Fanfare for the Common Man

 It's now the sixth of November: Guy Fawkes Day is over, and so is the civic ritual (not far) to the south of where I live. Though we do not know the full outcome yet, this election may well bring to office an administration that will bring with it policies that challenge the whole world, and not least Canada. 

At this moment, suspended between bad news (the New York Times has just called the United States Senate majority for the party of Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and J. D. Vance) and the remaining hope that the Democrats will take the White House of at least the House of Representatives, it seems a good time to reflect on what it will take to respond to the challenge of a man and an administration in the White House who wants to exercise dictatorial powers "on the first day"; who plans to replace professional civil servants with ideologically vetted functionaries; who has referred to dissenters in his country as "vermin"; who has promised his supporters "I am your retribution".

For my friends in the United States, this is a bleak outlook. The Trump Administration elected in 2016 came into office by surprise, with relatively few set plans, relying on professional civil servants and members of the military, most of whom had a basis in their professional and personal ethics that enabled them to resist Donald Trump's worst impulses. If he is elected this time, he will have a retinue of individuals who share his most undemocratic impulses and a plan to transform the American government, all ready.

Thirty-nine years ago, in 1985, Jonathan Kozol published "Illiterate America". It contained a chilling prophesy describing the end result of Ronald Reagan's educational policies. It ends with these words: 

Masking skills in time will yield to a determined passion to remove those masks and to compel us to look hard into the face of every Caliban we have created and ignored. Violent disorders will become endemic. They will be met with measures that no longer seek to pacify but only to contain. American will cease to be a flawed democracy. What we will become instead cannot be named.

If the American people have given Donald Trump another term, and particularly if they have given him a compliant legislature, he will have no shortage of supporters and enablers eager to make the worst of Kozol's prophesy come true. 

For the last century, successive American governments have cultivated ever more influence on other nations, Canada not least. The then Conservative government undertook a "leap of faith" in negotiating a free trade (later NAFTA and then the CUSMA) agreement with the United States in 1987. Those agreements have yoked our economy to that of the United States, and have left us vulnerable to economic pressure from any American government. 

If Donald Trump returns to the White House and brings a full complement of enablers and ideological zealots with him into government, we can expect they will not confine their ambitions to their own country. The zealots will seek to mould every country they can influence according to their own view of the good. The opportunists will seek to exploit Canadian resources and the Canadian people in every way they can. 

If that happens, we will have to decide whether to resist or not. If Trump brings the people we expect into office, we may not get the opportunity to negotiate. We have to face the possibility of a choice between a pretty complete accommodation with an unprecedented Republican agenda, or resistance.

Resisting would cost us dearly. To achieve it, we would have to come together and accept that Canada stands for something, flawed as our country is. Over the past decade, we have seen governments on the right pander to their supporters with cheap beer and fuel subsidies, the modern equivalent of bread and circuses, while on the left too many of us have embraced an irresponsible nihilism, choosing to dismiss our own country as irredeemable because of our imperfections. If Trump wins and brings the men and women associated with his campaign into office, we can expect to have neither luxury.

In this uncertainty, I have been listening to Aaron Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man. Copeland composed this work in the fall of 1942, at a time when fascism had run unchecked in the West and Japan for two decades, and reached it's ghastly climax in the Wannsee Conference, where the mass murder of Europe's Jewish population was planned. The outcome of the Second World War was far from certain. Copeland sent his fanfare out into the world as a cry of hope but also defiance, a reminder that however strong the powers of repression seem, ordinary people will still rise, in the words of Bruce Cockburn. "like grass through cement".