Aug 17, 2022 03:19 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 17, 2022 06:37 PM by C C.)
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/...canada-us/
EXCERPTS: . . . Prolonged exposure – too much MSNBC or Fox News – can lead to hallucinations, delusions and loss of contact with (Canadian) reality. Voters and politicians are both susceptible to infection.
The Canadian left has caught more than a few American fevers. For example, the American progressive left’s take on race, including placing it at the centre of nearly all social analysis, has been easily absorbed by Liberals and New Democrats alike, and is now fully part of the Canadian bloodstream. The fact that America’s past and present are different than Canada’s – not the opposite; not the same – tends to go unknown and unacknowledged.
But the party most at risk from cross-border emissions these days is the Conservative Party. There’s a lot of crazy in American politics right now [...] Once the party of law and order and small government, it now often sounds like the party of anti-law, disorder and no government...
[...] A half-century ago, Republicans joined with Democratic lawmakers to investigate president Richard Nixon and, after uncovering the depths of his lawbreaking, to remove him. A half-century later, Republicans in Congress and at the state level have nearly all rallied around Donald Trump, repeatedly, despite a level of lawbreaking far worse than anything Mr. Nixon did or contemplated ... It does not get any more banana republic than this.
Yet the Republican Party isn’t correcting course [...] Once upon a time, Canada’s Conservatives had a natural defence mechanism against being overly influenced by any of that: The party was anti-American. Proudly so.
Conservatives sometimes call themselves the party that created Canada, and that’s no idle boast. But what they need to remember [...] the reason ... to confederate provinces was to prevent this country from being swallowed up by the foreign entity to the south. That impulse remained at the centre of Canadian conservatism until the 1980s.
American politics and American culture were, until relatively recently, what conservative Canadians were trying to guard against. [...] Canada ... had progressed and survived through evolution and compromise, not violent revolution.
Many political analysts worry that, if the Conservative Party’s next leader (to be elected Sept. 10) adopts the resentment-based politics of the Trump GOP, then the party is doomed to failure. We worry about something different: that it might succeed. It is, after all, working down south... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . Prolonged exposure – too much MSNBC or Fox News – can lead to hallucinations, delusions and loss of contact with (Canadian) reality. Voters and politicians are both susceptible to infection.
The Canadian left has caught more than a few American fevers. For example, the American progressive left’s take on race, including placing it at the centre of nearly all social analysis, has been easily absorbed by Liberals and New Democrats alike, and is now fully part of the Canadian bloodstream. The fact that America’s past and present are different than Canada’s – not the opposite; not the same – tends to go unknown and unacknowledged.
But the party most at risk from cross-border emissions these days is the Conservative Party. There’s a lot of crazy in American politics right now [...] Once the party of law and order and small government, it now often sounds like the party of anti-law, disorder and no government...
[...] A half-century ago, Republicans joined with Democratic lawmakers to investigate president Richard Nixon and, after uncovering the depths of his lawbreaking, to remove him. A half-century later, Republicans in Congress and at the state level have nearly all rallied around Donald Trump, repeatedly, despite a level of lawbreaking far worse than anything Mr. Nixon did or contemplated ... It does not get any more banana republic than this.
Yet the Republican Party isn’t correcting course [...] Once upon a time, Canada’s Conservatives had a natural defence mechanism against being overly influenced by any of that: The party was anti-American. Proudly so.
Conservatives sometimes call themselves the party that created Canada, and that’s no idle boast. But what they need to remember [...] the reason ... to confederate provinces was to prevent this country from being swallowed up by the foreign entity to the south. That impulse remained at the centre of Canadian conservatism until the 1980s.
American politics and American culture were, until relatively recently, what conservative Canadians were trying to guard against. [...] Canada ... had progressed and survived through evolution and compromise, not violent revolution.
Many political analysts worry that, if the Conservative Party’s next leader (to be elected Sept. 10) adopts the resentment-based politics of the Trump GOP, then the party is doomed to failure. We worry about something different: that it might succeed. It is, after all, working down south... (MORE - missing details)
