Is the West falling apart?

HALIFAX—Prime Minister Liz Truss held office for just 45 days, the shortest tenure of any PM in British history. The country that once prided itself on having the fifth largest economy in the world is now in post-Brexit chaos. Standard and Poor’s has downgraded the country’s debt, and savage cuts in public spending appear inevitable. Even the return of Boozing Boris, the PM who partied at Number 10 while Britains were under COVID lockdown, isn’t out of the question. The only certainty seems to be that no matter who the Conservatives choose as leader, the party will be trounced by the Labour Party in the next election. With recession in Europe, and a cold winter looming without Russian gas, the situation is not much better on the continent. Italy just elected a far-right prime minister infamous for praising Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Amongst other things, Giorgia Meloni is anti-immigrant. Even in Sweden and France, the far-right has made advances in recent elections. Just as William Butler Yeats predicted in his great poem, The Second Coming, the centre does not seem to be holding in many democracies. In Canada, new Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is pushing a right-wing agenda, featuring tax cuts, smaller government, and the amorphous promise of more “freedom.” And oh yes, hating Justin Trudeau. The man who stood with the “Freedom Convoy” during its slovenly and self-interested occupation of Ottawa appears to mean what he says. In a stunning example of abdication on the environment file, Poilievre recently told Quebecers that a Conservative federal government would not interfere in any of the province’s major developments on environmental grounds. So if Premier François Legault decides to go forward with another major hydro development, as he suggested he would in the recent provincial election, a Conservative government would simply allow it to happen without Ottawa’s environmental assessment. So much for the federal government’s constitutional obligations, as Thomas Mulcair so aptly summed up in a recent column. The United Conservative Party in Alberta has elected a leader described by columnist William Kinsella as “unfit for public office.” Danielle Smith has mused about Alberta sovereignty, and declared that the province doesn’t have to abide by federal laws. Her party has also decided that it is not a good idea to teach anti-racism nor the merits of diversity in provincial schools. And up until recently, when she offered a tepid and doubtless forced apology, this is the woman who sided with Russia on the sovereign future of Ukraine. The United Conservative Party in Alberta has elected a leader, Danielle Smith, described by columnist William Kinsella as “unfit for public office.” The Hill Times photograph by Jake Wright The star basket-case of democracy in retreat is the United States. Britain may be in a mess, but the U.S. remains the most indebted country in the world. The national debt stands at an irredeemable $30-trillion, a significant portion of which was run up by Donald Trump’s unfunded and permanent tax cut for the rich. If you count state and municipal debt, and Washington’s unfunded liabilities, like social security and Medicare, some debt clocks place the real number at $130-trillion in the red. The only thing that keeps things careening along is that the U.S. can still borrow the money to pay the enormous annual interest on its debt. That’s why one of the perennial jobs of Congress is to raise the debt limits. Without approving greater borrowing on a regular basis, the whole thing would grind to a stop. Some would say a U.S. default on its debt is unimaginable. The numbers suggest otherwise. But government-by-credit card is not America’s greatest problem. Faced with bigger bills for gasoline and groceries, an inflation rate Americans have not seen in decades, the country seems poised to elect the ethically bankrupt Republicans to run the House of Representatives, and maybe the Senate, as well. If that happens, Joe Biden might as well get a paper route. It would be a more productive use of his time than watching a new Congress impeach his cabinet members and investigate participants on the January 6th Committee. If the Republicans take Congress, with Kevin McCarthy running the House, and Mitch McConnell the Senate, Biden will be a dead-duck president. At one level, what is happening in the United States seems fantastical and unthinkable. Are Americans really going to return to the party they threw out in 2020 after one terrible term of Donald Trump as president? For one thing, his record is stark and damning. Twice impeached, Trump only staved off indictment in other investigations because of the position he held. Some scholars believe a sitting president can’t be indicted. Trump avoided impeachment only because the jury was fixed in his Senate trial. Republicans backed the Liar-in-Chief on purely partisan grounds. Power, over truth and values. From the public deliberations of the January 6th committee investigating the assault on the U.S. Capitol, the evidence is clear that Trump and his enablers were laying plans to remain in office even if they lost the election—months before the 2020 vote was taken. They considered using the military to seize ballot boxes, but decided instead to come up with a slate of fake electors to pull off their coup. The president himself got on the phone to Georgia’s Secretary of State and blatantly asked him to find 11,000 votes for the Republicans, votes that did not exist. If that isn’t against the law, what is? Despite all the evidence showing that the only person who tried to steal the 2020 election was Donald Trump, the majority of Republican candidates running in the mid-term elections continue to back his Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was corrupt. That’s why Liz Cheney was hounded from office, and Herschel Walker might be the next senator from Georgia; an ex-football player with a fake police badge, over a Republican woman who wouldn’t be brow-beaten into submission by Donald Trump’s narcissistic bullying. Democracy itself seems to be at the cross-roads for a lot of reasons. A painful COVID hangover, hard economic reality, and the search for scapegoats has created a public mood where the worst thing for a politician to be is not a liar, a cheat, or a scoundrel, but an incumbent. History provides a caution. As Thomas Jefferson so famously, and ominously, put it: “The government you elect is the government that you deserve.” Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hill Times