Canada-U.S. Law Institute Special Webinar on the 2020 U.S. Election - The 2020 U.S. Election: Implications for Canada.

NOVEMBER 10, 2020

Speakers: Dr. Christopher Sands & Chios Carmody

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR CHIOS CARMODY: For those of you I haven't met, my name is Chi Carmody, and I'm an associate professor here at Western's Faculty of Law and the Canadian national director of the Canada-U.S. Law Institute. The institute was founded in 1976--that's forty-four years ago--as a joint creation of both Western Law and the Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio. And it was founded by none other than our former dean, and later governor general, David Johnston, to examine legal issues of relevance in the Canada-U.S. context.

And we're here today in this webinar to welcome and hear from Professor Chris Sands. Chris is a senior research professor and director of the Center for Canadian Studies at the renowned Washington-based School of Advanced International Studies--also known as SAIS--at Johns Hopkins University. They're located in Baltimore but also have a Washington, D.C. campus, and that's where SAIS is located. And earlier this year, Chris also accepted a concurrent federal appointment as director of the Canada Institute at the [Woodrow] Wilson [International] Center for Scholars.

Now, from 1993 to 2007, Chris was a fellow and director of Canada projects at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And from 2007 until 2016, he was a senior fellow and director of an Initiative on North American Competitiveness at the Hudson Institute, a well-known Washington, D.C. think tank.

In 2009, Chris was our Canada-U.S. Law Institute distinguished lecturer here at Western Law where he spoke, at that time, on the Obama opportunity for Canada. And for the last few years he's served very capably as a member of our institute's Executive Committee. His most recent book is Canada-U.S. Relations: Sovereignty or Shared Institutions?, and he's currently working on a book on the evolution of North America's political economy.

Chris is an American, but he's an American who knows a tremendous amount about Canada--more, I think, than probably most Canadians. But, I think it also stands to reason. Chris originally hails from Detroit where his dad, Gary Sands, taught for many years in the Department of Urban Studies at Wayne State University. So, Chris is therefore both a Red Wings and a Tigers fan. But, when nobody's looking, he also likes to root for the Caps, the Habs, the Canucks, and those ever-benighted Maple Leafs.

(Laughter.)

He's here today to speak to us about the 2020 election and its implications for Canada. And before passing the mic over to him, I'm going to thank both Susanna Eayrs, our Faculty of Law's communications officer, and Corey Meingarten, our systems administrator, for helping to make this event possible.

I'd also like to point out that, as with any webinar, Chris's remarks and some to-and-fro between us, we'll be taking questions from the audience, so please feel free to forward them via the "chat" function during our conversation or thereafter. So, Chris, welcome to this webinar.

DR. CHRISTOPHER SANDS: Thank you, Chi.

ASSOC. PROF. CARMODY: And what's your take on the 2020 election outcome?

DR. SANDS: Well, thank you very much, and I mentioned in one of my posts on social media that I had first given this lecture at the very beginning of the Obama administration, I called it the "The Obama Opportunity for Canada," and here we are now twelve years later and we're looking at Obama's vice president on his way to becoming president. So, it's fitting that I'm back. I don't know why you didn't invite me to give a Trump opportunity for Canada presentation--that would have been interesting.

(Laughter.)

ASSOC. PROF. CARMODY: Well, I was going to ask you Chris, if--and maybe we'll save it for later--there's a Biden opportunity for Canada and what that would be. But, I think in the to-and-fro that you and I have had before this conversation, we wanted to give you some time to maybe make some preliminary remarks. So please, go ahead.

DR. SANDS: Sure. Absolutely. So, let me start by talking about the election and what's happening in the United States, and then I'll talk a little bit about where the opportunity might lie, and I'd really be happy to have questions.

