The United States of America are divided in a dramatic way.
It is not just for economic reasons.
It is also and perhaps more so for cultural reasons (or visions) of the world.
Hopefully, their new Presidents, now and the ones in the years to come, will be skilled in uniting their country.
To do so, they must know how to govern for all the Americans, that is especially for those who did/do not vote for them.
Anyhow, Bambi loves the USA from the bottom of her heart. She wishes our neighbours the best. If they are doing well as a country, we would all be doing well with them, whether we admit or like it… or not.
When writing the above, Bambi is thinking of Canada, of the Western world by extension, and of tiny Lebanon whose fate depends much on the external policy of the future administration, especially with Iran, the big master of the Lebanese Hezbollah. The latter, along with the endemic corruption, have hijacked tiny bankrupt yet beautiful Lebanon.
It is that policy that would be key for Lebanon, whether led by Mr. Biden’s or by Mr. Trump’s administration… or by anyone else.
This being said, below you can find a quick translation of the two articles in question.
The thoughtful analyses of these journalists overlap, as you will see.
Let’s start with Mr. Rioux’ article first. It is entitled “Blindeness” [“Aveuglément”]:
https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/589257/l-aveuglement
“No one believed it in the fall of 2016. The Republicans had given themselves the most atypical candidate in recent American history. This vulgar, rough-hewn man couldn’t take her to the top tier of progressive, feminist, and globalized East Coast elites that Hillary Clinton represented. And yet, the impossible happened. Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States!
For a moment, these same elites wondered. The prestigious New York Times even went so far as to wonder what it had missed. Perhaps, from the skyscrapers of New York, Portland and San Francisco, weren’t you seeing exactly what was going on in the deep country? Like the children at New Year’s Eve, we therefore made resolutions. The New York Times even went so far as to hire centrist columnist Bari Weiss from the Wall Street Journal. She has since resigned!
For the denial immediately regained its rights. In the faculties, long theses were written that were as poignant as they were smoky, explaining that Donald Trump was nothing more and nothing less than Mussolini’s reincarnation. For four years, the well-meaning left repeated until more thirstily in all the stands that this monster had no legitimacy to govern and therefore had to be deposed. In short, that 2016 had only been an electoral accident.
Moreover, the 2020 election would be a shining demonstration of this. We would see what we would see. The Democratic sweep was underway. Happy globalization would resume its course as if nothing had happened. All the press and the biggest pollsters were convinced of this.
Tuesday evening at around 11 a.m., when it was learned that Donald Trump had just won Florida, this huge castle, carefully built for four years, collapsed. Because reality is stubborn. It took four years of denial to demonstrate that 2016 was not an accident.
Basically, whoever the president takes the oath on January 20, the election will have been played out of pocket handkerchiefs. In a way, Republicans are coming out even stronger in this historic voter turnout. Not only are they retaining the Senate and Supreme Court, but the Democratic majority is weakened in Congress.
Above all, it will be necessary to explain by what mystery a president who has been called a “white supremacist” for four years was able to increase his vote in all layers of the population, except … among white men! Not only did Donald Trump get more of the Hispanic vote in Florida and Texas, but more African Americans voted for him than in 2016.
No doubt some will repeat what a paternalistic left once said about these “insane” workers who were unconscious of voting for capitalist parties. Rather than admitting that, even outraged by the disgusting murder of George Floyd, many black voters do not share a racist ideology, that they have nothing to do with the “defamation” of the police, and that they enjoyed even less the long weeks of riots that set their neighborhoods on fire and bloodshed.
It seems indeed that the openly clientelist strategy adopted by the Democrats as well as the choice of Kamala Harris as candidate for the vice-presidency have not stood up to the economic results of recent years, which have benefited the poorest, among others. which there are many blacks. By signing the First Step Act, a bipartisan bill, Trump has also helped ease the sentences of many black offenders who populate American jails.
That doesn’t make Donald Trump a saint, let alone the greatest president of the United States, far from it. His astonishing statements on election night reduce politics to a power struggle. But that does not prevent him from being a candidate in whom half of the American population – including those strata that have suffered most from deindustrialisation and who do not identify with the societal reforms of the Democrats – can legitimately identify with.
This election bears witness above all to the monumental failure of the American elites. A blindness that has a lot to do with the contempt in which the new graduate elites hold those portions of the population that do not participate in the knowledge economy and that the British political scientist David Goodhart describes in his last essay (Head, hand, heart, The arenas).
Ever since the university youth replaced the old working-class base in the left-wing parties, one has the impression that these ugly, dirty and wicked people no longer have the right to exist. As if four years of blindness were not enough, we see a proliferation in the press of paternalistic sermons which teach 48% of American voters. Who for their racism, who for their sexism, who for their homophobia.
Ironically, these sad sires resemble that character of Bertold Bretch who, from the top of his ivory tower, wondered whether it would not be “easier … to dissolve the people and elect another”.”
End of Mr. Rioux’ article for Le Devoir.
Now, Bambi will present a quick translation of Mr. Mario Dumont’s article, published in the Journal de Montréal, entitled “Distrustful Latinos” [“Les Latinos méfiants”]:
https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2020/11/06/les-latinos-mefiants
“Donald Trump’s convincing victory in Florida was directly linked to the Hispanic vote. Many Latinos are extremely suspicious of the Democratic Party, because of the presence of more radical left elements in it.
It was primarily Cubans and Venezuelans who largely voted for the Republican candidate. The least we can say is that we are talking about citizens who have a “privileged” relationship with everything that calls itself the radical left.
For half a century, Cubans have lived through a Castro-style communist dictatorship. Little freedom, no free access to information, a life in poverty and rationing.
The reality is not always easy for them in the United States, but no one wants to return to live in Cuba.
Now imagine the Venezuelans who have tasted Hugo Chavez. The coups, famine, unavailable drugs, a regime of terror in a country in permanent crisis.
Nationals of this country who are fortunate enough to live in the United States are grateful.
They misunderstand?
What bothers me is the analysis done in most media of their vote.
It seems to be insinuating that they were wrong in voting Republican, but that they should be forgiven given the circumstances in their country of origin. They would be voters a little less enlightened since traumatized.
Can I claim the opposite? In terms of mistrust of the touting speeches of the radical left, we could well see these Latinos as particularly competent and lucid people.
Their life experience, the damage experienced by their families, are they not concrete realities that illustrate the dangers associated with revolutionary movements on the left?
Cubans and Venezuelans have heard the beautiful promises: “social justice”, a better world when the working class has crushed the economic profiteers and the big companies.
Then they experienced the deprivation of liberty and economic misery. The apprehensions of those who have lived through this misery should be understood as a life experience rather than as a political deviation.
Not with a 100-foot pole!
I understand that Joe Biden has nothing to do with Fidel Castro and that the more extreme minority in the Democratic Party will not bring the United States into socialism. Not at all.
But I note that those who have known leftist revolutions closely do not want to know anything.
To the point of rejecting from the outset a party that houses a minority wing of socialists.
Their opinion is worth at least as much as that of thousands of pseudo-intellectual professors who tout campus socialism while enjoying the comforts of life in the United States.
As much as that of the media which rightly denounce the far right, but with a smirk come to terms with the excesses of the far left.
This time, the alternative choice of a Cuban from Florida was Trump.”
The guy who has proven to us again with his behaviour of the last 24 hours that he is no match for a leader.
But they will have chosen what is the least worse for them.”
