David Olive
Nov. 6, 2020
In the aftermath of this week’s U.S. presidential election, America appears divided. Some say it is more divided than at any time since the U.S. Civil War.
That is an exaggeration.
It is true that Joe Biden’s victory, barring the results of recounts that will extend into next week and possibly beyond, is a narrow one.
But Biden appears to have won both the popular vote and the Electoral College, a strong mandate to govern.
That’s something former U.S. president George W. Bush and current U.S. President Donald Trump failed to do on first winning the White House, in 2000 and 2016, respectively.
Equally important, Americans have shown in this election that they are more united than ever in their commitment to liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy, as Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has warned, is in retreat worldwide.
Well, not in America.
A record number of Americans voted in this election.
And they did so during a pandemic, a first in modern U.S. history. They did so in a climate of economic, racial and climate-crisis anxiety, and despite justified fears of voter suppression and manufactured fears of electoral fraud.
And their votes have strengthened a liberal democracy, one that respects economic freedom as well as freedom of expression and the right to choose one’s leaders.
This election was a contest between two champions of economic liberty and entrepreneurial creativity, in contrast to the state-directed economics of China and other planned economies.
As president, Donald Trump has not made war on organized labour, as Ronald Reagan did.
And while demonizing Biden as a radical socialist, Trump has engaged in his own heavy-duty socialism. He tried in vain this year to restore multi-trillion-dollar pandemic income relief to millions of everyday Americans, an effort that was blocked by a Republican-controlled senate.
Those income supports, which expired in the U.S. on July 31, continue in Canada into next summer.
Biden, for his part, is a free trader within the traditionally protectionist ranks of the Democratic Party. Biden’s positive regard for open markets aligns with Canada’s.
Biden also didn’t buy into the socialist Green New Deal agenda that energizes the left wing of his party. Nor did Biden and his party embrace a proposed Medicare for All, a Canadian-style universal health-care system promoted by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, leading Biden rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination.
All that said, obviously there is a big difference between Biden and Trump.
Trump is a plutocrat capitalist, and Biden is a working-class capitalist.
A second Trump presidential term would be much the same as the first, as Trump repeatedly vowed on the campaign trail. He believes his policies are working.
By contrast, if inaugurated in January, Biden would upgrade an Obamacare that Republicans have tried to dismantle. It would continue to be a joint venture between government and the private sector.
Similarly, Biden’s proposed $2-trillion (U.S.) megaproject to reinvent America to protect it from climate crisis would be one of the biggest private-sector bonanzas in history.
Most of those funds would be invested in the private sector, to create tens of millions of jobs; to retrofit tens of thousands of buildings to run on clean energy; and to recapture from China the former U.S. technological lead in environmental technologies.
Which is to say, Biden would be a business-friendly president. That accounts for the surge in Wall Street buoyancy as a Biden presidency became a more likely prospect.
Though he was an architect of the free-trade deal among Canada and other Pacific-facing countries, Biden doesn’t have U.S. membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP, formerly the Trans-Pacific Partnership) high on his agenda.
But U.S. membership in the CPTPP is a strong possibility later in a Biden presidency, because it would help contain China’s growing imperialist behaviour in the region. U.S. membership would benefit all members of the pact, anchored by Canada, Japan and Australia.
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A more likely prospect, in the short term, is the U.S. dropping its specious charges against Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei Technologies executive under house arrest in Canada. That would hasten the release of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, Canadians imprisoned by China for almost two years in apparent retaliation for Meng’s arrest.
What Canada most needs from the U.S. is that America gets its pandemic under control.
Continued mismanagement of the U.S. pandemic could roughly double the number of American COVID-19 deaths, to almost 400,000, by Feb. 1. That forecast was issued last month by Johns Hopkins University and the University of Washington.
And if U.S. political leaders give in to pressure to further relax social-distancing and mask mandates, COVID-19 deaths could rise to just over 500,000 in that time.
Trump has proposed no changes to pandemic management, believing his policies are effective, and that anything stricter would infringe on civil liberties. European leaders now imposing pandemic-related curfews shake their heads in bewilderment at that approach.
By contrast, Biden proposes a new central buying office for pandemic-related medical supplies, so that U.S. states are no longer competing with each other and the feds for scarce supplies.
A President Biden would recruit a “corps” of 100,000-plus contact tracers. He would create an expert panel to accelerate vaccine development worldwide, and carefully plan for uniform vaccination across the U.S.
And if he deems it necessary, Biden would impose a national mask mandate, to head off one of the worst cases of mass preventable deaths in history.
The U.S. pandemic has already dealt a hammer blow to Canada’s enormous tourism sector, as the flow of American visitors dried up this year.
On a larger scale, a U.S. pandemic that continues to rage out of control will continue to stall America’s economic recovery. That, in turn, will delay a robust economic recovery in Canada, which counts on the U.S. as its principal trading partner.
Meanwhile, the divided America so often spoken of these days is not, contrary to most of what is said about it, based on race, income, gender, religious beliefs, or any of the other elements of so-called “identity politics.”
If America is divided, the election results this week show that the division is chiefly between urban and rural Americans. That is plainly evident in every colour-coded U.S. map you’ve seen this week, with their blue dots for cities and red blocks for rural districts.
That same urban-rural divide holds in Canada, France, Japan and Australia, and is always cast in high relief at election time.
The challenge is to finally close that divide.
Everywhere it exists, that divide is the cause of distorted governance, of groundless fears and obsolete ideas continuing to hold sway, and of social and economic progress stunted.
Closing that divide, which stalls our progress on everything from income inequality to climate crisis, is one of the greatest challenges of this new century.
That, and not who won or lost, is the crucial lesson of America’s recent election.
