About two-thirds of Canadians surveyed this month said American democracy cannot survive another four years of Donald Trump in the White House, and about half said the United States is on the way to becoming an authoritarian state, a poll released on Monday said.
The November U.S. election is likely to pit President Joe Biden against Trump, who is the clear frontrunner to win the Republican nomination as voting in the presidential primary race kicks off in Iowa on Monday.
Sixty-four percent of respondents in the Angus Reid Institute poll of 1,510 Canadians said they agreed with the statement: “U.S. democracy cannot survive another four years of Donald Trump.” Twenty-eight percent disagreed.
The Jan. 6, 2021 attack on Capitol Hill by Trump supporters seeking to block certification of Biden’s 2020 election win shocked many Canadians, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly blamed Trump for inciting the mob.
Canadians are also more clear than Americans that this isn’t a Trump problem. He’s just the symptom.
Canadians who are old enough remember the Bush II presidency, where Canada decided it wasn’t going to join the US on its adventure in Iraq, and Americans freaked out. Americans started boycotting Canadian goods, and saying that if Canada wasn’t siding with the US it was siding with the “terrists”.
The election of Obama restored some hope that maybe things were getting better, but the reaction to that with the whole Tea Party thing, and then the Trump presidency showed it wasn’t a blip, and that almost 50% of Americans were not rational people. Then there are things like the frequent government shutdowns, the constant gun massacres, the overtly political Supreme Court and its recent stance that precedent doesn’t matter.
Back when Reagan was in power, the US conservatives were making terrible decisions, but at least they had a coherent philosophy, they believed in democracy, and the conservative ideals were more or less shared by other conservatives around the world (Thatcher, Mulroney, etc.)
These days, the US right wing is an incoherent mess of conspiracy theories, religious extremism, and chaos. Conservatives want to ban or burn books, but they still claim to stand for freedom of expression and speech. They talk about passing laws banning non-heterosexuals from everything, while simultaneously wanting the government to get out of their lives.
And, with a nearly 9000 km shared border and massive social and economic ties between the two, whatever happens in the US will affect Canada. There’s no escaping that fact. Canadian democracy is almost irrelevant. If Trump comes to power again, there are no votes that Canadians can cast that will shield them from the chaos.