A Trumpified Canada?

Are we being Trumpified? A clear segment of the population has succumbed to the Trump Disease. Susan Delacourt writes:

In late 2018, Steve Bannon, one of the leading strategists behind the rise of Donald Trump, swaggered across a stage in downtown Toronto and spoke portentously about the “great turmoils to come” in the world order.

“Our strength is the ‘deplorables,’ just like in Canada. It’s the little guy. It’s upon their shoulders everything rests and they’re the backbone of the populist movement,” Bannon said in his closing arguments in a public debate with journalist David Frum.

Events in Canada over the past couple of weeks certainly look like Bannon’s turmoil fantasies come to life. A Trump-style rally, minus the ex-president, has escalated into a full-fledged emergency in Canada’s capital and its largest province.

We have our own deplorables:

“I see absolute cross-pollination between that movement there and what’s happening in the United States,” veteran U.S. journalist Alex Wagner told Ben Rhodes, the host of the “Pod Saves the World” podcast and a former national security aide to Barack Obama.

The revealing parallel is not the anger of the crowds, Wagner observed, but the joy. “That’s part of the whole thing, right? That there are people installing hot tubs,” she said. “There’s like a sort of rowdy carnival-like atmosphere, which is something you see at every Trump rally.”

Delacourt puts the question squarely:

Is Canada undergoing a political earthquake — a shifting of the tectonic plates under our democracy — or a large-scale national security incident, a one-off? In the newsroom, we might ask: Do we put our political reporters on this story, or our war correspondents?

The answer may be in a new book, Reclaiming Populism, by Paul Somerville and Eric Portzer:

It’s getting a lot of attention now because of the convoy, but also among some governments because of what the book has to say about keeping governments from falling into populist discontent.

Good news: their research has shown that Canada, unlike the United States or Britain, doesn’t have the required ingredients for a populist movement to take hold in any real way.

“What we’re seeing in Ottawa, in Canada, is not populism,” says Summerville, a former financial executive who has made some forays into politics over the years, including running as an NDP candidate in Toronto. “It’s a natural political event that comes after two years (of the pandemic) that goes against every way we’ve been living. It’s not the same as the long-brewing populist eruptions.”

Protzer and Summerville have closely analyzed what exactly was brewing in countries such as the United States when populism crashed the gates of power. Populism, they found, requires deep, entrenched economic unfairness — a general sense in a large part of the population that people are trapped in their current economic classes. An absence of “social mobility” is how the experts describe it. That is a much more dire situation in the U.S. than it is in Canada, they argue. In social-mobility terms, Canada and the United States are worlds apart.

Protzer, a research fellow at Harvard University, says frustration with COVID-19 restrictions — the spark for the convoy — is very different from the historic frustrations that gave rise to Trump or even Boris Johnson in the U.K. He describes the latter this way: “Two generations of economic unfairness, where people have felt that success is a product of family origins and elite machinations and not as a result of talent and effort.”

There are those who would argue that we have two generations of unfairness in Canada. We will soon see whose analysis is right.

Image:cfr.org