Category Archives: Social democracy

Dumb-as-we-wanna-be

Decline of the west, Epidemics/Pandemics, reason, Social democracy, Trump

 

As we watch America flounder from afar some of us have pity for them. They are led by a President who is the least qualified President in history. He is a man who makes decisions on the basis of “hunches” and “instincts.” He has never given any indication that he ever read a book. He has said that his favorite book is the Art of the Deal which he wrote (with the help of a ghost of course.) He has no respect for science or expertise. He ignores the advice of his best advisors, such as the leaders of the various intelligence services. Instead he relies on people like Vladimir Putin because Putin tells him things “strongly.” That is good enough for Trump. It doesn’t hurt that Putin has no regard for truth either. Added to that, this is a President who has nothing but disdain for government so places no importance to having it run well. He has no respect for career bureaucrats who are often exactly what we need, particularly at times like this when the world faces an economic crisis and health crisis at the same time. He dismisses them as members of something called” the Deep State.”

But this post is not about Trump. Everyone knows what he is like. More importantly the American people knew before they elected him that this is how he was. The American people, even though not a majority of them, voted him in to power. About 55 million people voted for him nearly as many as voted for a much more obviously qualified candidate. Many of those people still support him.

That is the issue. The American people don’t care about science or expertise. They too are content to rely on hunches, instincts, feelings, and above all faith. That is what matters. They have faith in Trump and in fact have religious devotion to him. Trump said, truthfully for a change, that he could stand in Times Square and murder someone and his supporters would still support him. If that is not religious devotion what is?

Ignoring facts, reason, data/evidence, and science can only go so far. I think the United States is nearing the end. And Canada is not that far behind.

Thomas Friedman author and columnist for the New York Times, characterized this attitude as “Dumb as we wanna be.” Then he said the following:

This pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated the fact that over the last 20 years we as a country have weakened so many sources of our strength. We’ve simultaneously eroded our cognitive, ecological, economic, social, governance, public health and personal health immune systems — all the sources of resilience we need to get through this pandemic with the least damage to lives and livelihoods.

 

All these immune deficiencies are the logical outcome of how we’ve let ourselves go as a country, how we’ve let ourselves be dumb-as-we-wanna-be for so many years — devaluing science and reading, bashing public servants for political sport, turning politics into entertainment, not to mention adopting horrible eating habits that have left 40 percent of Americans obese.

Dumb-as-we-wanna-be is epitomized by the guy in Austin, Texas, who last week shoved a “park ranger into the water while the ranger was explaining to a crowd the need for social distancing,” as CNN reported.

Warren Buffett was right: When the tide goes out you see who’s swimming naked. And now it’s us. We are still exceptional, but now it’s in the fact that we lead the world in total coronavirus cases and deaths from Covid-19.

 

It seems remarkable that a country that has so many of the best universities in the world should have turned its back on them. How did that happen? It’s an interesting story. It didn’t happen over night. Kurt Anderson in his book Fantasyland described how that happened over about 500 years from the time of the arrival of Puritans on the shores of North America. It came gradually, very gradually, as a result of 5 centuries of the disparagement of reason in favour of faith and feelings and an array of temptations away from reason. It is an incredible story and all of us are now in 2020 suffering the consequences of that as we face a health crisis and an economic crisis at the same time . This is not a good time to discover that we have abandoned reason.

 

Capitalism: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Capitalism, Social democracy

Capitalism has brought enormous benefits to society. Millions have been lifted out of extreme poverty.

Yet it also has a dark side. A predatory side. This side is uncomfortable. This side is also revealed from time to time. For example, it was brought to light in the COVID-19 pandemic. It brought out the best in people; it brought out the worst in people. As Charles Dickens once said,

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

It seems like Dickens was writing about the times we live in. Paul Krugman a Nobel Prize winning economist was alert to the sinister effects of capitalism. This is what he said,

“Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on workers. The economy has plunged so quickly that official statistics can’t keep up, but the available data suggest that tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, with more job losses to come and full recovery probably years.

But Republicans adamantly oppose extending enhanced unemployment benefits — such an extension, says Senator Lindsey Graham, a leading Republican, will take place “over our dead bodies” (Actually, over other people’s dead bodies.)”

