I’ve been actively avoiding writing about the election. Partly, because I’ve also been avoiding thinking about it. I spent election night at the residence of the Consul General of Finland. No, I don’t usually observe American elections with Nordic nationals, but I was invited to be a guest of the Consul General, Okko-Pekka Salmimies, and it seemed a better choice than stress-eating my way through the evening.
(In case you were wondering, journalists aren’t supposed to eat while on assignment, because food could be considered a gift and receiving any gift violates the perception of impartiality. Regrettably, the Santa Monica City Council voted against holding councilmembers to similar standards, but I digress.)
The reason I was invited was that the Consul General was hosting a reception, and the reason for the reception was that a delegation of Finnish diplomats was visiting to study democracy in the United States as well as democracy in Los Angeles. I suspect our weather was a motivating factor, but Finland does happen to have a consulate in Brentwood. It turns out that L.A. is the location of 91 consulates, making it home to the third largest consular corps in the world. I had no idea, though I suspect that also might have something to do with our weather.
I don’t believe the Finnish delegation was here for some esoteric Tocqueville-like undertaking, but rather a pragmatic effort to witness American realpolitik first-hand. I anticipated indifference to the voting results, partly because diplomats aren’t known for displaying their emotions and also because the invitees were mostly in possession of foreign passports and not subject to the slings and arrows of our domestic political fortune.
However, there was an unmistakably bleak mood as the CNN map turned crimson. For the Finns, the American election wasn’t about transgender rights, abortion or January 6th. It was about Ukraine. For a simple reason: Finland has an 830 mile border with Russia. To help put that in perspective, Finland is only 721 miles from tip to toe.
“What's going to happen to my hometown, which is like 50 kilometers from the Russian border?” asked Laura Beatty, an expatriate who lives in L.A.
People talk about the butterfly effect, but this might be the elephant effect. Republican votes in Georgia can have geopolitical reverberations in Finland. “The United States is a great power,” Ambassador Salmimies said. “We are reluctantly a smaller one.”
He wasn’t being humble; he was clarifying the stakes. It may be a sign of self-absorption that we’ve spent so much time bemoaning the hyperpartisanship in our country without fully contemplating its effect beyond our borders. “The more you get polarized, the weaker you get,” the Ambassador said, “and no country is strong if you are internally weak.”
The implication was that American weakness is feared far more than American strength, which is a pretty logical perspective when you consider the neighborhood the Finns live in. “We're talking about existential threats,” said Ambassador Salmimies, expressing concern about both Ukraine and Finnish borders. “If you allow someone to be a bully, there is no end to it unless you stand together.”
He was referring to Vladimir Putin, but his words could just as easily have been about our President-elect or even our local Council candidates. Unfortunately, some of them also made bullying and bigoted statements during the campaign, seemingly in the hope of appealing to angry voters. I returned home on election night convinced such voters were now in the majority.
But not in Santa Monica. Despite the unsettling addicts in our streets and the recent rise in violent crime, Santa Monica voters rejected the politics of victimization. I may not love the idea of a left-wing supermajority on Council, but I’m grateful that in this small sliver of the country, scapegoating was not rewarded.
However, in the process, Mayor Phil Brock lost his bid for re-election, and despite disagreeing with him on many topics, I believe that his departure from City Hall is a loss for the city. I had a lengthy interview with Mayor Brock last week, too lengthy to encapsulate in the space remaining.
So I will leave that for my next column, and I will leave you with a reminder that we are indeed a “great” power and a “great” country, in all meanings of that word, which doesn’t belong to any one political party. It’s easy to forget our vitality, when we focus on our deficiencies and disappointments. We face challenges, no doubt about it, and we are battle-scarred. For many of us, it has become exponentially harder to even read a newspaper. So I thank you for doing so, and I take it as a sign of our resilience and fortitude.