So first, what's happening. One of the fundamental changes that we're seeing in the United States is occurring because for almost forty, fifty years, we've had the baby boom generation as the largest cohort in the American electorate. And that cohort had fairly stable ideas of what a Republican or what a Democrat looked like. And so, the parties, which in the United States are sort of big tent parties that try to vacuum up as many votes as they possibly can, and are driven competitively to try to win elections, ideology being a secondary consideration--it's all about keeping everyone in the tent. And in that dynamic, as the baby boomers have gradually gotten older, they've come to all the senior jobs--they run the political parties.

But as of this election, we've seen the millennial generation become the dominant cohort in the electorate. And so, part of what you're seeing is the older generation trying to figure out how to win the younger generation over, and the younger generation being frustrated that their politics, their priorities, are not necessarily reflected in what they're seeing from the political parties. And if you know people on both sides of the border you can see that dynamic, which is frustrating to a lot of people, but is a necessary part of the change.

Now, one of the things that comes from that, which I think is very important to keep in mind for Canadians, is that the nature of the parties is also going to change. Donald Trump's election was a kind of milestone historically, because for a long time the Republican Party was for strong national defense, free trade and balanced budgets, and low taxes, and a certain amount of social conservatism--opposition to abortion, and promoting prayer in schools, and other sorts of values. Whereas Democrats were the pro-union, labor union party that cared about the least fortunate and focused on identity politics issues for trying to champion minorities, whether they were African Americans, Hispanics, or LGBTQ. Any group that felt itself a minority was going to, they hoped, identify with the Democrats.

And that's the old system. And what Donald Trump did was respond to a famous book by Ruy Teixeira which argued the United States was, through immigration, going to become a majority-minority society. Having had White, Anglo-Saxon males as the--and women, men and women, I guess, both--as the majority for a long time, we were suddenly going to have a majority that you could assemble from African Americans, plus Latinos, plus Asians, plus a few other of these groups.

And that, for those Canadian viewers who think of, sort of, the old line about the Liberal Party--that it was the "natural governing party" of Canada because it was so centrist--the Democrats were preparing to be the natural governing party of the United States. That is, to run the U.S. forever.

While at the same time, Republicans were wondering if there was any future for them. And they kept trying. Compassionate conservatism under George W. Bush, Mitt Romney was going to be kind of an efficient businessman president, you even had John McCain running on a sort of a patriotic soldier who hates war kind of dynamic. All of those were attempts to try to retool the Republican Party and, although George W. Bush did get elected, the others didn't, and the Party was in some turmoil.

As a result, here in the Washington Beltway we had these rich discussions about, "What is a conservative?" Different magazines had their own brands. It was William F. Buckley, or it was libertarian conservatism. Lots of debates about neoconservatism, and all these varieties. Where Democrats looked much more comfortable, much more stable. They knew who they were, they were supporting the expansion of the welfare state--Obamacare being, or the Affordable Care Act being the latest brick in that wall that included social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs. So, they were fine where they were. It was the Republicans who were in trouble.

And Donald Trump came at that very weak party like a freight train and pushed a lot of the speculative pretenders to leave the Republican Party aside, and instead substituted an idea, which is that the Republicans would be the workers' party. A party of blue-collar, hardworking people, including non-college educated and some college educated men but also women, against political correctness, for traditional values--because often the labor union contingent does have a certain amount of social conservatism, at least in terms of family and wanting to have some autonomy within the family. And he successfully built a majority using that in 2016.

And it should be remembered that, in this election, he had nearly half the electorate very much behind him. Not only did he not lose his base, but he was able actually to expand. And the 2020 election showed something very important, which was the proof of his concept.

In 2020, he showed that he was able to win significant numbers of African American men, Hispanic men, and suburbanites who saw in his appeal something for them which they didn't feel they were getting from the Democrats. And during the Obama years, of course the Democrats had changed, not intending to, but had become very much the party that spoke for Wall Street and for the big tech companies in Silicon Valley. They almost always gave their donations to the Democrats now, and the Republicans had really lost them. There was a bit of a Main Street versus Wall Street tension, where Republicans did better with small business, but this was a kind of dynamic that the Democrats found themselves in possession of. And so, in 2016--very anti-establishment year--Trump didn't want any of those people. He was happy to...