Is this what western democracy and capitalism has come down to? I will help the sick and poor only over my dead body!  Is this not predatory capitalism at its most ugly? Over our dead bodies…

What do the Senators have in mind? This is Krugman’s view:

“They apparently want to return to a situation in which most unemployed workers get no benefits at all, and even those collecting unemployment insurance get only a small fraction of their previous income.

Because most working-age Americans receive health insurance through their employers, job losses will cause a huge rise in the number of uninsured. The only mitigating factor is the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which will allow many though by no means all of the newly uninsured to find alternative coverage.

But the Trump administration is still trying to have the Affordable Care Act ruled unconstitutional; “We want to terminate health care under Obamacare,” declared Donald Trump, even though the administration has never offered a serious alternative.

Bear in mind that ending Obamacare would end protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions — and that insurers would probably refuse to cover anyone who had Covid-19.

Finally, the devastation caused by the coronavirus has left many in the world’s wealthiest major nation unable to put sufficient food on the table. Families with children under 12 are especially hard hit: According to one recent survey, 41 percent of these families are already unable to afford enough to eat. Food banks are overwhelmed, with lines sometimes a mile long.

But Republicans are still trying to make food stamps harder to get, and fiercely oppose proposals to temporarily make food aid more generous.”

 

How much more brutal do the Republicans, standing in for the corporate elites want things to get? I really don’t know how far they are willing to go. Are they really willing to let 41% of American families starve, as Graham seems to suggest? That seems to be a starting point. But where will it end?

Again here is Krugman:

But we’re only now starting to get a sense of the Republican Party’s cruelty toward the economic victims of the coronavirus. In the face of what amounts to a vast natural disaster, you might have expected conservatives to break, at least temporarily, with their traditional opposition to helping fellow citizens in need. But no; they’re as determined as ever to punish the poor and unlucky.”

In the past so-called Conservatives have claimed such draconian policies were necessary because otherwise the poor who received handout would lose their incentive to work. Why work when you get handouts? Forgetting first of all, that the reality is very few people prefer handouts to work. Forgetting that in America and Canada work is part of most people’s self-identity and sense of worth. People without work lose their sense of worth and even in many cases their sense of identity. They are also forgetting that currently with unemployment in the US standing at 14%, the highest rate since the Depression, there is no work to be had! Nonetheless, as Krugman said,

“What’s remarkable about this determination is that the usual arguments against helping the needy, which were weak even in normal times, have become completely unsustainable in the face of the pandemic. Yet those arguments, zombielike, just keep shambling on… There was never serious evidence for this claim, but right now — at a time when workers can’t work, because doing their normal jobs would kill lots of people — I find it hard to understand how anyone can make this argument without gagging.

Added to that there is a lot of hypocrisy among Conservatives who also claim that we can’t help the poor and sick any more than we do because it will increase the deficit and impair our ability to help the sick and poor in the future. First of all, letting them die will not help them in the future! Secondly, it is obvious that they don’t want to help any more than they are doing now and this attitude is not likely to change in the future.”

Finally, as Krugman pointed out,

“you still hear complaints that spending on food stamps and unemployment benefits increases the deficit. Now, Republicans never really cared about budget deficits; they demonstrated their hypocrisy by cheerfully passing a huge tax cut in 2017, and saying nothing as deficits surged. But it’s just absurd to complain about the cost of food stamps even as we offer corporations hundreds of billions in loans and loan guarantees. 

Krugman sought an understanding of the motivation of Conservative parsimony. This is how he explained it:

“So what explains the G.O.P.’s extraordinary indifference to the plight of Americans impoverished by this national disaster?

One answer may be that much of America’s right has effectively decided that we should simply go back to business as usual and accept the resulting death toll. Those who want to take that route may view anything that reduces hardship, and therefore makes social distancing more tolerable, as an obstacle to their plans.

Also, conservatives may worry that if we help those in distress, even temporarily, many Americans might decide that a stronger social safety net is a good thing in general. If your political strategy depends on convincing people that government is always the problem, never the solution, you don’t want voters to see the government actually doing good, even in times of dire need.

