Twenty-one percent of Canadians said they would support Trump in the last election. We all know some of those people. They were our friends and family. Many didn’t outwardly say they supported Trump. He was too crass, too dumb, too full of himself. But they supported a myriad of ideas that fell into the Trumpish camp. At first my sense was that they had a constellation of beliefs and values that, while I did not agree and could not totally understand them, were legitimate responses to the crazy world.
These friends and family seemed angry at everything COVID (anti vaxxing seemed to lead…to trigger the rest of the ideas), they seemed sure there was an underground force manipulating everything from the economy to international relations to our sleep patterns and the weather/climate, and on… They seemed to believe mainstream media was making stuff up and that their “alternative media” was telling corrective truths. They seemed annoyed that white people were getting discriminated against. They seemed suspicious of university educations, the police, the justice, healthcare and education systems, and more, and more. Once a conversation turned to one of these topics, the others were not far behind. Before you were finished there was a hint of them all.
It reminded me of when I was a fundamentalist Christian. We called our constellation of beliefs “First Principles.” You couldn’t believe one without the other. Our beliefs were like a network of veins, blood flowed through them all.
In conversation with these friends and family I often ended up defending the current system, as if I believed that capitalism, globalization and junk food were good for us. As if I believed everything I read in the newspaper, heard at university and saw on the news (at least the news I was watching). As if I believed our western, privileged justice system was fair, honest and good. As if I hadn’t spent most of my adult life (post church, that is) in some sort of protest against our western system and wishing for a revolution.
But theirs was such a completely different world view than mine, I felt like I had to constantly defend myself and in so doing I ended up defending things I had never defended before. I knew the revolution they had in mind would not bring about the systemic changes I thought were so, so, so necessary. I ended up using all my mental energy researching and debating each one of the ideas. I could not keep up so I started to quit the conversations before they got going.
I had been in a similar situation as them. In the church. I had an answer for everything. I had to. If one of my beliefs fell apart, the rest of them got shaky. So, I kept it up. I was right. “The world” was wrong. Although being right was tiring it was also life affirming. Being right never did a thing to improve the world but it made the world easier to bear. It was us against the world and there is a certain appeal to that.
But our tiny church would never have its crazy beliefs put to the test. The church would never have the power or position to see if its ideas worked or to see what would happen if wheels were put on what we believed.
Now here we are.
Their revolution is here. The whole constellation of ideas that made the Trump movement (or the anti-democratic movement) is being transformed into action. Not cautiously, slowly, one-thing-at-a-time, but slam-dunk, in-your-face, as fast as possible to throw everyone off their feet, scramble their brains, upset their stomachs, so everyone and everything is so off kilter that there is no effective respond. And if there is, they have that covered, responders will be arrested.
I think we are all a bit shocked when we shouldn’t be. Everything we see happening was promised. But even those of us who believed it would be bad didn’t really believe it. Not this bad.
The western system that made us all so complacent, so comfortable, so emboldened, so self-focused, is no longer there for us to depend on.
Now the revolution is here.
At the helm is a middle school yard bully who finally gets to be in charge and has one thing in mind—revenge. He hates that he’s chubby, weird looking, and not-that-bright. Now he’s going to take out everyone he blames for making him feel that way. He’s going to put us all in our place—beneath him—where he thinks we belong. Women, people of colour, people who are disabled, educated, gender diverse… Perhaps only very rich white men will be immune from his raids and ravages, because of his delusion that those are his people.
Nothing I have said here is new, helpful or even very interesting. We’ve heard it all before a dozen times. It’s just my morning meanderings. And, I suppose, my way of asking—is there still 21% of Canadians who support Trump? Now that his crazy talk has gotten real does it still sound good? Does the revolution look like what you thought. Is it going in the right direction?
Are Canadians going to embolden our own very weak strongman who can’t seem to grow up past his schoolyard-level Trudeau jealousy? In the name of what? The economy? Christian values?