Fresh from the heady feeling of predicting an election result, indeed an American presidential election, and having the reasons pretty accurate, I’m encouraged to take the next logical step. I only go over a bit of old ground to make the point that if we do not understand the depth of the problem – I suspect that the elite doesn’t even know there is one – then we might just as well have a drink or two and see what happens.

This is the most solidified establishment in modern history. It runs through several strata of society and includes members who profess not to like what they see as the “establishment”.

My father would have faded away even to find a union leader next to him in his comfy Anglican pew, even though he only went to Church once a year (though that once with great enthusiasm) and the union leader would have been no less surprised and uncomfortable. Today, they would seem part of the same elite fraternity to an environmentalist who sees them both as the forces destroying the river.

The folks that run things are like universities of elites, where the colleges don’t like each other very much, but have a strong commonality of purpose – to run things – and the students can’t wait to guillotine the lot of non-elites.

Loss of tradirional political discipline exposes imponderables that didn’t used to be – speaking just of the United States, where do the armed forces stand? Here is the eternal steadying tradition of the president being the Commander-in-chief, which suddenly is not such a sure or, indeed, comforting thing. Whether this hitherto stability will stand the shock of Donald Trump is the number one question.

There is good news and bad news.

The good news is that institutions are not easy to bring down, least of all when there is no organized force with that directly in mind.

The bad news is that when they do come down, it’s with a hell of a crash and there is a lot of collateral damage. Moreover there may be someone ready to help with the crash launch. That brings on the next imponderable.

To say it’s difficult to get a constant theme out of Trump’s mumblings is putting it mildly. What does he really want to do? Does he know? Trump has an enormous following as I write this but they’re scarcely a homogeneous group and seem to have as their only thing in common being thoroughly pissed off at something or someone or both. Just as the former elite came from disparate unorganized units, so does the Trump outfit, as any look at a Trump crowd clearly indicates.

The first concern, then, is domestic and there simply is no precedent from which to work. We have seen malevolent dictatorships crumble and we’ve watched benevolent aristocracies and all other manner of a governments go but the United States of America, and what it has become in fact and psychologically over the last 260 years, is just not readable on the evidence and leaves us in the highly dangerous “waiting game.”

Foreign affairs, of course, is the scarier part. Contestants, in whatever the contest, love weakness in their opponents and will probably exploit it even though there may not be much point at the time. It’s a natural reflex.

When we are talking about a game where the stakes are not very high, no big deal, but we’re on survival where missteps under the most benign of circumstances yield catastrophes. I needn’t begin to mention nightmares waiting to occur that exist all around the globe.

There is always one saving grace, otherwise known as MAD, when referring to nuclear warfare. In most international contests of any consequence there are huge doses of self interest available, namely survival, to keep some sanity inside the war room. Unfortunately, leaders have not always responded well to the obvious and even good counsel available. In the situation that exists in the world today, failure is not acceptable.

One cannot be blamed if after all of this time, being exposed to Trump blatherings, one becomes just a tad irrational. I am now going to be just that by saying “you never know”.

Ironically, President Warren Harding, who fights it out with W for being the worst of the lot, once said “the White House is an alchemist”. By that he meant one can never be sure what the person occupying the Oval Office will be like until time has passed. Admittedly, it seems a wild dream to suppose that Donald Trump could turn out to be a decent president, but this is as good as most dreams available to us.

The real issue is not Donald Trump – he is just the catalyst. The issue is slow, rumbling, unforseen, huge, undisciplined change by the “post-elite” who don’t get it yet and show no signs of doing so.

It’s a watching game and a very scary one.

Of course Donald Trump could beat Hillary in November. I think he will, but before going further, let me say that this would be any enormous worldwide tragedy and we must pray that there is a God and He will save us.

Back to the election.

Trump is in a lot better shape than the pundits give him credit for and he couldn’t have done it without a hell of a lot of help from Hillary.

She has been in the race too long and it’s showing. She’s displaying her temper and a lack of judgment – not to mention her recent health issues – things that everyone has but no-no’s when you’re running for president.

But let’s get to the underlying reason Trump is doing so well.

Whole new ballgame

The media and pollsters have been caught out making outdated assumptions and asking irrelevant questions. They’re looking at this contest through the prism of elections past and are still declaring their choice of issues and missing the main one. It’s easier that way – research and thinking take up booze time.

It’s an entirely new ballgame and I refer back to articles I’ve done here and elsewhere saying that society as we have come to know it is mortally wounded and it’s impossible to predict just what it’s going to look like a decade from now.

