Time to Reboot American Democracy. And Our Own

Whether we like it or not, we are witnessing the end of an American era that began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933 and ended with the election of Donald Trump in 2024.

Trump’s regime — I refuse to call it an administration — is rolling back all the achievements of the past 90 years. Most alarmingly, Trump is rolling back the defeat of fascism in the Second World War.

The 2024 presidential election was fought on the issue of fascism versus democracy, and, in a democratic vote, democracy lost. Millions of Americans are now protesting in the streets to restore democracy, and Canadians see a similar struggle looming in our next federal election.

But both we and the Americans should pause and consider what exactly we mean by “democracy.”

American democracy began as a democracy of male property owners, including enslavers. Only gradually did white working-class males achieve the vote, and then Black men, and eventually women and Indigenous Americans.

When Abraham Lincoln was democratically elected in 1860, most of the states that supported slavery democratically voted to secede from the United States and to wage war upon their countrymen.

When they lost the war, slavery supporters soon regained political power and democratically voted to suppress the votes of their Black fellow citizens.

All through the 19th century, whoever had the vote democratically chose to drive the Indigenous Peoples of America from their lands, invade Mexico and take two-thirds of it, and end the century with a splendid little war against Spain that gained the United States an overseas empire just like the European powers.

A golden age... for some

Some Americans always thought democracy had gone too far, that rich white men should decide among themselves how to rule the rest of us.

They bided their time during the New Deal of the 1930s, the Second World War and the postwar golden age for white male workers. Those workers, imitating their rich bosses, democratically elected segregationists and funded police forces whose function was mostly to repress Black people. They also democratically elected federal governments that overthrew democratic governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile.

Americans democratically elected as president Lyndon Johnson, who tolerated the massacre of supposed communists by the Indonesian army in 1965, when somewhere between 500,000 and two million people died.

But Johnson lost support when he signed the Civil Rights Act into law, and then sent U.S. troops to Vietnam. Americans then democratically elected Richard Nixon, who prolonged the war.

For half of the 90 years since the dawn of the New Deal, some rich Americans have spent billions to return America to the 19th century.

Starting with Ronald Reagan in 1980, they have been democratically rewarded with tax cuts of close to $50 trillion in total.

Impoverishing the working and middle classes was so easy that billionaires spent just a few more billions to ensure the democratic election — twice — of Trump.

My point is not that democracy is bad, but that it is only as good as its citizens. American culture since the 17th century has been based on the premise that great wealth depends on getting someone else to do the work, and to resolve disputes with violence.

American culture has always venerated the outlaw and the gangster, who epitomize a rugged individualism that sneers at laws.

Americans therefore have mixed feelings about social values like equality, law and order.

But even if American democracy and democratic institutions were as good as advertised, they had one catastrophic flaw: they could be gamed, subverted and dismantled by Trump.

What took him so long?

Given such a culture, it’s a surprise that Trump took so long to gain power. It’s not a surprise that Americans don’t like to see themselves as enslavers and crooks. Regardless of the evidence, they promote their country as the land of the free and the home of the brave. Their allies, with some eye-rolling, have generally endorsed Americans’ view of themselves.

Considering the alternatives, until now being pro-American has made sense — especially for Canadians. We have built our wealth by trading with Americans, let them do the heavy lifting on defence. We like to feel pleasantly superior to them because we don’t throw our weight around the way they do. They have also, until now, done us the favour of ignoring us.

But now that Americans have democratically voted their democracy out of existence and are busy making their government unfit for purpose, we need to recognize that “democracy,” American-style, was never for all Americans.

Americans themselves will have to resist Trump, and remake democracy to protect it against future subversives. That may take some time, and years of struggle.

In the meantime, we should study the strengths and weaknesses of our own democracy.

After all, we in Canada democratically consigned Indigenous children to residential schools for a century, democratically turned away Jews fleeing Hitler, democratically threw Japanese Canadians into concentration camps, and some of us now feel attracted to Trump-style demagogues.

How to improve our own democracy

While we need to find the strength to resist Trump’s bullying, we also need to find the time to improve our own democracy — to make it truly egalitarian, designed to care for all Canadians and to discourage the rich from simply buying the country as Elon Musk bought the United States.

For the long term, we need to treat our students not as future consumers and workers, but as the future owner-managers of a functional, responsive democracy.

Students should learn civics and history from Grade 1 to grad school, so that they understand Canada not as “the greatest country in the world” but as a responsibility that they inherit from their first vote.

We should also teach students digital literacy and critical thinking, and the unwelcome idea that some people regard them as prey, to be exploited and impoverished.

In the short term, we need federal-provincial agreement on interprovincial trade, increased trade with Europe, Latin America and democratic East Asian nations, and an eye-watering increase in taxes on the rich to provide jobs and training for the poor.

Such taxes should also help to increase our military spending well past a miserly two per cent of GDP. Of course this would be a scandalous diversion of funds we’ll need to transition to a non-carbon economy and to build resilient infrastructure that can survive climate disasters. Still, it can’t be helped.

That’s because we are now living next to a very large, very rich, very backward country that wants to take us over. To avoid the takeover, we need to set the price of conquest too high.

If we can’t afford to defend ourselves, no one else will come to our defence. We’re probably not ready for universal conscription, but we can at least offer young people a deal: four years of post-secondary, all expenses paid, in exchange for four years of military service.

Most importantly, we need citizens who recognize that they flourish in democracy and suffer under fascism — and who, despite its burdens, choose democracy.