Institutional Neutrality is Dead. Long Live Chaos
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Liberals believe that everyone is entitled to an opinion. Just so long as it’s the same opinion as theirs.— P.J. O’Rourke
Have you ever ordered from Skip The Dishes and then greedily savoured the taste of your food as it made its way to your house? And then, when the food arrived, the salad was wilted, the fries were mushy and the burger was overdone?
That’s probably how Republicans in the U.S. feel in the wake of the much-touted midterm elections on Tuesday. They ordered a mouth-watering portion of crushing Joe Biden’s Democrats. When their order was tossed on the stoop it proved a nothing burger.
Yes, the GOP appear to now (barely) control the House, which is no small thing. Biden’s legislative agenda goes through them. But the promised triumph in the Senate likely comes down to a woeful Herschel Walker winning a runoff in December with the incumbent Raphael Warnock to simply maintain a 50-50 status quo.
The GOP’s caviar dreams and champagne wishes were stoked by pollsters and TV pundits who promised revenge for two years of Biden calling them Nazis. Instead they got a cadaverous husk named John Fetterman, rendered non compes menses by a stroke, schooling TV doc Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s Senate race. Go figure.
The only upside was in Florida where governor Ron DeSantis led a true red wave, swamping the DEMs across the board in governor, senate and House elections en route to historic gains in the Sunshine state. The DEM drubbing was what had been promised— and never materialized— elsewhere.
Now, Republicans are left with the scenario none of them wants. The Mara Lago whale Donald Trump— whose wonky endorsements in the midterms face-planted in important races— stands as GOP kingmaker. He largely withheld his huge war chest from candidates who wilted against DEM media blitzes. And he has a fanatical base.
He believes he has the road open to a 2024 presidential nomination. Indeed, he thinks opposition to him would be disloyal to a former president. The only thing standing in his way will be fellow Floridian DeSantis, the favourite of those who live in a real world. Their clash— if DeSantis is willing— promises to be bloody. And highly entertaining for DEMs.
What leads conservatives in the U.S. to most despair in this conflict is the urgency of a cultural moment Trump introduced in 2016— a moment he seems to have allowed to pass in place of a cult of personality. As Pedro L. Gonzalez describes in in Chronicles Magazine: The Trump moment was a repudiation of the status quo through a legitimate democratic process. By subsequently denying that option to people through force and fraud, the establishment effectively removed a pressure relief valve.
It's hard to explain what a disaster this is for the establishment… They had to radicalize the people who are most patriotic about this country and most reverent of its myths, symbols, and founding documents: Middle Americans. People no longer believe in institutional neutrality. That is bad for the regime. But it's good for Americans who needed to be disabused of that illusion.
The abuses of the establishment against Americans have all but guaranteed the rise of a force that will be as bad or worse than what they pretended the first iteration of Trumpism was. It'll be good and necessary when it comes.”
It’ll be good for Canadians, too, when Jagmeet Singh, the Happy Squanderer, does his democratic duty bringing down the Trudeau Tower. Read the previous quote and insert the Canadian establishment where Gonzalez referred to its American counterpart and the observation applies to Singh, Trudeau and the insatiable apparatus of the Capital Region.
As we have seen in the ongoing Emergency Measures finger pointing, institutional neutrality in Canada is mort. The entire exercise on display in Ottawa has seen the Usual Suspects demonizing working-class’ complaints as white supremacy. They are saying they have nothing to learn from their fellow citizens. Anything but blaming themselves for allowing the Convoy to metastasize on the steps of Parliament Hill.
The recent government disgorgements to failing traditional media— abated by the corrosive Bill C-18— make clear that the ruling elite in Ottawa think they have bought off dissent. Trudeau has an open field to dabble in his vanities.
[If you want to sample the self-absorption vibe, here’s Trudeau’s wife Sophie nuzzling with Meaghan Markle on her podcast: “This wasn’t our day of being the wives and moms, all perfectly coiffed with updos and pearls and demure smiles,” said Markle. “This was the other version of us both with wild curly hair and swimsuits and loose linen and huge belly laughs. Big cuddles with our little ones, quiet whispers of girl talk on the terrace, giddy like absolute schoolgirls.”
The only resistance to this twaddle— Sophie G. greeted Markle with the chummy African term “ubuntu”— remains social media, and the Trudeau government is moving quickly to head off that outlet, too, with C-18.]
The presumption being he can turn off all the pressure valves for opponents and ride out the storms of his corruption. As in, the Global News investigation of Canadian intelligence briefs alleging that China's Toronto Consulate covertly funded a clandestine network of CCP-affiliated candidates in the 2019 federal election. A scandal that Trudeau let lie for 22 months while he told the UN that Canada is a genocidal state.
He needs to bear in mind Gonzalez’s prediction of “a force that will be as bad or worse than what they pretended the first iteration of Trumpism was”. While Ontario is still content to colour within the lines, a combination of western provinces is willing to provoke the biggest constitutional crisis since his Papa repatriated the constitution in the early 1980s.
Tread lightly, M. Trudeau. Skip The Dishes can’t save you now.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx