Cool is just cutting edge conformity. This is a blog about culture, film, television, and story telling. Plus whatever else crosses my semi-functional simian brain.
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Anyone else out there unnerved by what’s happening in America these days?
Experts on authoritarianism say that when political violence is being perpetrated by both sides (and make no mistake, there is violence on both sides), society is in the greatest state of peril, particularly in quasi-democracies.
And Trump is stoking the fires, cynically weaponizing the anger of disgruntled people.
Globalization, like all things, has had positives and negatives. Hundreds of millions prospered, but millions in the USA were left behind, and they aren't happy about it.
Worse, over the last 50 years, ever since the Powell Memo, big business has steadily pushed back gains made by organized labour, polarizing wealth in America to an increasingly dangerous degree. Worker wages have remained stagnant while 50 trillion has gone to the top 1% and CEO salaries have skyrocketed.
Democratic government, as opposed to authoritarian rule, is all about compromise: FDR and LBJ moderated the social and class divide with The New Deal and The Great Society. This helped America avoid falling into Communism or Fascism, creating the famed diamond shaped class structure, instead of the traditional feudal pyramid.
Extremists want purity. This can be good, in that we want to be moving forward towards a more equitable, prosperous, healthy society. It can also be bad, with people pushing for purely selfish, impractical or outright self-destructive ends. Extremists push in the direction of their obsession without regard for practicality. That’s their nature. It’s also why societies run by extremists are unstable.
The more you push in one direction, without regard for the greater body politic, the more resistance you build up.
Every Renaissance has its Reformation.
Push the pendulum too far, and it’ll snap back with a vengeance.
Savvy democratic leaders are aware of this, and implement changes incrementally, moving forward, in the direction (hopefully) that's most constructive, as much as politically viable.
This (hopefully) avoids the Reformation trap.
Demanding immediate extreme change leads to extreme resistance that can undo all progress.
It’s not always even logical: change can be frightening. People often accept things as they are without thinking. Sudden change throws their lives and world view into chaos, creating alarm and fear.
That seems to be where we are now.
Trump is a con man, but he’s cunning, and he’s picked up on widespread discontent, real grievances, and provided enemies to rail against: a Goldstein for the Two Minute Hate, and he’s using it for his own benefit, to enrich himself (to the tune of $3.4 billion dollars), distract his opponents, and dismantle the institutions that kept the system (relatively) fair and competitive.
United we stand, divided we fall. Trump instinctively knows and exploits this, and social media has been his ally in this from the get go.
Social media elevates the incendiary, and it helped Trump get elected. He’s the social media prez, the Great Divider, the Drama King-in-Chief. Facebook infamously embedded with Trump's election war room. Just as Mussolini and Goebbels used the new social tech of the day (radio) in the thirties, Trump's at the forefront of it today.
The White House is practically a reality TV show. I'm amazed at the restraint Trump's shown, in that he doesn't have a camera crew following him 24/7. We could watch him destroy America in real time.
Opposing Trump with violence plays into his hands and would send America into the abyss, giving him the very excuses he needs to go full authoritarian.
Never go full authoritarian.
The United States doesn’t need purity—it needs dialogue and, honestly, compromise. Eventually, this storm will pass, and a new generation of leaders will emerge to rebuild democracy.
I’ve admired the United States since I was a little kid. I grew up watching American films and TV shows, listening to American music, and imbibing American values through novels, comics and magazines. Obviously this was in addition to those of my native Canada, as well as the UK, but US content was a big part of my childhood.
I love American culture, and I bought wholeheartedly into America's liberty and democracy angle. A lot of people will scoff at that: the cynical view is that it’s all a con, and they point to all the wrong America has done since the end of the Second World War as evidence.
And you know what?
From an absolutist position of total moral purity, it’s true: America is a hypocritical abomination. It has engaged in coups, assassinations, invasions, massacres, and worse. It has invaded countries and left them in a state of chaos and internecine warfare.
The critics of America are legion, and they have many perfectly valid points.
However, if you look at the United States from a more nuanced point of view, in relation to the world hegemons of yesteryear, the United States is truly wondrous.
I kid you not.
Has there ever been a more reflective and self-critical nation than the good ol' US of A? Admitting flaws is the first step towards fixing them.
The US led international order, set down at Bretton Woods, invited the world into a global trade network in exchange for siding with the United States against the Soviets. The US would protect those who joined up and open American markets to foreign goods. It offered the carrot instead of the Soviet stick.
It worked: the American World Order was positive sum. Globalization lifted 300 million Indians out of abject poverty and into a now thriving middle class, not to mention 300 million Chinese.
