This column was originally published in Coast Reporter's winter edition of Coast Life magazine.
My Facebook friends usually affect a lofty disdain for the soap opera of US politics, but dropped all pretence after the second Trump victory last November 5. “I feel like I just got kicked in the solar plexus by an elephant,” one moaned. Another sobbed, “I broke out the bottle of single malt I’ve been saving for an emergency, but it tasted like dishwater. Trump spoiled even that.” This was only a faint echo of the recrimination and handwringing going on south of the border where supporters of the Democratic Party formed into a circular firing squad eager to train their aim on men, women, old people, young people, Latinos, black men, Harris, Biden, Beyoncé and just about every other blameless target among their number.
This is one of the notable differences between the right and the left, on both sides of the border. When the right gets knocked down, it just amps up the testosterone. When Donald Trump lost in 2020, then got impeached a second time, then got fined $450 million for tax fraud, then got convicted of sexual assault and fined $5 million for libel, then got fined another $83 million for repeating the libel, then got convicted of election fraud, and on and on—he just got louder and more defiant. And so did all his followers. And when the tide turned and the mindless masses focused their restlessness on the next bunch of rascals to throw out, Trump was still standing, ready to become the default replacement. This electoral fickleness is even more likely to ricochet to the Democrats’ benefit given the comedy of errors Trump is already fully engaged in with the next mid-term elections only 2 years off—if the American left could only stop swallowing its own tail.
I have a friend who is an American ex-pat happily sheltered in Canada. When she first came, Dub’ya was president vs Chrétien in Canada and she was quite embarrassed and apologetic about the comparison, making no end of apologies for the degeneracy of her once great country. Then elections happened and her country was taken over by the eloquent, statesmanlike Barack Obama while Canada fell into the hands of the churlish, parochial Stephen Harper, completely reversing the tables. In a twinkling, the USA was transformed into a beacon of progressive light while Canada became the land of darkness, burning DFO research libraries and abusing parliamentary norms. Then came the Trudeau-Trump turnabout and she was back to apologizing. And of course she wasn’t alone. People generally, in Canada, the US and abroad regularly change their deep perceptions of national character according to who is US president or Canadian PM. Under Trudeau fils, Canada is at this moment still viewed as one of the top progressive nations, leading the human rights and climate change contingents on the world stage. But given that modern-day Canadian electors can’t tolerate any administration for over 10 years, next fall will surely see the Liberals thrown out on their butts and replaced by the Trump-wannabe Poilievre, thrusting the country overnight into the column of international reality-deniers.
I’m spilling a lot of ink to make a simple point, namely that people tend to read too much into these elections, which are typically won by razor-thin pluralities that represent a tiny fraction of the population, not sea changes in all human consciousness. Trump’s ballyhooed “landslide” was made possible by something like 200,000 swing state voters representing .082% of the voting public, and yet observers from both sides are reacting as if the MAGA mind virus infected the entire population. It hasn’t. The USA is still the country we all thought it was on Nov. 4. Yes, the winning party does get to govern as though it had 100% support—which is one of the quirks of the democratic system nobody has been able to rectify these past 2000 years. But the tyranny of the razor-thin plurality only lasts until the next election, when the ruling party must pay for any liberties it took with the public will. It is quite possible the Trump wrecking crew has already crossed that line and if the election were re-run today, Harris would win and the world would be celebrating the triumph of positivity and light.
With a renegade like Trump in office, many have come to a belated suspicion that the US republic bestows perhaps an ill-advised amount of power in the hands and brain, tiny as they both may be, of one individual. But the founding fathers did anticipate this and did go to some trouble to counteract the danger. For one thing, they left a lot of legislative responsibility with the individual states. Secondly, they placed a lot of power in the hands of the two houses of Congress. All told, an American president has a lot less ability to play dictator than a Canadian prime minister does. It just seems otherwise because the US is a world superpower on a scale never conceived by the founders and that means even with its constitutional limitations, its president has perhaps more power than it is safe to leave in the hands of any one mortal.
Come on, US Democrats, give your heads a shake and get back into the fray! Helpless bystanders all over the world are counting on you.
