To the U.S. from a spooked Canuck

Dear neighbours to the south:

In about seven months, your great country will have its national election.

We share the continent, as well as a long history of being on the same side in conflicts, the English language, culture, music and sports, and mutual experience with democratic governance and the rule of law. This may be the year — your 248th year of independence, our 157th — for all of us to examine our grasp of what that means, and the depth of our loyalty to it.

Now, with the rise of rightwing authoritarians around the world and your own unlovely candidate, Donald Trump, we in the west are about to be put to the test.

I’m very nervous … for you, for the world and for us, should your “low-information” and beguiled voters go for him.

It’s set me on a bit of reading about how Adolf Hitler managed to ascend to power via his long membership in the National Socialist party (Nazi Party), and then appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933. It was, remember, an elected government, then free to pursue its racial, antisemitic theories, and lust for more territory (see invasion of Poland, 1939).

For 13 years after the First World War, Germany had a fragile democracy — the Weimar Republic. But economic conditions were bad, and Germans’ sense of humiliation drove voters to elect the Nazis.

We are an ex-colony of Britain and not an imperial power. We have one tenth of your population, a large land mass, and different electoral systems. Ours is a parliamentary government with several political parties, and two houses of assembly: one elected, one appointed. Yours is a republic with two elected houses, two contending parties and a direct vote for president.

It expresses my fears, based on the evidence, that many of your voters are hoodwinked by an evil spell cast by a man without conscience, a “wannabe” authoritarian, with a miserable personality, and a long string of criminal charges related to lying, hiding, assaulting, and inciting to violence. He uses warning language like “bloodbath” and “revenge,” and he endorses unsavoury leaders elsewhere. Many of you, and most of us, are baffled by the extent of Americans’ delusion.

Many Americans have set aside their critical faculties, the lessons they learned as children to run from evil and toward good. They have abandoned their critical mental powers to follow a huckster who seeks to be king.

I was, in 2018, in the same room as Mr. Trump when he insulted everyone at the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Charlevoix, PQ. He made a rude, noisy, late entrance, sat down resentfully, and pushed aside the translation equipment. He ignored the two prominent women on either side of him — Christine La Garde of the IMF, and Lt. Gen. Christine Whitecross, the senior woman in the Canadian military.

Of course, the topic under discussion, in French and English, was gender — not his thing.

He has openly threatened a purge of his enemies in the Justice Department and FBI, and a huge expulsion of immigrants. He called those convicted of offences at the Jan. 6 uprising “hostages.”

A few of us have started to discuss how to immunize Canadians against this infectious wave of Trumpism.

A few Republicans — so few it is remarkable — have spoken out against the ominous possibility of a Trump second term: John Bolton, Mark Esper, Liz Cheney, Nicki Haley, Gen. Mark Milley. It is a sad thing to watch politicians abandon conscience, the thing that makes us all human.

I realize the alternative candidate has his weaknesses and is not popular. But he is not deadly. I urge American voters to absorb the facts, and cast their privileged vote in November for decency, democracy, and the future.