RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO . MONDAY, JULY 29, 2024. In the middle of the summer of 2024 the old-school conservative T.S. Eliot’s “History has many cunning passages” has suddenly come home to roost in the USA.

It would of course be rash to try to say this early just where the cunning will lead on November 5. The 2024 American election does seem to pose two quite different and even contradictory visions of the American future. Even with the new Harris-Trump contest, current 2024 polling (like the 2020 election) suggests large numbers of voters on each side.

It seems fair to say as well that, as presented by the mass media, both visions are tending towards their own extremes — while what most voters want is almost certainly closer to the middle.

This may be a too-Canadian view. Yet there is one similar middle-of-the-road side to the USA — especially in the north? And according to all the polls, the Poilievre Conservatives with a style and agenda not at all unlike the Trump Republicans are leading in Canada. Justin Trudeau is even less popular than Joe Biden, with no Canadian Kamala in the wings.

(Unless … you seriously think that former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor Mark Carney — born in the Canadian Northwest Territories, largely raised in Alberta, and a current Ottawa resident — could be equally cunning??)

I confess to being suddenly inspired by Kamala the Momala myself (despite Republican rhetoric about cat ladies). I had earlier held at best vague opinions about her. Now I’m all for her sudden progressive good news in the USA today.

With James Carville’s warning about “giddy elation” in mind, however, I also find myself thinking about the full expression of T.S. Eliot’s cunning view of history (written in 1919, just after the First World War, and first published in 1920) :

“Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.”

It has no doubt been President Joe Biden’s ultimate great virtue to give Democracy in America 2024 at least one great moment of escape from and even transcendence of all the contrived corridors and issues, deceit, whispering ambitions, and vanities in Washington, DC and beyond.

And then President Biden just may have cunningly moved the ball forward by his accompanying quiet endorsement of his loyal Vice President Kamala Harris.

Still 2024 is, by virtually all accounts, a much better managed Trump campaign than in 2020.

In my own view as grandfather of five young people born in the USA, Donald J. Trump is plain insane in so many of his public policy pronouncements. (See his latest appeal to Christians to vote Republican one last time, after which voting will never again be needed to guard Christian values in MAGAmerica — values which Mr Trump of course spurns in his private life.)

Yet I also agree that Trump has shown a cunning grasp of the current quite large conservative political constituency which does feel, in various respects, that its America is slipping away, in the great rush of the new information technology and the rising global economy.

I take some heart from my TV-watching partner’s sense that in her sudden new rise to the American political heights Kamala Harris has played her cards so far so well. The time between now and November (just 100 days, some said on US TV a few days ago?) probably will be more like an extremely high-stakes card game than any ordinary US election.

I take some heart as well from recent local political events in my own backyard, just north of the northern border of the USA.

In a 2023 by-election I didn’t think the New Democrat Olivia Chow would be a good mayor of Toronto. (I voted for the Liberal Mitzie Hunter.) I was wrong. In an almost palpably constructive way, Mayor Chow has come to politically personify the new human diversity driving the future, as the Conservative John Tory could never manage.

This has, I think now, been altogether good for a City of Toronto where more than half the current residents were born outside Canada. Maybe Kamala Harris can finally do something similar in the USA, on a much grander and more important scale. Meanwhile a 100 Days War is now in progress, from New York to LA. May the best woman win on November 5, 2024 …