1 week Ago By Special to National Post
The great novelist Saul Bellow once wrote: “I have developed a certain sympathy with Canada. It’s no easy thing to share a border with the USA. Canada’s chief entertainment — it has no choice — is to watch (from a gorgeous setting) what happens in our country.
The disaster is that there is no other show.” Unfortunately, despite countless hours of American media consumption, many Canadians understand their neighbor surprisingly poorly. The latest program to capture attention here, as elsewhere, was of course the U.
S. general election, which Donald Trump won for a second time, much to the consternation of the pundit class in particular. Now, my own life has taken the inverse trajectory of Bellow’s, having been born in the United States and subsequently moved to Canada, and I have reflected over the years upon both the differences between the two countries, and how each appears to the other.
And a recurring theme I’ve noticed is the particular way that Canadian political commentators consistently misapprehend their southern neighbor. Part of the reason for this goes beyond ordinary errors of judgment. The commentariat class here heavily derives its understanding of American political developments from its U.
S counterparts in the media complex and is thus twice removed from political reality when those same counterparts prove deficient in anticipating and accounting for events. Many decades ago, the literary scholar Lionel Trilling described conservatism as merely “a series of irritable mental gestures.” Something like this could be applied to many of the reactions to Trump’s presidential victory this week — particularly those which aim their ire not just at Trump or his inner circle, but at Americans in general.
And this last line of criticism is particularly appealing to Canadian pundits, as it affords them the opportunity to indulge in a passive-aggressive form of nationalist preening (“oh, the Americans are at it again”) otherwise rarely available to them. Meanwhile, the incessant reliance of pundits on “fascism” and “populism” as explanations for Trump’s continued success have proven emotionally satisfying at the cost of real analysis, as it prevents people from recognizing the democratic nature of Trump’s appeal. It has also led these critics to disregard the ways in which ordinary democracy is perfectly capable of procuring undesirable outcomes on its own.
It is not particularly helpful to blame election outcomes on oligarchy when Trump handily won the popular vote as well as the electoral vote, nor can the by-now instinctive reference to racial supremacism and bigotry account for his unprecedented gains among non-white voters of nearly all backgrounds. Acknowledging these realities hardly requires endorsing him; none of this means that political observers are obliged to like or admire Trump. But it does mean that they cannot in good faith blame his political success on extra or anti-democratic factors.
It is only the false belief that all desirable things must go together, such that democracy cannot be democracy if it produces unwelcome outcomes, that leads people to think this way. Finally, it must be said that what Machiavelli would call “tumults”— that is tempestuous democratic political commotion — have long been a feature of the U.S.
political landscape; and while not wholly positive, these have also contributed in complex ways to that country’s unique dynamism. That this aspect of American political life is not entirely to Canadian tastes is perfectly understandable (nor are Canadians alone in this regard), but it is a consistent mistake that outsiders make in pathologizing political tendencies that lie outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior in one’s own country. That these same dynamics are not much-loved (or well understood) by America’s own media and academic elites is yet another filter that obscures clear-sighted observation from across the border.
Meanwhile, the worst thing Canadians could do now is treat American politics as a foil for their own situation at home. For, within Canada itself, we will likely see an impulse to react to events in the United States not simply as matters of concern for foreign policy, but as though they required a domestic political response. This would be a mistake, partly because Trump is, of course, not a Canadian political figure, nor is there such a thing as “Trumpism” here in any meaningful sense.
But also, because Canada presently faces serious political and economic challenges of its own, none of which are causally related to developments within the United States, despite their proximity. Indeed, at a time when Canada’s economy is performing worse than Italy’s or Spain’s, there will likely be strong incentives for pundits and politicians to fight pretend culture wars against phantom American threats as a distraction from the difficult and serious business of actually governing. This impulse should be resisted at all costs.
But if past is precedent, the Great American Show, broadcast in every household in blazing 4k resolution, will continue to overwhelm attempts at sober and reasoned consideration of real political issues at hand. National Post.
