Why do (most) Canadians despise trump while a lot of Americans like him (and some love him like Jesus)? I mean even before he threatened to put Canada into an instant recession.
About half of Americans like trump enough to vote for him. That's undeniable. It's also incomprehensible to a lot of us. They didn't care that he is a convicted felon. They didn't care that he encouraged a violent insurrection against the temple of American democracy the Capitol. They don't care that he pardoned the convicted Jan. 6 mob who battered police with flagpoles, sacked the building and called for the lynching of the Vice-President and Speaker of the House. Trump's supporters like his brashness. They like the way he talks. They think he gets them - when in fact, it's them who have been gotten (in the sense of conned). It's obvious to many of us that he has contempt for the very people who support him the most. He wouldn't be caught dead hanging out socially at one of his golf clubs with the people who attend his rallies, the groupies who buy his low-end merch, wear the hats, and believe every lie he utters as if it were gospel.
One theory is that he has tapped into a visceral animus that exists in American society, between the conservative rural uneducated ('I love the uneducated' trump famously said) and the coastal educated elites. The blue collar working class and the white collar upper class. It doesn't matter that trump is the epitome of an educated coastal elite. He doesn't talk like one. It doesn't matter that when he came to office in his first term, the only successful piece of legislation he claimed was a massive tax break that largely benefitted the wealthy and corporations. What matters to trump's supporters, and he knows it perfectly well, isn't actually lowering the price of eggs. My guess is that he won't be paying much of a political price for failing to deliver on that promise. To trump's followers, paying the increased price of eggs is worth having someone who will express, in the most outrageous, most offensive and public way, the visceral resentment and anger that they feel. And by the way, it's not a matter of education, as some have been arguing (usually the educated elite make the argument). That can easily be disproven by the fact that Americans have never been more educated in history, than they are today. More high-school and college graduates than ever before. The problem is that the economic opportunities afforded by getting an education have been drying up across the board for decades, and that's endemic. Coastal elites are still foolish enough to pay the exorbitant fees to go to elite universities, and spend the rest of their lives paying the debt back. The rest think it's a better bet to tell the elites "Fuck you!" in the loudest ugliest voice they can find. They may have the smarter (and more affordable) idea.
I hate sounding nostalgic, but there was a time in America in the 1950s, 60s and 70s - I was reminded of this by an interview with Harvard professor Michael Sandel on Steve Paikin's show - when you could go to a baseball game at Boston's Fenway Park, and the rich and educated would be indistinguishable from the high-school dropouts and working class, except maybe that some people sat closer to home plate and the dugouts. Baseball was always the people's sport. Symbolic of democracies equality of opportunity. The stadia were always huge, because baseball is played on a massive field, with plenty of affordable seats. When I was a kid, my dad's clothing company (no multinational enterprise) had season's tickets for box seats along the first base line at Jarry Park. Many weekend afternoons in the summer were spent taking in an Expos double-header. Point being, the experience embodied a kind of social cohesion accessible to everyone. Contrast that to tickets for sport (concert etc.) nowadays. They are priced out of reach for the average person. The elite sit in corporate boxes, while their employees watch on livingroom and sports bar TV screens. It's symbolic of a fracturing of the economic and cultural fabric of society.
Since the mid-1980s, the social divide shaped by economic globalization that offshored manufacturing and financially privileged those who could take advantage of the information economy, created a divide that stagnated wages at the bottom for decades and hypercharged wealth accumulation at the top. This trend gradually morphed into the fragmentary politics of group identity. A sense of social cohesion, built on trust that everyone was working toward the same national project of fairness and opportunity, was coming apart, because the economic and political results demonstrated the exact opposite. Enter trump, whose populist message targeting those left behind by increasing wealth disparities, found a home within groups of society looking for a voice to express their anger, frustration and blame.
Why hasn't Canada fallen prey to that brand of identity politics of resentment? It's not as if tickets for a hockey game have become more affordable. It's not as if we don't fall for identity politics in general. We do. Canadians are more woke than an alarm clock. One word: healthcare. That, and all the other nationwide institutions explicitly designed to strengthen the national social fabric, like our social safety net, our public schools, our childcare etc. Most northern countries, for example the Scandinavian countries, tend to have a more developed social safety-net systems of support. It comes with the challenges of living in northern climates. A certain sense of interdependence emerges, and a national culture and institutional framework. I'm not suggesting that Canada doesn't have regional cultural identities, of course we do, some very distinct ones, as in Quebec. But in terms of shared experience and affinity, there's nothing like a cold Canadian winter - which shapes our choice of sports, technologies, arts, sciences & manufacturing (ie. research we are particularly good at doing and products we're particularly good at making) etc. In short, everything that makes up an identity. Our social fabric simply hasn't frayed the way it has in the US because we still trust in our government, the services they provide, and each other. Sure, we had our copycat trucker convoy disruption when people were going out of their minds during the pandemic. Most Canadians hated it. We trust our healthcare professionals to provide advice in the interest of citizens. We like order not chaos. It gets too cold up here for chaos. The US has always influenced our politics and culture, and always will. But the bottom line is we're different. We're not American. And in the next few months I think we'll prove it.
