At one time, my political views and voting behavior generally inclined towards what is generally seen as conservative, but of late, they have changed to what is generally viewed as liberal. And yet, like some others who have turned from liberal to conservative in the more distant past, I feel that it is not so much that I have changed, but that the world has changed about me.
As a conservative, I suppose I was what Margaret Thatcher would have called a "wet"; shrinking from following conservative ideas where they would violate some liberal taboo. Nor am I the perfect liberal. The change in the world around me, therefore, is in what I see as the most urgent issues of the present time.
I can date my transformation, at least in voting behavior, to a specific event: the then Prime Minister of Canada announcing that scientists on the government payroll would have to seek prior approval before publishing scientific papers - intended specifically to prevent them from publishing research results tending to indicate that increases in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were resulting from our widespread us of fossil fuel and were having deleterious effects on the world's climate.
Although I am well aware that many Alberta voters feel themselves to be economically dependent on a vigorous oil industry, I have always felt that hard scientific facts relating to human survival must take absolute precedence over political convenience.
Thus it was that in the next Federal election, I voted for Justin Trudeau (which I did by means of voting for the Liberal candidate for Member of Parliament in the constituency in which I live; this act is generally understood as voting for the leader of his party to become Prime Minister, and objecting to the literal inaccuracy of this can be viewed as the act of a pedant) despite having, in his time, having quite utterly abominated his father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau.
Pierre Elliot Trudeau was very controversial as Prime Minister for more than one reason.
His finance minister, Edgar Benson, adopted austerity policies to stem inflation which led to unemployment in Canada rising from the neighborhood of 4.5% or so to 6% and higher. This coincided with the Presidency of Gerald Ford in the United States, who imposed price and wage controls under the "Whip Inflation Now" slogan.
In October of 1973, in response to the Arab oil embargo imposed in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, he imposed restrictions on Canadian oil exports to the United States, essentially preventing our oil producers from taking up the slack and preventing the shortfall in the supply of oil that occurred as a result. Also, despite the Constitution of Canada clearly setting out that natural resources in the several Provinces of Canada belong to those Provinces, he imposed the National Energy Policy, which prevented the Government of Alberta from increasing oil royalties, and which also placed fossil fuels under price controls. (When a later Conservative government removed the price controls, it still insisted that Alberta not increase its oil royalties, as if private oil companies, rather than the people of Alberta, the owner of the resource, deserved the increased revenues resulting from the increased price of oil.)
Prior to the step taken by American President Richard M. Nixon, Pierre Trudeau's governent withdrew diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China (commonly known as Taiwan) and instead extended diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China; that is, Red China, then governed by Mao Tse-Tung (aka Mao Zedong).
Several of the other controversial things done by Pierre Elliot Trudeau can be summarized as dragging Canada kicking and screaming into the modern era. Thus, he switched Canada from Imperial measures to the metric system. He legalized homosexual acts between consenting adults. He removed restrictive immigration quotas on countries with non-white populations.
That last one might have gone down better had Canada not entered into an era of high unemployment due to his economic policies; increasing immigration at a time of high unemployment, instead of at a time of buoyant prosperity, seemed to me as a sure way to encourage the growth of racism and extremism, just the sort of things he presumably wanted to discourage.
After having soured on Stephen Harper, who I had previously admired for his steadfast support of Ukraine, Donald J. Trump came along in the United States.
It was on April 11, 2005 that Donald Trump bragged, on the Howard Stern radio broadcast, of intruding into the dressing room for Miss USA contestants.
Prior to that, I thought that it was a good idea to "Make America Great Again"; which I understood to mean to restore full employment in the United States to the historic levels of the 1948-1968 period, through such obvious measures as limits on immigration and higher tariffs on imports.
I had not then anticipated either ICE brutality, or trade policies involving high tariffs on American allies like Canada, while leaving China, the actual source of the problem, largely untouched.
After hearing about the Howard Stern broadcast, however, it seemed to me that Donald Trump was clearly not the man to carry out this program in an effective manner. However, I heard of it only during the course of his 2016 Presidential campaign, so I'm not right up there with Rosie O'Donnell, who called attention to it back in 2006.
The subsequent record of his disastrous first term as President is history.
He irresponsibly denied the science of anthropogenic global warming, and based policies on that denial.
I heard a commentator on the radio say that, as, in general, Presidents get re-elected unless there is a downturn in the economy, it was likely that Trump would get re-elected, despite pollsters expressing doubts about that.
Shortly after that, the COVID-19 epidemic arrived, and Donald Trump denied the science of it being a dangerous infectious disease, opposing common-sense public-health measures such as social distancing, the use of masks, and particularly the shutting down of types of businesses that bring people together in public, and work-from-home policies.
Fairly or not, I immediately leaped to the conclusion that he was putting the lives of Americans at risk because he thought that the short term economic impact of such measures would dampen his re-election prospects.
I consider science denial in a politician as prima facie evidence of dangerous incompetence.
At least, to his credit, Donald J. Trump did support efforts to find a vaccine against COVID-19.
In any event, the vaccine didn't come in time to prevent mail-in ballots from being necessary for the 2020 election. This frustrated Republican efforts of voter suppression, and, thus, only thanks to black voters having more sense than the typical white voter, Donald Trump was defeated in what was perhaps the fairest and most honest election ever held in the United States.
And now we come to January 6, 2021.
In the immediate aftermath of the event, while I felt that President Trump clearly bore some responsibility for what had happened, due to his persistent election denial, I also felt that there was no proof that he deliberately intended that the illegal entry into the Capitol building to take place.
If that was a conspiracy, rather than a spontaneous decision by the mob gathered there, I thought it a distinct possibility that one or more of Trump's billionaire backers could have come up with it, without (necessarily) telling him.
Not that I was in any way confident that he was genuinely innocent of that charge, instead of merely having plausible deniability for it.
And then, incredibly, no doubt largely thanks to the renewed application of voter suppression, he managed to acquire a second term.
His disastrous reduction of support by the United States for Ukraine in its hour of need was quite enough to characterize that term; the trade war against Canada only confirms the assessment.
But enough of why Donald J. Trump is not healthy for children and other living things. Why would anyone still vote for him after all that?
As a former conservative, I feel myself capable of answering that question.
Let's first review some historical background.
After the events of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush did not round up all Arab and Muslim Americans and put them in internment camps, as was done with Japanese Americans during World War II. Liberals in the news media, however, not being grateful for small favors, were still highly disapproving of his decision to imprison terrorism suspects in a facility in the military base at Guantanamo Bay, in order to evade the prospect of some judge releasing any of them on a technicality.
Given the potentially catastrophic consequences of a terrorist act, while having some misgivings about this drastic remedy, I felt at the time that while it would be better if another measure, less clearly a violation of basic rights, could have been found, as I was not sure what other measure could have been taken that would be certain to be effective, it was appropriate to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt on this decision.
In any case, by the time of the 2008 election, at least some in the Democratic Party were using rhetoric of a kind that suggested that they thought that there was some urgency in preventing John McCain from being elected to continue the policies of George W. Bush.
If that was in fact what they genuinely believed, that the Democratic Party needed to make every effort possible to save America from the disaster than John McCain's election would bring... then why on Earth would they have chosen the 2008 election to take the highly experimental and extremely risky step... of choosing one Barack H. Obama as their candidate?
Of course, though, subsequent events saved their bacon, as the phrase goes. Another radio commentator that I happened to hear noted that if one were bold enough to think the unthinkable, the current close race between Obama and McCain could turn into a landslide for McCain if there were another terrorist attack on the U.S..
The general principle applied by that radio commentator was, of course, proven right by subsequent events, but in the opposite manner. The stock market crashed.
The reaction of John McCain was to channel Herbert Hoover, and advise Americans that the fundamentals of the economy were still sound. Then, in his role as a U. S. Senator, he obstructed emergency measures on the part of President G. W. Bush to contain the damage to the economy from this stock market crash until there was some more gravy for his home state added.
As anyone who knows who Franklin Delano Roosevelt was might have expected, this had the result of making Barack Hussein Obama the first African-American President of the United States of America... probably decades before the country was actually ready for a black President.
But he only squeaked to victory; I heard subsequently that exit polling found that a slim majority of white voters still supported John McCain for President, and it was only because that majority was too slim to not be offset by his understandably overwhelming support among black voters that he won the election.
