MURDOCK: Thoughts on dictatorship and revolt

The President of the United States of America will have his wish. He will forever be written into the history of that nation as one of the consequential presidents of the first (and maybe last) quarter millennium of the American empire.

The President of the United States of America will have his wish. He will forever be written into the history of that nation as one of the consequential presidents of the first (and maybe last) quarter millennium of the American empire. His fate, however, will be to place him in the invidious position of being the most destructive and brutally negative of all who have been elected ‘By The People’ to be the guardian of their nation’s constitution in his role as chief executive officer of that nation’s homeland and global affairs.

What has happened to America that has led them to select a president who by nature is a dictator and who promises to Make America Great Again? His supporters revel in his public persona — angry, vengeful, arrogant, rude, monosyllabically profane and bombastic. In his hunger for lasting power, President Trump has now set up the conditions for a civil war.

Governing by animal instinct reminiscent of Senator Joe McCarthy, he has declared that those who oppose him are communists — to be rooted out and destroyed. In many respects, this political and moral earthquake was predictable. For the past 60 years, America has led the western world in championing individualism.

Indeed in America, freedom of the individual, is a core concept of their constitution. Unhappily there is a downside to unfettered individual economic and lifestyle freedom. This downplaying of community cohesion lays the groundwork for a loss of social trust and a shared moral order of ‘what is the right thing to do’.

This facet of hyper individualism lends to the point where, in America, when things go wrong it is always someone else’s fault. Today, 70 per cent of its citizens believe that others are out to get them. And there were reasons to be concerned about the future of American society if the status quo had continued.

Since 2000, the rates of suicide have increased by 30 per cent, and lifetime rate adult depression has now reached 29 per cent. Over the past half century divorces have skyrocketed, fertility, and marriage rates have decreased and a sense of ‘personal happiness’ has dropped by 50 per cent. The country was being governed by an inherited educational elite class of 20 per cent of the population.

Eighty per cent of Americans don’t trust each other — and they certainly believe, as a nation, that they have been taken advantage of by the rest of the world ever since the Second World War. This had to change and so America is in the process of abandoning its constitution and putting its faith in a dictatorial nationalist populist form of government — combining economic self sufficiency, aggressive patriotism and a reactive suspicious attitude toward elites and globalization. In America, the mood is to pull up the drawbridge and put their faith in an imperial homegrown national leader.

Which brings us to Canada. Parts of our country are at risk of falling into the same trap. Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms was created as a substitute for not having an American Constitution.

While we do fundamentally believe in the primacy of peace, order and good government, we are silent, and overly polite, in avoiding codifying our individual duties and responsibilities to one another as citizens. And so we see the rise in Alberta of self absorption in the wishes and wants of our provincial individual desires. In falling into the trap of convincing ourselves that others are squandering our inheritance, we have elected a government that we have allowed to be overtaken by an aggrieved national populist faction.

If left without an organized, articulate opposition, the Freedom Convoy that terrorized our national capital, will lead us triumphantly into an economic and political protectorate bondage with the fractured nation to the south. Some call it a sovereign Alberta.