Writing about Donald Trump is like writing a Christmas sermon.
It has all been said before.
The day of the US election that saw the return of the master disrupter, as opposed to master disruptor, was not a surprise for me. His inevitable recovery from defeat—rather Napoleonic in its way—was a marker of just how far the old order is crumbling and that there is currently no workable political alternative model to the ascendancy of the right.
We are in for a time of demolition—the establishment structures are being usurped by a large cabal of finance thugs, political neophytes, and true believers—and any comfort we can take from the change of regime is likely flitting if not delusory.
As poet W. B. Yeats has said, in a different context right after World War 1:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. (“The Second Coming”)
For sure, the mood of our times is desperate. We know in our bones that an era has ended and that what is to be born has yet to take shape. The Reality TV star has brought us to the cusp of the Unreal City (hell in the poetry of Dante and T. S. Eliot).
Andrew Coyne, political columnist for The Globe and Mail, puts the case with his customary unvarnished forthrightness sparing neither our genuine fears or elusive hopes. What will happen in the U.S. “will wash over Canada in various ways—some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington. All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened by them.”
This is what massive upheaval does: it makes us strangers to one another, corrodes the common good by instilling fear of the other, and makes us putty in the hands of ruthless shapers.
But it also challenges us to think afresh, to envision an alternative to the forces of decomposition that prevail among us, that summon us to a new re-creation.
We must stem the “blood-dimmed tide” by rousing the best to conviction.
Michael’s new book The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis (House of Anansi, Sept. 2024) can be purchased through Amazon Australia.
Dr. Michael W. Higgins has been involved with investigating and expanding the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, particularly in Canada, for over forty years. Dr. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto.
With thanks to Pontifex Minimus.
Pontifex Minimus is written on the ancestral territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation peoples, who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial.
