to a safer father figure.
But if you listen carefully, I think you can hear political metaphors for secure attachment in that Davos speech.
American hegemony, he said, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
Now, you heard Varoufakis in the first part of this episode refute all of that and illuminate the hypocrisies in those statements. But taken at face value, it’s like he’s laying down the bedrock of solid management, the building blocks of safety and clarity. Like: here are the things we got from our agreements that helped us flourish, and we can regain those without the fascism. And if we do, we’ll be okay.
But Carney’s punchline is that the international rules-based order was a lie. And so I’m going to argue that his offer—his unconscious offer, his presentation of secure attachment—is also a lie. And the big problem is that it’s a harder lie to detect.
Bowlby and his descendants fleshed out the picture of secure attachment by describing caregiving that was reliable, consistent, trusting and trustworthy, accepting, present, and encouraging the child or cared-for person to develop their own agency. The securely attached child won’t become anxious or dissociative when their caregiver leaves because it is deeply embedded in their nervous system that the caregiver will return with their familiar warmth and support.
This allows the secure child to venture forth into their own creative life.
Trudeau and Carney are excellent at presenting this affect of trust. Have you ever seen either of them off balance, defensive, or surprised by a question?
Both of them make every one of Trump’s cabinets sound like a Trandoshan from Star Wars.
But what security does the capitalist order they defend actually provide?
Going back to the dawn of neoliberalism in the 1980s, G7 leaders promised national security, economic growth, and personal liberty.
And they may genuinely have believed that their policies would deliver those values. But the policies themselves deregulated markets, eviscerated labor movements, rolled back the post–World War II social gains, scorched the environment, and allowed financialization and tech tycoons to basically do whatever they wanted.
And they did it all eerily using the same rhetoric—albeit in gentler tones—used by the right wing: the rhetoric of stability and strength.
Here in Canada, most of us are relieved that Carney won the last election over the sniveling whiner Pierre Poilievre, who’s a MAGA imitator and sycophant of Jordan Peterson. We call him Maple MAGA here.
We know things would be worse under him, in the same way that most leftists in the U.S. acknowledge that things would be different had Harris won in 2024. But the difference is one of degree.
And it’s significant that Carney and Harris come from the banking and policing worlds, respectively—the two pillars of capital management and defense.
These are people who will listen and nod when protesters decry U.S.- and Canada-funded genocide in Gaza while continuing to cut checks to the IDF to maintain their vision of global security.
These are people who will bow to the investor class in the hope of securing investment dollars while trading away social programs through austerity deals to lock in those contracts.
Carney may offer his followers feelings of security and safety, but what happens when he eases labor standards and environmental protections to extract more oil? Or when he railroads First Nations people and continues to collaborate with Israel or strike trade deals with Qatar that say nothing about human rights? What happens when his development policy for AI says more about profit than it does about worker displacement? Aren’t these all flags for disorganized attachment, but on a slower boil?
So much for the policy level. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that these leaders build on the fact that capitalism per se fosters disorganized attachment at the family and personal level.
In my own life, I feel this in every simple transaction I have to make to feed our children. For example, we go to one of the corporate monopoly grocery stores and just accept that they’ve been found guilty of price fixing. And now, in collusion with tech apps like Instacart, they are beginning to get into surveillance pricing, or the use of digital wizardry to instantly change prices on the shelf—ostensibly to reflect true market value in the moment—while exploiting the same personal data because it happens on your phone that feeds you ads.
And the whole purpose is to lay bets, facilitated by AI, on what you personally would be willing or able to pay for that can of beans versus what your neighbor will pay. And so you will now get different prices because you live in an even more fractured reality in which the actual value of things is completely mystified and fetishized away from your sight.
I have been able to survive and navigate this so far at 54 years old as a privileged person, but within a growing awareness that the basic systems of living are constructed to legally exploit and extract as much as possible and send the profits to the top.