My lifetime has seen the greatest expansion of wealth, stability and prosperity in all of human history.
The price? Global warming and pollution, as well as wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Panama, Libya, Syria, etcetera. The US has been, at times, an agent of destruction and chaos.
The most alarming is perhaps global warming, which, if not checked, could have devastating consequences. Just ask a Venusian. Scientists believe Venus once had oceans and a temperate climate. Now? Not so much. The earth is in the goldilocks zone, but towards the inside edge, and as the sun expands, it will grow increasingly hot until it is uninhabitable (in something like 250 million years). There is no need for us to accelerate the process.
Civil wars have also raged across the globe, causing enormous suffering.
The American world order unquestionably falls short of perfection, and people should continue to point out the flaws and advocate for improvements.
But let us not abandon the baby with the bathwater.
If one looks at the world before 1945, war was far, far more common. Before World War One, there were no organizations attempting to maintain a law based international order, because it didn't exist. It was the law of the jungle between states, as John Mearsheimer endlessly reminds us.
One big step foward, post-1840, was the United Kingdom's attempt to shut down piracy and the slave trade.
The next exception was the League of Nations, brainchild of Woodrow Wilson (sadly also an unrepentant racist).
After WWII, the US upped its game with the creation of the UN. Neither organization was perfect or particularly effective, but they were better than nothing. Humanity crawls and scratches it's way forward; leaping to Utopia in one jump is regrettably the domain of fantasists.
It is also worth noting that the US administration of FDR pushed for the dissolution of European colonial empires, making support for the United Kingdom in World War II dependent on the UK giving up its empire after the war.
Did the US maintain perfect consistency in these anti-colonialist policies? No. World politics is the definition of flawed compromise, and the US stepped back many a time in the face of the red menace.
Vietnam is a case in point, and many argue the US should never have fought it in the first place. Westmoreland's kill counts were definitely not the way to measure success, incentivizing US soldiers in the field to kill indiscriminately to satisfy the demand for progress by the high command. This was a travesty, and Westmoreland was woefully ill-suited for the job. America also heavily funded the French attempt to maintain control of Indochina, undermining its rhetoric and later efforts to preserve South Vietnam.
Nevertheless, South Vietnam had its own independent government. Horribly corrupt and compromised, to be sure, but independent. North Vietnam was a totalitarian state, and South Vietnamese who did not co-operate with the Vietcong were treated brutally. This was not a clear cut war of good vs. evil any way you slice it.
Second, the Bretton Wood agreement obligated the United States to defend allies from communist aggression. The Tonkin Gulf incident was drummed up by the United States as an excuse to come to the defence of South Vietnam. If the US had let the country fall without a fight, it would have sent shock waves through every other country that had thrown in with the United States. The alliance system would have shattered, and so a show of force was required to maintain confidence.
Does that justify the suffering caused? The hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians killed by bombing campaigns in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos? Of course not.
And yet, if one looks at the bigger picture, there is a realpolitick logic to it. We are all trapped in systems larger than we are, and even Hegemons are no exception. Where there is no higher authority or arbiter, anarchy reigns and might makes right. Now is the only time in all of history where the law of the jungle has been replaced with even the faintest whiff of law and order. The United States is that higher arbiter.
Prior to 1945, trade was restricted to within colonial empires, protected by powerful (and expensive) navies. The world was mercantilist, and wars of aggression were common. The strong took what they wanted while the weak suffered what they must.
Since 1945, the United States has used its dominant position and prosperity to push campaigns to stamp out disease, protect global trade, and reduce interstate aggression.
This is a terrible, horrible system, yes, but only when you look at how far it falls short of perfection.
More recently?
The United States, to my great horror, is abandoning everything it built. The Voice of America? 85% of staff laid off. Funding to fight disease and poverty and suffering world wide? Shut down. Protection of trade lanes? Reduced. Globalization and free trade? No more: tariffs are the order of the day.
All of these changes are for the worse, and I suspect billions of people are going to very soon miss, and miss greatly, the era of American order, however horribly flawed it may have been.
One of the best and most admirable things about the United States has been its enshrined ideals. Yes, true, it excused the horrors of slavery at first, and yet, the ideals embedded in the Constitution bore the seeds of slavery’s destruction. At root the two were incompatible, and as time went on, this incompatibility became ever more glaring.
The horrors of World War II and the Holocaust forced America to look long and hard at its own imperfections anew. Allied propaganda of WWII spoke long and passionately against the bigotry of Nazi Germany. And yet, the Nazis had looked at the US when they were developing the Nuremberg Laws that discriminated against Jews.
