With the expected announcement of a snap Canadian federal election, the relationship between Canada and the US weighs heavy on the Canadian zeitgeist, as uncertainty fills our stores, jobs and lives.
A recent poll from the Association for Canadian Studies found 63 per cent of Canadians surveyed said that the Trump threat of Canadian annexation should be taken seriously.
The Liberal Party, under Prime Minister Mark Carney, has seen a massive resurgence in the polls after President Donald J. Trump came into office and former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigned, surging to 38 per cent from a low of 20 per cent.
Many Canadians have found themselves baffled by the sudden turn from Canada’s closest ally and do not understand where this geopolitical move has come from and is these political ideas could take hold over Canada.
Historians through their study can enlighten us as to how these political problems push forward, and how we can avoid them coming about or solve the issues they cause, with their published works.
Published in February of 2021 by retired Indiana University Kokomo professor of history Jon Kofas, Post-Trump America: Prospect for American Democracy examines the downward social mobility of the United States post-2020 election as compared to the situation the U.S. faced in 1964 after the presidential candidate Barry Goldwater lost to Kennedy.
Goldwater’s election notably brought both Ronald Reagan and the American far-right into the country’s political sphere in 1964, but he still lost by a landslide in the election.
Trump, while losing the popular vote in 2016 and 2020 and the electoral college in 2020, still ended up winning the popular vote in 2024 while moving farther right than he had in the previous two elections.
Kofas recognized this as a possible outcome, at least in the driving systemic forces that caused the Democratic Party to lose the recent election in failing to address the problems which the current status quo is bringing to the American working class, a problem that plagued the Liberal Party in polls all of last year.
“Establishment Democrats are convinced that reversing the path to ‘Third Worldism’ and Fascism rests with a stronger centrist and/or center-left political system, and only modest policy changes to the status quo,” he wrote. “In short, let’s strengthen bourgeois democracy under the neoliberal model of 'finacialism' where all focus is on accommodative monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policy to keep a strong stock market.
“This model is precisely what led to ‘Third Worldism’ that brought Trump to the political arena as the savior only too anxious to impose an authoritarian capitalist model.”
The term "Third Worldism" refers to a concept of economically underdeveloped countries that sit in the global periphery.
But Trump also represents a different form of the current capitalist status quo, not a solution.
While Trump has opposed progressive social policy by striking down DEI programs and dictating speech on minority transgender groups, he has still strengthened America's hard powers globally with his military actions in Yemen and support of Israeli imperialist expansion, as well as the previously mentioned Canadian annexation threats.
Kofas recognized that groups looking to make social change start as being focused towards eliminating “bad actors” rather than the system itself and this is partially what made many turn to Trump as a figure for change as people will conform to the system they live in to survive before overthrowing it.
“Unless there is structural change, new ‘bad actors’ will find ways to operate on the edge of the law or just over it for their own self-interest, and/or that of the privileged elite,” he wrote.
But Kofas reiterated that this change will not come from within the parties representing the current capitalist systems of the United States.
“Whether Republican or Democrat, most people will support the status quo, not realizing that its dysfunction is at the root of ‘Third Worldism’,” he wrote.
Speaking today to Humber from his home in Greece, Kofas shared his thoughts on Trump’s second term’s novel policy.
“Everything that Trump has been doing since [20 January] indicates that systemic, institutional dysfunction is manifesting itself more clearly in the President’s policies and in corporate America going along with the model,” he said.
Kofas believes that Trump’s moves to have presidential control over the executive branch, while constitutionally shaky, is a sign of “Third Worldism,” especially seen in his attempts to create a strongman persona on the world stage, which many Canadians are experiencing right now.
“Lashing out at friend and foe alike in what is clearly calculated high-risk geoeconomic and geopolitical populist manoeuvring as a means of reasserting [the] lost glory of ‘Pax Americana’ is the ultimate manifestation of an authoritarian ‘Third Worldism;’ a tactic replete in inherent contradictions, not to mention deviation from the path of a country at the core of the capitalist world economy pretending to follow a “rules-based world order,” he said.
Pax Americana refers to the political idea that there has been a period of relative tranquillity post-1945 to the present day in regions to which U.S. power has extended.
Kofas doubled down on the claim that current parties in America's political systems will insist upon working within the current dysfunctional framework.
“The American political class and socioeconomic elites controlling the media and social media along with mainstream analysts from academia will continue to insist that democracy equates with the electoral process, not policies reflecting the social contract currently molded by authoritarian neoliberalism and finding expression in Trump as Wall Street’s ‘front-man’ befuddling the reality of a society on a slippery slope toward Third Worldism,” he said.
However, that also means a hard pivot to classic-style fascism and its military action that would come to our border, is not immediately around the corner.
“It is premature to predict whether the American elites driven by the reality of ‘playing second fiddle’ to China and perpetual class warfare will embrace full-fledged Fascism as did interwar Italy and Germany,” he said.
The path Kofas outlines has been set since the Reagan administration, introducing neoliberalism as the next step of a more privatized economy to the U.S. which made it so easy for the country to lean right into Trump and his authoritarian policy.
“It is not the case that Trump was an aberration in 2024 any more than he was in 2016. Well-financed by billionaires and millionaires, he was immersed in the mainstream of the perpetually evolving GOP to the right since Ronald Reagan institutionalized neoliberalism,” he said. “Leaving behind the party of Eisenhower and Rockefeller to mold it toward the direction of a far-right tilt, Reagan combined military Keynesianism and anti-labor, anti-social welfare and pro-corporate welfare, neoliberalism.”
In simple terms, Keynesian economics calls for larger government interventions in the private sector, while neoliberalism calls for less.
Kofas thinks that also means there is little to no reason to think that the current political powers will strongly reverse the current course either.
“There is no evidence that either political party is interested in redefining the state’s role to reflect the Constitution, at least not in the manner that FDR and those embracing the New Deal viewed it,” he said.
Kofas does point to Bernie Sanders as one who actively stands for New Deal style policy.
“Bernie was and remains the Keynesian, New Deal Democrat, alternative to the neoliberal-military-Keynesian ‘establishment Democrats,'” he said. “Both Wall Street and establishment Democrats vehemently oppose any deviation of the party from its military Keynesian and neoliberal path.”
Kofas has one clear conclusion as to how North America got to where it is with Trump.
“Trump came to office both times thanks to the establishment Democrats and Wall Street amid rising socioeconomic inequality and militarism as leverage to gain global market share,” he said.