We live in a system that makes relationships, care, and even identity unstable and transactional, while exposing people—especially children—to chronic insecurity and contradictory emotional demands. This is a system that makes housing, food, healthcare, and work precarious and caregivers stressed, overworked, or absent, which disrupts the consistent emotional attunement children need to form secure attachment.
It’s a system that rewards your availability to the market over your availability to your dependents. This forces parents to oscillate between nurturance and neglect in ways that feel unpredictable to the child.
And who among us, as a parent, hasn’t felt our giving twisted by anxiety about survival? We can’t afford this. Don’t be weak. You must compete. All of the other messages that create the classic attachment contradiction: the caregiver is both a source of safety and resources and a source of fear and want.
A system organized around competition, scarcity, and commodification will produce relational environments that are chaotic, emotionally contradictory, and unsafe for secure attachment to develop.
It’s long been understood in antifascist culture that given the choice, liberals will always opt for the perceived safety of order over change.
And this is why, when push comes to shove, they will negotiate with, appease, and ultimately back stronger and stronger forms of capitalist domination.
Because it’s familiar. It’s what they know. It’s more predictable than letting the working class decide what it wants and needs.
What does this mean for antifascist parents?
I think, first of all, it’s an object lesson in identifying performative versus material care. I think any kid in the world could benefit from that disarming moment in which they realize, through a calm discussion, that just because Mark Carney seems like a lovely guy, lovely guys can still be deeply invested in very harmful systems.
But an additional challenge for those of us who are parenting through this shit show now is to realize how attractive this ethos of stabilization is, and therefore how attractive Carney’s spiel is on the level of the home. A lot of us value this stability as well—any stability—and we might feel it whenever we say, “Hey, things are going to turn out all right.”
But as conditions accelerate and deteriorate, we’re going to feel a sharper contradiction between the desire for comfort and safety and stability at home and what we might actually be called to do.
There is no definitive content to good attachment parenting. It’s bipartisan. I don’t think white nationalist or fascist families can develop good attachment, but I definitely think conservative and liberal families do it, and they do it well all the time.
So I’m starting to wonder if solid liberal attachment parenting functions as an additional pacification technique against revolution.
In other words, if your primary care relationships are really stable, you might default back to the comfort of family, experiencing it as a special respite from the contradictions of the world.
I got at some of that in my review of Scott Galloway’s notes on *Being a Man*, because he makes a really clumsy Gen X argument for attachment being the only thing that makes the chaos of capitalism worthwhile.
Now, if attachment theory is essentially a strategy for emotional sustainability, it might implicitly encourage a liberal reformist orientation to life: let’s not change things too fast, let’s come back to center, let’s adjust, let’s accommodate.
Meanwhile, it is unavoidable that radical politics can sometimes demand ruptures.
These are very difficult paradigms to integrate. It is good to come to secure attachment and the capacity for social repair. And it is also good to know when you have to cut bait and fuck shit up, because the capitalists will kill you if they must, and the fascists will kill you because they want to.
Speaking of fascists killing, I want to end with a few notes about Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old VA ICU nurse murdered in Minneapolis as he attempted to observe an ICE abduction and then moved to protect a woman observer who was being assaulted by ICE officers.
Before my thoughts, I want to read this tribute from someone who knew him well, Jessica Hauser.
Jessica Hauser:
“I was Alex Pretti’s final nursing student.
He was my friend and my nursing mentor for the past four months. I stood shoulder to shoulder with him during my capstone preceptorship at the Minneapolis VA Hospital.
There, he trained me to care for the sickest of the sick. As an ICU nurse, he taught me how to care for arterial and central lines, the intricacies of managing multiple IVs filled with life-saving solutions, and how to watch over every heartbeat, every breath, and every flicker of life, ready to act the moment they wavered.
Techniques intended to heal.
Alex carried patience, compassion, and calm as a steady light within him. Even at the very end, the light was there. I recognized his familiar stillness and signature calm composure shining through during those unbearable final moments captured on camera.
It does not surprise me that his final words were, ‘Are you okay?’
Caring for people was at the core of who he was. He was incapable of causing harm. He lived a life of healing, and he lived it well.
Alex believed strongly in the Second Amendment and in the rights rooted in our Constitution and its amendments.
He spoke out for justice and peace whenever he could, not only out of obligation but out of a belief that we are more connected than divided and that communication would bring us together.
I want his family to know his legacy lives on.
I am a better nurse because of the wisdom and skills he instilled in me. I carry his light with me into every room, letting it guide and steady my hands as I heal and care for those in need.
Please honor my friend by standing up for peace, preferably with a cup of black coffee in hand and a couple of pieces of candy in your pocket, just as he would. He would remind you that caring for others is hard work and that we must do whatever it takes to get through the long shifts.
Step outside with your dog, breathe in the world, hike or bike as he loved to do, and let yourself find peace in the quiet moments within nature.
Stand up for justice and speak with those whose views differ from your own. Hold your beliefs with strength, but always extend love outward. Even in the face of adversity, take one step, no matter how small, to help heal our world through these acts. Carry his light forward in his name.
Let his legacy continue to heal.”
Matthew Remski:
So that’s from Jessica Hauser.
Many people online are referring to Alex Pretti as a martyr. His parents, Michael and Susan, in their beautiful statement, use the word hero. And I think these are powerful and appropriate terms.
What I would like to emphasize is the straightforward normalcy of Alex’s decent actions and what that says about the contested territory of masculinity in this fascist era.
I’ve never been in the situation that Alex was in, having to keep composure and walk into the road with dignity where fascists are attacking people.
But I do have the sense, and this comes from various experiences of street and schoolyard violence, that we have primal instincts in such moments.
He saw a woman being mauled and he stepped in.
And where his real poise came in was that he fearlessly turned his back to the attackers to shield her and said to her, “Are you okay?”
He had a lot of years in training and I’m sure really tough moments every day in nursing veterans.
But I can’t help but reflect on the fact that the instinct to help and this question he asked is an exchange that is happening around the world countless times, even as I speak, even as you listen.
In his essay “Everyday Communism,” and I’ll just say this is a short text that changed my life, David Graeber wrote about communism outside of the grand terms of state and revolution and as the foundation of all human sociability.
As he wrote, this is what makes society possible: there is always an assumption that anyone who is not actually an enemy can be expected to act on the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”
The beaten woman needed help, and Alex had that ability.
A crucial cultural support for the permission structure for the fascism that gunned Alex down has been the manosphere, which in general functions to repudiate our obligations to each other—especially if we are men—by focusing on male anxiety and punching back against the feminist call to solidarity.
There are many misogynist fetishes that they amuse themselves with, but their primary political role is to essentialize, individualize, and optimize manhood as aggressive and conquering.
They suggest this is the answer to humiliations that they can never properly name, which is the cruelty of capitalism.
This goes from ghouls like Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk to evangelical pastors who describe empathy as sin, and also to a lesser degree even wealthy liberals like Steven Bartlett and Scott Galloway, who participate in this same basic message: you can transcend the struggles of an unjust world by focusing on yourself and hedging on your obligations to your neighbors.
Being a man for these guys always means reaching for the top more than lending a hand.
In about 30 terrible seconds, supported by 37 years of learning and growth with parents, family, friends, and colleagues, Alex Pretti showed that entire universe of male fascist cheerleading and apologism for what it is and the ice manhood it dead-ends at. It’s cowardly. It’s selfish. It’s bootlicking. It’s deeply uncool.
And he did it by doing something utterly natural to him, and I would guess something that’s utterly natural to a large number of us as well.
And by doing so, he also proved something that I believe: that fascism can never win against our basic instincts for solidarity.
So teach the kids about Alex Pretti, everyone.
Take care of each other.
