Mark Carney “now leads the west,” tweeted Anthony Scaramucci the other day. It was a reaction to the Canadian prime minister’s decision to pull out of trade talks with the United States at the last minute on Friday night — “something that few other world leaders before him have dared to do,” as The New York Times’ Matina Stevis-Gridneff put it. “We’re at a juncture where other countries may be very closely watching how this plays out as they also are becoming increasingly frustrated with the demands the U.S. is placing on them in these largely one-sided trade agreements,” was how one trade expert put it to The Washington Post.

Prime Minister Carney has certainly been keen to fill the role of global head of the resistance to the Trump administration. A Wall Street Journal story last month highlighted the degree that Carney has been pressing Europe’s leaders behind the scenes to accept the premise that “the old America isn’t coming back” and adopt a less conciliatory stance towards the White House in response.

Carney, I do think, dislikes the United States quite deeply, both philosophically and personally, and holds an ideology that posits Europe and England as morally superior civilizations and better allies for Canadian interests. I think there’s plenty of takers for this worldview, in Canada, Europe, and even America itself, and to the degree Carney is seen as the man embodying a pivot away from a repulsive, belligerent United States and towards some new alliance of calm and principled western powers who treat each other with respect and fairness, Carney’s international standing will continue to rise.

Yet as I wrote previously about his Davos’ speech, Carney is also a Canadian politician who has to operate within the confines of Canadian domestic politics. There is a tension between these two roles he seeks to occupy simultaneously — the grandness of being a leader of a principled liberal world order, championing transnational interconnectedness, and the smallness of being a Canadian politician, captive to the petty hangups of an often deeply insecure, parochial country and all its assorted taboos, shibboleths, and mythologies.

Carney spoke to the Canadian public on Saturday, offering three reasons why his government walked away from trade talks with the US administration. Two of the three were broadly sympathetic by objective standards: Trump apparently insisted on keeping tariffs on certain types of Canadian-made trucks even as automobile tariffs were lowered on other makes, and evidently wanted “language” in the Canada-US deal that would “restrict our ability to have other trade deals” with other countries, presumably by locking Canada into a so-called “fortress North America” continental tariff regime. But Carney’s third reason for walking away was odd, and has been subject to considerably less media and political scrutiny precisely because it’s so odd.

Here is how the prime minister put it:

I’ll give you a third. Continual efforts, always resisted, as I said in my remarks, and always will be resisted, efforts to restrict our protections of our language, our culture, and in effect our sovereignty.

The “as I said in my remarks” refers to a statement earlier in his press conference where he said (translated from French):1

We were not prepared to compromise on our sovereignty, the protection of the French language, and our culture. To our American colleagues, let us be clear: for my government and for Canada, these issues were never on the table, even though the United States tried until the very last minute.

Later on, Carney spoke of the Americans trying to “influence our cultural support and language protections,” and characterized this as the poison pill that ended the talks once and for all (again, in French):

We were ready and close to having a comprehensive agreement that would be fair to both countries. We were close to that happening, and it seemed that we were close to reaching a comprehensive and fair agreement with the United States. But they made changes, including threats on the French language and Quebec culture and Canadian culture. That is not acceptable. That would never be acceptable, and for that reason, that marked the end of the stage of negotiations. [emphasis added]

Asked for more specifics, this exchange ensued (again in French):

Q: You talked about compromises on our sovereignty, the French language and culture and key sectors. What specific concessions were you not prepared to make?

CARNEY: Well, for example, there were suggestions about discoverability online involving Canadian culture and French media. That’s one example. As well as subsidies and support for our culture and the French language, and even information provided on Canadian products. So there are a number of examples. And it was unacceptable right from the start. But the Americans kept trying and trying and we said no. Ultimately it’s simple. That was never on the table for Canada. And it would not have been acceptable to Canadians.

Carney must provide greater clarity to Canadians about what exactly he means by all this. While Canadians might tell pollsters they agree in the abstract with the need to “protect Canadian culture,” Carney’s sticking points appear to be extremely narrow, interest group-driven things — particularly Quebec interest group driven things — that I can’t imagine most Canadians expect to be beyond the realm of compromise in a multi-billion dollar treaty with Canada’s largest trade partner.

Ottawa spends millions every year subsidizing what is euphemistically called the Canadian “cultural sector,” including movies and TV shows few Canadians watch, magazines few Canadians read, and radio stations few Canadians listen to. In 2023, the Trudeau government passed Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, which promises to boost the discoverability of government-certified “Canadian content” on streaming platforms in ways that have yet to be fully decided. And Ottawa of course legally mandates French-English bilingual packaging for all goods sold across Canada, including goods imported from other countries.

Some of these policies are reasonable things for American trade negotiators to oppose. Complaining about Canadian cultural subsidies seems a bit irrelevant, just given it’s hard to argue American cultural products are in any way failing to compete in the Canadian marketplace. But the Online Streaming Act, which I have long opposed, very explicitly seeks to discriminate against American content by putting Ottawa’s finger on discoverability algorithms in a way that will harm the interests of American creators seeking to build a Canadian audience through platforms like Netflix and YouTube. Bilingual packaging is likewise a burdensome obligation Canada imposes on American goods of which no comparable ask exists in the opposite direction.

Despite Carney’s grand language, it is exceedingly difficult to believe it “would not have been acceptable to Canadians” if he moderated government policy in some of these realms of contention — say, by repealing C-11 (which he’s already significantly watered down anyway), agreeing to cuts in cultural subsidies, and introducing a quota or something for imports of goods in English-only packaging. The hardline stance he actually took, by contrast, the idea that it was this particular bundle of issues that “marked the end of the stage of negotiations,” (a “red line” as an unnamed aide would later put it) only makes sense in the context of Canadian domestic politics, particularly the disproportionately large role the province of Quebec plays dictating the priorities of the Liberal Party.

A large portion of Quebec’s French-Canadian majority believe themselves to be a severely endangered people on the brink of cultural extinction. Massive federal subsidies to Quebec cultural industries are one of the few perceived cures, along with an uncompromising insistence that the French language be used in any realm of life where the federal government holds even the slightest whiff of jurisdiction. Carney’s Liberals won 44 of Quebec’s 77 seats in last year’s election — a quarter of his parliamentary caucus. It is very difficult to understand why Carney does anything he does without understanding his reliance on Quebec votes, as well as his insecurity that the province may not fully trust him, an English-Canadian Anglophile with shaky French skills and no personal connection to the province, as an avatar of their interests. It is the same reason why the prime minister has been so dogmatically unwilling to compromise in trade talks on the one issue in which Canada is unambiguously in the wrong — the country’s hideously protectionist dairy industry, based in Quebec.2

In the hours since Carney’s decision to abandon trade negotiations with the Trump administration was announced, Canadian pundits have applauded in unison that “no deal is better than a bad one.” Carney’s high poll numbers ensures the public largely defers to his judgment about what’s good or bad, but a higher standard of proof should be demanded.

If Carney was prepared to walk away from a flawed but better-than-nothing trade deal — one comparable to what the Europeans, Japanese, South Koreans, and British have already secured — it is appropriate to expect him to reveal what exactly made this deal so much worse, ideally by proving that Trump expressed a level of greed and meanness towards the Canadians that was appalling even for him. But if it was merely a standard Trump deal that Carney opposed for basically domestic political reasons, to pander to Quebec voters and lean into his anti-American tendencies that are popular elsewhere, then the prime minister has revealed himself to be a much smaller man than the world thinks.

