I was listening to a colleague discuss the American election last week.
Yes, despite the predictions of just about every pundit, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are still in their respective races.
More to the point, The Donald is likely to be the Republican candidate.
Barring a miracle or a brokered convention with a lot of political shenanigans, it is pretty much a lock.
Further, and this is the scary thing, it is quite possible The Donald could end up being the president of the United States. He seems to think so as he has been trying to put on presidential airs over the past few weeks.
Unfortunately, his version of "presidential airs" is a mockery of the position to which he aspires. But he has defended his previous speechifying as merely "entertainment for the masses."
He has been telling the "poor rubes" what they want to hear.
Which leads to the central question about politics south of the border: what do the masses really want to hear?
It would seem almost every Republican candidate has been reading from Aaron Sorkin's script for The American President. Telling people about the way things used to be and telling them who to blame for why things are the way they are now.
According to the Republican candidates and pundits, it is the welfare mom and the Muslim immigrant and the Mexican worker and the foreign investment. It is curable by building walls - either to prevent people from entering the United States (or leaving) or to put people in jail.
I would suggest most of their rhetoric misses the mark. They speak about how Congress is dysfunctional but I would suggest it is really the entire American free market system that is dysfunctional. Congress is a symptom, not a cause.
I say this because in the last 100 years we have gone from local to regional to national to international economies as we have developed faster and more efficient ways to move goods around the world.
In my youth, you didn't get fresh apples in the middle of winter at a reasonable price.
Imports were expensive.
And you certainly didn't see mangoes, durian, and star fruit in the produce section of the local supermarket. If you couldn't find it locally, it wasn't there.
But container ships and large cargo planes have changed things. Produce can be grown, frozen, and shipped or flown around the world while still fresh.
We move massive amounts of goods.
The consequence of this is the free market did exactly what it was designed to do. It sought out the cheapest source of materials. It found the lowest cost manufacturing sites. It restructured to maximize profit for those in control of companies and corporations.
The local store couldn't compete with the big box chain.
Mass production has made the unique work of the artisan somewhat obsolete.
The result has been the movement of jobs from developed countries, such as the United States and Canada, to other parts of the world.
It is not that Chinese workers are better at making cell phones than someone in Iowa. They are simply just as good and a lot cheaper. It is not that Finnish workers build better hockey sticks than someone in Ontario. They just cost less for the same product.
The lower middle class, who held the manufacturing jobs, has been gutted by market forces. As my colleague put it, the elites do not understand why the masses are upset but it is because it has become increasingly difficult to put a meal on the table and to provide for a decent living.
In the 1960s, it required one person working 46 weeks a year to have a middle class lifestyle. By the year 2000, that number had gone up to 83 weeks which means you either had one breadwinner working two almost full time jobs or two people employed.
Of course, with mom and dad working, who is going to raise the family?
The Republican candidates all speak of "traditional family values" but how is it possible for a parent to stay home and still have a living wage?
Our system - and I do mean "our" because we are intertwined with the American economy at so many levels - is in serious danger of imploding. We are seeing this now with house prices in cities such as Vancouver that are well beyond the reach of a working family.
We are seeing it with a loss of manufacturing jobs in the heartland of B.C.
The Donald is so successful because he is telling the public who to blame - the politicians - and how to fix it - elect him president. Unfortunately, I don't think he can and if he tries, the consequences for Canada will be dire.
We are all likely to get Trumped.
