RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK,TORONTO. FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 8, 2024. Like others I am altogether surprised by the Trump Republican victory in the 2024 US election.

Over the past few weeks, however, I can claim to have written at least one arguably prescient sentence on the subject : “I also can’t help wondering if America is quite ready to start singing Beyoncé’s new song, at the precipice of an incredible shift” (posted on October 26 : see below).

The election has now shown clearly enough that America is not quite ready to sing Beyoncé’s new song — and elect as president a class-act California woman born in the USA to middle-class Asian-African immigrant parents .

Like others again, I wanted to believe that America was ready to take this bold step forward. I still think it some day will be. (Just as it finally did elect Barack Obama for two straight terms.) And the states of the Union in which I could most agreeably live today are those won by Kamala Harris in 2024 — from New York, Massachusetts, and Virginia in the east, eg, to Colorado, California, and Oregon in the west.

Meanwhile Andrew Coyne has wisely stressed : “She got 48 per cent of the vote — more than Donald Trump got in 2016 or George Bush in 2000, both of whom were elected president.”

This suggests something like the UK 2016 Brexit vote, where in round numbers 52% voted Yes and 48% voted No. Now, some eight years later : “As of May 2024, 55 percent of people in Great Britain thought that it was wrong to leave the European Union, compared with 31 percent who thought it was the right decision.”

It seems that the initial 52% estimate in 2024 in the USA will/may finally be much closer to 50%. But all this could nonetheless be one signpost on the road to wherever Donald Trump and the sometimes deranged forces he seems to represent will try to take Democracy in America over the next four years.

The Red Surprise election of 2024 (insofar as it actually exists beyond mere political rhetoric) will arguably enough prove to be the peak of the Trumpian Triumph — as it tracks the 2016 referendum’s 52% Pro-Brexit in the UK to its subsequent fall to less than a third of the various peoples of the UK today.

Of course this kind of analogy has its limits. Another side of what strikes me as the inevitable fate of the Trumpian ordeal ahead has been nicely captured by the caption across a photo of a red MAGA baseball hat, posted at 8:25 PM (ET) on Nov 7 by Justice Horn :

“The Bible predicted that Christians would follow a false prophet and that they would wear his mark on their foreheads … Revelation 13:16–17.” The apocalypse that the far-right prophets at the bottom of the calculated Trumpian ethos anticipate is real and will happen, that is to say. But in the end they will be on the losing side, with their false prophet gone.

So it is written. So it will be. (Though to actually read verses 16 and 17 of chapter 13 in the Book of Revelation mostly reminds me why reading this concluding book of the Bible seriously for the first time convinced me that, in my late teens or possibly very early 20s, I had to leave the otherwise good Baptist church in which I had been baptized as an adult at the age of 12, along with friends in my Sunday school class.)

One thing I have finally learned from these and many other sources over my increasing years now is that in all the great American movies the good guys win in the end. And in the rugged saga of Democracy in America that began in the early 19th century the progressives are always the good guys — and even the most truly American Americans in the opinion of many whose views also cannot be denied. (At least as we see such things up here, north of the North American Great Lakes.)