I’ve got to admit that I find our Southern neighbor a bit of a mystery these last few years. Mysterious enough to make me wonder if they’re trying to deliberately fashion their democracy into a blend of The Handmaids Tale and The Purge.
At first I really didn’t believe that there was an architect with a plan for this modification, but now I’m beginning to suspect that someone other than Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson actually has a strategy for the future of American democracy.
And once more this Tommy Douglas quote comes to mind.
Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.
However, in defense of the ruling class, I’ve got to say that unbridled freedom is a recipe for disaster. It just seems to me that as a race we aren’t equipped to manage freedom appropriately. Until the selfish and the idiotic among us grasp the idea that responsibility is a mandatory component to their demands for limitless freedom, we can’t rationally expect any result other than mayhem.
But, I still struggle with understanding who or what exactly is steering American democracy these days. It could be that no one is at the wheel and our Southern neighbor is akin to a runaway truck with no path or destination. It’s like a scene from some action movie where combatants are fixated over fighting for the steering wheel while the vehicle they’re in barrels toward a precipice. And from the look of things, it’s more important to have hold of the steering wheel than it is to avoid the cliff.
Strangely enough, the people wrestling for control of the steering wheel only seem interested in turning the vehicle to the left or to the right, and so it seems that some other force is actually deciding whether the democracy vehicle moves forward or backwards.
As a general rule, I think that society moves incrementally forward. Technology is based on the concept of out with the old and in with the new, but advancement from a social perspective tends to lag behind. We have no problem at all embracing the newest I-phone for example, but we tend to cling to old school thinking when it comes to updating ourselves. And that’s how we end up with people who see no hypocrisy in using the internet to repudiate science.
Right at this moment the Americans appear to have decided that a hard right turn is in order. I think that any turn that can be described as hard is inherently dangerous once speed is involved. High velocity hates sharp turns in either direction and then the steering is hard to control.
The good news for America is that they have enacted their auto-braking system. It took a while but there are finally enough justices on the supreme court that have decided to say out loud what has looked both obvious and inevitable. That they don’t serve the will of the majority. So then the question becomes, who do they serve?
My best guess is that they serve the will of the people that really drive the future of American democracy. But, I’m still not certain who those drivers are, and that would be a nice thing for your Northern neighbor to know.
Because it seems logical that if the future of America is minority rule, then the concept of democracy is at best amended, and at worst discarded.
And that’s problematic from the perspective of your Northern neighbor. I’m not sure if Canada is prepared for the Americans hitting the brakes to facilitate the hard right turn they’re trending toward. I guess it’s possible that in short order that socialist brown Canada could be seen as a threat to the new America as our values drift apart from one another. Like I said earlier, it depends who’s driving. Is it Wall street and the billionaires, or is it the god fearing homo hating Christians?
Let’s say it’s a mixture of the Amy Barret Christians, and I shouldn’t have to pay taxes, unions are evil billionaires at the wheel . Then what?
Will America decide to officially declare itself a Christian nation and officially enshrine Christianity as a part of government?
Will every American woman crossing the border into Canada have to go through a pro-life checkpoint to determine if they’re pregnant? If they are, will they be forbidden to travel or will they have to check in on the way back to make sure they’re still pregnant?
Will the school curriculum be decided upon by this minority, under the guise of parental rights to determine what their children are taught?
Will gay marriage and gay adoption be made illegal, and will cannabis be re-criminalized?
I really don’t know how far right the Americans are prepared to go. I suppose it depends not only on the supreme court, but also on how many Republicans get to go to Washington. If enough Christian capitalists’ get together with the Maga crowd then it’s entirely conceivable that Canada could be seen as a threat to the new America. At that point it may be necessary to activate a special military operation to de-socialize those free health care, aborting, weed smoking, no death penalty, gun control, Northern socialists.
It’s actually a good thing that Canada has gun control. Because if we didn’t then we’d be socialists with guns and socialists with guns are communists if I understand the American conservatives correctly. And communists are scary.
I just don’t know, but I think that Canada and maybe Mexico should keep our heads up for noise emanating from our neighbor that a maga-Monroe doctrine is a good idea for a foreign policy. I can’t shake the feeling that the Christians would love a new crusade of morality once they get their own house in Christian order, and the capitalist’s would see all kinds of opportunity for acquisition of land, water and mineral resources.
Time will tell I suppose, and sadly I can’t think of a damn thing we can do about it.
Other than watch.