Whatever the reasons, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Americans suffering from the economic consequences of Covid-19 will get far less help than they should. Having already condemned tens of thousands to unnecessary death, Trump and his allies are in the process of condemning tens of millions to unnecessary hardship.”

Grim words or grim reality? You decide.

The neo-liberal Problem

Epidemics/Pandemics, Social democracy

 

Neo-liberals or sometimes, neo-conservatives, or libertarians, are those people who believe the less government we have the better.

Trump had many problems during the Coronavirus pandemic. One of them was bias. Donald Trump’s had profound bias against what the believed was a “Deep State.” The Deep State is a common bogeyman on Fox and other right-wing media and is really part of the neo-liberal bias against the government.

Lobbyist Grover Norquist, a famous neo-liberal is credited with saying, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” The mortal enemy of such a point of view is those who see that government can accomplish good things, besides the military. There is perhaps no better example than fighting a pandemic. The richest person in the world then needs the government to keep the poor people away.

The real problem is that in the case of pandemic the state is vitally important. No one else can coordinate the massive effort that is needed by all the parties involved. Who else could do that? What would happen if it were not done?  At least at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis Trump’s bias against the state interfered with his judgment. That is what biases do!

Here is how the New York Times team of reporters described the situation in the Trump administration:

“Unfolding as it did in the wake of his impeachment by the House and in the midst of his Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.

Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China. The virus at first took a back seat to a desire not to upset Beijing during trade talks, but later the impulse to score points against Beijing left the world’s two leading powers further divided as they confronted one of the first truly global threats of the 21st century.

The shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s performance have played out with remarkable transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation.”

Another famous statement about government that neo-liberals cherish is from Saint Ronald Reagan. He said, the most dangerous words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” But this is a cheap shot. We all take shots at the government, but the fact is we need government. None of us want to live in the state of nature where there is war of all against all. We want government. Government is good. This really is the neo-liberal problem. Government is important. And nowhere is this more evident, we now know, is during a pandemic.

 

Predatory Capitalism

Social democracy

 

Nowadays one hears much about limiting the power of the bureaucracy on the initiative and effort of the entrepreneurial class.  One should remember that not all bureaucracy is bad.   One should remember the predatory nature of capitalism unregulated or moderated by bureaucracy.  For example, in the early twentieth century novel The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair , he showed how the American meat-packing plants then operated, free from all government regulation.  “Rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together… there were things that went into sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit”. This was fiction, but it was fiction that contained a lot of truth.

These leaders of industry were no  more corrupt than our current business leaders, but they allowed things like this to happen because it was cheaper and no laws prevented them from doing so.  That novel was a strong impetus to the passage in America of the first consumer protection legislation, which required federal meat inspection.  Canada eventually followed suit. Such laws hardly seem radical today. A bureaucracy was created for the protection of the public. Who today really wants to get rid of that bureaucracy?  There was a movement afoot, in the nineties to eliminate all government red tape.  To get the bureaucracy off the back of business.  But is that really such a wise thing?  Sinclair referred to the forces urging a free reign for American business as “organized and predatory greed“.  Do we once again want to allow them free reign?

Modern conservatives of the right-wing variety (not the left-conservatives that I call the real conservatives) love to criticize government bureaucrats.  They are constantly harping about how government is “on their backs” and how they just cannot carry on business efficiently under these circumstances and how the poor workers suffer as a result.  Not just them but their workers. But look what happens when the bureaucrats are too weak.  A good example is the Westray mining disaster in Nova Scotia in which 26 miners lost their lives in the explosion in 1992. I knew the lawyer who was counsel for the inquiry that followed. A supervisor in the mine admitted that he did not consider it his job to report safety violations. He said his corporate bosses told him that he should not report the safety violations and if he did not do as he was told, they would hire someone else who would do as told.

Naturally, there were workers lining up for his job.  Even though the supervisor came from a mining family and knew the risks and dangers of mining, he covered up the safety violations rather than reporting them to the safety inspectors.  It was a clear case of the deterioration of the safety mentality that can and does occur in modern corporate enterprises.

