A few years ago, the host Pierre-Yves Lord explained to us in a documentary that we often show prejudice against men who are named Kevin.
If that discrimination alone could explain Republican politician Kevin McCarthy’s problems, that would be almost reassuring. But that’s not why he had such a hard time getting elected to the post of Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
Its problems are much more complex, deep and worrying.
They reflect the ills of the Republican Party and, more broadly, those of democratic institutions in the United States.
And they sound like a warning for Canadian democracy – we will come back to this a little later.
Let us first examine in detail what has just happened with our neighbors.
Kevin McCarthy has been targeted – and the majority of elected Republican Party officials taken hostage – by a radicalized wing of the political formation.
These elected officials, who number around twenty, are mostly part of the Freedom Caucus.
Note that the ancestor of this “freedom caucus” is the Tea Party, an ultra-conservative and reactionary protest movement formed under the presidency of Barack Obama, which had an unfortunate tendency to compare the federal state to a tyranny.
“We need to fix this broken system,” said rebel elected official Matt Rosendale recently. But in reality, these politicians are saboteurs. The system they want to weaken and discredit. Not reform it.
Several of these politicians are among those who questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The rebellion that we have just witnessed is not a trivial event. It had been more than 100 years since we had seen such a confrontation for the choice of the speaker of the House of Representatives.
And it is no coincidence that this chaos occurs two years to the day after the historic assault on the seat of the American Congress.
The Republican Party today, with or without Donald Trump, remains an undemocratic force with many radicalized elected officials within its ranks.
Moreover, at the very moment when the Republicans were torn apart in Washington, the American organization Eurasia Group published its annual report on the most important global geopolitical risks for the next 12 months. And in seventh place, after “the Russian thug” and Xi Jinping’s China, we find “the divided states of America”.
Although several of the Republican candidates backed by Donald Trump lost in last November’s midterm elections, the organization’s findings are damning: “The United States remains one of the most politically and politically divided advanced industrial democracies. dysfunctional in the world. »
“Division as a driver of public anger has become a structural feature of American life, fueled in part by social media,” the report also read.
However, in addition to this text on the American “risk”, there are a few paragraphs where Canada is warned. “In 2023, growing cleavages and regional antagonisms in Canada will contribute to growing political instability on the continent,” according to the organization, whose vice president is former Justin Trudeau political adviser Gerald Butts.
These fears have been echoed by many politicians in Canada in recent months.
Little was said about it in Quebec, but at the end of December, former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole published a 1,000-word text on his blog to denounce the radicalization of political debates in Canada.
One of his hopes for 2023, he writes, is “to see fewer flags bearing slurs against Trudeau” across the country.
“The proliferation of political protests like this in recent years is a sign that we are slowly becoming desensitized to political trickery and aggressive rhetoric, whether from the left or the right,” said Erin O’Toole. .
Former Alberta Conservative Premier Jason Kenney has also expressed concern about the state of Canadian democracy. He emptied his heart in his resignation letter last November.
And a few months earlier, it was Alain Rayes, the federal deputy (conservative who became independent) for Richmond–Arthabaska who was alarmed.
After facing a deluge of hate on Facebook last August, he denounced the “toxic climate that we live in the political landscape”.
Ironically, when he left the Conservative Party a month later following Pierre Poilievre’s victory, aides to the new leader encouraged their members to harass the Quebec MP to force him to resign.
At the time, Alain Rayes asked “all political leaders” to calm things down and denounce the aggressive partisan abuses that threaten Canadian democracy.
His request remains highly topical.
Political debates are not as toxic here as they can be in the United States.
But how many warnings will still be necessary to prevent them from escalating even more?
As we see in our neighbors, once a monster has been created, it is very difficult to control it.