The ethos that created Donald Jefferson Trump also buoyed bullish former Toronto mayor Rob Ford. It boosted the National Front in France. It incubated the UK Independence Party. It propped up the Aryan thumb that is Geert Wilders. It is the raison d'etre for the Greek paramilitary boys' club of Golden Dawn.
They all belong to a political fraternity that believes common sense can solve any problem.
Extremism isn't the end goal, it's merely the output. Voters and supporters of these maniacs aren't themselves extremists—they're frustrated idiots.
My garbage is overflowing? Damn refugees.
Crime is up in my neighborhood? Minorities at it again.
We lost a war? Political correctness makes us weak.
This political brand of earnastiness—a word I just made up because making up words is fun—is the core belief that there is nothing with this place that can't be fixed with some good ol' fashioned get-er-done-ness, conveyed through monosyllabic bumper stickers.
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This isn't new. The moronic chest-thumping and high-pitched insistence that Muslim/Mexican/Serbian/Italian/Jewish/Irish immigrants are the threat to our country has been around for about as long as there's been columnists like me to sit back and very smugly explain why it's wrong.
But what's new is the feeling that the crazed frustrated, the earnastiness, is winning.
Sure, Dick Nixon was a piece of cake. And Ronald Reagan was a racist. The George Bushes couldn't stop invading the Middle East.
But there's something scarier about this new wave of racism, xenophobia, stupidity. Maybe it's because this hard-on for hatred is rehashing fights that we thought we've already won.
Whereas most social struggles—women's liberation, the gay movement, the fight for black civil liberties—went in one direction, with stops along the way, it now feels like we're sliding back. It's as though we've just climbed up a mountain, only to feel a tugging on our leg as Donald Trump races down the hill on a snowmobile, and he's tied a rope from it to our foot.
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And you know what? There's no real way to fix it.
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Trump supporters, just like Rob Ford voters or people who still insist on watching Two and a Half Men, revel in simplicity. They hold onto the firm philosophical belief that Occam's Razor is not just a problem-solving principle but a way of doing business.
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So, where does that leave us?
It leaves us with the task of fixing politics altogether. In Canada: finding a way to bring in a more diverse cross-section of politics that gives channels to the disgruntled that doesn't involve watching Ezra Levant rant about his refugees-as-terrorists vitriol. In America: getting money out of politics and taking a sledgehammer to the two-party system. In Europe: re-imaging racial integration and reforming immigration procedures to ratchet-down tensions while still managing a Eurozone and helping the wave of migrants heading from the Middle East to the southern and eastern borders.
But those options are difficult and fraught with problems.