The Jim Crow South was their model.
After 4 years of propaganda against the evils of bigotry and fascism, American veterans returned home to see what they had been fighting overseas dwelling in the US, out in the open.
What, then, had it all been for?
The cognitive dissonance was deafening.
A few decades later, the Civil Rights movement brought Jim Crow formally to an end. Crow would persist in dark corners for decades to come, but at least it was driven out of the light, however slowly and imperfectly.
I maintain that one of the greatest tragedies in American history was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He had promised freed slaves property and a mule, and I believe he would have kept faith with this pledge. Lincoln would not have tolerated the caste of southern aristocrats, exploitative monsters every last one, to stay in power after the war.
If Lincoln had not been murdered, America may have made far more progress towards inclusion and not endured a century of suffering under Jim Crow.
America has always fallen short of its ideals.
That, sadly, is very human.
What we must not lose sight of is that it does have ideals, and noble ones at that. No, not perfect, nothing is. But they provide a guiding light by which to orient society; over the long decades, Americans have noticed the hypocrisy, where they fell short, and called it out. Every new generation of American teenagers since the sixties has pushed to better embody their ideal.
And America was improving, slowly but surely.
For every step back, two steps forward.
Until now.
Over the last six months, the United States has indulged its dark underbelly. That Confederate battle flags were carried into the US Congress during the January 6th insurrection says everything.
Remember that the only interests the Confederacy ever advanced were those of an exploitative elite. The aristocrats of the South weaponized bigotry to pull onside ignorant whites, slathering atop ideals of military honour and the preservation of tradition, to better get the unwashed to fight and die in a war against their fellow man and their own interests.
Over the last six months, Trump has threatened to use economic force to destroy the Canadian economy and annex the country. When the elephant south of the border makes such threats, it is only prudent for the mouse to take notice.
How can we ignore it?
American tariffs are expected to reduce Canada’s GDP at least 2%. If Trump gets more serious, he will start wooing Alberta, and that’s when things will get really serious.
Incredibly, the US has tossed aside 200 years of close collaboration to bully and threaten its friends. I'd dismiss Trumps bluster as mere rhetoric, but then, I’d have thought deploying marines on American streets was rhetoric, too, until it happened.
The US is trampling over the ideals of its own rules based international order with threats of military force against Greenland and Panama. Trump has fawned over dictators, pardoned insurrectionists, proposed emptying Gaza to turn it into a beach resort, and had people snatched off the street in 2025 without trial.
This is not the America I remember.
Trump’s administration is where integrity goes to die. Just ask Tulsi Gabbard.
My hope? That the excesses of Trump’s administration will lead to a revitalization of the American Union, of those who truly believe in the US Constitution, rather than those who pay it lip service and have no idea what Habeas Corpus even is.
I am not a political extremist. I have been denounced for both for being too left wing, and for being too right. My views have been fairly stable over time; it’s generally the political pendulum outside of me that swings. Recent events south of the border, however, are so alarming there is really only one choice to make, and that’s between the ideals of the Union or the Confederacy, between patriotism and treason.
Trump is closely tied to the rampaging billionaire broligarchy that seeks to channel money from the middle class to the top. He allowed Elon Musk to gut regulatory bodies that held big businesses (and arguably monopolies) in check, created meme coins to enrich himself and exploit the office of the presidency, opened the doors to foreign money and demanded he be courted for favours, and threatened punishment for those who don't.
An untrammelled aristocracy, the kind of NeoFeudalism far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin advocates, is the calling card of the Confederacy. Yarvin is the philosopher-whisperer to JD Vance and Peter Thiel, a man who would like to see America broken up into corporate micro-states beholden to shareholders. Most shares in American businesses, of course, are in the hands of the top 1%. This cabal does not seek a diamond shaped society oriented towards a middle class, but a pyramid, one with them atop in perpetuity.
This is no longer a fringe fantasy — it’s knocking on the door of the White House.
One word keeps popping up at the back of my mind, one that I thought had been rightly consigned to the dustbin of history: fascism.
It’s a strong word, to be sure, and so abused over the years to be almost meaningless. I’ve seen it hurled about at the drop of a hat, like the boy crying wolf; it’s been reduced to a mere epithet, and many people just roll their eyes when you bring it up. I thought fascism was thoroughly discredited in the wake of the Second World War, even as it persisted in backwaters like Franco’s Spain, where it died a long, drawn out death.
Unfortunately, eventually a new political leader arises for whom the appellation is frighteningly applicable.
