The wrong man

Doug Ford is a people pleaser. His government works on that principle. He doesn't conceal the fact; indeed, he proclaims it. He is "for the people". If the people want to drink, he'll have alcohol, including  pre-mixed cocktails, available in corner stores. If people want to drive, he'll build a highway. If people want a spa and water park, he'll arrange it. If the people want entertainment, he'll lease out the waterfront venue to a promoter (never mind the promoter in question is a predatory monopoly).

That has made Doug Ford popular with an enthusiastic base. It also makes him extremely unsuited to lead during what look like the very hard times ahead of us. There is very little that is pleasing about our situation. Doug Ford will have very little to offer in the way of gratification if Donald Trump follows through on his threats. We don't need a premier who promises us everything we want; we need a premier who can rally us to stand together, even if the government can offer us nothing but toil, tears, and sweat. 

January 20, part 2

Just a few hours from now, Donald Trump will take the oath of office, and we will learn which of his threats, or promises, he intends to carry out.

In my last post, I wrote about the hazards of taking Mr. Trump's implicit promise to make Canada a state with caution; I believe that if we surrender before Donald Trump's economic aggression, we would find ourselves residents of a territory, not a state, and Canadians, or former Canadians, as we would be if we surrendered, might well find ourselves classified as US nationals, rather than citizens with voting rights. 

But if too many Canadian commentators have been mistakenly optimistic about our prospects should we surrender, we have been unreasonably pessimistic about our ability to face the kind of economic pressure Trump's government could or would bring to bear. 

January 20

On Monday, Donald Trump will take the presidential oath of office and the reigns of a president's very considerable power under the American system.

He's also set to be the first American president to seriously question Canada's sovereignty. Some Americans have always regarded Canada with an kind of uneasiness and suspicion, because we contradict their favourite narratives. If, as some American conservatives actually believe, Americans represent the pinnacle of humanity, if everyone aspires to American citizenship, then why do forty million Canadians fail, indeed refuse, to petition for admission to the union? Plenty of American pundits have expressed hostility to the idea of Canada. Most American presidents and lawmakers, on the other hand, have had a real degree of affection and respect for Canada. Even where US presidents have disliked our politics or politicians, the decencies of international relations have kept these sentiments out of official United States policy. Until now: Donald Trump has made it quite clear that, at least when it comes to rhetoric, he has no intention of abiding by the old restraints. 

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. 

Project 2025 and "schedule 'F'"

Republicans complain the Democrats have set out to terrify the public with references to Project 2025. They point out the project did not come from the Republican Party, but from the Heritage Foundation, a right wing policy development and influence organization. The Heritage Foundation operates at arm's length from the Republican Party and the Trump campaign, but all three entities belong to the larger American Conservative movement, and the personnel in the Heritage foundation, including the staff responsible for Project 2025, overlaps with the personnel of the Trump Administration of 2017-2021 to a significant degree.

The project itself consists of a public policy framework, containing both broad ideological outlines and specific implementation details. Its authors have divided it into several phases: the initial policy document, titled Mandate for Leadership, which they have released publicly, then a series of training videos, which have been leaked to ProPublica, and a number of other as yet unpublished documents.

The mask is right off

This time he said it before a microphone and TV cameras. Donald Trump claimed that from his perspective the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he has awarded to, among others, donors, professional athletes, politicians, and radio commentator Rush Limbaugh "is better" than the Medal of Honor. He claimed the medal of freedom is "better" precisely because recipients do not have to sacrifice their health or their lives.

Donald Trump has made it clear from the outset that he despises service and sacrifice. He has repeatedly, and very publicly, rejected the notion that those who sacrifice themselves for the good of others have a claim on their fellow citizens. He dismissed the five and a half years his political rival John McCain spent in brutal captivity for his country with a sneer: "I like people who weren't captured, OK?". When the family of Humayun Khan, who had given his life in Operation Iraqi Freedom, appealed to Donald Trump to abandon his Islamophobic policies in the name of the United States Constitution, and of their son who had given his life for that constitution, Donald Trump dismissed them by doubling down on his Islamophobic positions.

Eleven score and eight years ago...

...the continental congress of what would become the United States severed their links with the most scientifically sophisticated and democratic nation in Europe. In doing so, they also cut ties with the most just, wise, and honourable monarch in Europe at that time, a king whose Royal Proclamation of 1763 laid out the requirement to treat the Indigenous peoples of the continent with basic respect.

 Last month, the Supreme Court of the United States decreed the presidential powers extend to immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, and rendered prosecution for any act by a president extremely difficult. Last week, President Biden announced he would forego a presidential nomination that was his for the good of the country. Both decisions, in their way, stand to shape the nature of the American experiment.

A verdict and a question

The conviction of Donald Trump by a New York jury actually raises a number of questions, some trivial and some decidedly not.

From the beginning, Donald Trump's behaviour has appalled me. His casual cruelty disgusts me, and his contempt for the very idea of service angers me at a deep level that frankly surprised me. His profound divisiveness and heedlessness incompetence frightens me, particularly when I consider the power of the office he has held and wants to reclaim. I and others appalled and enraged by Donald Trump should probably ask ourselves how much we really want to celebrate the conviction and possible incarceration of an elderly and by all accounts rather pathetic individual on a relatively minor, if squalid crime. 

On the trivial side, I wonder how the US Treasury Department, which provides security for American presidents and former presidents, will decide which agents have to accompany Donald Trump to prison. Musical chairs, perhaps? Offering danger money or hardship pay?

The jury verdict on Donald Trump does not, in fact, mean he will go to prison or even jail: not soon, and quite possibly not at all. Courts have routinely sentenced people guilty of worse things than any of the charges against Mr. Trump to fines, community service, or probation. As well. Mr. Trump still has avenues of appeal.

Peter Pan's Crocodile and Donald Trump

Many years ago I heard a theatre legend, one of many such stories, in which a young and cocky actor playing the crocodile in Peter Pan managed to infuriate the stagehands. In crocodile costume, of course, he walked bent over, following tape on the stage, and one night, after a particularly egregious offence against the stage crew, he followed the tape, tick tocking away... straight into the orchestra pit.

The usual message for this story for actors is: don't piss off the stage crew. It also has a message for politicians and pundits: don't blindly follow the tape. In politics, of course, the tape we follow has many names and takes many forms: peer pressure, compromise or the allure of power. More dangerously, the tape we follow takes the shape of a phenomenon visible throughout politics and society: a series of minor propositions, each of which we may not want to agree to, but which at the time seem less painful than a sense of letting the team down, or losing friends, access, and influence. C. S. Lewis described this process in his great essay The Inner Ring.

A welcome departure...

Jeff Sessions testifying
by Office of Robert Aderholt

 I begin to write this in the last few minutes of January 20, 2021. I will probably publish it in the first hours of January 21, which, among some other distinctions, marks the first full day of the Biden-Harris administration. TV news has shown President Biden swearing in new officials of his administration, with an admonition similar to Churchill's famous "blood toil tears and sweat", and a single, uncompromising requirement: he required all his appointees to always show respect for their colleagues and the American people. 

At the same time, the officials, strategists, functionaries and hangers on of the previous administration have departed Washington, one or two clutching freshly printed presidential pardons, others just leaving. As Americans celebrate a hard-won transfer of power, in the last minutes of this day I want to celebrate the departure of a man who left Washington over two years ago, and now lives in well earned obscurity, his attempt at a political comeback denied by Donald Trump for precisely the wrong reasons. That man, Jefferson Sessions, implemented the most egregiously cruel of all the policies of the Trump administration, the policy of family separation at the American border with Mexico. 

A trophy of ashes

At a pivotal moment in the film "The Bounty",  when the mutineers under Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) are about to put Captain William Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) and the crew loyal to him into the ship's boat and set them adrift in the Pacific, Bligh asks his former second in command if he thinks he can command the mutineers, "this rabble". Bligh reminds Christian he failed, and Bligh had the law behind him. 

