RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2026. Among Canadians it has become a commonplace that the belittling attacks of President Trump in his intermittent 51st state war on Canada have finally inspired a new wave of Canadian patriotism, deeper and tougher than anyone alive today can remember.

Similar breezes may be at least starting to blow in the adjacent USA itself, as April showers give way to May flowers in the (Western Christian and now so-called Common) year of 2026.

There at last seem a few reasons to believe that President Trump may finally also inspire some much vaster 21st century new wave in his own country, in the venerable tradition of Democracy in America, first celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s and 1840s.

(And echoed several times since, including FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s and 1940s, and the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.)

To take just a few cases in point, on April 23, 2026 President Barack Obama posted on TwitterX : “Hope isn’t blind optimism — it arises in the face of uncertainty. If you look at our history, we’ve gone through some rough patches. But we tend to come out on the other side of them stronger than before.”

On April 22 FactPost@factpostnews informed TwitterX users that, as reported by no less than FOX Business News on TV : “Trump’s approval on the economy is at just 30%. His [broader or more general] approval is at 33%. Can Trump turn things around before the midterms? It’s possibly a disaster for the Senate and the House.”

A disaster, that is, for Republicans and Trump supporters. On this very upbeat scenario for we the good guys, wherever we are, the Democrats would win both the House and the Senate in the midterm elections this coming Novermber 3, 2026 — only a little more than six months away.

Until recently the conventional wisdom was that the Democrats will likely win a majority in the House this coming November 3. As in the midterm elections of 2018 during Donald Trump’s first unlikely presidency, however, the Republicans would hang onto the Senate.

Winning at least a majority in the Senate now seems a potential Democrat triumph as well. And any such comprehensive win in both houses of Congress could seriously launch some wider new wave of Democracy in America.

At the same time, in a world where a week can be a long time in politics, six months can be even longer. No one on the good guys’ side wants to underestimate the political depths of Donald Trump, MAGA, the Trumpian Republican Party, and the underlying conflict between, say, rural conservative America and urban liberal America in the 2020s.

So far the strongest element in the new wave of Democracy in America that President Donald Trump may ironically enough be bringing to life has been ordinary Americans. They have been out on the streets, knocking on doors, protesting the vast arrogance and malevolence of the American state under right-wing conservative domination.

I think this has to continue somehow for the forces of progress to win big in the November 3 midterms. And I can only hope it does. Many enthusiastic citizens ready to do the hard work of democratic politics, down on the ground, is what is most admirable (and important) in de Tocqueville’s high tradition of American democracy.

What will the new democratic wave of the 2020s look like? I don’t think that’s altogether discernible yet. Pete Buttigieg has nonetheless offered a related observation that strikes me as apt and interesting :

“My word of warning to my own political party is that we would make a terrible mistake if we thought that our job was to just take power somehow and then put everything back the way it was … We’re not out to … just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together … That’s … not what we need. … the truth is they are destroying things right and left … a lot of good, important things … some useless things too, because they’re destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.”

It strikes me that just what these different terms might be under some new Democratic governing ethos remains very much open to debate right now.

If we see increasingly more clarity on this front over the next six months, that could be a sign Democrats actually will do very well in the 2026 midterms. (And then there will be another long enough journey to the presidential election of 2028.)

The encouraging thing at this juncture, in the spring of 2026, is various bits of evidence that the venerable tradition of Democracy in America so aggressively opposed by the Trump II administration just may be about to come alive in full bloom and vigour, yet again.

Or as the eternal optimist Barack Obama has put it : “If you look at our history, we’ve gone through some rough patches. But we tend to come out on the other side of them stronger than before.”