FOR NEARLY A YEAR, Canadians have been discussing the danger posed by the United States. The anxiety shows up everywhere—online forums, polling questions, and in the unusually blunt asides from officials. This is good. We need to get in the habit of having hard conversations about who threatens us, the extent of that threat, and what we can and must do if we are to survive as an independent country.
For CANADA, the diagnosis of the US administration is not academic. It is the difference between managing a relationship with a flawed but crucial ally and planning a campaign of resistance against a powerful neighbour no longer reliably constrained by its domestic institutions.
Unfortunately, we see signs of deference everywhere.
Congress has effectively abandoned its role in holding the president to account. It has failed to uphold its power of the purse on things like international development assistance, bowing to the administration’s decision to simply not spend the money. The loss of that funding has already led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition. It has failed to uphold congressional power to declare war, ignoring military actions in the Caribbean that culminated in the unlawful capture of Venezuela’s authoritarian president. It declined to act when the administration sidestepped the Senate’s confirmation power by allowing Elon Musk to wield cabinet-level authority without ever being confirmed. Congress has also largely demurred in defence of its power to regulate import tariffs. It is, in effect, a presidential lapdog.
Trump is incredibly different from everything in your lifetime. You either haven’t been paying attention, or your a frog in a pot and just didn’t notice the temperature rising.
For all of your life things just kinda worked out, things were never super great under either party but your country didn’t collapse either. So you’re expecting things to go on like that for the rest of your life.
History does indeed rhyme, but it’s not rhyming with W Bush, or Obama or anything else in your lifetime. It rhymes with guys like Putin, Erdogan, Mussolini, and Hitler.
Trump is incompetent and a clown. But still he’s doing a lot of damage because Americans won’t stop him because of the false sense of complacency.
But while Americans stick the sand, the rest of the world is noticing. And we don’t see Trump as the cause of the problems, he’s a symptom of the rot in American culture. It’s scary having someone as deranged as Trump in power. But even more scary is what may follow him. Trump is at the top of a fascist movement, but he’s deranged and incompetent. The next leader of American fascism may not be so incompetent.
We all hoped you would just vote for the black lady and things would have indeed gone back to normal. But that didn’t happen. Americans either voted for fascism or were complacent about it as you are. So now the world has to change. Trade will be routed around the US. Alliances with the US are just paper now, they’re meaningless. The US will be isolated as Spain was under Franco.
You could’ve just voted in primaries and got some people in power that would tax the wealthy. The US is the wealthiest country in the world, just the wealth didn’t trickle down as Reagan told you it would. But if you thought being a wealthy country with a population indoctrinated into apathy on wealth distribution was bad? What happens when that wealth just isn’t there and you’ll still have a population too apathetic to think about wealth distribution?
The US is fucked and the rest of the world is trying to distance itself from you before it all collapses. But go on and keep thinking everything is going to keep on as it always has.
Did you miss the part where I said worse…?
It has been in perpetual decline for decades. Trump didn’t just happen overnight, nor will America be ghosted overnight, Empires die slow deaths.
Not a fan of Putin or erdogan… But I think falsely conflating them with Mussolini or Hitler is a bit much.
Fascism is rising in all western democracies as a response to late stage capitalism. It’s not inherent to America, nor is from a false sense of complacency.
Yeah… I don’t think the fascist movements ballooning all over Europe have been made aware they appropriating American culture.
Lol, who said I didn’t vote for as you said “the black lady”?
I’m willing to bet the corporations in your country still care more about money than they do about policy. America still has a bunch of capital to swing around and in the end that’s really what liberal democracies care about.
I think nations should boycot America, I just don’t really expect them too.
When did I say I didn’t?
Do you think everyone in America shares a hive mind or something?
Again… What do you think everything progressively getting worse means? What do you think a “collapse” actually means? How exactly is a country like Canada going to shield itself from a collapsing America when America is by far its largest trading party?
If you think this problem is just in America, or that canda doesn’t have a problem with income inequality… I really don’t know what to tell you. This is just what happens to any nation who bases their economy on the idea that infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is possible.