Never again

Government matters. It matters who they are and what they do. Rarely, if ever, in our lifetime has this notion been more brilliantly illuminated than this moment right now.

It matters that we present a competent collective response to crises such as COVID-19. It matters that we have democratically elected leaders who are base-line competent and well-meaning. Even when they fumble. Particularly when the prospects look bleak. For this is when strongmen leaders become stronger. When despots become more despotic.

If there are positive lessons from this pandemic— and I expect there will be a few—let one of them be that at least for a generation or three we think about government and its role in our lives—that we elevate civics teaching in our children’s education.

In the first couple of weeks of this pandemic, I recoiled at the instinctive reaction of pundits and commentators to frame the US response to the pandemic through the lens of Donald Trump. This challenge was different from the daily parade of crimes, scandals, and loathsome words and behaviour of the American president.

I pushed back against the automatic framing of this pandemic through the Gangster in the White House, as David Frum has properly characterized him, mostly because I saw Trump as largely irrelevant, particularly in the early days. This is because in the scramble to accumulate information about the threat of the coronavirus I tended to look past governments altogether—to look to first sources such as epidemiologists, statisticians, front-line healthcare professionals and the like.

But in recent weeks the glaring contrast between US leadership and most other developed nations (save for Hungary, Serbia, and others) has rudely thrust itself to the forefront of my consciousness. For Trump demonstrates in each of his daily briefings that bad leaders—even when surrounded a competent and mostly functional institutional bureaucracy— can wreak havoc and death upon on vast swaths of people who elected them. It has highlighted the fact that a bad leader is not merely benign, but rather a toxic threat to his nation and beyond.

Ever the empty-headed carnival barker, Trump careens in his daily briefings from nonsensical conspiracy theories, to race-baiting to snake oil huckster. “Try it, what have you got to lose” urged the American president on Saturday about using a malaria treatment against the virus—while his medical experts strained to contain their discomfort just steps behind him. It is all delivered with the lunatic narcissist’s certainty that insists simultaneously that the ‘good’ is all him and the ‘bad’ has nothing to do with him at all. “I was number one on Facebook.” There is nothing useful that pours out of his mouth—yet he insists on controlling the microphone.

Trump is a living parody. And it might be funny if it were all just a television concoction. Rather, it is increasingly a horror show from which thousands will die and many more will suffer.

Now imagine if Trump possessed a bit more guile, a bit more cunning. Like Orban in Hungary, or Putin in Russia, Trump would be working feverishly to consolidate power in the White House and diminish Congress. Democracy—already fragile in that nation— could be, may still be, torn asunder. It is perhaps ironic that America’s best chance against that happening is that Trump is simply too stupid to pull it off.

I want to believe that any American citizen watching their president in recent days will vow: Never again. Never again. Never again will we put a buffoon in the most important job in the world. Never again will we subject our safety, security, and economy in the hands of a dim-witted crook.

Only 63 million voted for Trump in 2016. More than 123 million eligible electors chose not to vote at all. Put another way, Trump was elected by a little more than a quarter of the eligible voters.

According to an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Trump presidency came about because voters were “anxious” about changes in their circumstances and the growing diversity in American society.

I expect this is true. To a point. But while I expect a share of the population carries around the undefined grievance that someone else is responsible for their particular plight, I don’t believe that was the compelling electoral driver in 2016. I suspect the answer is more banal. A great many of us have come to think that government and politics have nothing to do with us. That it doesn’t really matter. Or that it is controlled by the powerful and the connected. So, we tend to view elections as the horse race that it is regularly portrayed. Those who are immersed in it, tend to be those committed to the sport of politics rather than the ideas or principles. There is a cost to this facile framing.

I lean toward the explanation that a great deal of Trump voters simply chose to blow up government— like an 8-year-old with a firecracker—just to see what would happen.

I don’t believe we are immune from such tendencies in this country or elsewhere. We are, thankfully, being well-served by our leaders on the national, provincial and municipal stages. But we have a less than stellar record of voting. Last year, 66 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot in the federal election. Just 58 per cent of voters participated in the provincial election in 2018—though that was the highest in 20 years. And just 43 per cent of eligible voter exercised their franchise in Prince Edward County’s municipal election in 2018.

It matters. Government matters. Let us never again take it for granted.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca