Pick Your Team
It has been said that in the US, politics is like sports, you pick your team and you just start screaming.
You can see what is important to a nation by the size of their cathedrals. In the US, the largest cathedrals are for sports and shopping malls. The shopping malls are monuments to consumerism, the lifeblood of a capitalist society. Sports stadiums in the US can seat tens of thousands of spectators, so we can conclude that sporting events are important to Americans. Political rallies are so large, they must use sports arenas to contain them. It seems that sports and politics are competing for priority.
When you only have two options
Politics in the US has devolved into two political parties: Democrats and MAGA (formerly Republican). The usual explanation for why only two parties is the use of a first-past-the-post, or winner-takes-all voting system. The candidate with the most votes wins the election. In alternative systems, voters can rank the candidates, and it becomes possible for someone who is not the number one choice to still be elected if they are a popular second choice. This is not the system in either the US or Canada. There is talk of implementing this in Canada but so far, no progress has been made. The catch is that the ruling party at any given time was elected by a first-past-the-post system and changing the system would seem to be not in their favour. There is no talk of implementing such a system in the US, so elections tend to be binary choices.
The popularity in the US between Democrat and MAGA is reminiscent of the split during the American Civil War. The Republican Party with Abraham Lincoln was opposed to slavery and the Democratic Party supported slavery. After the Civil War, the Democratic Party was conservative, and the Republican Party was rather progressive. Since the 1960s, after the Civil Rights Act, the parties have somewhat reversed positions. Although no one openly supports human slavery, the modern Democratic Party is more inclined to support minority rights. Relative to modern political parties, northern states during the Civil War would have been Democrat and southern states would have been MAGA. Maybe the American Civil War never really ended. There are certainly still a lot of Civil War flags flown in the US to this day. US politics has been binary for a long time. The teams do change from time to time, but the choice of teams is still one or the other.
Trump has threatened to annex Canada a number of times now (giving more warning to Canada than Russia gave Ukraine before they invaded, so we’ve got that going for us). If Canada is conquered, would Canada become Democratic or MAGA? Since it would be MAGA invading, presumably they would be hoping Canadians would choose MAGA. Of late, MAGA has become more aligned with Nazis. Canada has a long history of fighting Nazis, longer than the history of fighting Nazis in the US. Canada joined World War II years before the US and there was no question which side we were on. Canada served with distinction.
In recent years, the US may have forgotten Canada was there in the fight. The myth in the US is that the USA defeated the Nazis. The truth is it was a team effort, and the US was late to the party. There was a large Nazi rally in Madison Square Gardens in the US in 1939 and more than 20,000 attended. It wasn’t a given that the US would fight against the Nazis in World War II. The Madison Square Gardens rally was repeated by MAGA and Trump in 2024 October and it did not seem to harm his election chances. It seems many in the US have become comfortable with Nazis. I was born at the end of World War II and it is inconceivable to me that, in my lifetime, the Nazis are back, yet here they are.
The onslaught of the press
In 1909, Carl Jung visited the US. He wrote about this visit in an article in 1931. One thing that impressed him was the boundless public nature of American life, the lack of distance between people. Jung spoke of the defencelessness of the individual against the onslaught of the press. He said it “is positively terrifying.”
In Jung’s words, “You are simply reduced to a particle in the mass, with no other hope or expectation than the illusory goals of an eager and excited collectivity. You just swim for life, that’s all. You feel free – that’s the queerest thing – yet the collective movement grips you faster than any old roots in European soil would have done.” (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 10).
The image that comes to my mind is the murmuring of starlings. Huge flocks of starlings move through the air in intricate and tightly choreographed movement, moving as one. The individuality of the birds is lost to the collective. This herd mentality is compelling. Perhaps to those in the crowd, it is liberating. It does not, however, contribute to individual freedom. Each is a member of the group.
So, as they say, it seems to be that in the US you pick your team and you just start screaming.
