When I was young, my father used to read me snippets from H.L. Mencken’s writings.
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was an American political pundit and satirist my dad admired.
A cousin recently sent me a Mencken quote I had not seen before: “As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
This quote, from 1920, predicts, imperfectly, the results of the recent American presidential election. While D.J. Trump is no “moron,” his character is deeply flawed in ways likely to have profound effects on the United States internally, and on its allies, including Canada.
A dispassionate analysis reveals that:
- poor people voted for billionaires’ tax cuts
- immigrants voted for mass deportations
- seniors voted to gut social security and “Obamacare”
- men voted for their wives and daughters to possibly die from miscarriages
- value shoppers voted to raise duties on Chinese goods, which will increase Walmart and dollar-store prices
- police voted for a convicted felon
- “law and order” advocates voted for a convicted felon
- religious men and women voted for a man who often mocks religions
- “family values” people voted for a twice-divorced philanderer and adulterer
- taxpayers voted for a man apparently proud to pay little or no income tax
In an election like no other, many Americans behaved like turkeys voting to establish a new feast to be called “Thanksgiving.”
We know that Donald Trump is a pathological liar to the point that little of what he says is true. In the four years from 2017 to 2021, fact checking by the Washington Post counted 30,573 false statements. Why would people believe anything he says, and then vote for him?
Part of the answer is that Trump knows how to talk to “his people.” He tells them what they want to hear, that they are suffering but it is not their fault. The blame lies elsewhere: drug smuggling, imported goods made by cheap labour, illegal immigration, NATO membership and America’s defence of other countries. The list is long.
He is also a climate-change denier, a stance with an eager audience in coal mining and petroleum- or gas-producing areas ... not to mention states with vehicle assembly factories.
Then he tells people to vote for him because he knows how to fix “everything.” He offers examples like the Ukraine war and the fighting in Gaza, both of which he would end in “one day.”
Trump’s message is always simple, delivered like a sermon. Key phrases are repeated two or three times to ensure they are remembered. The message then repeats at other events, until his audience accepts it as fact.
Trump has become a cult figure.
Not long ago, on Nov. 11, the Toronto Star carried an opinion piece by a University of Toronto academic titled ‘Why I still assign students essays.’ She explains, “we do not assign essays so that there will be more student essays in the world.” Essays are meant to gauge a student’s ability to collect information, set it out logically and then relate it to the topic set by the instructor. Essays written by artificial intelligence do none of this. They teach the student nothing, nor give the teacher an insight to the student’s ability to reason.
This does not bode well for our society’s future. The reason lies and exaggerations work in our society is because too few people can think them through logically.
When Trump tells Americans he will bring well-paying manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., few understand that these jobs only went overseas because domestic fabrication cost too much.
Applying 100 per cent tariffs to Chinese electric cars will prevent their sale in North America. Domestic manufacture is unlikely to match the cost the Chinese have achieved and will delay North America’s transition to electric vehicles.
The international market for gasoline-powered vehicles is decreasing. As the worldwide appeal of electric vehicles grows, that market will expand. North American companies are likely to miss out and employment in the light vehicle industry will shrink — surely, not what MAGA supporters voted for.
Trump’s promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants is also likely to harm the American economy. In a previous column, I pointed out that 32 per cent of Canadian businesses with paid employees were immigrant-owned. This is probably lower in the U.S., but immigration has been beneficial for that country.
Immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children or young adults include: Sergei Brin (Google founder, Russia, age six); Madeline Albright (former U.S. secretary of state, Czechoslovakia, age 11); Andrew Carnegie (steel magnate and philanthropist, Scotland, age 13); I.M. Pei (well-known architect, China, age 18); Elon Musk (world’s wealthiest man, inventor, engineer, South Africa, age 20); Arnold Schwarzenegger (former California governor, actor, Austria, age 21); Levi Strauss (inventor of Levi’s blue jeans, Germany, age 24); Nikola Tesla (alternating current power developer, Croatia, age 28); Arianna Huffington (author and publisher of the Huffington Post, Greece, age 30); and Oscar de la Renta (fashion designer, Dominican Republic, age 31).
The Manhattan Project, which gave the United States the atom bomb that ended the Second World War, was spearheaded by immigrant scientists. The best known were Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi.
The world’s most famous scientist, Albert Einstein (Nobel laureate, physics, 1921), arrived in the U.S. in 1933 as Hitler came to power. (Einstein renounced German citizenship in 1940.)
If Trump makes life difficult for people born abroad, Canada is well poised to welcome them, their energy and their inventiveness.
Meanwhile, the president-elect has been naming his cabinet. Clearly, many were chosen for their personal loyalty to Trump.
Some are so unqualified for their jobs that many Republicans have been stunned. A prime example is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is known to ridicule vaccination and has made it known he will discourage the fluoridation of water, which has been known (for a century) to greatly reduce dental cavities and which has few, if any, negative side effects.
Canadians cannot be complacent. We have Trumpish “wannabes” who stand ready to upend our lives. These people fail to understand that Canada is not “broken.”
Far from it, we always appear in lists of the world’s top 10 countries, often in the top five. We are not there by accident. We earned our place through spending on public services.
Unfortunately, politicians who promise to reduce taxes rarely warn that doing so will reduce the public services Canadians take for granted. These are already stressed as “progressive” governments were frightened to raise taxes to support existing service levels.
We can only hope Trump’s threat to levy a 25 per cent import duty on all Canadian-made products unifies our politicians to form a united “Team Canada” approach to this threat.
Our future prosperity depends on it.
Peter Bursztyn is a self-proclaimed “recovering scientist” who has a passion for all things based in science and the environment. The now-retired former university academic has taught and carried out research at universities in Africa, Britain and Canada.
