It’s easy to hate Trump. But superficial grandstanding like ripping up his speech means nothing when Democrats vote for his bloated military budget and awful trade deal.
Trump is no anomaly. He gives a face to the atrocities of America as a superpower. He sheds light on the corporatism, regime-change wars, and deeply-embedded racism that has been there even with the most likeable of Presidents. Trump is American politics as usual, without the mask.
A country only two and a half centuries old, having spent one of those centuries with racially-driven slavery and the second steeped in legislative and cultural segregation, is not going to come anywhere close to healing that hurt in a fifth of its lifetime. Economic inequality is at absurd extremes. Corporate interests have corroded away the hollow democracy we laud.
The climate is in crisis. Trump’s environmental deregulations and vow to take the US out of the Paris Climate Accord are frightening. But so are Obama’s fracking, Trudeau’s pipelines and tar sands, and the Paris Climate Accord’s woefully inadequate targets. The good news? The crises we face have been met with a growing progressive movement.
Climate strikes. Yellow vests. Progressive Democrats like Bernie and AOC. The outlook is bleak, but many have chosen not to face it laying down. There is an opportunity for revolutionary change at an unprecedented level. Simply defeating Trump with any establishment politician is a dangerous missed opportunity.
A progressive victory in the United States would spur greater action here in Canada. When we tout ourselves as better than the US, there’s an implication that we’re doing well. But the USA is a despairingly low bar. Our own history of corporatism and racism is interwoven into our national fabric. A Canada in which the NDP and Green Party can win at the Federal level would be transformative.
Beating Trump is another low bar. The Democrats have long been complicit in the West’s brutality, and an establishment politician like Biden is no fix. It’s just the mask going back on. That’s why a progressive is the only way forward, and why Bernie Sanders is by far the best option.
Anthony Teles 
Anthony – very insightful, and well presented thoughts. Trump is indeed a symptom – we truly get the politicians we deserve (and elect). A big reason for his win was the revulsion the ‘ordinary American’ felt towards the established political elite. No question he panders to many base perspectives – but politicians are panderers by their very nature as they seek power. What is needed is intelligent, thoughtful discourse on how to move forward to address the the very real concerns you well note. What we need are not politicians, but Statesmen (like many of the Founding Fathers of the US – Washington, Jefferson… certainly not without their individual flaws, but fundamentally principle-driven). And, above all, we must remember: “Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists, not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent, and radical alternative” [Ayn Rand]
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