On this blog I have never made a secret of my disdain for those who are willfully ignorant and mindlessly led. To allow someone else to do our thinking for us is unforgivably lazy and a complete dereliction of the responsibilities of citizenship. Yet in both the United States and Canada, that dereliction seems widespread and growing.
Consider the circus (a.k.a, the Republican National Convention) that so recently concluded in Milwaukee, site of Don Trump's presidential nomination and the quasi-apotheosis of J.D. Vance as his running mate. The embrace of cheap emotions, distortions and lies there was widespread. Witness this distasteful scene, which earned a rousing ovation:
“America’s ruling class wrote the checks [sic]. Communities like mine paid the price.”“America’s ruling class?” A Democrat who used that kind of language would be scorched for waging “class war,” for promoting division and turning his back on the American dream of everyone rising together. Democrats are gun-shy about that. Even now, when under Joe Biden they’ve done more to create good working-class jobs than Trump ever did, they soft-pedal their message.
But Vance gets away with it. My favourite part of his convention speech was when he slammed Biden for supporting the “disastrous invasion of Iraq” and sending working-class kids off to fight and die in far-off deserts.
That is truly chutzpah on a grand scale. I seem to recall it was a Republican president, George W. Bush, who ordered that disastrous invasion and the even more disastrous attempt to pacify Iraq and the region that followed.
After recalling Vance's rank hypocrisy and opportunism (which I discussed in my previous post, Philips asks a pertinent question:
[H]asn’t Vance, a successful venture capitalist among other things, joined that same ruling class he now rails against? Isn’t the Trump-Vance project now backed by a coterie of billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel? Isn’t all the class-war talk just a smokescreen for traditional Republican policies that leave Vance’s hillbilly relatives scrambling for crumbs?
Maybe. But if you’re the kind of person who’s devouring articles in the New Yorker and the New York Times detailing all this, you’re already a lost cause from the Trump-Vance POV. And the evidence is those kind of attacks aren’t landing. It’s like going at Pierre Poilievre for targeting “gatekeepers” while spending his entire adult life as the ultimate gatekeeper — a career politician. True, but frankly so what?
A comparison with Canada's mentality is inevitable, along with the fact that the hard right has stolen from the Democrats and the Liberals/NDP the mantle of working/middle class champions.
The arrival of Vance is another big step in the Republicans’ campaign to displace Democrats as champions of the American working-class. Poilievre and, in his own way, Doug Ford, are managing the same trick in Canada, stealing that space from the Liberals/NDP. It’s astonishing, and disappointing, that progressives on both sides of the border have allowed conservatives to pull that off.
I'm not sure progressives could have done much about it. It is not often in their natures to rant, chant, hector, exploit and grossly manipulate those whose issues they advocate for. To lie wantonly and shamelessly would require a breadth of unscrupulousness that would make them no different from those they fight.
To conclude, while playing from some sort of reasonable playbook may now seem out of date, the alternative is far worse.
