So here we are. Two weeks ago today, the next, grim chapter in world history was determined as our southern cousins elected for a second time a geriatric racist-misogynist-narcissist-felon coated in a spray-on tan. From here on out the news will keeping getting worse, reaching new lows daily if not hourly, as the constant dreadful drip of cabinet nominations has already demonstrated.
Imagine the worst possible people to lead vital government departments, then prepare to feel like a fool for not imagining orders of magnitude worse choices. And who's to stop it? Not the Republican Senate, not the Republican House, not the Trump-leaning Supreme Court. No checks, no balances.
I have now uncurled from the fetal position I was in for much of the last fortnight, sadly finding the view sitting upright to be pretty much the same as it was sideways. Adding to the misery was that my spouse was thousands of miles away, visiting family in the old country for the first time since before Covid, leaving our dog as my sole domestic conversation companion for the last month. At just shy of two years old her grasp of international relations and the recent resurgence of authoritarianism around the world is a work in progress, so I did most of the talking and she did most of the listening as she slowly inched closer to her kibble container until it was actually dinnertime.
There's a quote by John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and advisor to John F. Kennedy, that nails American conservatism as accurately today as it did in 1963. Conservatives, he said, are engaged in "one of man's oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is, the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness."
Enter billionaire Elon Musk, stage far-right. Witness the propaganda cesspool that Twitter devolved into after Musk bought it. See how it helped facilitate a mass con-job on half of the American electorate, convincing them that putting the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent in charge will magically rescue the downtrodden wage-slave because why? Because illegal immigrants.
Has a presidential campaign ever so viciously demonized essentially anyone who wasn't a straight white male?
From eating dogs to taking jobs, it was all the immigrants fault. The politics of divide and conquer. No claim was too ludicrous, no conspiracy theory too insane. And spreading these lies with viral efficiency was social media—the alternate "news" universe that technology has now made commonplace and which AI is rapidly making far worse. Facts don't stand a chance against feelings. Stoke grievances, fan the flames of resentment, rake in the votes.
Here's another quote, one from Lyndon Johnson, using the language of his time: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Stoke grievances, fan the flames of resentment, rake in the votes
Trump gave a resentful working and middle class plenty of somebodies to look down on, then ruthlessly picked their pockets. Which indirectly brings us to race.
On July 23 in this space I'm sad to say that I accurately warned against over-optimism for Kamala Harris's chances, noting, "it is unwise for anyone with even a moderate understanding of American history to underestimate the contaminating currents of misogyny and racism that continue to flow through the American psyche—less visible, maybe, in recent years, but running deep, generations deep..."
Were her gender and skin colour the determining factors? Possibly not. But in a contest so close, with margins so thin, everything counted. I'm reasonably sure that—everything else being equal, even with all the blatantly ridiculous, Trump-cult lies— a white male Democrat could have won it. There's the world we want, and there's the world we live in.
Now to the inexcusable negligence of Joe Biden, to his preposterous position that only he could beat Trump (sounding very much like Trump). There is much blame to go around on the left, but none more damning than Biden's failure to recognize that his time was up, his failure to announce in 2022 or 2023 that he wouldn't run again, his failure to open the nomination to all comers. In that scenario, Kamala Harris would not have been the nominee.
(Will our deeply unpopular Prime Minister take Biden's debacle to heart? Doesn't look likely.)
So what's ahead for us north of the border. Well, the promised 10-20 percent tariffs on Canadian goods would be catastrophic, given that nearly one-third of our GDP is exports, and 70 percent of that goes to the US. Trump has also said he'll reduce corporate tax rates to an absurdly low 15 percent maximum (because, you know, this clearly will help blue collar workers living paycheque to paycheque), meaning a likely flight of investment capital out of Canada and a dramatic decrease in the value of the Canadian dollar.
As for the divisive resentment politics, those have already seeped north. As the Tories have ramped up their attacks on Trudeau, disinformation on social media has ballooned. It's common now to see ostensibly sensible Facebook friends sharing alarming "news stories" about immigrants to Canada being "given" homes, and receiving tens of thousands of dollars "from the Liberals." All bullshit, but emotionally effective when we're still paying outrageous post-Covid prices for groceries and housing and eager to latch on to someone to blame for it.
(Keep in mind, by the way, that Facebook banned Canadians from sharing legitimate news content over a year ago. You can't share anything on Facebook from PelhamToday, or from the Niagara dailies, or from any other mainstream news provider. Therefore what you see shared on Facebook and Instagram is at best informed opinion, but usually just rank propaganda intended to elicit anger.)
Right then. That's it for the post-mortem, except to say that the US electorate is historically centre-right, and the farther-left-wingers among the Democrats need to dial it back a notch if they ever hope to win nationally again—"LatinX"? "Defund the police"? "From the river to the sea"? For god's sake.
Okay, one last last thing, a strong recommendation to read this commentary by a U.S. pollster on why he was wrong in predicting a Harris win. Pay particular attention to what he says about social media's role. It's a new world, all right, one that we're all stuck in.
See you next time, when we return to normal programming, or at least as normal as we can hope for.