Another example was the outbreak of “mad cow” disease in the beef herds of Britain in the 1990’s. There were warnings, but business such as agri-business cannot be trusted to police themselves.  They will too often be ready to risk health and safety for their profits.  Too often it is our risk for their gain.  Not really a good deal.

We need strong checks and balances to provide for our safety.  We need strong government.  We need strong bureaucrats who won’t just cow-tow to the business interests.  We need strong business, strong unions, and strong government.  When the power of any of these is unchecked problems occur.

Yet neo-liberals  by rote are opposed to government bureaucracies.  For example in the US in the 1980’s the Reagan administration “deregulated” the airline industry.  Canada followed suit of course. This was followed, of course, by a number of airlines going broke, or being swallowed up by other airlines.  Naturally the competition that followed was ferocious.  Many cut their prices greatly, while consumers cheered (for awhile).  What many consumers did not think about however, was that this meant those airlines would have to cut their costs.  So there were cheaper meals, that tasted that like cardboard, and fewer direct flights with cramped seats and less trained staff, but that was not enough.  More costs had to be cut in order to compete.  So airlines would fly the planes longer.  Stretch out their usefulness.  But this would also stretch out their safety.

Modern multi-national corporations have incredible abilities.  If they do not like the laws or submissiveness of workers in one country they can very quickly go to another.  Recently for example, the Disney Corporation went to Haiti to manufacture garments.  This is one of the poorest countries in the world, and all they had to pay their workers was 28 cents per hour and labour laws are weak. In Haiti  workers could be forced to accept very low wages.  A garment that cost 11 cents to make could be sold for  $28.  In other words, the labourer who created it got less than one-half of one per cent.

Sometimes capitalism can be pretty darn predatory. The public needs control to regulate it. The public interest demands it.

Selling what No One wants

Social democracy, The Simple Life

 

Modern manufacturers learned that it was not enough to sell what people wanted to buy.  They had to go further than that.  They wanted to sell what no one wanted to buy.  At least not yet!  Part of their job was to make people want to buy what they wanted to sell. They transformed the principle of supply and demand.  They did that by manufacturing demand.

Many products were at first strange to the American public.  For example, Gillette razors, Kodak cameras, Waterman fountain pens, Kellogg cereals, to name but a few.  So it became necessary to create a market for their products and this is what the manufacturers and their marketing and advertising experts learned to do, and to do well.  They not only created new products, they created new living habits.  They changed the country.  The result of all of this of course, as we now know very well, is extravagant packaging, disposable products and containers, planned obsolescence and cosmetic changes that quickly created markets for replacement products.  The consumer society was created.  Now we have come to realize, with some pain, that the effects of all of this are not private and not benign.  Far from that.  The ecological effects alone are monstrous, to say nothing about the effects on the minds and morals of people.

We have to learn to control that. To do that, to some extent at least, we must control markets. That is not always easy, but it is frequently important.

Selling what no one wants takes some creative genius, but it is a genius that must be curtailed.

Moral Control of Corporations

Social democracy

 

Multinational corporations are becoming more, not less, influential. This is why it so unfortunate that their behaviour is often completely immoral.

A case in point is Nigeria.  Soon after the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa and 9 other opponents of the Nigerian  regime, Shell continued on in its business relations with the government of Nigeria as if nothing had happened. Multinational corporations assert no responsibility for its business partners.  Who could expect more given their tolerance of their own moral shortcomings?

It is however becoming increasingly apparent that some  corporations like bad governments.  They serve a very useful purpose provided that they don’t become too bad.  In other words as long as they allow business to carry on business with at least some degree of order, that is good enough with the multinationals.  As long as governments permit business to operate with some assurances that they can keep their profits, they like it if such governments are oppressive of their citizens. Even if political corruption is rampant and bribes are a cost of business.  They like it if labour costs are kept low, and environmental safeguards are ignored and safe working conditions not required.  This allows for ever greater profit. It would have been nice if Shell had voiced its opposition to the approach of the Nigerian government  They might have had a small effect. Unfortunately, the world over, business people  resist the notion that morality should ever play a role in business.

