Democracy: Saved by the Bell!

 I’ve been enjoying Ken Burn’s new documentary on the American Revolution.  In the act of declaring independence, militarily resisting British rule, and establishing a new country with a democratic government, the Americans were creating a democratic revolution that changed the world forever.  Learning more about those events from 250 years ago helps to put some things in perspective.

 There are interesting similarities with present day events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for instance.  It’s not much of a stretch to think that, from the point of view of Putin and probably most Russians, Ukraine is a rebellious colony, and its leaders are illegitimate, in the same way that King George III saw the American revolutionaries.  In 1776, the British, with the biggest navy in the world, appeared to have overwhelming force on their side; yet they were not able to defeat the American rebels. Just three years ago, in February 2022, almost everyone but Zelensky and the Ukrainian military believed that Russia, with its massive superiority in men and firepower, would take Kiev in three days.  But today in late 2025, it’s becoming more and more obvious that Russia, like Great Britain before it, will never defeat its former colony. 

Modern Russia under Putin represents the opposite of everything that America once stood for: it is not a representative democracy with a free press, it is a criminal oligarchic state run by a ruthless leader.  And today the current U.S. president wants to run America in the same criminal manner as Putin runs Russia, so he is bent on destroying the free press and democracy. To add to this, the extreme right is emboldened everywhere  both by Russian propaganda and by this president’s attempts to destroy the international rule-based order.  

Democracy, that great experiment in modern government, is under fire from the richest and most powerful men in history, and up until very recently they appeared to be winning.  But are they? 

Democracy has gone through a lot of big tests lately:  the U.S. financial meltdown in 2008, where banking elites ate the economy and the common people had to pay the tab;  the Covid 19 global pandemic of 2020, when public health became too much of a perceived burden, and opposition to vaccines, the very thing that prevented a worse disaster, was used to leverage authoritarianism;  the Insurrection of January sixth 2021, when a sitting President tried to reverse an election defeat by spreading lies and inciting a mob to attack the U.S. capital in an attempt to unseat his successor; and that same person’s stunning re-election in November 2024, which supercharged his ability to sow political and economic chaos throughout the world.

It is poetic justice that Donald Trump’s ties to the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein have brought America back from the brink.  For Trump’s followers who, up till now, had no problem with giving him free reign to trample on democracy, the one thing they won’t countenance was his refusal to release the Epstein files.  Thank God for that one red line!

Training Ground for what?

 When Trump first got elected in 2016 I was acutely aware of the bad possibilities:   concentration camps, corruption, bad decisions on the international scene like withdrawing from Nato and cozying up to Putin, and, above all, the nightmare of an American invasion of Canada. But that all seemed rather paranoid during Trump 1.0 - he was in charge of an intact system of government that was historically stable, and there seemed to be guardrails in place.  I kept saying to myself: “this is an emergency! This is an emergency!” At the time,I got no purchase on those claims, so I chalked it up to  paranoia. 

The second time that Trump was elected was shocking in a different way.  This time,I didn’t feel like a paranoid anymore, because he was coming out and saying the quiet parts out loud:  becoming a dictator on day one, in it for revenge and retribution,  the concentration camps, the dropping of all pretense of the Rule of Law,  and putting the Mafia lean on Media conglomerates. Now I feel vindicated for the fear I had during Trump 1.0. This isn’t a conspiracy in the shadows, it’s right out in the open.

Unfortunately, there is  an ongoing danger that seems to me implicit in the thoughtless verbiage coming from the U.S. Ambassador, Pete Hoekstra.   For a diplomat this guy is not very diplomatic. He’s basically insulting Canadians and appears to be tone deaf to any expression of Canadian concerns.  But that is the point of Trump’s “diplomacy” I’m afraid.  Hoekstra’s rants are a dominance display,in the same way that a male chimpanzee pounding a heavy branch on the ground is.

Trump is disengaging from America’s 20th Century role as the world’s policeman;  he is disengaging from Nato, from any idea that Russia or any other rogue nation should be contained; he took the side of Russia in his attempt to end the Russia/Ukraine war;  when it started he expressed his admiration for Putin taking so much of Ukrainian territory in what initially looked like a successful  Russian "blitzkrieg";  after winning his last election, he mused about taking over Greenland, and annexing Canada, and, while he didn’t rule out taking Greenland by force, he talked about using “economic warfare”  to defeat Canada.

And, if that isn’t enough, just yesterday Trump announced to all “his generals” that he would like his military to use Democrat-run cities as a training ground “so that they can go afar.”   I think  I know exactly what he means by “afar”. That emphasis on using the military on American citizens, withdrawal from those lands across the sea, but staying close to home, yes it all makes sense now.

This  reminds me a lot of a certain twentieth Century politician’s fascination with the word “liebenstraum”  or “livingspace”.  An idea that actually led to WWII. In Trump’s mind “liebenstraum” translates to:  “Fortress America” - the entire North American continent in Trump’s hands. 

   So, I think that Ambassador Hoekstra’s real job is to show Canadians how it’s going to be from here on in!  Trump wants his military to go after Democratic cities.  That will be their training ground for their next project - invading Canada.

Liberal, Conservative, Fascist

  

I am a liberal, not in the sense of being a member of the liberal party, but in terms of what I believe is good for society.  It’s remarkable how great the variety of  ideas there are about what is good.  But at the same time there are universal moral rules that we can mostly all agree on, whether we are liberal or conservative, like: do not lie, steal, injure or kill.  Liberalism prioritizes the value of free speech, economic competition, and democratic representation.  Liberals believe that as a society, we ought to acknowledge and tolerate a multiplicity of voices, cultures, religions, and traditions.

   

Conservatism is about conserving ways of life, traditions, and religious practices.   Conservatives tend to value small government, supporting business enterprise, are less tolerant of a multi-ethnic society but more tolerant of the fusion of church and state, i.e.  favoring certain traditional religious sects over others, integrating them into the political system and identifying them with the nation itself.  Some will insist that the United States is a “Christian Nation”.  A good example of this are the six conservative members of the current U.S. Supreme court, who together voted to overturn Roe vs Wade, and allow states to ban abortion, on largely religious grounds.

In spite of the fact that science leads to a better understanding of our world, as well as the development of new technologies, which ultimately drive our economies, science is under attack by people who see the more open-minded objective stance of science as threatening their Biblical world view.  Trump and Co.’s systematic  defunding of scientific and medical research, Maga harassment of individual scientists, and Trump’s ongoing degrading and undermining of higher education will cause severe long term damage to America’s economic system, threatening Americans’ health individually and collectively.

With the advent of Trump and the extreme right wing we see the resurgence of white supremacy in the face of the diminishment of white cultural, political, and economic power. In America, the move to authoritarianism, where laws favour an elite group, and everyone else is legally exploited,  can easily tend towards Fascism, where racial and cultural homogeneity is enforced by a powerful secret police, backed by the state, along with a network of concentration camps to segregate outsiders from “real Americans”. With Maga, the idea of the public good vanishes - it’s all about wiping out L’ancient regime. (in this case: the liberal rules-based order.) 

  Trump’s particular brand of fascism is what you get when you begin by over-emphasizing fear and intolerance.  That makes people more susceptible to believing lies, and tolerating lying.  Ultimately it has led to dehumanizing people and putting them into concentration camps, just as it happened before in Nazi Germany.   

 There are two strong impulses battling it out in our human nature - the impulse to include and the impulse to exclude. Where we have multiple societies and ethnicities, civilization works best as inclusive,  where we practice civility towards each other and we do our civil duties to uphold the law,  refraining from favoring certain groups over others in public institutions, and sanctioning those who would treat certain groups as less than human.  When we over-emphasize exclusion we get war, death, and the destruction of civilization. Shipwrecked sailors  were more likely to survive when they took care of each other rather than leaving it to “every man for himself”.  Intolerance and exclusion will only diminish us and may well reduce our chances of survival as a species.

Fossil Fools

One of the aspects of Trump’s project 2025 that I find particularly heinous is their active campaign to elevate fossil fuels over all other forms of energy.  

From the very beginning of his second administration Trump has declared war on renewable energy, ordering a halt to all present and future U.S. wind projects, and blocking subsidies and loans for wind and solar projects on U.S. farms,  depriving rural areas of much needed electricity and extra income. 

 But Trump is not only shutting down renewable energy projects in the U.S., he is trying to do it on a global scale by slapping extra tariffs on  countries that have pledged to lower fossil fuel consumption. There is no sense to these policies other than blind vengeance for windmills “ruining” the view on his Scottish golf course, and all the more likely that he appears to be in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry.

  

In Trump’s first administration he claimed that global warming was a Chinese hoax, and now he wants to kill two birds with one stone by  denying loans and subsidies for renewable projects that use Chinese parts.

Emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the overwhelming reason for the acceleration in the global rise in mean temperature that has already led to more severe droughts,  more frequent and longer lasting wildfires, bigger and more frequent storms and  more catastrophic floods.  The economic cost from the destruction of lives and infrastructure could cripple future society. In fact, insurance rates have been steadily climbing for years - and  in the not too distant future insurance may become unaffordable.  

The fossil fuel industry wants to deceive the public about the bad consequences from burning their product, which is inexorably leading to serious long term damage to our society and the environment,  and through their bought and paid for politicians, they are successfully blocking any action that would lessen the severity of climate change.  They are lying about the effects of fossil fuel emissions, smearing climate scientists, and joining hands with fascist and right wing governments in suppressing the science, and dismantling and sabotaging the transition to electric vehicles and renewables.

Trump is not acting alone on this. He is backed by a coalition of political, religious, and industrial leaders who are joining hands to stop the rest of us from doing anything constructive about climate change - and the driving motivation is so that dying industries can continue to maintain their profit ratios.

The transition to renewable forms of energy is not only possible, it is happening in industrialized nations like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and China.The fact that much of the world has come together to tackle the problem in a series of global meetings is a great sign of human progress - such a thing has never been attempted before and never on such an enormous human scale. 

To simply deny the problem and to block any efforts towards a viable solution, as the President of the United States is now doing, is, I believe, a crime against humanity.

 

How lying Leads to Violence

 President Donald Trump cannot stop lying.  His philosophy, if you can call it that, is that the truth is what he, the most important person, wants it to be.  It’s remarkable how long someone in power can get away with denying reality, but reality has a way of eventually catching up with even the most important of us. 

The United States is now politically unstable from the stress of undergoing the last three Presidential elections, with Trump anchoring each of his campaigns on lies. There was the famous phone call with President Zelensky where Trump tried to get Zelensky to agree to lie about Biden.  Then, when he lost the second election Trump spearheaded a campaign of lies that the election had been rigged against him, culminating in his inciting a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021.  Since he was re-elected he abused his powers to pardon all the insurrectionists, so, in effect, anyone who commits crimes based on his lies gets a get out of jail free card as long as Trump is president!

Truth is an ideal that we share in common through our daily communication.  By trusting others, we take truth to be the default, and that makes human cooperation possible. Of course, some people deceive others just to further their own interests - and the more this happens the less we trust each other.

Central to all moral systems is the prohibition of lying.  Honouring the truth is a lynchpin of morality.  If lying were tolerated, wrongdoers could get away with anything by lying about what they did, or shifting the blame onto others, as indeed, Trump is doing.

When politicians make a habit of lying then they are actively eroding the moral system.  Spreading lies about immigrants, saying that they are “eating the dogs”, is a preparation for dehumanizing and abusing them.  Seeking to excerpt power over a group by discrimination and coercion is ultimately a rejection of morality and an embrace of “might makes right”. When this happens morality breaks down and human cooperation breaks down with it.  We are back in the jungle.

 In the last year, during his third Presidential campaign there have been two attempts to assassinate Trump. Then there was an attempt on a Democratic governor’s life, and just two weeks ago, the murder of a Minnisota state legislator and her husband and attempted murder of another.  In the meantime Trump is not trying at all to tamp down the rhetoric and bring people together, no, he is actively inciting more violence by sending Ice officials after undocumented immigrants and hoping that the people in blue states will try to physically stop Ice officials so that he can claim an insurrection as an excuse for calling in the national guard and the marines, against the wishes of the civic authorities and the majority of the people in those states. 

Violence has been growing in America every year Trump has been in office and it is directly fueled by Trump’s malicious lies about immigrants and his political rivals. His lies are not only destabilizing America, they are destabilizing the globe. Heads of state are too scared to call out his lies, so it falls on everyone else, all the “unimportant people” to do so.

Trump is Taking us Back to the Jungle!

 Tarzan the Ape Man was a popular story when I was growing up.  Nowadays it’s not so popular, because its premise, that a white male brought up by apes could rule over blacks, is too obviously racist.

I bring this up because it reminds me of what Donald Trump is doing: Stripping down our rule-based international order in order to nakedly dominate the rest of the world.  It’s back to the jungle on steroids.

Jane Goodall, who spent decades observing chimpanzees in the African jungle even compared Trump to one dominant male she named “Mike”, because his method of achieving dominance was not to demonstrate superior strength, but to scare the bejesus out of his fellow apes by grabbing empty 55 gallon oil drums and smashing them against each other in a terrific hullabaloo. This ingenious technique reminded her of the way Trump delivers a constant barrage of lies and insults in order to gain publicity.

America is the greatest country in history because it developed a democratic rule-based system of government, welcomed immigrants from all over the world, built a public educational system that honoured and encouraged critical intelligence and scientific and technical achievement, and then helped build international economic, legal, and cooperative institutions that facilitated the spread of knowledge, public health, and enabled billions of human beings to be raised out of poverty. And all this time the United States was itself a beneficiary of these changes.

Sadly, as I write this, The Trump  administration, in the name of MAGA, is savagely deconstructing the entire edifice that made both an international rule-based order and America’s greatness possible.  He is replacing it with big power politics, the rule of the strongest countries over the smaller, weaker countries.  This is the rule of the jungle, winner-takes-all ethos if you can call it an ethos.

Our closest biological relatives are the great apes.  Where we differ from them is we are more intelligent, more cooperative, and we’ve replaced ape dominance with moral rules.  In the jungle, it is winner-takes-all, and minimal sharing.  Each troop of apes rules their patch and viciously repels all male intruders.  In contrast, humans are able to cooperate widely by collectively adhering to moral rules.  Trump is amoral.  He doesn’t care that an innocent man was sent to a Salvadoran concentration camp without due process - it’s not a mistake, it’s intentional.  He doesn’t care that Russia invaded a sovereign neighbour, Ukraine, and murdered Ukrainian citizens and kidnapped their children.  What’s important to Trump is the law of the jungle - the weak must defer to the strong.  By enacting tariffs on every other country for no rhyme or reason, and by destroying the institutions that uphold the international rule-based order, he is asserting his dominance over the world.

What took millenia to build, he is destroying in a matter of weeks.  Soon the economic fallout will come.  The American economy will falter and slow to a crawl, international investors will pull their money out of the U.S. and  global economic growth will reverse its course. Even if the American people rise up and overthrow his regime, it will not restore what was lost.

Say goodbye to civilization and moral decency and hello to Planet of the Apes.

Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining

 We are heading for rough waters - in Canada, in the U.S., and all over the globe. The fact is that the U.S. economy has been the basis for the global economy, for global stability, and the U.S. dollar has been the universal store of value, because no other economy has been  bigger or more productive in human history.  But that’s all going to change; in fact, it’s already started to change, and nothing we can do will halt this change.

 There is already an ongoing crisis of confidence caused by the actions of the current President of the United States.  By his utterly reckless actions, In less than one hundred days, Donald Trump has single handedly increased economic uncertainty exponentially.  Now, the lesson has become evident to all: he cannot be trusted, nothing he says can be relied on.  This means that the uncertainty has no reverse gear, it will just keep ratcheting up;  because of what he has already done, nothing that Trump does from here on can change the nature of this problem. 

 Because international investors will realize that the  American economy and the American dollar are not to be trusted,  a tipping point will be reached, probably  sometime this year, when people around the world will decide to take their capital out of America; and this will become irreversible; it will turn into an unstoppable flood, a contagion that spreads exponentially.

  But where will the money go?  There is no real substitute for the United States, so it will have to go into multiple currencies and economies, none of which are equivalent in scale or quality, which means that the value of all this capital will decline precipitously.  We are looking at a severe contraction of the world’s money supply, something that has occurred before during the Great Depression, but never on the vastly larger scale of today’s global economy.

It will take all of the knowledge and ingenuity of the world’s central bankers to keep their economies afloat; so here in Canada, Mark Carney’s experience steering Canada’s and the UK’s central banks during major crises, will be a valuable asset if he wins the election.  That’s the silver lining for Canadians:  Trump's belligerence and bullying have unified Canadians like no other force in our history;  it has even convinced Quebecers of the importance of being Canadian, which is a miracle in itself!  And, while a significant minority of Albertans are making noises about succession, that  will go nowhere, because  Alberta’s economy, which is tightly bound to the fate of the oil industry, will take a dive as the demand for oil plummets, leading to an exodus of workers from that province.

There’s even a silver lining for Americans, and this is even more important in the scheme of things, because, in spite of America’s inevitable weakening, they will still be our neighbour to the south with a much bigger population and economy.  But a market crash and a depression will seal Trump’s fate, making him so universally unpopular that his project 2025 scheme to create an American autocracy will be stopped in its tracks by the collective will of the American people.  Thank God for small mercies.