Is There Possible Common Ground Between Angry Sides?

There are a lot of angry people out there.

Many of the people who support Donald Trump, Rob and Doug Ford, Brexit, and other more conservative politicians and causes are angry at what they see as an elite that don’t care about their needs. They believe the elite look down on them as stupid and backward, denigrate their identities as citizens of Canada, the U.S. or wherever else, and waste vast amounts of tax dollars pandering to what they consider special interest groups such as gays, environmentalists, Indigenous people, illegal immigrants and others. Their support for Trump, the Fords and others like them stems in part from their feeling ignored, and wanting to make themselves heard.

Many of the people who the supporters of Trump and the Fords accuse of being special interest groups are angry, too. They are angry at what they see as the racism and bigotry directed at their communities, at economic developments that threaten their ways of life and their identities, and at ideas and actions that treat them as though they’re somehow wrong or messed up due to who they are. Activist groups like Black Lives Matter and Idle No More advocate on behalf of communities that feel oppressed and backed into a corner, and that they have to fight for their identities and their people.

The end result are societies that become increasingly polarized, to the point where it seems like people are forced to choose sides. Anyone who disagrees is not just someone who disagrees with you, but an enemy who needs to be crushed.

What should we make of this situation?

As I’ve alluded to before, there is no one single “elite” in Canada or anywhere else. Different groups are able to get governments and institutions to make changes they want at different times. As a result, while various groups of people are angry, often for very good reasons, their anger stems from different origins.

It’s impossible to tell which of these groups might “win”, and in any case a “win” by one side might not be a good thing. After all, the problems that made so many people on the “losing” side angry would still have to be addressed, and could come back to haunt the people on the “winning” side.

The real challenge in the 21st century, then, may not be for one faction of angry people to win over the other. Maybe the real challenge is to try to figure out if there are common threads between the reasons different people are angry. Maybe that can be a way to build bridges between different groups of people, and address what they’re all angry about.

Obviously, it’s impossible to please every single person in a social debate. But at this point, it almost seems like no one’s even willing to try.

I don't think you can so easily conflate supporters of Trump with those of Ford. Ford won heavily in the GTA burbs which have a huge number of visible minorities, and as far as I'm aware he's never been accused of racism. He was also up against the horrifically incompetent and corrupt Wynne government, and a lot of people just wanted her gone.

The situation in the US is different. There you have two different media sources telling people two different sides of the story, and neither is fairly depicting the counter-arguments or 'the other side'.

A lot of the ones supporting Trump do indeed feel as you describe, that they are ignored and ridiculed by the urban elites, their values and needs dismissed while the elites frantically concern themselves with the well-being of minorities. They have a point, I'm afraid.

The media, and the bulk of the population, are concentrated in big urban centres. People living in rural areas or small urban areas are a mystery to them, and not one they're much interested in exploring. The media is also focused on the coasts. How many TV shows through the years have been set in small urban areas, or in the south or midwest? How often do you hear a southern accent on the national network shows? The politicians go after core populations, especially those who can be divided into easy groups for political targeting (Gays, blacks, hispanics, gun owners, religious people, etc). That mass of largely blue collar working whites in smaller urban centers and rural areas doesn't fit well into any boxes. And the Democrats in particular have largely ignored them for some time.

In Canada, the media is almost universally progressive and set in a very few cities, delivering the same treacly message of tolerance and acceptance and universal brotherhood while pretending their progressive values are universally shared. But they're not. Not by a long shot. It's just that those who don't share those values have no medium to communicate their disagreement. Nor are there any political parties which do not share that same progressive urban value system.

No comparison.
Ford after 15 years of Liberals and Wynne is more like Notley after loddy generations of PCs in Alberta. People were sick of it and voted for change to teach them a lesson.
Wasn't a squeaker like Trump, more due to Democrat complacency and lack of turnout on their side.

Short answer is no. There is no peace possible with extremist absolutists, and that includes the cult surrounding Trump or the type of SJW menace that shouts down professors in university classes.

Look at it this way - do you really want to find common ground anyway with someone who's proudly walking on a Canadian or American or British street with a Nazi flag in their hands? No peace was possible when this kind of thinking first reared it's filthy head 90 years ago. Nothing has changed since. Some forms of thought can't be met halfway. They have to be smashed to the ground and obliterated completely, no matter the cost.

One thing we need to stop doing is comparing American Conservatism to Canadian Conservatism. Totally different.

Stephen Harper was more like Barak Obama. Our Conservatives are more like their Democrats.

Trump is in his own special category of stupid. He cannot be compared to anyone.

"Conservatism" is a dead concept in the United States anyway. It's just slavish devotion to a monster just because he's a mega-troll that "owns the libs", even if he abandons everything conservatives allegedly held sacred for the preceding sixty years. If Trump tweeted that he wants a five-minute gay porno clip to be shown on the jumbotron before the national anthem being played at every ball park in the country, the loyal cultists (including the evangelicals) would merrily go along with it. The order came from Great Leader so of course they'd have to obey it, right? Isn't that what Jesus said to do, always obey the boss?

No bridge is ever open between the people and demagogues or fascists.
The bridge is still there for those conservatives who are tired of holding their noses and swallowing the puke in their mouths they get supporting Trump.

Of course there's no comparison between Canadian and American politics, if any leader tweeted contradicting his party platform, making unilateral proclamations or behaved in such a boorish and reprehensible manner internationally, they'd be removed by their own party within the first 100 days.

Fiscal conservatism has always been a chimera though, just a complete illusion. When they're in power they'll inflict austerity on those they don't like because hitting on welfare and health care as hard as they can, or forcing teachers and nurses to take a pay cut, is so fucking easy. But the train of taxpayer money going into the maws of their crony capitalist friends never stops. Not in the defense industries, even though at least with defense the beneficial trade off is the jobs that sector maintains and even creates. Not to subsidies for the massive agricultural concerns like Monsanto or Cargill. And definitely not to the financial sector no matter how badly the thieves of Wall Street, with their endless crooked scheming, strip the flesh off the bones of the middle and working classes. It is no coincidence at all that the worst of the economic upsets of the last seventy years, after FDR and Truman, have always happened under Republican presidents that preach the sacred free market bullshit angle the most fervently.

It's a lie. Always has been, always will be. The rest of us are just here to be collateral damage for them that they respond to with their usual shrug and "meh". After all, it's none of them that ever do any of the suffering.