Canadians of course have learned this affects them too as the case of SNC Lavalin showed. We have to vigilant against corporate corruption, even when, as they always claim, it will cost jobs. We don’t need to support corruption to maintain jobs. We need clean jobs. Only clean jobs. And we need to control corporations, whether they like it or not.

Are contractual rights sacred?

Social democracy

I believe in the freedom to contract. But, as with all freedoms, this freedom is not absolute. There must be limits—reasonable limits.

Normally it is of course the right that preaches the sanctity of contract.  Contractual rights are of course a form of property right.  Many property rights are in fact no more than contractual rights these days.  For example what is a guaranteed investment certificate, but a contractual right to have the bank pay the holder a certain amount of money on a certain date. Any expropriation of contractual rights should therefore naturally meet with the loud opposition of our right-wingers.  Ordinarily, they are certainly vocal in opposition to any encroachments onto contractual rights without compensation, at least when the expropriated parties are people of wealth.

It was therefore interesting to see the reaction of the political right to proposals by the City of Winnipeg council a few years ago that the council obtain a tax freeze by tearing up its collective bargaining agreement negotiated freely with one of its main unions the year before. Interestingly there was little or no opposition heard from the right of the political spectrum. The conservative government under Premier Pallister did the same with its government employees during its first term in office.   I guess contractual rights are not important when they belong to the workers, rather than the investors.  There was absolutely no talk at all of the sanctity of contractual rights.  When it comes down to the poor and vulnerable labourers they are fair game.  In this neo-conservative age the rights of the poor, the vulnerable, and the mere workers are under siege.

Are contractual rights sacred? That depends on who is asking.

 

The welfare State

Social democracy

 

The welfare state is not a bogeyman. I am not a socialist though I have a lot of sympathy and lot in common with them. I consider myself a social democrat instead. I remember Premier Ed Schreyer in 1969, who made the same distinction after he led his party of New Democrats to power in the Manitoba provincial election.   A social democrat is a person who understands that the welfare state is essential to democracy, and at least enlightened business leaders have come to realize that.

Frankly I believe that socialism is as outdated as capitalism.  They were old foes that were both wrong. A Social Democrat realizes that government is a useful tool to bring about economic well-being and justice. It is not the enemy of the people. It is not the goal of the social democrat to have government own all businesses or to control, or as Marx said, “the means of production.”  The social democrat is content to have those owned privately. However the social democrat realizes that the owners of businesses and properties should not be allowed to have unfettered power because if they do they will use that power to exploit the less powerful in what they perceive, often mistakenly, as their own interest. That is not in the public interest. The Social Democrat speaks for the public interest–i.e. the common good.

Many Capitalists and most neo-conservatives want to see government shrunk. They are constantly on the warpath against ‘Big government.” They believe that almost everything of value comes from private enterprise and that government is only a chain around it. Government is seen as a hindrance, as a purveyor of red tape that strangles private enterprise. Famously, an American neo-conservative once said he wanted to shrink government until it was so small it could drown in a bathtub!

The Social Democrat also realizes that often public goods are just as important, if not more so, than private goods. Both are goods!  For example, the Social Democrat appreciates schools, hospitals, fire departments, highways, sidewalks, parks, ecological reserves, national and provincial/state parks, recreational facilities and much more, as great goods every bit as important as private goods.

Well-known Social Democrats were Tony Judt and Eric Hobsbawm.  They appreciated all the goods that governments had brought about in the 20th century and that it was crazy to suggest that all these goods had been brought about by private enterprise.

As Ed Broadbent stated in a speech in 1997, the welfare state is not a matter of altruism or charity.  Rather, it is a grand bargain that reconciles citizens to the inequalities that arise in the capitalist system by offering them equitable treatment in at least some fundamental areas of life.  As he said, “the marriage of the welfare state brings together the two dispositions of fairness and self-interest.  Like all marriages, it is precarious– and the balance between the impulse to solidarity and to self must be constantly monitored.”  In the years of the neo-conservative retreat this delicate balance was disturbed and often forgotten.

