Tomorrow, Americans will go to the polls in what is almost certainly the most important election of my lifetime. Turnout is already high in advance voting and it's likely that more Americans will vote in this election than any other in modern times.
I devoutly hope that sanity will prevail and a Trump and his regime will be soundly trounced at the polls, soundly enough that no matter what his protestations about election fraud (and he will whine, cry, and shout), there is no doubt about the outcome.
But I have a horrible feeling that all may not go well. Too many people are living in an alternate reality and their views are deeply held.
The longest conversation I had was with Jim Worthington, a hale 63-year-old who founded People for Trump, a large grassroots organization, and is a member of Mr. Trump’s fitness council (Mr. Worthington owns the Newtown Athletic Club). He organized the Doylestown Trump road rally because Trump supporters were tired of being labelled racists and scorned in supermarkets for wearing MAGA hats; they wanted to be loud and proud.
“I read that over 1,600 cars took part,” I said.
He snorted: They had 6,700 cars, he said, “but the media downplayed it. They said 400 cars.”
No, I said – 1,600. The conversation continued that way: Mr. Worthington would assert something, I’d question it, we’d move on. He claimed that Philadelphia’s 17 new satellite offices, where voters can hand-deliver mail-in ballots, were Democrat-only, unsupervised places in private homes; in fact, they’re in schools and public buildings, and run by state employees.
“Hey, I know a certain percentage of my employees are stealing from me, so what’s to stop someone there from saying, ‘Here’s $20, vote for Joe’?”
“What’s to stop someone from doing the same for Trump?” I countered.
“Republicans don’t cheat,” he replied.
But they lie, constantly and about everything.
Born amid made-up crowd size claims and “alternative facts,” the Trump presidency has been a factory of falsehood from the start, churning out distortions, conspiracy theories and brazen lies at an assembly-line pace that has challenged fact-checkers and defied historical analogy.
But now, with the election just days away, the consequences of four years of fabulism are coming into focus as President Trump argues that the vote itself is inherently “rigged,” tearing at the credibility of the system. Should the contest go into extra innings through legal challenges after Tuesday, it may leave a public with little faith in the outcome — and in its own democracy.
The nightmarish scenario of widespread doubt and denial of the legitimacy of the election would cap a period in American history when truth itself has seemed at stake under a president who has strayed so far from the normal bounds that he creates what allies call his own reality. Even if the election ends with a clear victory or defeat for Mr. Trump, scholars and players alike say the very concept of public trust in an established set of facts necessary for the operation of a democratic society has eroded during his tenure with potentially long-term ramifications.
“You can mitigate the damage, but you can’t bring it back to 100 percent the way it was before,” said Lee McIntyre, the author of “Post-Truth” and a philosopher at Boston University. “And I think that’s going to be Trump’s legacy. I think there’s going to be lingering damage to the processes by which we vet truths for decades. People are going to be saying, ‘Oh, that’s fake news.’ The confusion between skepticism and denialism, the idea that if you don’t want to believe something, you don’t have to believe it, that’s really damaging and that’s going to last.”
That has consequences for the United States and for Canada.
In their book Four Threats, political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman point to four broad issues that have defined every moment of crisis in the history of American democracy: political polarization; conflict over social belonging and political status along lines of race, gender, nationality or religion; high and growing economic inequality which spurs the wealthy to protect their own interests; and excessive executive power. Only now, they argue, have all four of those threats been active at the same time.
There are reasons to believe the Canadian democratic system is better designed and more durable than that of the United States. But no system is foolproof — and centralization of executive power and the overbearing nature of party discipline are longstanding concerns in Canada.
It's not obvious that our institutions and media would respond effectively to a populist authoritarian leading one of the country's major political parties and trampling democratic norms and rules at will. For that matter, it's fair to ask how well our political system has responded to challenges over the past decade — everything from aggressive parliamentary tactics like prorogation and omnibus legislation to policies that specifically target immigrants and ethnic minorities.
If public cynicism is a concern, there was some solace in survey results released this week by the Samara Centre for Democracy — which found that 80 per cent of Canadians are satisfied with the state of democracy in this country. But significant skepticism remains: 63 per cent of those surveyed agreed that the "government doesn't care what people like me think," while 70 per cent said that "those elected to Parliament soon lose touch with the people."
Canada is not necessarily immune to any of the forces that might be driving what has happened to the United States, including polarization.
As Mettler and Lieberman write, differences across political parties can be good and healthy. There's a downside to fetishizing centrism or bi-partisanship. But the system can start to break down when politicians and citizens view each other as enemies rather than rivals.
What all this boils down to is that too many people have constructed a worldview (or bought into a worldview that has been constructed for them) that doesn't match the real world. A society that ignores climate change, environmental degradation and pollution, science and the scientific method, the effects of economic inequality, and the ways in which a highly contagious virus spreads, cannot last. I am very afraid that the rot has spread so deeply and so far that the foundations of U.S. society will collapse. That will not be good for Canada or for the world.
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