Canada is up against it, literally and figuratively.
Waves of domestic anger and fear are rolling up from the US, pouring over our border, and recent polls suggest that we may be reacting to it.
While growing political polarization in the United States has triggered a not-quite bloodless civil war, Canadians have quietly moved in the opposite direction. Maybe it is our pragmatism, and we recognize that American culture has impacted our own, and we are defending against it. Perhaps we simply don’t care as much about government policy as our neighbours do. One way or another, we look to be circling our wagons closer and closer to the centre. It is too early to draw stable conclusions from this, but it suggests a trend.
In my view, Canadians are fundamentally resistant to conflict, and the values responsible for our resistance are so deep, so rooted in our northern soil that we begin the process of compromise as our ideas are formed.
Like so many things, the exceptions prove the rule. The National Energy Program introduced in 1980 was rare in that it was deeply polarizing from the git-go, knowingly and perhaps intentionally so. The waves of unsuccessful campaigns for separation in Quebec are another. Interesting to note, both those examples are regional in nature.
I think it is difficult for us to understand what Americans are going through.
For one thing, a lot of Canadians behave as if we believe that freedom, democracy and liberty are synonyms. American political and social behaviour suggests that they see the words as symbolizing quite different concepts.
Look at the landscape south of the border.
Democrats are frustrated that efforts to establish gun controls are likely to fail until there is a majority of left-leaning justices on the Supreme Court. In order for that to happen, three conditions must exist: a Supreme Court justice or two or three needs to die or retire, the sitting President has to be a Democrat to appoint their replacements, and the Party needs a majority in the Senate to confirm the appointments.
The majority of Americans believe that when these three conditions exist, the Supreme Court will re-interpret the Constitution, find the justification to outlaw assault weapons and make thorough background checks mandatory before anybody gets to buy a gun. Just for example. In other words, a progressive administration and Senate will re-interpret the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
Democrats and Republicans agree on this. Democrats are anxious to see it happen, and Republicans are terrified at the prospect.
In the same vein, Republicans have been waiting, none too patiently, for a right-leaning Supreme Court to re-interpret the Constitution and find the justification to make it illegal for a woman to get an abortion just because she and her doctor want one. This is what reversing Roe vs. Wade means.
When you add up all the left leaners and all the right leaners, you have a large majority of the American population either in favour of- or willing to accept a partisan supreme court.
Back in the 1980s, when I had a business partner in the White House, I was told that after deciding to appoint now-retired Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court, President Reagan said, “For years, people will be trying to guess what he’s going to do.”
It is likely to be long before another American President appoints a predictably unpredictable Justice to the Supreme Court.
What feels most important about all this is what appears to be a growing definition of liberty in the United States that shifts away from the guarantees of a constitution’s protection of the minority towards significantly more power in the hands of a thin majority, allowing them the freedom to impose their will on everyone.
These dynamics are a problem for American democracy because they lead, step by step, towards a totalitarian government. In details of continuing support for Donald Trump, we see that the first steps have already been taken.
How is it possible that foreigners might be able to see what so many Americans cannot?
It has become a common global view that for all their wonderful qualities, Americans are inclined to the occasional delusion about themselves and the rest of the world. Perhaps this is how mythology has always been conceived and then delivered.
Recognizing this begs the question: will the domestic perception of extant liberty and freedom in the United States of America survive the arrival of totalitarianism, the disappearance of elections, free speech?
Will Republicans celebrate their freedom from socialism while Democrats fight amongst themselves, blaming factions for freedom’s fall?
In the unlikely event that Democrats prevail, would they suspend freedom - temporarily, of course - to stamp out every spark of threatening social conservatism?
Ten years ago, these concerns would have been laughable but are not as funny today.
How about five years from now? Can we take for granted that there will be a 2028 Presidential Election?
Besides having a strong affection for our neighbour to our immediate south, I worry for Canada. If it came to pass that there are no more American elections, how about trade disputes with a puny northern neighbour, particularly one suffering under a whiney democratically elected government that is free to reverse past decisions and leaves its future to chance decision-making by another democratically elected government?
Beyond the interests of its economy, why would America tolerate us? Or anybody else? Would we seek new, presently unthinkable alliances?
Wouldn’t it be great if this concern is proven unwarranted, at least for the time being?
If the present and right-leaning Supreme Court decided to uphold Roe vs Wade, perhaps we can relax for a while. Not so much because our fate will be determined by an American woman’s right to choose but because it might dignify the Supreme Court to those confident that the institution is in the bag.
Maybe we could relax a little if the partisanship of the US Supreme Court turned out to be an aborted partisan dream, that the independence of the institution has not become another American myth.
Oversimplification? Important considerations ignored? Of course. Retrospection reveals that oversimplifiers are legion, that the crystal ball gazers who got it right also oversimplified.