One of the interesting by-products of the success of the welfare state was to increase the number of working class families open to neo-conservative arguments.  It is easy for people to forget the help that they have received and give themselves sole credit for their own achievements. For example, many people, including successful entrepreneurs, came to believe that their success was the result of their own efforts alone, ignoring the benefits, direct and indirect from the complex networks of the welfare state.  Many successful people forget about the subsidies that they have received from the welfare state, such as state subsidized education, housing, transportation, entertainment, health care, care for their elders, assistance to their business or profession.  They think that just because they did not receive direct social assistance that they have received no help.  Then by hypocrisy that even politicians would find impressive they declare themselves “self-made men!”

Social Democracy v. Socialism

Moral Humility, Social democracy

 

We heard some Conservative Americans on the radio complaining about the rise of socialism. To them “socialism” is a very dirty word. It is about on par with child molester. I really think the issue of socialism will be very important in the next Presidential and Congressional elections.I hope so.  Many Conservatives think the Democrats are handing them the next election because they are going so radical. Is that true?

I know Trump has already been active in referring to the Democrats as leftists, or, even worse, radical socialists. They point in particular to Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and worst of all–the Green New Deal. Talk about a bevy of boogey men. Republicans think they are being handed the next election on a platter. As a result I think it is a good idea for us to be clear about what a socialist is and is not.

What is a socialist?  This is not as clearly defined as one might like. When I went to university we defined a socialist as a person who believed that the means of production should be owned by public. That does not mean there should be no private property, but I still think it goes too far.  I thought the definition had changed since then, but I have not found a better one. According to this definition, a socialist believes the infrastructure of production–such as factories, businesses, and the like should be socially owned, not privately owned.  In this sense of the word I have never been a socialist. Even in the days of my misspent youth.

I have been more attracted to the term “social democrat.” I would say that a social democrat is one who believes that the public should have significant control (not ownership) of the important private property, such as the means of production, but including other things–that can have a substantial impact on society.  Social democrats don’t want to own all these things. But they do want society to have social control exercised in a democratic manner over the vital instruments of social influence. This includes the means of production but many other things as well. “Democratic” means are important to distinguish Social Democrats from Communists. Communists clearly demonstrated how things go awry when democratic means are abandoned. Without democracy the apparatchiks are as bad as the capitalists.That control must be used for significant social goods, such as greater equality (not absolute equality), greater freedom, and greater fraternity. These are really the goals of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Some aspects will have to be controlled fairly tightly. Others hardly at all. The amount of control will vary greatly depending on how influential the instruments are and how pernicious their effects.

Social democrats don’t have a strict ideological position on what needs to be socially controlled and what not. As a result social democrats don’t have a principle such as ‘that government is best which governs the least’—the principle of libertarians and neoliberals.  Nor do Social Democrats believe by rote that people should be allowed to do anything provided it does not harm other people–classic liberalism. The people will democratically decide from time to time, how much control to exercise in particular circumstances and this can always be debated freely in each case under consideration. Social Democrats, unlike Socialists, Communists, or neo-conservatives are not governed by rigid ideology but by rational decision making on a case by case basis based on evidence, data, and careful thinking.

Social Democrats will not hesitate to use government as the means to their social democratic ends. Social Democrats do their best to keep out bias in decision-making. Social Democrats don’t have a recipe; they have a technique–i.e. reasoning based on the best evidence, analysis, and logical reasoning. These goals are humble and modest. That is one of the reasons I like them. Those are some of the reasons I call myself a social democrat.

Why waste time talking about Trump?

Philosophy/Ideas, Social democracy, , ,

 

Some have raised many important issues in messages to me as a result of my blogs. I could bore you with a long diatribe. I tend to that to people. So I will bore you with a shorter diatribe. Some will say not short enough. So be it.

To begin with, as has been suggested by others, I don’t think it is useful to waste a lot of time haranguing Donald Trump. Frankly, he is not worth it. Yet he is the American President and as we know, every time the US coughs Canada gets a cold. As well, it scares me just to think he has his finger on the nuclear button. And it is a big one you know. And it works.

More importantly, about 50 million people voted for him and many of those still like him.  This really scares me. Many people just want to see Trump go away. I do. But that will not end much. Who will those 50 million support the next time? Someone even worse? Trump is just a symptom of a disease.