Thus it was, even before Donald J. Trump came along, I had reason to think that, at least as a group, black people were the only voters in America who had any sense. Of course, as individuals, a very large minority of white voters also had some sense too.
To his credit, despite disappointing some of his supporters, Obama abandoned what I felt was his irresponsible policy of withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan immediately before the election. To his further credit, he also abandoned his also irresponsible, in my view, policy of immediately withdrawing American troops from Iraq, but this took place only after he won the election (and, presumably, having become President, and being briefed on its potential consequences, he was then better informed on the matter). So it wasn't as if there were no important issues on which John McCain appeared to be the better candidate; but for most Americans, as for most voters in nearly any democratic nation, the economy is nearly always the most important issue.
All right. Barack Obama failed to win the 2008 election in a landslide... for the obvious reason. Now let's get to some other reasons why there are still people around who vote for Donald Trump.
How about the recent Ghostbusters movie that was basically a remake of the original movie, but with the lead roles previously held by male characters recast to female characters?
In Canada, in the city of Vancouver, a new bridge built to supplement the Pattullo Bridge was named the stal'əw'asəm Bridge. However, signage also did show an alternate name for the bridge below its official name; some news reports at the time identified the alternate name, Riverview Bridge, as being given in order to allow the bridge to be identified more quickly in communications between first responders.
Even with Canada taking reconciliation to what appear to be extremes, somehow our Federal politicians haven't found the money to provide all the people of Canada's First Nations with safe drinking water.
Also, legitimate concerns about the safety of women in washrooms and locker rooms, or about the fairness of women's athletic competitions... are brushed aside as being nothing more than mere subterfuges for bigotry against transsexuals. The more realistic idea that, yes, of course they're being used as subterfuges by some, but that doesn't change the fact that they are also legitimate concerns... doesn't seem to occur to people.
I don't really think that it's only because the ten-second sound bite has made nuance a lost art. People are not that easily hypnotized into losing their reason.
To me, the disastrous policies of Donald Trump are clearly a priority far more urgent than the petty annoyances of the excesses of political correctness.
But it would clearly help in ending these disastrous policies if the Democratic Party ceased from identifying itself with, or creating new examples of, such excesses of political correctness.
The "culture war" involves issues which many Americans see as vital, due to their deeply-rooted religious faith. Yes, this faith is being obviously exploited by venal religious leaders. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a genuine problem that needs to be taken into account.
Thus, the First Amendment implies that the public schools are not to engage in the religious indoctrination of children. This militates against school prayer. It also means that it isn't acceptable for school biology textbooks to claim that there exist genuine doubts about the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, or to claim that there are genuine arguments in favor of Intelligent Design, which is Creationism by another name. However, as long as there are Christian denominations which view the literal truth of the Genesis account of Creation as an article of faith, it also means that there is a problem with teaching evolution as a fact.
Does this mean that the only option is entirely avoiding the history of the development of life in the biology curriculum? There is another option. Newspaper accounts of crimes will often refer to someone as having allegedly done something... even if he has been caught red-handed on national television, in order to respect the right of an accused to a fair trial.
So the problem is solved. Textbooks will simply need to teach students about what some scientists believe about the origin and development of life, without commenting on how many scientists believe this, or why the textbook does not consider what any other scientists may believe as worthy of mention. Examination questions, similarly, will need to be worded so that students may always choose the correct answer without denying or abjuring the least word of the Bible.
Similarly, schools, having a duty to inculcate good citizenship, may certainly teach students not to harass or intimidate others they regard as effeminate, or otherwise engage in violent or discriminatory conduct towards homosexuals. But what they should not be permitted to do is to expose minors, without prior parental consent, to what are termed "gay-positive" materials - since such materials could lead children to doubt or question the absolute truth of Scripture; Biblical condemnation of homosexual acts is not confined to Leviticus, but is found within the New Testament, and, thus, is considered binding upon Christians by many Christians.
I suppose the notion that one must respect the First Amendment rights of people one doesn't like has taken a bit of a beating these days because they don't seem to be respecting our First Amendment rights, but using this as an excuse is the road to precisely the dangers we properly fear.