Can You Feel It?

It's been building for quite a while, at least a decade, perhaps two. It's this gnawing feeling that we're losing civility. It's ever so gradually fading away.

We're moving from a society into tribes within a society. We cling to our differences both real and imagined and almost always exaggerated or inflamed.

The rift that divides us serves as a fertile breeding ground for xenophobia, racism, and bigotry of every description.

We have our tribes. Everything else is "the other," something to be viewed with hostility, suspicion, even paranoia. They are not "of us" even though we may actually agree on just about everything except a few hot button issues and even they may be exaggerated, inflamed.

I thought of this today after reading an item in The Guardian about the "Brexodus" underway in the UK.  It was about young people now choosing to leave Britain for a better life elsewhere. There were repeated comments about how Brexit has changed the British people, hardened them, made them less tolerant and more xenophobic; how Brexit has fractured British society and left old friends refusing to even speak to each other.

This, of course, is not unique to the UK. It seems to be happening everywhere across the West in varying degrees. We're certainly not immune, not really.

Imagine a Canadian senator on the lawn of the parliament buildings, half-laughingly exhorting protesting truckers to run over every Liberal in the country or the leader of one of two major political parties playing footsie with white nationalists.

Perhaps our tribe doesn't do that but don't we use that to justify embracing the divide, widening the rift? Where does that end? How do we stop it, reverse it? Do we even want some sort of reunification or do we prefer to hunker down within our camp, imagining how we'll trash the others in the next election? Do we have any sense of what's at stake as this deepens, what we might be losing?

We think of our constitutional institutions as a bulwark against extremism but are they really invulnerable? The Americans have got what they consider the most bulletproof constitutional settlement in the world, a divinely inspired gift from the Creator no less. Yet they elect a president who sees that constitutional fabric as a hurdle, not something to be respected and upheld. Worse yet, he has a Republican Congress that prostrates itself before him and stands by and lets him run roughshod over that vaunted constitution. We haven't yet seen how far his ideologically stacked Supreme Court will go in colluding with him but, let's face it, they haven't been chosen to administer justice equally.

This has happened before.  The history of authoritarianism is replete with examples of law makers transforming into law benders before turning into law breakers in service to the tyrant of the day.

Why am I so vexed at this? It's simple - we are embarking on an era far different to anything experienced in the history of human civilization. The world is becoming a place unknown to us or any of our ancestors. It will be more difficult, more challenging, more dangerous and to rise to those events will require a deeply cohesive society in which all - rich and poor, right and left, of all skin hues, religions and ethnicities - collectively shoulder the burden, mutually sacrifice for a greater good and look after each other.

Is there any other way to defend and preserve all the good things that we have? Can we hope to do that if we stand divided in camps glaring and hurling insults at each other?

I don't think the future will go well for us, especially for our youngest generations, if we don't overcome this tribalism. And, if we fail, is it not conceivable that these two camps we have today, left and right, will break down further into sub-groups that do define themselves by rich and poor, by religious faith, colour, ethnicity, geography, demography? How far does this go before tribes break down into gangs?

Optimism is hard to muster. We're not even preparing our nation and our people to meet the truly existential threat of climate change. This is not something that is thirty or fifty or seventy years off. I'm convinced we shall see the world transformed in the course of the 20s even if countries of the northern latitudes are least impacted.  Perhaps that will shake us, bring us to our senses, heal the rift. If not, then what?

How the Leader of the Free World Became the Leader of the Global Right Wing.

AmeriKa's president, Donald Trump, will not be the leader of the free world. He will, however, be the leader of the global right wing. Across Europe, the radical right is embracing the next US leader as one of their own. Donald Trump validates their ugly bigotry, racism and xenophobia. He is one of them. It's no accident that he's also warmly received by the radical right Netanyahu government in Israel.

In the Middle East, the strongman thugs who rule with iron fists in the post-Arab Spring era couldn't be happier.

He will be a bit of both but radically different, too, predicts Theodore Karasik, a senior adviser with the Washington-based Gulf State Analytics, who has discussed the future of the region with Trump’s advisers in recent months. Trump’s chief priority, he said, will be to fight the Islamic State, while outsourcing the rest of the region’s security to Russia and to Arab states.

Words like “moderate” and “democracy” won’t feature in a Trump administration’s Middle East vocabulary, he added. “We are now engaged in realpolitik.”

For the region’s strongmen, most of whom had fraught relations with the Obama administration, that is welcome news. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyep Erdogan and Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi have hailed Trump’s election as a chance to reset their badly frayed relationships with Washington.

Hold onto your hats. With ideology this rancid driving AmeriKa's foreign and military policy, we could be in for a very sharp and wild ride.

Will Trump Embolden Bigots in Canada?

Yesterday we read Kinsella's post about a white power, Alt.Right handbill posted in his neighbourhood. Today we have an account from CBC Ottawa of a woman, Anna Maranta, a rabbi no less, who awakened in the early hours of Tuesday morning to find a swastika and the word "kike" spray painted across the front door of her Glebe home.

"I went to bed a little later than usual and woke up in the middle of the night, around 2:30, and as I was walking back to my room coming down the hall I saw a reflection on my front door, which is a glass window door, that kind of startled me," she said.

"I knew right away it was a swastika."

Rabbi Maranta raised the obvious concern:

"It's one thing to be marching down the street and be yelled at from the sidelines," she said. "This is somebody who came onto … my property, onto a lit porch, somebody who knows my routine, and so it's likely somebody … I know in this neighbourhood, and that hurts me even more."

Maranta believes the election of president-elect Donald Trump could be related to the racist graffiti on her door.

"My first thought is that this is an example of what happens when you allow somebody who is in a position of power to speak openly racist, bigoted, misogynistic language and don't censor [it] in any way," Maranta said.

"It allows other people to express their feelings, to express their hatred, and to feel like they've been given permission to do so because no one has effectively silenced that."

Is this an early glimpse into an AmeriKan contagion creeping across our border? Maybe, maybe not. That said we have to treat it as a threat not just to targeted people of colour, immigrants, Muslims or Jews. It's a threat to our society, to what in part distinguishes us from the sometimes narrow, intolerant bigotry that now seems to flourish elsewhere whether in the US, Britain, continental Europe, South Asia, the Middle East - pick a corner of the world. If we don't want that ugliness in Canada we have to choose to reject it. We have to get serious about hate crimes and reinforce minority protections. We have to realize that America can no longer be our beacon which means we can no longer outsource our economic, military and foreign policy to Washington. We have to chart our own course something we once were pretty good at doing when we had this leader named Trudeau.

Eisenhower saved his departing speech to warn Americans of the dangerous rise of what he termed the "military industrial complex." The warning went unheeded and that complex as it was in the 50s has metastasized throughout American society, the US economy and the nation's body politic. What will Obama have to say as he vacates the premises for his successor? He's given hints in statements during his farewell tour of Europe.

Barack Obama has warned of a "rise in a crude sort of nationalism" following the Brexit and US presidential votes.

Speaking in Greece on his final foreign trip, he said: "We have to guard against... tribalism built around an 'us' or a 'them'."

He said the US was painfully aware of the danger of divisions "along lines of race or religion or ethnicity".

Mr Obama said the UK's vote to leave the EU and the US vote showed that people generally were now "less certain of their national identities and place in the world" and that had produced populist movements both on the left and the right.

Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald, has a report on how Trump's victory has traumatized school children, especially kids of colour, in the United States.