I think Trump is a demagogue with authoritarian tendencies. Similar potential leaders have had significant support all over Europe. This is an international phenomenon.

If you have time, I urge you to read a marvelous (and short!) book by Timothy Snyder called On Tyranny. Snyder is an expert historian who is familiar with how tyrannies have arisen in the last century. Remember that Hitler was elected before he became a dictator. He did that by preying on the fears of people and finding scapegoats.

Part of the reason so many people voted for him, I believe, is that people, particularly in the US, have for more than a hundred years been accustomed to making important decisions without the benefit of reason. They have made decisions on the basis of faith, rather than reason. They are used to doing that.

Kurt Anderson has written a book on the subject called Fantasyland. So far I have just read a brief summary in Atlantic magazine. I am waiting for the paperback. Sometimes it hurts to be a cheap Menno. His thesis is that Americans have spent 500 years making important decisions on the basis of fantasies rather than reason. They believe on the basis of what they want to be true, rather than on the basis of what the evidence supports. Trump is just part of that process. Many people, particularly people who are unemployed or underemployed, believe Trump can help them, even though the evidence does not support that conviction. Yet they believe it. They have abdicated their reason.

A lot of people are in despair. Around the world. That is understandable given how the lot of most people has seriously deteriorated in the last 40 years, while the lot of the elites has risen sharply. Inequality has risen by astonishing amounts. Rich people have done amazingly well while ordinary people have seen their incomes decline.

The people who have not done well and daily see how well others have done, because the modern media makes sure that everyone knows, are filled with resentment. Resentment is an explosively dangerous force. It is blind to reason. Near home a few years ago a dairy farmer was mad at his wife who wanted a divorce and got so angry that he burned his barn down with all of the cows inside. And he did that  after cancelling his fire insurance. If he could not have it all no one else would have any of it. It was totally irrational. People consumed with resentment can do that.

About a year ago, a man in Alberta who was facing a divorce from his wife, murdered her and their children. If he could not have his family no one could. So he killed them all and then killed himself. Again it made no difference how irrational this was. People blinded by resentment can do that.

People in the modern world are not only resentful of their loss of money, and status, they are deeply insecure. Capitalists, as we all know, have been forced in recent recessions to lay off workers. That is hard and it is profoundly unnerving to those laid off. This has happened over and over again. As a result many people, particularly after the most recent recession feel a deep sense of insecurity. Even though capitalism has produced amazing wonders, it is deeply flawed if it needs to create such misery. Such a system is broken.

This has happened all over the world, but particularly in places like Appalachia, in the US. Many there are resentful and desperate. They justifiably gave up on both Obama and Hillary Clinton. Who can blame them? But they turned to an unlikely source for help. Donald Trump. A billionaire that had no empathy for them. As I have said before, “Trump has the empathy of a turnip.” But at least he heard them. Clinton was deaf. No wonder people turned to Trump over Clinton.

I have little doubt that his supporters will be disappointed in Trump. He is no savior. Voting for him was also deeply irrational. Many people in the United States wanted a personal wrecking ball who would destroy the system. I have met such people on my current trip to the United States. There are surprisingly many of such people. It did not matter who would be hurt by Trump’s actions. It did not matter that he would not help them. As we know he has done nothing for them. He has drastically reduced taxes on the wealthy and unsurprisingly very few people still believe that the way to help poor people is to give money to rich people. That is what Trump and many Republicans believe.

I am not trying to create class divisions as one person suggested to me. As Warren Buffet, hardly a leftwing radical, said, ‘for the past few decades we have been in a class war and my class has won. The rich people.’ The class war, if there is one, or was one, is over. Donald Trump is just the culmination of that process.

I fear that rich people in the US in particular have seized the government to their own advantage and are blind to the damage they have done. They have got temporary benefits as a result, but do not see how the resentment is building up and how dangerous that can be. How will the resentful people explode next time? Who will be the next wrecking ball? This is one of the reasons I say that capitalists are the greatest danger for capitalism.

I really think, the rich people have done a massive disservice to everyone–not the least to themselves! And not least to the system that brought them such prosperity. I am not a revolutionary. They are.