By Peter Christensen

Op-Ed Commentary

Now that the American election is over and someone is finally in control of the greatest nation on earth we can all breathe a sigh of relief. World leaders are stumbling over each other to congratulate President Trump. Even Putin is ready to talk about peace. And Justin well, he is just Justin.

All good Democrats, Liberals and lefties have for a short time stopped name calling and are eating long overdue humble pie.  It is true they continue to cry out end of the world predictions but the people have spoken and democracy has ground out a victory for the Republicans.

It must be particularly grating for upper class lefties to have a right-wing government elected by working class people, seeing as these same lefty euphemizers are always beating their chests about being defenders of the underdogs. But no one believes in them, at least not the majority. Their slander campaigns and mudslinging did not cut deeply enough with the working person; I think people had just had enough foul talk from them.

And while loads of upper class deletants characterized Donald Trump as an asshole or worse many of them voted for him. Why?

The United States is a business. It may be a lot of other things but first of all it is a business and if it wants to stay in business, it needs a businessperson to run it. At times that means making decisions.

A business can only absorb so much ‘BS’ before it starts to fail. Things need to be seen for what they are, talked about in real terms and commitments need to be upheld. Business people say things that are off-centre, that are funny, (something a Democrat is unable to digest or appreciate), and to the right of what they would do given power; however, they talk like ordinary people instead of constipated curtailed figure-heads that can’t answer a question directly.

Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of guilt driven social media manipulation. Maybe there is nothing wrong with success? Maybe we need to celebrate success rather than pulling those who have the skill to make improvements down to some misanthropic form of equality.

Maybe the reason Canadians can afford public services such as Medicare is because we have had success through individual achievement, something that will become even more critical as world trade becomes increasingly competitive and the need to harness and prescribe the use of our abundant natural resources becomes critical to our national wealth.

We must face it, Canadians are social democrats by nature and are able to live next door to a powerful capitalist nation because we understand and sympathize with many American policies and values, so much so that we are their second largest trading partner, only recently second to Mexico by a small margin.  While social democracy seeks to reform capitalism through policies such as progressive taxation, universal healthcare, and workers’ rights, it maintains and supports a market economy in order to pay for these luxuries.

It is a realistic ideology.

Socialism on the other hand would have our economy controlled by ‘workers,’ read ‘the Government.’ Rather than letting a free market determine the value of goods and services socialists would prefer that we have hundreds of thousands of non-producing civil servants arguing over what the price of bananas should be while in the interim curtailing success in business.

The centrally controlled economic system has been tried in Russia and China and failed dismally and since both countries adopted a market-based system of valuing goods they have prospered.

Various pundits have proclaimed that President Trump’s win will be nothing short of disaster for the democratic world. All democratic systems will fail, the Americas will become a fascist republic. Even our very own East Kootenay socialist fortune teller Gerry Warner says Trump “will strip the US of all that is good in the country and impose a regime every bit as repressive as Russia and install hundreds of Putin-like oligarchs to divide the country into a corrupt kleptocracy of ill-gained wealth.” O yea of little faith in the power of democracy!

It is true that we feel a sense of polarization in our politics; however, that is the nature of change. The lefties and socialists have had their go at things for the last decade and managed to keep their agenda in the public eye through the new social media platforms but even these eye catchers are starting to lose their novelty, candy sales down, and social agendas beginning to lose their appeal because they do not generate wealth.

Polarization is the nature of change and a healthy thing. Strong democracies like the United States and Canada have built into their constitutions and processes safeguards that protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens while allowing change and challenge to operate. Be thankful.

– Peter Christensen is a Columbia Valley based writer and poet.

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