Alex Trebek and the Donald

RIP to a giant who made knowing stuff cool. https://t.co/GQybsCTDLo

— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 8, 2020

 If the clue reads: "In 1984 George Orwell wrote this thing was statistical, though the book says, clearly, it isn't", the correct response is: "what is sanity?"

On the day after most media outlets called the election for Mr. Biden, Alex Trebek died at his home, with his family, after a brave struggle against pancreatic cancer. In his public fight over a year and a half with the cancer, he showed grace, humility, and a defining gentle, self-deprecating humour. 

He provided a useful, even healing, counterpart to the career of that other TV show host, the one who disastrously took his act into the White House. Alex Trebek did more than making "knowing stuff cool"; he made reaching for the truth cool. He made acknowledging and correcting his mistakes cool. The TV show "Jeopardy" taught us many things, some trivial, some not, but perhaps the most important lesson the show taught came not from the clues or the questions, but from the occasional adjustments to scores as the judges accepted a response Mr. Trebek had rejected, or rejected a response he had allowed. Alex Trebek always conveyed these changes courteously, always with a tinge of regret for taking away points, and never, not ever, with any hint of wounded vanity at having his calls overruled. In doing so, he taught us nothing matters more than the truth, not the flow of the play and certainly not the ego of the host. Without display, without fanfare, without even speaking to the matter directly, he taught everyone who watched the show the importance of getting things right. 

Luke Skywalker and the United States Constitution

Conor Friedersdorf thinks the Left has made a huge mistake in abandoning the pure libertarian position on the freedom of political speech. At least, he thought so as of last week, before the pardoning of Joe Arpaio.

Donald Trump's pardon of Joe Arpaio, as Mr. Friedersdorf himself has pointed out, along with many other able commentators, has a real potential to unravel the rule of law. The presidential power of pardon has few specific limits, but the United States Constitution certainly never intended it to permit the President to undermine a prosecution, much less a law, the president simply disapproved of. The specific pardon of Mr. Arpaio, whom President Trump pardoned for offences related to civil rights violations, makes the situation more troubling. Issuing a pardon for someone who has never expressed regret or admitted wrongdoing means one of two things: either the President believes the court made a serious error of fact, or he condones the offence. If officials with the power to pardon violators actively condone civil rights violations, they effectively strip some, and in the end all, members of the community of their civil rights.

This illustrates what I call the Skywalker rule of constitutions: like the death star, every written constitution has to have a relief port.

Reflections on Conservatism in the Wake of Charlottesville

The American people have elected a man who has no idea of shame as their president, and I surprised myself by feeling particularly incensed to see the way he confidently assumed he could disrespect a gold star family and then count, not only on the obedience and professionalism but the political support of the American service chiefs. Last week, his service chiefs served a quiet but determined notice: they would obey him but never willingly acquiesce to the corruption and dishonour of the military they served. After witnessing white supremacists parading with the symbols of slavery and genocide, and their president refusing to condemn either the ugly ideology or its uglier, murderous display, the chiefs of the American services: Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps issued a series of statements condemning white supremacy and warning potential recruits their services had no place for bias or racism.

Size the office to fit the man

photo by Gage Skidmore

 Donald Trump’s recent behaviour has provoked dark thoughts among American opinion writers. Ross Douthait, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, has raised the possibility of declaring Mr. Trump medically unfit for his job and invoking the 25 amendment to the US constitution to remove him.

That is a spectacularly bad idea. It is, to paraphrase Orwell, a bad idea even though National Review says it’s a bad idea. For one thing, the authors of the 25th amendment intended it to deal with a medical crisis, not a policy disagreement or even justified reservations about the character of a president. For another, it doesn’t deal with the structural or even the psychological problems the Trump presidency raises.

