[URBAN NOTE] "Lessons for Americans from the city that elected Rob Ford"

[rfmcdonald]

Jonathan Goldsbie writing in NOW Toronto offers some useful advice to our southern neighbours.

I'm sorry.

Dear Americans,

Hello from Toronto. We promise not to be smarmy or condescending.

It's just that we have some experience electing a uniquely unqualified bigoted demagogue whose stunted emotional maturity and tenuous grasp of reality caused people to fear for things they held dear. But while we can't pretend that our late former mayor was ever nearly as terrifying as your president-elect, there are sufficient similarities that it may be worth comparing notes.

There's a whole subgenre of Toronto punditry devoted to examining Donald Trump in light of Rob Ford, and you can easily Google it, but what echoes right now is the sense of post-election destabilization — the shockwave radiating from a political system deliberately smashed to bits by an electorate that seems to prefer the whims of a narcissistic thug.

Please do not mistake the following for wisdom — being aware of these perils in advance will not make a sliver of difference. But they may help you be less surprised by some of the phenomena coming your way, so you can put that much more mental and emotional energy toward thwarting the looming ethnic cleanse. (We, uh, didn't have to deal with that part here.)

So here are 10 things we learned the hard way:

1) It will get weirder and it will get worse. Everything you have seen, heard, and learned up until now really was just the beginning. In addition to all of the foreseeable ways that Trump's taking office will be destructive, the saga of his presidency will dart down brain-melting paths of which you could not possibly have conceived. Your institutions of democracy will be confronted with, and overwhelmed by, circumstances they were not set up to handle. And you will discover gaps in the law that you never before noticed, because some principles of governance had been deemed too obvious to require spelling out.