A “soft launch” to unseat Pierre Poilievre as head of the Conservative Party of Canada was how the conservative influencer Marc Nixon characterized it. Jason Kenney, the former premier of Alberta, had made a grand, seemingly unprovoked campaign-style policy declaration that he was officially against supply management in the Canadian dairy sector. Most Canadians don’t know or care what “supply management” is, but singling you’re against it is a good way to establish bona fides of political seriousness with high information voters and policy wonks. And “serious” is the adjective Kenney has always wanted people to apply to him. That, and “ambitious.”

There’s little evidence Poilievre’s hold on the Conservative leadership is shaky. A recent Angus Reid poll had 75% of Conservative voters claiming a positive opinion of him, while in January the party proper affirmed his leadership with 87.4% approval. If an election were held today, odds are high the Conservatives would win a share of the popular vote comparable to last year’s election — which is to say, their highest share in 37 years.

The Conservatives did lose that election, of course, and even polling competitively still means stubborn second place. When I talk to Conservative politicians about this, there’s a palatable sense of frustration, though blame is directed less towards Pierre than a Canadian political climate that feels fundamentally irrational. The issues Poilievre has made central to his political brand — affordability and the economy — are consistently ranked by voters as their highest priorities. Yet even as all the big economic metrics — unemployment, inflation, GDP growth, you name it — are worse now than under Justin Trudeau, Carney remains the most popular politician in the country.

Jason Kenney clearly thinks things would be different if he was running the Conservatives. In 2022, he resigned as Alberta’s Conservative premier after only receiving a 51% mandate from the party to continue his tenure — widely interpreted as a rebuke from the right to his Covid lockdown policies. Now in exile, he’s been careful not to criticize Poilievre’s leadership directly, but has been an outspoken free agent on social media, constantly issuing long, didactic tweets weighing in on the issues of the day with rhetoric that can’t help but invite compare-and-contrast with Pierre.

Kenney has always been quite anti-American for a Conservative, and an explicit and vicious critic of President Trump in particular, that “noted Epstein pal and ‘beauty pageant’ owner who ‘grabs ‘em by the p…y’” etc., with matching vitriol for what he calls the president’s “MAGA amen corner in Canada.”

Questionable diplomacy, but Kenney frames it as patriotic. Like Carney, his is a vision of Canadian identity defined by constant loud assertions of moral superiority to “the Americans.” Like Carney, he is deeply, mawkishly Anglophilic, believing loyalty to Britain’s monarchy to be the defining element of Canadian life.1 He even has his own Carneyism: “grovelling is not a strategy.”

The implied rebuttal to Poilievre is obvious: Pierre has been too agnostic about Trump’s America, too oblivious to the degree the Conservative Party is perceived as unwilling to resist what Kenney calls “Donald Trump’s erratic, bad faith attacks on our economy & sovereignty.” Kenney clearly sees an opening for a new sort of Conservative leader, one pushing an anti-American, royalist, “Red Tory” theory of Canadian nationalism, capable of beating the Liberals at the patriot game.

On one level, it’s all quite preposterous. Kenney’s understanding of Canadian identity is weird, dated, and esoteric (among other painful affectations, he insists on calling July 1 “Dominion Day”). Most Canadians probably remember him as one of the more rank partisans of the Harper years, yet he enjoys little goodwill with the Conservative base, not just for the Covid policies that led to his downfall in Alberta, but for presiding over a record-high intake of immigrants during his tenure as federal immigration minister — a calibration point that helped inform Trudeau’s even-higher intakes.2 His eagerness to defend the Carney Liberals from the attacks of “MAGA North” reads as gratuitous white-knighting.

But despite it all, there is a faction within the Canadian Conservative staffer-pundit-lobbyist industrial complex that eats this sort of thing up. There is a conservative clique sometimes called the “New Right,” overlappingly associated with the blog Without Diminishment, Caroline Elliott’s failed campaign for head of the British Columbia Conservatives, and parts of Premier Ford’s political machine in Ontario, that craves a Conservative Party that’s more ideologically pragmatic, more anti-American, more sentimental and Anglophilic, more spiritual (if not necessarily religious), and more inclined to see government as a force capable of imparting meaning, purpose, and faith upon a citizenry perceived to be wanting. Without putting too fine a point on it, it’s a faction that seems to draw disproportionately from men, who, like Kenney himself, have few interests beyond politics and history, and regard with considerable pity and condescension what my friend Sean Speer recently described as bourgeoise “normies” whose priorities lay elsewhere.

In short, there’s little reason to suspect Kenney would lack the human infrastructure necessary to mount a viable challenge to Pierre at some critical juncture in the near future. A conservative politician of Kenney’s pedigree is well aware that Canadian conservatism is a fractious coalition, with different party leaders embodying different styles within a diverse movement. One gets the impression his reentry to federal politics will be informed by the sense his faction is on the upswing.

Yet Kenney’s would-be boosters (and indeed Kenney himself) must ponder the low likelihood that bringing mutiny and schism into the Conservative Party in the pursuit of making such an odd and divisive man a candidate for prime minister will ultimately prove worth it.

“All this requires is a different vision of Canada. This vision must not simply be western; it must be reforming. Those who, like the Red Tories, believe we can change the system by adopting its rhetoric and co-opting its vested interests are wrong. That is, after all, why we are here today.

The Joe Clarks may succeed in making themselves more at home in Ottawa, but to their constituents, they sound more like the same old song. In the stale air of politics, what Canada really requires is the sweeping winds of change. This will challenge the vested interests of the National Policy, the Welfare State, and the Quebec question, and they will resist. In the end, however, these groups will have to cast aside their narrow definitions of Canada — the country they claim to love — because that country can no longer be built on the economic exploitation and political disfranchisement of western Canada.”

— Stephen Joseph Harper speaking at the founding convention of the Reform Party of Canada, Winnipeg 1987.

Earlier this year, Stephen Harper had his official prime ministerial portrait unveiled in the House of Commons. It was done in a style now fashionable in political portraiture, where the scene is cluttered with a bunch of little knick-knacks representing various things the subject cared about: books, sports memorabilia, pets, smaller portraits of family members, etc. It brings a literalism to an art form once known for subtlety; we no longer need to interpret the creases and shadows in a politician’s face to discern his life story — anything that ever mattered to him is now explicitly splayed out for all to see.

Harper was in some ways the first truly middle class Canadian to serve as prime minister; it’s fitting his portrait, which depicts, among other things, a Beatles mug and his cat Stanley, is so aggressively bourgeois — far more Kinkade than Gainsborough.

Attended by a who’s-who of Ottawa bigshots, the portrait unveiling also represented the culmination of Harper’s steady evolution into the sort of person he once loathed — a creature of the Canadian political establishment.

Harper began his political career as a leader of a right-wing insurgency against Ottawa’s existing political order; four decades later he’s yukking it up with Chretien and Carney. A figure once distrusted and feared by the broad Canadian left as a dangerous radical concealing a horrifying “hidden agenda” — a man who, in 2008 the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois attempted to instigate a coup through the governor-general to unseat — is now praised by his former partisan rivals as a cheerful team player operating firmly within a settled ideological consensus. A defiant political career is now retold as a much friendlier story — including by Harper himself.

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Harper was first elected to the House of Commons in 1993 as a Calgary representative of the upstart Reform Party; a party that believed the country’s existing Tory-Liberal duopoly was both economically illiterate and unhealthily obsessed with eastern shibboleths, most of which revolved around appeasing Quebec. To get the job he ran against Jim Hawkes, the Progressive Conservative MP who had once been his mentor; his maiden speech as a parliamentarian, was a condemnation of the idea of fiscal stimulus.

Harper the Reform MP was an interesting figure, as was his subsequent incarnation as a conservative pundit heading the National Citizens Coalition. His 1987 address to the Reform Party faithful (quoted above) critiquing John A. Macdonald’s National Policy as the root of western alienation offers a valuable rebuttal to the traditional Eastern narrative of Canadian history. His 1997 speech mocking the poor design of the Canadian parliamentary system remains a bracingly honest read. The fact that such an iconoclast wound up as prime minister is a testament to the open-mindedness of Canadian democracy.

Yet governing moderated Harper’s earlier instincts. As Prime Minister Carney playfully reminded at the portrait ceremony, Harper’s once ironclad commitment to balanced budgets softened in response to the Great Recession — a fact now often held up as either a tribute to his pragmatism or the fundamental unseriousness of libertarian economic orthodoxy. A need to preserve political power made him more sensitive to the demands of the protectionist industries and regional lobbies he once scorned as rent-seekers. He became more impressed by ceremony and ritual, and came to see the grandness of the Canadian political system as central to the Canadian identity — as Canadian politicians are want to do.

But Harper also lost interest in telling a contrarian story about Canada. The new Harper is accordingly far more predictable and boring, interested primarily in things that are either uncontroversial or at least uncontroversial to Ottawa people. He now demands to be understood as someone who loves history, loves the military, loves hockey, loves the arctic, loves Quebec, loves French, loves the First Nations, loves the monarchy, loves “our parliamentary traditions,” and so on. That, evidently, was what Harperism was really all about.

There was a time when Harper didn’t like the word “Tory” and didn’t think it applied to him. Today, however, he seems eager to be understood as a practitioner of a kind of old-fashioned sentimental conservatism of rather niche appeal; a conservatism preoccupied with flags and dead prime ministers and a kind of cheesy anti-Americanism where we’re supposed to enjoy naughtily rooting for the British side in the War of Independence.

Some of this revisionist myth-making veers into the insultingly ahistorical. Among the dozens of blunt symbols in his portrait, Harper’s tricolored tie is apparently supposed to represent the three essential factions of the 21^st century conservative movement he unified: blue for classic Tories, green for western Canadian populists, and light blue for Quebec. Of course, in reality Quebec played no meaningful role in Harper’s political rise. His crowning success was uniting two warring factions of English Canadian conservatives around his leadership in 2002 — merging his upstart Reform Party with the remaining Progressive Conservative rump. Two parties united, two men shook hands. Quebec, far more than any other province, overwhelmingly rejected the whole thing. The greatest triumph of Harper’s electoral career — his 2011 reelection to a majority government — saw his support in Quebec decrease, from 10 seats to five.

To be sure, Harper gave far more thought to Quebec than it ever did to him. He had his theories about what was good for the Quebeckers and what they should want. Though he clearly never understood the province in any strategically helpful way, he came to believe it was immoral not to try. And so he began his speech at his portrait dedication in French, performing the ritual that Peter Brimelow — a Canadian political commentator ‘80s-era Harper greatly admired — once described as akin to Irish grannies leaving bowls of milk for the leprechauns.

As prime minister, Harper’s public image was aloof, businesslike, and taciturn. In retirement, he’s become more relaxed and chatty, but still very much the man biographer William Johnson summarized as “coldly intellectual and coldly arrogant.” In the Trump era, Harper has offered himself as a voice of “nationalism,” reciting tired anti-American cliches while expecting deference as the self-proclaimed “most pro-American prime minister in Canadian history.” He surely believes he deserves this title, though beyond his envy for America’s conservative movement and a hawkish inclination to support American wars, his “pro-America” bona fides look less robust in retrospect. Even in office, he often displayed a childish need to declare Canada the “better country” to American faces, and he routinely makes all sorts of silly sweeping generalizations about supposedly innate differences between Canadians and Americans. In an interview with the Hub last year, he rambled about Americans being more “tribal” and Canadians “much more individualistic,” in response — revealingly enough — to a question asking whether Canadians could find things to be proud of without resorting to anti-Americanism.

Amid Trump’s tariff war, it’s worth recalling that Harper aggressively pushed “trade diversification” — including open-mindedness to free trade with China — long before there was any existential pretext for doing so. A 2013 trade agreement with the European Union was “the biggest deal our country has ever made,” while the 2015 Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement was a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity. Boasts of having signed trade deals with “51 countries” remains a common staple of Harper speeches to this day.

These deals probably reflected Harper’s free market principles more than anything else, but viewed with 2026 eyes, they clearly didn’t do much to alter the fundamental flow of Canadian trade and have offered Canada little “protection” from Trump’s self-destructive desire to blow up cross-border commerce. Could anything have? Perhaps not, but it’s hardly self-evident that Harper’s diversification deals are a prouder trade legacy than Justin Trudeau’s successful negotiation of NAFTA 2.0. Harper now describes Trump’s belligerence as an “opportunity” to pursue diversification further, though without much reflection on why it failed the first time.

But if Harper of today has become a bit of a dullard, the overall heroic arc of his political career remains. As he formed his political consciousness in the 1980s, he was willing to resist the conventional wisdom of the time, and offered accurate and insightful critiques of serious structural dysfunctions within the Canadian economy and political system. Though he ultimately proved more interested in the former than the latter, his Reform movement did shift Canada’s Overton window in a more responsible direction on fiscal matters, and built new conventional wisdom that (at least briefly) elevated the importance of things like balanced budgets and costed political promises. The Conservative Party he founded has not won an election in 15 years, but it remains competitive, and has helped organize Canadian elections into a clean ideological binary rather than the endless partisan splintering that once appeared inevitable.

Harper formed his political consciousness in rebellion to the political establishment of his time, only to enter his statesman years sounding much like it. To truly follow in his footsteps, Canada’s next great conservative leader must identify the aspects of the Harper legacy that demand a rebellion of their own.

#1. Is the Iranian nuclear program popular?

Every country with nuclear energy capacities has also had a nuclear weapons program at some point, so it’s probably fair to consider the pursuit of the former synonymous with at least the possibility of the latter. Countries with a nuclear weapons program, in turn, tend to either be large nations determined to maintain their great power status (China, France, India, etc.), or small, unpopular ones seeking to discourage international intimidation (South Africa, Israel, North Korea, etc.).

Iran has qualities of both. Iran began its nuclear program under the late Shah in order to pursue “a prestige project that would vault Iran into the front ranks of Middle Eastern countries,” in the words of The New York Times. The subsequent Islamic Republic, widely-hated by the west, continued the program, rightly believing that it would be otherwise vulnerable to foreign attack.

A lot of outside conversation about Iran takes it for granted that their current Islamist government is broadly disliked by ordinary Iranians, with the nuclear program treated as inseparable from the dictatorial character of the regime — a weird tyrannical fetish akin to Saddam Hussein’s giant statues. In that sense, it’s usually implicitly assumed that the Iranian nuclear program surely won’t outlast the mullahs, making the goal of ending the nuclear program one and the same as the goal of regime change.

This strikes me as a dangerous assumption because, a it fails to acknowledge the subtle but important distinction between a country that wants an immediate nuclear arsenal (forbidden by international law) and a country that merely wants to perpetually pursue “nuclear technology” for the (wink-wink) boost in “national status” such technology provides.

The Iranian regime has always denied their nuclear enrichment program has the pursuit of weapons as its goal while nevertheless hyping the program as a source of patriotic pride unconnected to any practical civilian purpose like electricity. All negotiated settlements between America and Iran, including the 2015 JCPOA and even negotiations aimed at settling the current war, are required to concede some limited right for Iran to keep enriching uranium, which the regime considers a non-negotiable.

Do the people of Iran view this uncompromising stance on enrichment a bizarre and stubborn insistence of the Islamist regime, or a respectable commitment to an important national interest?

In the aftermath of being bombed by Israel and the United States, has the Iranian nuclear program gained fresh unpopularity as something that invites violence upon Iran? Or has it gained fresh appreciation as something necessary to protect Iranian sovereignty, regardless of regime?

#2. What would Iranian democracy be like?

When Iraq became a democracy in 2004, its people proceeded to elect sectarian Shiite parties that moved the country deeper into the Iranian orbit. When Egypt became a democracy in 2012, it elected the Muslim Brotherhood, eventually provoking a secularist military coup. When the Palestinians held parliamentary elections in 2006 they elected a Hamas prime minister.

I point this out not to make some Kissingerian point about democracy being too important to trust to the irresponsible as much as to note that the west tends to chronically underestimate the power of the conservative faction of Middle Eastern societies.

Western politicians’ over-reliance on secular, western-educated, western-based exiles and immigrants to get a sense of the true character of this-or-that country seems to invite chronically naive predictions of what democracy in the Middle East will be like. The degree this-or-that country is actually very “secular” and “westernized” and “pro-American” in particular is a cliché you hear repeated endlessly, because it’s the most frictionless thing to imagine. It can be used to justify a certain “damsel in distress” view of foreign policy, in which the purpose of intervention is understood as the act of liberating someone lovely who wants it, as well as a lack of curiosity about “what comes next.”

This is one of the underrated original sins of the 2003-2011 Iraq war. While it’s popular to blame the Bush administration for not having a “plan” for the post-invasion occupation and fantasizing about being “greeted as liberators” with children throwing flowers and sweets and all that, this mindset was also the most flattering assumption one could make about the Iraqis themselves — that their population did not contain any reactionary faction beyond the dictatorship and its loyalists, and therefore any future Iraqi political system would surely contain nothing more than mild policy disagreements within a shared liberal consensus.

But of course, mild policy disagreements within a shared liberal consensus isn’t even an accurate description of American democracy, which features a loud reactionary faction of religious fanatics who get elected from time to time and do all sorts of terrible things.

On Tim Miller’s podcast the other day Iranian expert Arash Azizi, author of What Iranians Want, estimated that only about “10-15%” of Iranians support the current regime, which he described as having broadly discredited itself through its pursuit of an obviously impossible puritanical social agenda and devoting too much time and energy to the Israel/Palestine conflict, which most Iranians do not care about. But there is a lot of space between the precise flavor of right-wing reactionaries governing the Islamic Republic and some post-regime change government that’s still quite conservative, Islamist, sectarian, and authoritarian.

Democracy is honest and the sort of government Iranians will elect under some future democratic regime will reflect Iran as it is: a diverse, traditionalist society containing many different ethnic and religious groups — a country “less Persian than America is white,” as Ben Shapiro put it — with a substantial urban/rural divide, and a long history of dictatorship and contentious internal debate. That Iranian democracy will be uncertain and messy is not an argument against it, but simply foreshadows a country that will not magically transcend all worries the west currently has about it the second free and fair elections are held — whether those worries involve the nuclear program, human rights, or whatever else.

A desire to avoid thinking about this sort of thing is probably why so many prefer to fantasize about the return of the monarchy via the swift installation of Reza Pahlavi, a man completely unqualified to govern anything, but attractive for personifying an unchallenging status quo ante bellum.

#3. What are Iran’s foreign policy goals?

I don’t want to put two fine a point on it, but from what I can tell, the west basically wants an Iran that stays quiet and keeps the Strait of Hormuz open. But Iran has goals beyond what outsiders want, and even if it became a democracy someday it would continue to pursue some sort of foreign policy that puts its own interests first — as all countries do. What are those interests?

The present war against Iran is being fought in considerable part to protect Israel. Is it rational to assume doing what’s good for Israel will ever animate Iranian foreign policy going forward? As mentioned above, Iranians may not care much about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but presumably they will have thoughts about Israel, given how much Israel thinks about them.

Onetime enemies of the United States, including those brutally victimized by US foreign policy, like Vietnam, can come around to a pro-American position if interests align. Will Iran be one of these sorts of places, or will it be more of a Cuba-type situation — less keen to forgive and forget?

The US is a strong ally of Saudi Arabia, the Middle East’s dominant Sunni power which has consistently resisted the Islamic Republic’s efforts to expand influence in the region. Surely this will have some ongoing relevance for Iranian-American relations — to say nothing of Iranian relations with other US allies in the Arab world.

In short, will a future Iranian government see the United States as a leader upholding the sort of world order it wants to live under? Or will it be more of a BRICS-type country that gravitates towards alliances that seek to offer an alternative — or counterweight — to an American superpower unworthy of trust?

The unifying theme of these questions is a plea to recognize Iranian agency, not just in the present, but particularly the future. The Islamic Republic has made Iran both too easy to demonize and too easy to infantilize. At some point it needs to be taken seriously.

Yesterday, at Vancouver Websummit — a tech conference here in British Columbia featuring a surprisingly large roster of political commentators — I saw Curtis Yarvin speak. Yarvin is this far-right character who has become a bit of a media darling lately, repeatedly profiled in the prestige press and subject to much of the same dark titillation that characterizes how the liberal intelligentsia so often thinks about right-wing celebrities these days. His big, naughty idea is that dictatorship is preferable to democracy, and this apparently has some currency with both tech CEOs and the Vance-ite wing of MAGA.

At Websummit, Yarvin’s talk was structured as a debate between himself and Ramesh Srinivasan, moderated by Cenk Uygur. Srinivasan was not a particularly good advocate for democracy; he seems like a nice guy but was way too deep in a certain pit of lefty malaise to spring to the defense of American institutions. It’s hard to defend democracy when you don’t believe America even is one, as he at one point claimed. Whatever points he tried to make were mushy and unfocused.

You’d think this would give Yarvin, who has a reputation for being this ferocious warlock, a clear advantage, but it didn’t. I imagine most of the audience filling the main auditorium of the convention center left thinking they had wasted time on one of the conference’s more mediocre events.

I was taken aback by how dull and uncharismatic Yarvin is, and how shallow and undeveloped his arguments are. Despite his reputation as the “bad boy philosopher,” I found he comes off as neither.

He is a flat speaker with little stage presence. He’s not animated or funny or charming or sassy or wild. He has a slumped posture and very dark eyes that peer from beneath downward-pointing black eyebrows, giving him a fixed expression that’s less menacing than gloomy. Coupled with his curtains of parted dark hair, he has an uncanny resemblance to Snape from the Harry Potter films. He came out wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt for reasons I’m sure he was eager to explain, but never did.

I didn’t think Yarvin’s talents as a speaker or thinker came anywhere close to meeting his obvious desire to be a serious provocateur. His most interesting defense of dictatorship was an observation that there are many well-functioning institutions in American life that are run as dictatorships, even hereditary monarchies — mainly corporations — and no one seems to find fault with those. It was unclear how seriously he believed this, however, for he’d also often cite, in a more sneering way, examples of liberals governing as dictators, including Dr. Fauci and LBJ, who he clearly thought made America worse by virtue of their authoritarian style. When Cenk asked him about checks and balances, he similarly seemed fine with conceding that effective dictators require a cabinet with impeachment power and so forth, which, as my friend SoyPill noted in a video takedown of Yarvin, quickly just winds up reinventing liberal democracy. Overall, he spoke more like a college student making a half-assed defense of a challenging position in debate club than someone who’d thought particularly deeply about his supposed signature issue.

I think people can have bad politics and still be engaging. I wrote a while ago about Slavoj Zizek, whose politics I think are comparably shallow and vague but is undeniably a funny and compelling performer. Many people on the far right, from Ann Coulter to Alex Jones, have a flamboyant stage presence that makes them hard to turn away from. The degree that political commentary has become entertainment is not an uncomplicated good, but charisma is part of the art of effective communication, and can be used to compensate for a lack of weak ideas. Yarvin strikes me as the worst of both worlds; a guy with little to say who doesn’t seem to be having fun saying it.

As a leading Cansplainer, I frequently get calls and emails from American journalists and pundits seeking an on or off-the record explanation for something going on in Canadian politics. Ever since Prime Minister Carney’s surprising come-from-behind victory last year, a common question from the Americans has been, “what can Democrats learn from him?”

My usual answer is they can’t learn very much.

American liberals certainly want to learn a bunch of things from Carney — they want to learn that a competent, well-educated, calm and confident technocrat will be popular with voters, and that his pragmatic, and even somewhat fiscally conservative (they imagine) agenda will be a compelling alternative to both right-wing authoritarianism and leftist demagoguery.

There are aspects of this that are true, to be fair. Carney does exude a great deal more competence than Canadians are used to seeing from their prime ministers, and he holds something approximating qualifications for the job, which is also rare in Canada.

But most of Carney’s victory in 2025 was extremely contingent on a set of circumstances particular to both Canadian politics in that moment, and the peculiar psychology of Canada more broadly.

Carney became prime minister when Justin Trudeau resigned on March 14, and inherited Trudeau’s campaign for a fourth term, which had begun in a de facto capacity many months prior. Election Day was April 28, meaning Carney had just 45 days to make his case to voters.

This of course broadly echos what happened with President Biden and Kamala Harris: an unpopular leader stood aside and saddled his understudy with the obligation to close the deal. In both cases this happened in a very slapdash last-minute sort of way because the incumbent was too proud to retire earlier, which makes it hard to find a lesson to learn here. What didn’t work for Harris simply did work for Carney — and in an even more rushed campaign.

Perhaps if someone other than Harris had been the candidate the Democrats would have won, and if someone other than Carney had been the candidate the Canadian Liberals would have lost. Both parties did their best and things just worked out better for one of them.

Harris was an experienced politician while Carney had never held elected office before. Harris was known, but broadly unpopular with the voting public, while Carney was a virtual stranger who wound up being popular. Both schemes were gambles, and if things had gone the other way it would be easy to say it was the Canadians who did everything wrong.

The far more contingent variable, however, was the distinct role nationalism played in the Carney campaign.

Canada has many underrated similarities to Latin American countries, a big one being the degree Canadian nationalism tends to be bound up with parties of the left, and anti-American, “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. President Trump’s insane second term decision to impose vindictive, pointless tariffs on Canada was offensive, but his repeated musings that he’d like to see Canada become the “51^st state” were worse. The Canadian press inflated his ramblings into “threats,” and the patriotic Canadian left was activated.

Carney seems a sincere anti-American. Justin Trudeau was in many ways quite a sheltered man who didn’t come to politics with a particularly deep understanding of the world outside of Canada, even the United States. Carney, by contrast, lived and worked in America, but also Europe and England and Asia. My personal theory is that Carney developed a deep resentment of the United States during the many years he spent outside this continent, possibly because he didn’t like constantly being mistaken for an American, and tried to compensate for this by developing a flamboyant envy for more distinctly non-American countries. Working for the British government seems to have made him an enormous Anglophile, while his antipathy for Brexit has made him idealize Europe as the highest form of civilization in a very European way. He wants Canada in Eurovision and says Canada is the “most European of non-European countries,” whatever that means.

This is a long way of saying that Carney was well-suited to run a sincerely anti-American campaign, in which he could constantly frame the imperialist Trump as his true enemy, and his actual conservative opponent a mere Trump quisling.

On the stump, Carney spoke darkly of “the Americans” wanting to conquer Canada and seize its water, land and resources and often said stupid things about how “in America” there’s no diversity and everyone pays out-of-pocket for operations and all this. Voters seemed to love it though. Polls suggested that “dealing with Donald Trump” was the top issue for Canadians over 60, and Canadians over 60 have been widely credited as being the demographic most critical to Carney’s win.

Does any of this seem like something Democrats can easily emulate? Talking to one American journalist, I suggested the broad American left simply lacks a comparable foreign nation to demagogue against the way Carney demagogued against Trump’s America. American liberals aren’t fond of demagoguing against foreign countries in general, I said. The reporter replied, “what about Israel?”

I found that a shockingly good rebuttal. Israel is broadly unpopular with Democrats these days, and liberal voters do seem to hate and fear the country in a way that’s not entirely dissimilar from the way liberal voters in Canada hate and fear the United States. Israel is very right-coded in the same way the US has long been right-coded in Canadian political discourse, and there’s an increasingly popular narrative on the American left that Republican politicians who like Israel too much are traitors or puppets, which is very akin to the Carney narrative about the Conservative Party.

A Democrat who runs hard against Israel is playing with a sort of fire, of course. Such rhetoric can inflame anti-semitism and conspiracy theories in American culture, which aren’t exactly in short supply as it is. Dumping Israel could complicate America’s ability to remain relevant in the Middle East. But anti-Americanism has been dangerous for Carney, too. In theory, the prime minister still has to renegotiate free trade with the US sometime this year, which polls suggest the Canadian public no longer regards as all that important — an economically suicidal opinion, but consistent with the endlessly-celebrated “nationalistic spirit” consuming Canada in the Carney era.

Even at its most loathed, Israel does not play a role in American culture that’s remotely comparable to the one the United States plays in Canada, a country whose entire sense of self is inseparable from anti-Americanism. But if Carney can be said to teach anything, it’s that loathing has its uses.

It’s a uniquely ridiculous Canadian story.

Two Canadian pilots were killed in a freak accident at LaGuardia airport and yet Canadian news coverage has been dominated by outrage over the fact that the CEO of the pilots’ airline, Michael Rousseau of Air Canada, released a condolence video that had French captions but no spoken French!

Though one of the two dead pilots was French Canadian, near as I can tell, none of the anger at Rousseau’s video is coming from anyone associated with the victims themselves, but rather the Canadian political class and punditocracy. Prime Minister Carney denounced the video for lacking “judgment” and “compassion,” and a bunch of other politicians have said similar things, particularly in Quebec, where the legislature passed a unanimous motion demanding Rousseau’s resignation. There have been a ton of angry anti-Rousseau editorials in all the leading Canadian papers.

It is obviously a highly performative, almost ritualistic, almost religious outrage occurring mostly so members of the Canadian establishment can collectively affirm one of their shibboleths: the country’s elite should be bilingual.

On social media, however, the reaction has been quite different, with ordinary Canadians expressing frustration and annoyance at the distasteful nature of it all. Two men are dead and this is what our betters are yapping about? An old debate — long stigmatized, but never successfully suppressed — has resurfaced: why are we doing this bilingualism thing at all?

I’ve been arguing against the Canadian elite’s cult of official bilingualism for a very long time. To the extent I have a controversial reputation in Canada and don’t get invited on things very much, it’s in large part because I’m very outspoken on this issue, which is often treated as the one line you’re not allowed to cross. Hating trans people or saying October 7 wasn’t so bad… those are edgy opinions that can be forgiven. Questioning bilingualism is a much more unforgivably toxic take, because it’s seen as offending Quebeckers, and a lot of elite Canada wants to be on Quebec’s good side.

But I also feel this is one issue where I’m very, very obviously in the right, and where I have the least self-doubt. There aren’t many issues where I feel I could hold my own in some Jubilee-style “Surrounded” debate bro type thing, but this is one.

So, with that being said, let me attempt to engage with some of the arguments you see made in favor of not just official bilingualism, but the idea of Canada requiring a bilingual ruling class in particular.

Canada is a bilingual country, so it makes sense for the Canadian government, and other Canadian national institutions, to provide nationwide services in both French and English.

Canada is a bilingual country by law, but not by fact. Canada is in fact an overwhelmingly English-speaking country. According to the 2021 census, 87% of Canadians can speak English while 11% can speak only French and about 2% can speak neither. Of these four million Canadians who can only speak French, 96% are located in the province of Quebec. Excluding Quebec, the rate of Canadians who can speak English rises to 97.8%.

It’s sensible for things in Quebec to function mostly in the French language, given about 94% of people in the province can speak it. It’s sensible for things outside of Quebec to operate mostly in English for the same reason. In both Quebec and the rest of Canada there is a very small minority of people, mostly in urban centers, who cannot speak the dominant language of where they live, so it’s reasonable for accommodations to be made for their needs on a case-by-case, community-by-community basis.

What is decidedly not reasonable, however, is to blindly organize all public (and in some cases, private) operations in this country as if there exists some substantial unilingual French-speaking minority everywhere from Newfoundland to Nunavut that is helpless without services specifically tailored to them — a minority in need of French-speaking receptionists and clerks and cops and teachers and librarians and journalists and guides and managers and lawyers and judges and HR departments and all the rest, all accessible at all times, anywhere in Canada.

For Canada’s service sector to go above and beyond in seeking to accommodate the needs of a unilingual French population in provinces and territories outside of Quebec that either barely exists or is substantially overshadowed by other linguistic minorities is to engage in a preposterous misallocation of resources simply to pay tribute to a bilingual fantasy version of Canada that’s never actually existed.

The French are one of the “two founding nations” of Canada and therefore should have their language granted official status across the country.

If Canada’s non-bilingual reality is conceded, it’s usually countered by a blunt normative assertion that an obligation to provide French services nationwide is some inherited right owed in perpetuity to the descendants of one of Canada’s “founding nations.” Even if French services are not needed in much of the country in a strictly functional sense because the number of unilingual French speakers does not justify them, French Canadians, as members of one of the “founding nations,” can claim a right to French everywhere simply on the basis of language preference. Such arguments featured prominently in a 2022 panel discussion I participated in on the Steve Paikin show.

In the Air Canada case, the French-speaking population of Canada would have preferred to hear Mr. Rousseau do his mournful video in French. The Tagalog-speaking community of Vancouver, who suffered a terrible attack in 2025, were presumably not entitled to expect a condolence message from anyone in their language, because they are not a “founding nation.”

What does it mean to be a “founding nation” of Canada? The term does not appear in the Canadian constitution. It does not appear in the Confederation debates. It is a narrative device employed to posit a certain theory of Canadian history that’s both flawed and dated. Indeed, the “two founding nations” theory is so at odds with the realities of both Canadian history and Canada’s modern form it cannot be used to justify public policy without inflicting enormous undemocratic harms upon the country.

What are now the provinces of Ontario and Quebec began life as a single French colony that was conquered by the English in 1760. In 1867 the constitution of the Dominion of Canada was written to unify the now-separated Ontario and Quebec with two other English colonies, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, as the first four provinces of a democratic federation. A clause was included allowing for the use of French in the union parliament, and there were protections for the education rights of “the Queen’s Roman Catholic Subjects.”

The 1867 compact was a pragmatic deal in which different provinces were given different things in exchange for their willingness to sign on. The English Canadian founders were certainly pleased with themselves for having secured the support of Quebec’s French Canadian political elite, but beyond the limited concessions to the French language and Catholicism, they did not enshrine any theories of culture (or as they would have conceptualized it at the time, “race”) into the document that established what Canada was.

As a purely demographic matter, Canada was hardly a nation of just two “peoples” in 1867. In addition to French and English Canadians, the four initial provinces were home to substantial populations of peoples from other European backgrounds, descendants of enslaved Africans, and indigenous North Americans. By 1871 the entire northwestern half of North America had been annexed by the Canadian state. It would subsequently be carved into four additional provinces and two territories and populated by millions of immigrants from across Europe and the wider world. Substantial numbers of Eastern Europeans famously migrated to the central Canadian prairies, while people from China, Japan, and India created sizeable communities on the pacific coast. Subsequent waves of 20th century immigration would proceed to make Canada one of the most multicultural nations on earth.

In short, in absolutely no sense has the construction of Canada into its modern form met any definition of a nation founded by and for only “two” types of person.

To presume that French Canadians (and for that matter English Canadians) possess inherent rights that derive from their cultural identities rather than their status as free individuals is a profoundly illiberal idea that frames Canada not as an egalitarian democracy, but a hierarchy of peoples, wherein one’s ancestral identity can override competing interests of Canadians of different backgrounds. Canadians, in fact, explicitly rejected enshrining these values into the Canadian constitution when they voted down the Charlottetown Accord in 1992, a package of amendments the aging Pierre Elliot Trudeau criticized as a project of turning Canada into a nation governed by “a hierarchy of categories of citizens.”

Diversity brings with it diversity of language, and Canada is home to a vast array of linguistic minorities. Over 800,000 Canadians told the 2021 census that they speak Punjabi either “regularly” or “most often” at home, with the Mandarin-speaking community roughly the same size. The next three largest groups — Spanish speakers, Arabic speakers, and Tagalog speakers — are about equally-sized to each other as well, comprising a combined total of nearly two million. The number of Canadians who speak French at home — seven million — consists of the plurality of Canadians who speak something other than English, though the total number of people speaking what the census calls “non-official languages” at home outnumber French-speakers at 7,799,855.

It is difficult, in other words, to justify nationalizing “official” status for the French language purely on the basis of an appeal to the inherent rights of a linguistic minority, given linguistic minorities have long comprised a broad and diverse community of Canadians who exist in different proportions in different provinces (only 57,420 British Columbians claim French as their “mother tongue,” for instance, but over 417,000 claim Chinese). Yet that is what Canada did.

In 1969 the elder Trudeau’s administration passed the Official Languages Act, which heralded the dawn of “official bilingualism” in Canada, more than a century after Confederation. In 1982 Canada gained complete independence from Great Britain, and the two “official languages of Canada” were enshrined in the Canadian constitution for the first time — a move that was, in my opinion, Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s greatest betrayal of his liberal principles. These late-20th century reforms made Canada a “bilingual” country in a legal sense, granting new constitutional rights to English and French-speaking Canadians in ways that are mostly only relevant for English speakers in Quebec or French-speakers in non-Quebec provinces. But as a matter of demographic reality, Canada remained and remains a diverse society built by a diverse array of people.

That not everyone has been awarded “language rights” for their contributions to the country, or even receives performative gestures of acknowledgment by elites (even Rousseau’s video began and ended with a rote bonjour/merci), was a choice informed by the ideological assumptions and political calculations of Canadian politicians in the 1960s and 1980s more than an honest reckoning with Canadian realities. Their parochialism has not aged well.

Learning French is easy. There is no excuse for English Canadians to not become fluent in it.

Arguments that English Canadians are lazy, arrogant, etc, for not being fluent in French have been flying around in the aftermath of the Air Canada fracas, with CEO Rousseau held up as a quintessential case study of the stereotypically lazy Anglophone. Rousseau’s past promises to learn French have been dug up, and facts about his personal life that supposedly reveal the weakness of his excuses have been publicized (lives in Montreal! Has a French wife!). The Montreal Gazette published a whole little timeline chronicling his shame (“March 2022: Rousseau struggles through a committee hearing,” etc.)

Rousseau comes off as a pathetic figure. He has apologized for not speaking French in the video about the dead pilots, just as he has apologized many times in the past for his failure to gain fluency in a language he assures he’s been trying hard to learn through private tutors and classes (“Well, next time — if there is one — maybe try harder,” scoffed Raphaël Melançon in the Gazette).

Amid all this condemnation, in an otherwise hostile editorial in the Toronto Star, David Olive conceded there might be some perfectly benign, morally-neutral reasons why Rousseau, an Ontario businessman in his 60s, might not have become fluent in French during his five years running Air Canada in Montreal, while Prime Minister Carney, an Anglo from Alberta, has seen his French improve during his time in Ottawa:

Carney, now 61, has since become functionally fluent in French. His French improves every day because he speaks it publicly almost every day.

And that’s a partial explanation for Rousseau’s language deficiency. A new language is hard to master unless one uses it daily.

Carney has ample opportunity to speak French, and doesn’t miss a chance to do so, as in his speech at Davos and in addressing the Australian Parliament earlier this year.

By contrast, Rousseau seldom has occasion to speak French. The language of international civil aviation is English. Rousseau speaks English with his peers at other world airlines, with suppliers at home and abroad, and with global aviation consultants. Rousseau works in a cocoon of English.

Olive, of course, ultimately hand-waves all this away, quoting a different columnist who cited some other people who moved to Quebec and “learned French on the job.” Though the examples cited (the heads of the Montreal orchestra and Hydro-Québec) strike me as people somewhat less likely to find themselves in “a cocoon of English.”

Language is ultimately a tool of communication, and the “cocoons” we inhabit dictate what sorts of communication skills we develop, and just as importantly, what sorts of communication skills we’re likely to develop in the future. On this linguists agree: if a language is not perceived as necessary for any day-to-day communicative purpose, fluency is probably impossible. This is why languages tend to be learned fastest when the learner is in some situation where the need for communication is perceived as extremely pressing: a baby wanting to speak to his mother, a missionary looking to save souls, two people madly in love with each other, and so on.

As The New York Times noted in a review of language learning apps:

It sounds like an obvious observation, but the entire point of learning a language is to communicate with other people. You can learn as many words or sentences as you want, but until you’re able to have a conversation with another person, you’ll never be fluent. Or, according to the CEFR model [the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, a gold-standard for measuring fluency], you won’t even be halfway there.

Most English Canadians do not need French to communicate with other people, mostly because they are extraordinarily unlikely to regularly encounter people in their day-to-day lives who are unilingual French speakers. This is why Canada’s French immersion education system has been such a notorious flop: English Canadian kids can spend hours a day getting lectured by teachers in French, but the second they go home — or even just leave the classroom — they return to a world of English that reminds them just how superfluous learning French is. It’s not unlike the immigrant parent who dreams of “raising bilingual children” by only speaking the old country’s language to them, only for the project to fall apart once the kids realize that mom and dad know English just fine.

We humans are selfish creatures, and our minds work in self-centered ways. Needs are perceived by the assessment of the individual, not some external party. I can tell you you’re hungry, but you won’t eat if you don’t agree. The enormous cognitive reprogramming of gaining fluency in a second language is not a skill likely to be acquired without the brain perceiving a need for a particular form of communication for which no alternative, be it linguistic or, increasingly, technological, exists.

Bilingualism boosters in Canada tend to hugely overstate the degree that appeasing the feelings of others, or being patriotic, or doing what the prime minister says, or being publicly shamed, or craving upward-mobility in the Canadian elite can function as a motivating “need” for language acquisition. Canadians most likely to be French-English bilingual continue to be those who were born or raised in Quebec, and to a lesser extent those who come from some other community in Canada, usually Ottawa, where French was necessary for day-to-day communication. This fact makes bilingualism mandates for specific jobs a bit of a backdoor affirmative-action program for Canadians who come from Quebec and other French-speaking regions, but that’s a discussion beyond the scope of this essay.

Most French Canadians know English. This proves English Canadians are uniquely lazy and arrogant in not learning French.

According to the World Economic Forum, English is overwhelmingly the world’s most popular second language to learn. Kim Namjoon from BTS and the Iranian foreign minister might not have much in common, but both understood their lives and careers would be improved by gaining fluency in a language with over 1.5 billion global speakers. Again, however, it’s important to recognize that “usefulness” is something perceived by the communication needs of the learner, not some external political ideology or public pressure.

English fluency is the gateway to communicating with the greatest number of people. It has emerged as the planet’s “bridge” language, what a Norwegian oil executive speaks to a Saudi prince when hammering out a deal. Learning English is a necessity for enjoying the cultural products of Hollywood, the world’s most prolific producer of entertainment, and for consuming the greatest amount of online content, half of which is written in English. Ask a young person in Buenos Aires or Jakarta why he’s so good at English and the answer is often “I grew up watching American movies,” or simply “the internet.”

There is nothing remarkable about the fact that English fluency is high among French Canadians (46% of Quebeckers are bilingual). English fluency is high in Croatia and Poland too. Knowledge of English is a common and rational response to inhabiting a world in which so much that is interesting and important — much of it originating or occurring outside of Canada altogether — is communicated in English.

It is unfair and arrogant, and a symbol of cultural chauvinism, colonialism, and imperialism to expect French Canadians to learn English.

The issue is not what people are “expected” to learn, but what they are actually learning, and, accordingly, how society and public policy should be structured in response to what people actually know.

