Coyne Mulls Chaos on Our Border. Is Anschluss In Our Future?

Andrew Coyne accepts that chaos is coming to the United States, if not at this year's mid-terms, then by election year 2024.

Coyne doesn't presume to predict what the United States will become except that, at best, it will be on the authoritarian side of a vestigial democracy.

The growing sense that the United States seems on course for some combination of instability, autocracy, and political violence – is therefore not just a problem for Canada to manage. It is existential. If we can no longer count on sharing a border with a stable, democratic, and peaceful partner, then all of the other assumptions on which the Canadian nation-state is based are in doubt.

Several intermediate propositions can be stated with some confidence:

- that Jan. 6 was not, as many people expected at the time, the last gasp of Trumpian extremism, but the start of something new, and even more sinister;

- that the threat to democracy is no longer, if it ever was, confined to Donald Trump himself, but rather has metastasized to include much of the Republican Party;

- that the grievances of the Republican base – against foreigners, against immigrants, against racial minorities, against Democrats, and against the liberal cultural elites they view as being in cahoots with all of them – have hardened into a kind of laagerism: a sense that they are an embattled minority whose very existence is in peril, and that as such all tactics are justified in the name of self-defence;

- that a significant share of Republicans, the polls tell us, have accordingly persuaded themselves that democracy itself is expendable – or at least that, as it has already supposedly been undermined by their Democratic opponents, so they are entitled to respond in kind, even extending to the use of violence;
that, large numbers of Republican voters having been convinced against the evidence that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen,” large numbers of GOP officials at the state and local levels are now working to ensure they cannot lose the 2024 election, whether by means of old-school voter suppression laws or by new-school laws empowering state legislatures to set aside the popular vote in favour of a slate of presidential electors of their own choosing;

- that Mr. Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee in 2024, but that even if he is not, the GOP has passed the point of no return – their base has become so unhinged, the party elite so corrupted, they are simply unwilling, or unable, to accept electoral defeat. 

The Bottom Line.

Put all these together, and it is difficult to see how the Americans avoid a crackup in 2024: a Democratic victory at the polls, followed by attempts to overthrow it, followed by some violent incident of one kind or another – after which anything is possible. The country is in such an agitated state, with such a tradition of settling disputes by force of arms, that it would be more surprising if it survived the next few years intact than if it did not.

Which again raises the question: how will Canada respond? Not just how will we deal with the possible aftershocks and spillover effects: what will we do, who will we be, when we are no longer safely nestled in the lee of America’s Gibraltar?

Could Canada chart an independent course? Could we resist political and economic pressures to accept some form of annexation?  How much can we rely on our allies in other democracies? How do we handle secession should America go down that path?