I studied Political Science at university because it was the faculty allowed the most electives, and I had many interests I wanted to pursue. Luckily, almost everything relates to politics in some way or another.

Life is political.

I liked learning about economics. I liked learning about history. I liked learning about political theory and its applications.

I liked learning about statistics, and about the various ways that stats and numbers lie.

I liked the idealism with which some of us posited the future. I liked the discussions with the people and teachers in my courses – robust debate is political science’s happy place. Why do you think it’s such a common undergraduate degree for lawyers?

Political Science isn’t only liberal and progressive thought, though that’s how I prefer to roll. An expansive and helpfully collective mindset just seems logical to me. I was never able to wrap my head around the decision to be conservative. It’s such a small, selfish, and regressive mindset, and these aren’t qualities I admire.

Is it ironic that religion and conservatism are so intertwined?

Conservatism is obsessed with “getting mine,” and “freedom to.” Conservatives aren’t big fans of rules, restrictions, and regulations that get in their way, though they’ll quite happily through rules and restrictions on others. They’re like toddlers in that way – their philosophies are inconsistent and immature.

To live together in groups, whether that group is a family, community, city, or state, we need to get along. Each of us demanding the prioritizing of our own agendas – freedom to – gets us nowhere fast. Society is about collectivity. Society is about freedom from the things that will destroy our collectivity. Freedom from things that harm, impede, and cause us distress. Freedom from things that limit us and keep us small.

Freedom from poverty, for example. Poverty – and its brother, homelessness – is very expensive. It costs society more to keep people from housing than it does to provide it. And yet, the “freedom to” crowd would fight you to the death to prevent you from providing help.

Freedom from disease running wild through our neighbourhoods is another good example. It’s nice to not worry that the neighbour might have Ebola or COVID. I understand that in the USA, the conservative Republicans have ensured that the Centers for Disease Control will no longer be tracking or reporting outbreaks of illness and disease. Good luck. Tuberculosis is breaking out in several American states.

Freedom from ignorance is one of my favourite freedoms, but it requires a collective effort that funds educational institutions and community supports such as libraries, museums, and art galleries. Conservatives hate spending money on education. That should ring lots of alarm bells.

These things have been on my mind lately as I watch the collapse of the USA in real-time. I predicted it, but I thought it would take longer post-Trump’s re-election. I wonder what will emerge? Nothing good: American MAGAts hold almost all the power in the US, and they’re very much focused on personal freedom cosplaying at the expense of all. The freedom to open-carry around Walmart (a semi-automatic can assassinate forty-five people a minute if you’re a good shot) is more important than other people’s lives.

The freedom to compensate for perceived penile insufficiencies with weaponry is more important than kids not getting dead at school.

I prefer the freedom from gunshot wounds and death while engaging in “dangerous” behaviours like grocery shopping that comes with regulations based more on the left of the political spectrum.

Great moments in global politics see me obsessed, and the sinking of the America-that-was is a big event. I’ve been online and in journals obsessively as this unfolds, collecting information and opinions, and refining my own. Some people still think this moment in America’s history is a glitch, that this bell will be unrung at the next election.

Part of the problem is the propaganda issue in the US which is already massive: Americans aren’t seeing what the rest of the world sees these days. How could you? You have an administration openly lying, and openly blocking the dissemination of news. X and Meta are highly complicit.

America is in big trouble. Great powers collapse, and the US is on track, but things are starting to look like they’ll get ugly indeed. The MAGA-fuelled, kakistocratic autocracy is taking over. Dark days are also promised for Americans as their leadership threatens the world. Canadians are feeling a bit like Ukraine as Republicans continue to threaten war. And yes, talking about annexing a foreign country is talking about war.

People don’t want to believe what they see unfolding in the US because trouble like this hasn’t come to North America before. History, however, has to start somewhere. And the myth of American exceptionalism has been cracking for some time.

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