Earlier tonight, I heard a Republican strategist on CBC News telling us not to worry if Trump wins: his bark is worse than his bite.
Damn, I hope he is right. But historical precedents suggest otherwise. I am, of course, especially reminded of how Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933; many who supported him were also convinced that his bark was worse than his bite.
Well, it wasn’t. The rest, as they say, is history.
As a matter of fact, perhaps I am an alarmist, but I tend to think of something else after the spectacle tonight. It is what became perhaps the most iconic moment from the entire Star Wars franchise: the recognition by Padmé Amidala of what just happened when the Galactic Senate granted extraordinary powers to chancellor Palpatine.
Coming back from the land of science-fiction cautionary tales to that of real history: In early August 1914, Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s foreign secretary remarked that the lights were going out all over Europe. Today… well, America was called by the late Ronald Reagan the shining city on the hill of liberal democracy. The lights of this great shining city might have been extinguished tonight. There are other lights of liberal democracy still shining brightly, including the lights here in Canada, but they are much less powerful and rapidly diminishing in number. Liberal democracy, which has always been an outlier in the course of human history, is now fully in retreat.
And, well, I daresay many who call themselves “liberals” bear at least some responsibility. Over the past few decades, life for many in the Western world stagnated or became worse. Incomes barely kept up with inflation, homes became unaffordable. The income and wealth gap between rich and poor rose. Families could no longer promise their children a life that, never mind better, would be at least as good as the lives of their parents. Public infrastructure was often neglected, health care systems remained underfunded. Many Western cities saw a palpable rise in homelessness and visible poverty: Just look at the number of homeless right here on the main streets of downtown Ottawa, minutes from Parliament Hill.
Leaders and activists on the left had ample chance to step in, offer and, if in power, implement real, forward-looking solutions. Instead, they chose to focus on, ahem, the “important” problems of the day: proper pronouns for everyone, DEI programs at workplaces, stamping out white supremacism in math education (I kid you not! Wish it was a joke) and other pressing issues. In light of that, why is anyone surprised that populism won the day?
Sadly I am not. Much as I rooted for Harris, I predicted a Trump victory, and it appears that I was not wrong.
Now we get a chance to find out if that CBC analyst was right after all. Is the bark worse than the bite? I’m not holding my breath…
Viktor, it looks like your pessimistic prediction was right and my optimistic expectation failed miserably. Today I woke up to learn these irritating news, which leave me to think sadly “how that could happen” etc. Well, again optimistically I agree with this analyst. We have seen “Trump in Action”, actually 4 years of show with officials tossed on weekly basis, many words spoken, few inconsistent decisions in external politics – and actually very little done or achieved. Perhaps I missed something significant? Thus I expect another 4 years of this stagnation and internal political struggles. It’s very sad anyway, somehow giving impression of “Disunited States”. Not in the sense of any looming civil war of course, but just that there are so many people wasting efforts and time in bitter quarrels. As a sidenote, I wonder why most of the media and papers I’ve seen obviously underestimated Trump’s support. Though given slogan of one of them “Democracy dies in darkness” I think now most of them were somewhat DP-biased or affiliated.
> proper pronouns for everyone, DEI programs at workplaces, stamping out white supremacism in math education (I kid you not! Wish it was a joke) and other pressing issues. In light of that, why is anyone surprised that populism won the day?
but these “pressing issues” – are not they also manifestation of populism? i.e. aren’t we observing clash of two populist camps?
Wish I could gloat happily with “I told you so” but I am not exactly happy. But no, I’d not call the left’s tendency to cater to “woke” ideology a form of populism… issues like pronouns are not really popular issues! I suspect most people don’t give a flying… thing when it comes to pronouns or whether or not it’s “white supremacy” that mathematicians of the past were predominantly white. And I have yet to meet a single person who was enthusiastic about having to complete DEI training at their workplace.
A lot of the media was engaged in wishful thinking. Some were not: they called attention to the fact that a) the popular vote was close, b) the polls had a tendency to underestimate Trump’s support, and that c) Harris was weaker in the swing states than Biden. The writing was on the wall. People just refused to read it and they were reading tea leaves instead.