People, after all can be told to learn all sorts of things. English Canadians have been told for decades that learning French will open up marvellous doors of opportunity to wealth and power, and yet they haven’t. French Canadians, by contrast, inhabit a political culture where English is often framed as a symbol of historic oppression and cultural erasure. Decades of Quebec administrations have intentionally erected roadblocks to make English education difficult. And yet English fluency rates among French Canadians remain high despite it all. Not Dutch high, but at least as good as, say, Greece.

Some French Canadian nationalists may interpret this as evidence that they just haven’t been fighting the Anglo hegemon stridently enough. The Quebec political class certainly enjoys characterizing language as a zero-sum game, in which the growth of one comes at the expense of another. But the prosaic explanation is that the popularity of English among the Quebec middle class has less to do with some grand nationalist drama than a concession to the practical — English is useful to know.

English Canadians have no reason to be proud or arrogant about this. To speak the world’s most useful language as your mother tongue is to win a cosmic lottery. It is, to use the fashionable term, a “privilege.”

Inherited privilege is a cause for modesty and humility. If you inherit wealth, you can attempt to create a more just and equitable society by giving some of it away to the less fortunate, but language doesn’t work this way. A native English speaker cannot sacrifice some of his English to others in the name of equality. And just as the wealthy man would never seek to create an equal society by preventing someone else from making money or emptying his wallet into the dumpster, so too is language equity not something that can be achieved by handicapping others or making sacrifices out of guilt.

The native English speaker who tries to learn a second language purely out of guilt or embarrassment will inevitably collide with someone who has learned English for their own personal betterment. This is the old cliché of the American tourist in Germany or wherever who awkwardly chokes out a “ich mochte bestellen machen…” only to be cut off in flawless English — “would you like to see the English menu?”

Communicating with someone who speaks your language as their second can be an annoying experience. English speakers generally have high tolerance for it just because the global ubiquity of English communication makes it an unavoidable fact of life. Speakers of other languages often have less patience for hearing their languages spoken poorly, in part because speakers of other languages are increasingly likely to be able to speak some English these days, and accordingly prefer to minimize slowness and confusion by just switching to the language where both parties will communicate better.

The only way to resist this state of affairs in Canada would be to create a system in which French Canadians are prevented from learning English and thus English Canadians have no alternative but to learn French in order to communicate with them. As I mentioned earlier, you can see elements of this in some of the language education policies of the Quebec government. Yet even the most authoritarian French language policies cannot counter the usefulness of speaking English in the eyes of the native French-speakers themselves.

This is not an outcome that results from the arrogance of English speakers. They are increasingly irrelevant to this calculation altogether.

English Canadians would never tolerate a CEO/politician/etc. who only spoke French, so why should French Canadians tolerate one who only speaks English?

It’s unclear if English Canadians would actually care all that much. English Canada certainly has no organized infrastructure of outrage capable of publicizing horror when the French language is used too much or at the purported expense of English. The closest would be the various lobby groups in Quebec set up to defend the “official” linguistic interests of English-speakers in that province. Yet most English Canadians outside Quebec neither know nor care about them — an encouraging testament to the degree ethnic appeals to Anglo solidarity have faded as any sort of rallying cry in 21^st century Canada. English Quebeckers annoy many French Quebeckers for reasons that are comparable to the ways in which French Quebeckers often annoy English Canadians, and the degree English Quebeckers are imagined to represent mainstream English Canadian thinking and behavior has warped a lot of French Quebecker perceptions of the bilingualism debate outside their borders.

While one does occasionally encounter federalist French Canadian politicians in Ottawa who speak English poorly or barely — Justin Trudeau’s revenue minister, Diane Lebouthillier, comes to mind — the likelihood that a French Canadian in some position of national importance would have somehow never achieved basic English fluency is unlikely to the point where contemplating it becomes little more than a thought exercise about an alternative universe. But the true function of the question is to again wrongly reframe language learning as a matter of fairness and justice, rather than practical communicative necessity.

Could someone achieve a position of national importance in Canada speaking only Chinese? Unlikely (though it has happened), just because the majority of Canadians don’t speak Chinese and the rise to any job of national importance will have almost certainly required communication with members of Canada’s English-speaking majority. This is a linguistic barrier, and to the extent even the most common sense barriers can impose a disproportionate burden on certain individuals, it is unfair. In a society as large and diverse as Canada, however, outrage at unfairness is tempered by, as the constitution says, that which can be “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

The great irony of all this is that French Quebeckers appreciate this utilitarian logic in the context of their own province. It is a consensus opinion among the Quebec political class that immigrants speaking Chinese or Arabic or Malay or whatever should learn French in order to function in an overwhelmingly French-speaking society. Some of this is justified chauvinistically, with Premier Legault framing non-French speaking immigrants as culturally “suicidal,” but much of it is clearly practical.

It is irritating and unproductive to be unable to communicate with your fellow man. An assumption that the fewer will adapt to the norms of the many remains the most reasonable method of accommodation anyone has devised to date.

Prime Minister Carney gave a speech yesterday that went viral, and for basically the same reason that first term Justin Trudeau speeches often went viral: it offered a stylistic contrast with Donald Trump that American liberals found exhilarating. At a time when Trump is squawking with jingoistic pride about making the planet bend to his will, Carney coldly described a global order where the moral conscience of the planet orients around the opposite of what America does and believes.

American liberals love Canadian prime ministers for the same reason they love Canada itself: the glimpse of an alternative universe. The idea that Carney is a politician engaged in a political project in his own country that inevitably entails duplicity, flattery, fear-mongering and all the other things elected politicians traffic in rarely occurs to American liberals, in the same way it rarely occurs to them that Canada’s single-payer healthcare system might be sustained more by greed than generosity. It’s not a useful thing to think about because the goal isn’t understanding, it’s reverence.

American liberals like the idea that when Carney talks about the end of the American-led global order he is doing so with a shame and regret that mirrors their own. But there’s little in Carney’s background that has ever suggested he likes or cares about the United States or its leadership position in any real way. He is a self-proclaimed “globalist,” and if that word has any useful definition at all, the globalist seeks a globalized world run by global institutions and globe-trotting transnational technocrats like Mark Carney, not a unipolar world led by ugly Americans.

Carney was elected last year in a campaign that featured constant disparagement of America and Americans as mean and rapacious, in contrast to Canada’s infinite virtue.“America is a melting pot, Canada is a mosaic because we value diversity” was a typically gratuitous statement he managed to cram into many of his stump speeches. In doing so Carney was following the standard playbook of his party. Certainly in every election of my lifetime, the Liberal Party has campaigned on some drumbeat of fear and hatred of the United States. The idea that “the Americans want our country,” as Carney often put it, isn’t even particularly fresh. In 1988 former Liberal prime minister John Turner attempted to retake office running hard against the idea of free trade with the United States, which he confidently stated was a thin pretext to annexation. A famous Turner campaign ad depicted an American trade negotiator maniacally erasing the Canada-US border.

Turner lost to the Conservatives and free trade went ahead. In time even the Liberals came around to it. But every subsequent Canadian prime minister has also treated “over-reliance” on US trade as a crisis in need of correction. Jean Chretien worked to include Mexico in NAFTA. Stephen Harper considers the bevy of international trade deals he signed to be a defining pillar of his legacy. Justin Trudeau pursued free trade with China and the nations of the trans-pacific.

Canadian diplomacy during this same period routinely broke with American objectives in favor of contrary alliances with other nations. On South Africa, