The global resurgence of populist politicians more interested in obtaining and keeping power than telling the truth is a symptom — not the problem — that stems from the issues sowing resentment among voters who elect them, a crowd of area students was told recently.
Gwynne Dyer, a London-based, Canadian-born independent journalist, last week offered nearly 300 students from Sundre High School, Spruce View and Cremona some thoughts on the state of democracy, the road ahead and the case for optimism for a better future.
Being a journalist, attempting to understand and explain history as it unfolds by navigating the narratives spun by agendas on both the left and the right is a tricky business, and typically the truth falls somewhere in between, he said.
“I’m absolutely not certain that I’m right about everything that I say,” he candidly told the crowd gathered in Sundre High School's gynmnasium.
“I am trying to make sense of it on the run, and I don’t know how it’s all going to come out — nobody does.”
The subject of his speech was not necessarily specifically about U.S. President Donald Trump, he started.
“But it is sort of Donald Trump. He’s not the problem, but he is a symptom of the problem — a very big symptom of the problem, so he’s the right place to start.”
Figuring out what’s going wrong in the world that someone who so highly holds decorum and telling the truth in disdain could still become elected to high office begins with better understanding why 63 million Americans were willing to vote for him, he said.
“They’re as smart as we are, surely they must have noticed what kind of person he is,” said Dyer, adding he was not referring to whether the American president is Republican or Democrat, on the left or the right.
“He’s not on the right, he’s not on the left, he’s not a Republican nor a Democrat. He is himself a populist who will say anything he needs to say to take the next step towards power or keeping it.”
He said Trump even openly flirted with the possibility of running under the Democratic banner 10 years before becoming the Republican party’s presidential candidate and would wrap himself in whatever colour best serves his purposes.
Additionally, he said he thinks conjuring up or spreading half-truths and outright lies comes as second nature to a president who since beginning his run for the U.S. presidency, has been documented to have made 4,000 false or misleading statements, sometimes contradicting one another.
“That is the sort of man we’re dealing with here, and he is also not the sort of person you would really want to have in your house, let alone in the White House,” he said, adding millions of perfectly decent U.S. citizens still persuaded themselves to vote for him.
While many undoubtedly stuck to traditional party lines and could not imagine voting for anyone but a Republican, Dyer said changing demographics in the U.S. mean those votes alone would not be enough.
“If he hadn’t managed to get some Democratic votes too, he couldn’t have become president.”
He said Hillary Clinton assumed the Rust Belt — the former manufacturing heartland of the U.S. — was a secure Democratic stronghold and did not invest time there in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Trump, he said, saw an opportunity to exploit the growing resentment of people left angry and frustrated by the loss of millions of jobs and consequent collapse of once thriving industrial economies, and so campaigned hard in those states.
Once-thriving metropolitan centres such as Detroit are all but crumbling apart and many people scrape by on welfare. So ahead of the 2016 U.S. election, Dyer visited the Rust Belt to gain some insight on what people thought.
“Trump campaigned there because he knew something (Clinton) seemed not to get, which is that people in the Rust Belt states are very angry and desperate,” he said.
“That was my overwhelming impression when I talked to these people — they felt they had been betrayed and abandoned.”
He said while some of Trump’s voters actually believed he would bring back jobs, many — including coal miners — knew those were empty promises that did not align with the reality that the coal industry is in the face of natural gas development no longer economically viable and not about to return.
“They didn’t actually believe he’d bring back coal jobs.”
However, by voting for Trump, Dyer said they told him everyone would know how upset they are.
“They really wanted to make sure that people knew how angry they were,” he said.
“It wasn’t rational, but it was very emotional.”
So Trump became president, which Dyer said while alarming, is not particularly unique in today’s global political atmosphere. Many other nations have experienced reactionary populist upheavals, from Brazil’s recently elected far right president to England’s narrow Brexit referendum.
Dyer said supporters of such movements are connected by shared concerns of economic stagnation and decay, which populists typically tap into by placing the blame on scapegoats such as immigrants and foreign enterprise.
Meanwhile, he said unemployment numbers in the U.S. and Canada might sound good but are carefully and selectively calculated by governments to mask the reality of the situation.
He pointed to U.S. economist Nicholas Eberstadt who sought out the services of a public opinion polling company to ask a sample of Americans whether they had worked the week before. Eberstadt discovered the percentage of prime age working people who are unemployed is about 17.5 per cent — not the much lower and celebrated 3.75 per cent claimed by the administration, a situation likely to be similar in Canada, he said.
Although people are not rioting en masse — largely courtesy of the welfare state created throughout Western societies after the Second World War to avoid repeating the past mistakes that during the Great Depression left people desperate enough to turn to leaders like Mussolini and Hitler — their anger boiled over at the ballot box, he said.
“It’s about jobs and lost jobs.”
However, Dyer said the loss of employment stems not from bogeymen like Mexicans that populists such as Trump point the finger at, but rather by American business owners and managers who sought to maximize their profits by exporting production to cheap labour pools. Compounding the situation and costing the loss of millions more jobs is automation, he said.
Yet despite all of the disconcerting developments in recent decades that set the stage for what’s happening today, Dyer had a parting message for the students.
“Don’t panic.”
The hurdles we must overcome are real, he said, but there’s always a way through tough times and there are silver linings.
“This is not a society that’s getting poorer — we’re getting richer.”
Certain jobs and industries might be on the decline, but he said there are more services and products available in the modern global economy than ever before in human history.
“The problem is making sure everybody is able to participate even though we don’t need them to work,” he said, adding basic income programs, which have the support of billionaires such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, could well be part of a long-term solution.
“You’ve got support for that — not just from the usual suspects on the left, but from the unexpected collaborators on the right as well.”
Nearly a century ago, there was a drastic shift to five, eight-hour workday weeks from six, 10-hour workday weeks to spread out available jobs. Although controversial at the time, Dyer said “the sky did not fall, people got richer, everybody benefited and had a much nicer time." After the Great Depression, Dyer said no one was in a hurry to return to 60-hour workweeks.
Fast-forward to today, and we are faced with a similar situation, he said.
“It’s not from Mars, it’s not unheard of,” he said about universal income, adding such programs could unlock opportunities for people who will have time and sufficient financial freedom to pursue their passions. The cost could be largely borne by funds saved by no-longer-needed social programs combined with an automation tax on producers that no longer pay wages, he said.
Dyer’s visit to the local high school’s gymnasium was not his first.
“We are always looking for opportunities to enrich student learning,” said teacher Chris Simpson, adding the journalist articulated answers to some of the questions students had.
“The problem of democracy is that it appears slow and at times dysfunctional when in reality it works as long as the electorate is willing to think critically about the issues,” he said, adding students were very receptive to Dyer’s presentation.
“In truth, many told me they felt reassured after the presentation. This reaffirms for me young people feel a lot of anxiety about the future.”