The first major clue for me anyway, was on the environmental front. Environmentalism was always a leftwing issue and often the loony left at that.

With the arrival of global warming, it suddenly occurred to the masses that there were troubles in River City and that maybe those grubby long-hairs marching with the placards had something after all. When science, almost to a person, backed up the demonstrators of yore and the evidence grew almost daily, suddenly the middle class caught on and development no longer trumped all other considerations.

The secret, always suspected, was out of the bag and we learned that the Establishment had been lying for a very long time and that the public had naively come to uncritically accept what they were told by their “betters”. Once it became obvious with the climate issue that all these good corporate citizens, our politicians and community leaders had not been telling the truth, it was a very short step to assuming that anything they said was suspect. This manifested itself in movements like Occupy Wall Street by young people and outrage increasing through social media.

The Mainstream Media had no choice but get into the Establishment life-boat. The world over, the rich increased the gap between themselves and the poor and as that gap widened, carrying more and more power with it, the resentment of the poor became stronger and stronger.

Brexit offers clues to Trump’s success

The latest and best example of this was Brexit in Britain, England especially. I wrote an article on the subject that that the main issue was being obscured by the media and that the underlying cause of discontent simply wasn’t being recognized.

Now there are lots of reasons that Brexit went as it did and no doubt all made a contribution. In my view, however, there was one principal cause and one sub-cause that really did the EU in.

The same “pissed off mood” existed in Britain as elsewhere and those who were that way and voted “Leave” probably wouldn’t recognize that. “Real Reasons” are hard to determine, especially if you don’t try.

I offer as an hypothesis that the “Leave” vote was that deep down feeling of resentment of being fooled, aggravated by more recent “insults”, as many people felt that they had been cheated and subjected to a “bait and switch” by those set in authority over them.

If you look back at the process you will see that the first referendum in 1975 simply wanted to know if Britain, having finally been accepted by de Gaulle wished to stay in the common market. The operative word throughout was “market”. This was not portrayed as approval of any kind of a political union and had it been, it clearly would have failed. To Britain, an economic deal looked like a pretty good idea and they voted for it by a substantial margin.

It was under the presidency of Jacques Delors, an unelected bureaucrat, from 1986 till 1994. that the Common Market inexorably moved to a political union. Delors was detested by many in Britain.

It is a long history and I don’t wish to oversimplify it but just point out that by the time of the Brexit vote on June 23, 2016, the same massive irritation with the establishment that we saw in North America was also present in Britain and a substantial part of that irritation came from Jacques Delors and a political union they neither voted for but in fact opposed.

For many, the Brexit vote was a chance to rectify what they saw as a “bait and switch” scam by the elite that started off as a marketplace and ended up in a huge, meddlesome bureaucracy in Brussels.

Public ready for a brawl

Enter the US election with the same festering distrust of the establishment. The pundits and the pollsters, stuck in a time warp, are overlooking reality and the “garbage in, garbage out” rule comes into play.

Much of the public, both on the right and on the left, is thoroughly pissed at where their social, economic, and political masters have taken them and they aren’t much interested in debates under the Marquess of Queensbury rules, seen as the Elite’s rules, preferring a brawl if necessary.

This has given Trump a big advantage. As long as he hammers at Clinton, the dissident voters are happy and don’t much care about the truth or fairness of the attack.

In fact, the more outrageous he is, the more popular he becomes. Many wonder how Trump can get away with it and it’s because a large part of the American public is quite willing to let him get away with it if it gets the job done and turfs out what they see as the enemy.

Trump fights by own rules

In the meantime, Hillary Clinton is playing right into Trumps hands. The more she calls his supporters names the more they support him. It stands to reason that when she calls Trump bad names, they support him if only because Clinton represents all of the things they’re mad at and the more bumps on the nose of the privileged, the better.

It is not all Hillary’s fault of course. I doubt there are many politicians of consequence prepared to fight a man like Trump because he doesn’t fight by the old rules and they don’t know how to fight by the new ones.

Paradoxically, Trump could probably buy out the Clintons 100 times or maybe 1000, yet the Clintons are seen as the ones who have taken advantage of the system and enriched themselves at the expense of the least well off. That is a base canard but the reality is that this is how it appears to disaffected voters, and appearances are as good as facts in politics.

I will now assure the victory of Hillary Clinton by making a famous Mair political prediction – which will, as always, be wrong – and say that Donald Trump will succeed President Obama next January…and may God have mercy on all of us if for once I’m right.

Everybody seems to have a theory about Brexit and I am no exception.

Britain was never in Europe entirely. It is a long torturous history from the beginning of the Common Market to now but it goes back much further than that. I don’t suppose it’s too big a stretch to say that the original invasions of Great Britain from Europe were all part of an effort to bring the islands together with the mainland.

Over the years the British, despite the occasional common monarchy, thoroughly mistrusted the French more than that they saw economic advantages in any union. Oddly enough, Britain’s only enduring alliance with Europe is with Portugal, going back to 1386.

Churchill’s ‘New Europe’

It was after two massive wars in the 20th century that spawned the idea of peace through economic arrangements and there are many who credit Churchill as the author, arising out of his famous speech in Zürich in 1948 where he called for a united states of Europe.

Not for the only time in his career he was badly “non” quoted because after he spoke of united states of Europe, he said these words: 

Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America, and I trust Soviet Russia – for then indeed all would be well – must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe and must champion its right to live and shine.

Churchill long nurtured the notion of the English speaking world and saw not only the political connections as important but also free trade arrangements which had been augmented over the years. He certainly saw no reason to sacrifice those arrangements to the uncertainty of a European market full of countries Britain had mostly been at war with and few of which it had strong trade relations with.

A common market

From the outset, the Labour and Conservative Parties were each divided on this issue and the divisions in some cases ran very deep. For the average Briton, the overriding feature was the avoidance of yet another bloodbath and the coming together of France and Germany, originally in a Coal/Steel Pact, went a long way toward solving the problem.

The notion originally sold to Brits was a “common market” not a political union. In fact the political operation was pretty loose with an unelected executive in one city and a toothless parliament in another. The executive wielded most of the power and was unaccountable to the public.

Politicizing the union

As matters progressed, the European centrists eased into  a not terribly subtle process of politicizing the union without saying so. The history of this starts with one Jacques Delors.

However much Britain may have accepted membership in what was to become the EU, there were everyday irritations which probably need not have taken place. One might find, for example, that the garden hose they had to buy didn’t fit the British faucet and things of that nature. These piss-offs didn’t kill the EU but they certainly did nothing to inspire affection. 

Jacques Delors became the President of the European Commission in January 1985, laying the groundwork for single market within the European Community, which came into effect on 1 January 1993. There was no public vote to ratify this new arrangement.

Thatcher and co. push back

In the autumn of 1988, Delors addressed the British Trade Union Congress, announcing that EC would force the UK to bring in pro-labour legislation. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher responded with her famous “Bruges Speech” on September 20, 1988, where she said that she had “not rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed by a Brussels superstate”.

The fat was in the fire. Whereas, as recently as the early 1980s, much of the Labour Party had opposed the EC, while the Conservatives had favoured joining, after 1988 it was to be the Conservatives who were divided, with Thatcher and her supporters opposed to further European integration.

Delors bore the brunt of British Euroscepticism. This was best exemplified by The Sun’s headline on November 1, 1990 reading, “Up Yours Delors” in response to his attempts to promote further European integration and a single currency for the EC, and labelling Delors “the Froggie Common Market chief”.

I need hardly say that the English, especially, are super sentimental and place a lot of stock in their institutions. I happened to be there when the switch was made to decimal coinage and the controversy exists to this day, especially as to the names of the new coins.

When there was first a threat to the pound – and it was a real one – and then to the Royal family, probably not so real, the backs of many English were up. My thought when prime minister Cameron announced the referendum was that the “toffs” and others would not deal with the real issues on voters minds. This referendum wasn’t being held in the clubs of Pall Mall or on the verandah at Lords but in the public houses all over the land. Dealing just with England, where the majority for Brexit sprang, what were the issues of that time?

Freedom of Movement

Certainly the breakdown in relations between Germany and France, with Germany one more time becoming the dominant nation in Europe, was very disturbing. This went right to the guts of the matter for wasn’t this new relationship the basis of peace forevermore?

There was also rising resentment at further loss of sovereignty to the EU, the question of the pound lingered and the English particularly did not want to give up their pound for the Euro, however irrational or economically inconvenient that stubbornness might prove.

But the elephant in the room was the Freedom of Movement principle, in operation since the creation of the European Economic Community and primarily designed to support the economies of EU countries by providing a mobile work force. Never wildly popular, the massive refugee situation made this into a problem that not all the “liberals” in the UK could explain away.

I don’t mean to suggest that there weren’t many more issues than these because of course there were but the folks holding a glass of good old English bitter saw their security threatened, more and more loss of sovereignty and Britishness, and hordes of unwelcome tawny Muslims swamping their “scepter’d isle”.

That’s the great weakness of popular democracy – the guy in the pub gets to vote too and might just not agree with his betters.

Canada not big on democracy

Canada has never cared for democracy much. It certainly wasn’t what the Fathers of Confederation had in mind when they made sure that the elite wouldn’t have the last say with the Senate. It seemed such a good idea to ensure that regions with smaller populations would have some clout at the centre but good ideas can be carried too far if left to work like they’re supposed to.

The solution was to make sure that Ontario and Quebec always ran things, that only the wealthy were eligible and then, just to make absolutely sure, the Senators for each province were appointed by the Federal government. All serious attempts to change this anomaly have been strangled at birth.

Voters surprise PMs

There have been referenda, notably on Conscription in 1942 and the Charlottetown Accord referendum in 1992.

Neither worked out quite like those in charge wanted.

Mackenzie King’s vote on conscription managed to further aggravate French-English relations, which have not fully recovered yet. The Charlottetown Accord was, in my opinion, a huge success for the people but shattered Prime Minister Mulroney’s political career, that of his successor, and, for some years, his political party. There has been no appetite amongst the chattering classes for any more referenda.

On the other hand, In would argue that Charlottetown whetted the appetite of the public for a direct whack at the PM from time to time, but this notion has been ignored by the elite, even though there has been an ever increasing grumble amongst the people that they’re not satisfied with the present system of governance.

Tree-huggers go from villain to hero

Don’t stretch from this that government by “initiative” is just around the corner. What’s happened is a slow but steady build up of resentment against the institutions and people set in authority. The establishment, political and economic, has chosen to pretend it’s not there. Yet, whereas not too long ago environmentalism was seen as a left-wing issue exclusively, if anything, they’ve been left behind in the struggle to preserve what we have rather than destroy. This isn’t a matter of changing fashions but a combination of issues amounting to a true renaissance.

People began to see that there was more to life than a new bridge or a bigger skyscraper.  They watched inexhaustible supplies being rapidly exhausted. It became clear that both industry and government, and often unions as well, were not only being economical with the truth but lying through their teeth. What was absolutely essential wasn’t essential at all, unless making a bunch of money was the object.

Oceans and lakes and wild animals took on a new meaning. Tree huggers, once condemned by the decent sort of person, found themselves supported by the majority who, unlike the developer and the government, could see limits to the number of valleys and trees to be exploited. When oceans no longer teemed with sea life but plastic bottles and toilet paper, alarms slowly but steadily spread and continue to this day. This brings us, in a strange way, to Brexit.

Justin can’t have his cake and eat it too

Glamour doesn’t last anymore and the public simply won’t accept Justin Trudeau, the hero of the environment, in Paris and Justin Trudeau the man frantically trying to build more LNG plants, pipelines and expand use of fossil fuels. There was a time when that sort of hypocrisy was expected, but times have changed and Mr. Trudeau and leaders like him all over the world are waiting for another large shoe to drop.

How is it possible, ordinary folks ask, we have the world’s worst polluter, the tar sands, yet after all the lofty pledges at Paris, are moving to develop them as quickly as possible. How is it possible to square that circle?

Of course the Liberal party has found that you can do this if you’re not bothered by hypocrisy. They never have been.  A very good example occurred in my area of Howe Sound where the Trudeau government had scarcely taken over before they approved Woodfibre LNG in Squamish, on a shocking  environmental assessment, then held a seminar through their local MP to teach us why Climate Change was bad and how to avoid it!

Collision course

The public is no longer fooled and, as the warnings of Science increase exponentially, combined with an unwillingness to accept a word as told by developer or government, the collision comes closer.

As with the EU, the elite find it best not to listen, or think they hear things they don’t. It came as a huge shock to London to learn how so many Brits were angry at issues thought to be dead. The “higher purpose persons”, in the late Denny Boyd’s marvellous phrase, assumed that issues most important to them led everyone else’s list too.

The obvious solution is not to hold referenda where Jack’s as good as his Master, but rely upon “good old parliament” to go through democratic motions and make sure that, as always, the Golden Rule applies and that those who have the gold rule.

But what if this silly notion of real democracy prevails and Trudeau, like David Cameron, finds he must consult the public directly.

One thing is sure – the elite won’t have any idea of what the public is really thinking, the pollsters will ask all the wrong questions, and the “rabble” will rise.

Brexit really did happen, was not confined to Britain and is a very long way indeed from being a spent force.