On Nov. 9, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory, Canada’s Globe and Mail published a massive opinion piece consisting of more than two dozen paragraphs by Andrew Coyne whose affiliation with both The Globe and the CBC aptly suggests the Leftist bias of his worldview. Entitled “Sometimes the people get it wrong,” the article, clearly rooted in a loathing for Trump, spends almost an entire page in saying next to nothing at all!
Coyne first attacks the notion that Trump’s victory was somehow a landslide. In the three most hotly contested states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, he points out, Trump won by a total of only 244,000 votes. But for that number, Kamala would be president today. Yet a couple of paragraphs later he admits that the swing from the Democrats in 2020 to the Republicans in the most recent election was approximately 9 million votes overall. So while Trump’s victory was clearly not a landslide, one wonders at the logic of Coyne’s apparent effort to minimize the significance of his election. In paragraph 7 he continues on in that effort, saying “it’s among the narrowest popular-vote wins in U.S. presidential history.” In the 60 elections held since 1788, 47 had apparently been won by a wider margin than that separating Trump from Harris! But with a dozen outcomes less decisive than that of 2024, does this make Trump’s victory one of the narrowest in U.S. history? What’s your point, Mr. Coyne?
Shifting tactics, Coyne goes on to admit that, yes, Trump did win the election, but basically because of the many flaws of the previous administration. At the same time he admits to having read several “deep, nuanced think-pieces on the average Trump voter’s deeply nuanced views about the importance of entrepreneurial dynamism, or the virtues of free speech, or the importance of the merit principle….” Stating “I don’t say these analyses are entirely without merit,” he nevertheless goes on to demonize voters in general who, he insists, do not “vote for a candidate or party based on a reasoned appraisal of what the candidate can do for them, or what’s best for the country, or anything related to cause and effect.” From there, of course, he zeroes in on those who voted for Trump, implying them to be little more than conscienceless idiots.
So Coyne cites valid reasons for having voted against the Democrats, only to denounce those who did so. Clearly unwilling to overtly support the Elitism implicit in the contemporary Left, he nevertheless cites books such as Bryan Caplan’s “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies choose Bad Policies,” a work whose very title implies a need for our “intellectual elites” to take charge of the democratic process. The result of this authoritarian urge, of course, is the “cancel culture” to which we’ve become accustomed over the last several years.
The sub-title of Coyne’s article suggests the decline of Reason in this modern age to be the result of “factors such as social identity and partisan loyalty.” But Identity Politics defines the contemporary Left and indeed is why many who used to align themselves with that sector now identify as conservatives whose rational, moral perspective utterly transcends that which simplistically bases its valuations on the superficialities of skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, etc..
Yes, Coyne’s article raises many important issues and I fully understand his antipathy for the often obnoxious Mr. Trump. But when he says the latter is utterly unfit to be president because of what he represents, “including his attacks on the rule of law, basic freedoms and democracy itself,” one can’t help but counter with the fact that the Biden administration was guilty of the very same. Indeed one might suggest Trump’s aggressive policies on many issues to be a natural reaction to the insanity of the policies of his predecessor …. i.e., open borders which utterly ignored the Rule of Law; use of the judiciary to persecute those who walked into the Capitol on Jan 6, while allowing thousands of B.L.M. pillagers to go free; toleration and indeed support for a cancel culture that brazenly violated the “basic freedoms” of those who refused to bow before the platitudes of Leftist orthodoxy; etc., etc., etc..
Five paragraphs from the end of his massive article, Coyne again grants that “identity politics has a lot to answer for,” that “the Biden administration made its share of mistakes” and that “Ms. Harris has her flaws.” Shortly thereafter he admits: “The notion that the people are always right is a staple of democratic discourse. And there is much truth in this.” And yet so much of what he has said utterly contradicts that truth! His article, in other words, while granting the complexities of the political situation here in the West, resolves them in a manner utterly unjustified by the facts he has presented. Having repeatedly impugned the integrity of the Democratic Process by suggesting, as the Elitist Left is prone to do, that the average voter is a mere simpleton, he nevertheless denounces Trump as the major threat to that process. Having admitted that many Trump supporters are in fact “nuanced” in their views, he nevertheless ends by implying those who voted for him to be mindless idiots. It is an article rife with contradictions which Coyne fails to adequately explain because, quite simply, he is a committed Leftist who loathes Donald Trump. No one is suggesting the latter to be without his flaws, but the sort of “insights” offered by those of Coyne’s mindset do very little to improve the calibre of the contemporary political debate.