It's necessary to finish Reconstruction.
The unreconstructed are in the way of addressing both the current pandemic and climate change. The pandemic isn't an existential threat on species scale, but climate change is.
This can be viewed as particularly pressing in Canada, where Reconstruction was never formally started.
When Ulysses Grant left office, he went back to being Mr. Grant. Sure, he'd been a general (he'd been the general, but he wasn't serving any longer) and he'd been president (but the whole point to being President, rather than a king, is that you stop doing it). So, by address, Mr. Grant.
At least since President Carter, that hasn't been true; it's still, by address, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama.
That's a mistake; that's making the presidency holy, instead of a job. Once you do that, you can't think about it accurately; it picks up this nonsensical air of immutability rather than being a job, and the current holder of the job being subject to material evaluation.
Holiness has been undone before; the House of Hohenzollern is still rich, still owns (and sometimes inhabits) castles, but the head of the house is Mr. Hohenzollern. And that was with a fair number of people who did not want it undone, rather as there are a fair number today who demand a king and will not have the president be anything other than holy.
One of the best simple things a hypothetical Biden admin could do would be to change the protocol rules, and get real strict about former presidents losing the title of address. Yeah, sure, you had the fate of the world in your hands for awhile, but you put it down. The brimstone whiff of the mushroom cloud and soulless glint of the market attend on you no longer.
And, yeah, sure, Trump hasn't got his own fate in his hands. Trump's haplessness is not the point; the point is that which is public is not, after all, that which is holy. If you try to make the simple material necessity of the public sphere -- the requirement to keep the minimum qualification for civilisation and maintain for all citizens the odds of dying of violence or starvation so low as to be immaterial -- a holy thing, you wind up with something that isn't civilisation or in any respect holy.
You'd think more people would notice.
Civil authority exists so those entrusted with public office -- elected or otherwise, the auditor general or the chief medical officer or an appointed judge hold public office just as much as the premier does -- can at need exercise it for the preservation of the public welfare.
So when Fort Mac is like to burn, or there's a flood around Winnipeg, the exercise of civil authority is not -- and should not be! -- "you might wish to consider evacuating"; it's "Out, now." And the authority suffices to have you removed involuntarily.
This applies to public authority in the context of a pandemic. We can look around at where the control measures have worked with COVID-19, and where the control measures haven't -- Ontario is a strong "haven't" -- and note this difference; everywhere the pandemic control measures have worked have a positive construction of civil authority. Some states are straight up authoritarian -- Vietnam -- and some are open democracies -- New Zealand -- and there are a whole bunch in between (Singapore somewhere in the middle) but they've got this common element of a general legitimacy of the idea of exercising civil authority for the general public good.
So the worrying thing is not, in its way, that a whole bunch of people are going to suffer needless harm; it's that the political mechanisms to confer and use civil authority to the degree necessary to avoid general harm are busted. (This is apparently irrespective of political party inside Canada; it's not a uniquely conservative failing.) I'd put this down to the slow mammonite radicalisation of the last couple generations; the only legitimate purpose of government is to not tax the rich. (Yes, I know that sentence makes no sense. Take it up with the mammonites.)
Going further into the century of angry weather with no exercisable construction of civil authority sufficient to avoid general harm is a distressing prospect. Everyone individual dies, and I have no expectation of surviving the first big failure of agriculture, there's too much I can't eat. That's, well, it's a lapse of civilisation when people start dying of starvation. Lapse is not end, and no functioning construction of civil authority is end.
It don't leave me feeling hopeful.
(Ontario is a "strong haven't" because we're getting a second wave and because the current policy overtly and consciously includes killing and maiming teachers and school children in preference to taking the (obvious, simple, known) steps necessary to extirpate the disease. The purpose of the system is what it does; that this goes on the same pile as the customary ~10,000 annual excess deaths from air pollution doesn't render it excusable or palatable.)
The line goes that the Best Fencer in the World is not worried about the second best; they're worried about the worst, because they cannot predict what the idiot will do.
Lots of people are getting a certain distance into the UK government's pro-hard-Brexit stance, and how this is playing out in ways that are going to force the EU to economically isolate Northern Ireland in ways the UK government can then use as domestic "blame the EU" exculpation for the economic disaster of a hard Brexit. (And how this is really rash in a good-governance sense and how it's obviously unlawful and so on.)
People doing this analysis tend to be careful, professional, and knowledgeable; something of a handicap when examining mammonite intentions. (Remember that the whole point of mammonism is to make a counterfactual a god. It's not sensible stuff, and it's not followed by sensible people.)
What they're after, what the whole "new global trade", etc. is all about, is going after the legitimacy of national borders with respect to trade.
From people who are completely about national borders with respect to the movement of people this seems odd, but remember they've already done this about capital; barriers to entry (or exit) for capital existed in living memory, and the free movement of capital is a problem (if the capital can move freely and the people can't, you've got a system for producing at best serfdom). But free movement of capital is not enough of a problem if you're a mammonite; the goal of mammonism is to have all the money, and you can't do that if there's a government with the power to tax. So the government has to go, and part of the incremental project of removing the government is to remove the legal framework for having customs and border controls for goods and services. It's quite likely the plan is to declare that the UK has no customs and border controls, won't create any, won't perform any, and will do nothing except check for legality of residence (which if you don't have, they'll murder you).
This presents something of a problem for the EU. (Putin wants to get rid of the EU, remember, and is a significant shareholder in the the UK's Mammonism, LLC rebrand of the Conservative and Unionist Party. This is not solely about a fire-sale looting spree.) Making the UK implement customs checks requires straight-up conquest; impractical against a nuclear power and permanent security council member. Insurance blockade, well, difficult; lots of ongoing and annoying enforcement costs. (Starting with the resulting general starvation in the UK, which will neither affect the the people in power nor look good to the EU's membership.)
There will be US-sourced hulls available to transport UK goods; lots of American mammonites with shipping companies. The short-term cost-optimal thing is to just not bother with customs checks yourself, but that's equivalent to surrendering the European project, so you have to eat the increased cost and commercial drag, which only gets worse as Trump's second term involves declaring a duties-customs-and-fees holiday for everyone except China.
(Which holiday also bans trade with anyone who doesn't reciprocate.)
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