Flirting With the Dark Side

Many people bemoan Donald Trump for changing the face of politics in the US, but I’ve always felt that honour belonged to Sarah Palin.

It was Palin’s explosive debut and ensuing rhetoric that turned poor McCain’s 2008 campaign into a race for the bottom and allowed all the neofascist wackos to leach from the woodwork. Trump simply leveraged the newly instituted crazy.

Here in Canada, we’ve inaugurated our own Palin. A former radio host with a chip on her shoulder the size of a Russian oil rig, Danielle Smith and her extreme agenda will be Canada’s undoing, mark my words. As this country’s love/hate relationship with oil persists, it’s only a matter of time before Smith’s Trump loving, vax hating, power loving, environment hating, populist loving temperament makes its way to the top of the bottom.

Photo from CBC Calgary’s: Premier Danielle Smith says she has ‘very strong mandate’ to implement the UCP agenda

In a recent interview with the National Post, Smith described her parents as “reliably conservative.” She talked about a time when, as a Grade 8 student, she came home praising a teacher who spoke positively about communism. With family in Ukraine – part of the Soviet Union at the time – Smith said her father argued vehemently against her teacher’s opinions, noting that was the moment her dad realized the family “needed to talk a lot more around the dinner table,”

Not just the foundations for a present-day Greek tragedy, this little nugget reveals the greatest misconception propping up politics for generations: that we adults come by our biases and ideologies of our own free will.

Certainly, the dinner table discussions that followed Smith’s fall from familial political grace shaped the angry zealot we have today; a core memory that now drives a deep seated plea for daddy’s approval. I imagine Smith was ridiculed and proselytized until she could no longer see or think straight, and now everyone needs to pay.

And while many adults eventually eschew their parents’ more extreme political leanings, Alberta is a different animal. Generations of families have carved out a pretty decent lifestyle thanks to oil. It’s only in times of crisis, when oil prices drop and Albertans can’t seem to wrap their heads around the consequences of their toxic relationship with goo, that they rat themselves off the sinking tanker in search of a life preserver. But now they have Danielle Smith. Clean energy? Not on her watch.

For now, Alberta has its kakistocracy and we can only imagine all the stupid that will come of it. But will we descend into the same fresh hell the US is experiencing? I fear the answer is yes. Because these days, we’re not exactly evolving.

*See Andrew Nikiforuk’s “Weirder and Weirder: Danielle Smith’s New Example for Canada at The Tyee for more on Alberta’s petrostate populism:  https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/05/31/Danielle-Smith-Example-For-Canada/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_term=intro&fbclid=IwAR2Fnzlwir1BgnKBVeGr_jhX4mpM6gFRQSPe1Xlqo0aM3xhmLc7E53YiatM