What, me worry?

by Gage Skidmore

If American news reports accurately describe the events of last week's meeting between President Trump and Russian representatives, somewhere in the Western Asia at least one person probably has a lot less confidence in their future than they did a few days ago. We may never know the name or names of the people who apparently took huge risks to obtain important details of the latest efforts by the Daesh to loose chaos on international air travel. We can only hope the president of the United States did not sentence them to an unpleasant death by recklessly boasting about his intelligence sources.

We have less room for doubt about what happened next. After both his national security advisor and his secretary of state denied the story in carefully worded statements, Mr. Trump took to late night Twitter and cast doubt on their claims by stating he had, in any case, the right to tell the Russians anything he wanted them to know.

The white battalion

by Gage Skidmore , via Wikimedia Commons

A friend and colleague of mine, an officer in the Canadian Infantry, taught me "Old King Cole" ("beer beer beer said the privates, merry men are we"), and he taught me about the White Battalion. The White Battalion is a tradition in the Canadian Forces, or at least in some regiments. It is a term for the regimental dead. As my friend explained to me, regiments disband, their colours hung on the walls of churches for time and nature to return them to the Earth, but white battalion never disbands; its members are transferred to an active regiment. Soldiers remember, honour, and grieve.


The act of remembering war dead has many expressions in many places, but it works out to the same basic contract: a society will ask its young men, and in some cases its young women, to put themselves in harm's way for the sake of the nation. In return, the nation will carry the names of everyone who gives their life in its service down through history in honour. It is a covenant painted on the walls of thousands of churches. It is carved in the stone of war memorials in villages and cities across the world. It forms the basis for a signature piece of American political rhetoric: Lincoln's Gettyburg Address. It is a part of the hearts of millions of families.

What's wrong with David Frum's excellent article

by HiMY SYeD via Wikimedia Commons

David Frum recently wrote an excellent article in the Atlantic Monthly on the possible development of an authoritarian populist state under Donald Trump. Read it if you haven't already.

David Frum comes from Toronto, but he left many years ago for the United States. He did not live through Toronto's experience with insurgent populist conservatism. That may or may not have led to what I regard as the most interesting omission in a very good article.

The corruption of freebies in politics

By Kiwiev via Wikimedia Commons

By freebies, I don't mean swag ; I don't mean rides in jets and helicopters provided to politicians by prominent business leaders. In fact, I don't mean corruption of politicians at all, although crooks in office do cause major problems. I mean a much more serious problem: the corruption of the voters and, by extension, the political process.


Commentators have long derided political promises as bribing voters with heir own money, but the purposes of legitimate political debate include the best use of resources. The process gets corrupted when politicians promise someone else will pay. One example of this we all know: the slogan "make the rich pay", an aspiration often stated but seldom realized. Calls to tax the rich frequently give rise not to better services but rather to increasingly convoluted tax avoidance schemes. Governments have had much greater luck extracting money from people accused of crimes. Conservative governments in the eighties, motivated to reward their friends with deep tax cuts and to punish those they disdained, invented a series of creative and mischievous government financing tools, from the outright forfeiture of assets to fine surcharges.

Donald Trump's promise to force the Mexican government to pay for a massive public works project on the southern border of the US has a precedent: Ronald Reagan's government sent Oliver North on an unconstitutional fund-raising tour through the palaces of depots to obtain funding for the "contra" mercenary terrorists the US Congress had explicitly refused to support. Mr. Trump has extended this idea in two ways: proposing a major infrastructure program employing hundreds of thousands of Americans, and planning to take the money by some form of coercion rather than beg for it.

The value of a tell

I have seen a number of comments about the movement calling themselves the "alt-right"; these comments argue we should not accept these peoples' name for their movement, but rather call them fascists, racists, national socialists, misogynists, and plain haters. An Internet activist has written a Google Chrome plug-in that renames "alt-right" to White Supremacy or neo-Nazi. The Associated Press has also updated their style guide to require quotes and a full definition whenever writers use the term "alt-right".

I sympathize with the impulse, but if we reject the name "alt right" we stand to lose potentially useful information. The name a person or a group gives themselves is always a "tell"; it gives away more about the people who take the name than they intend.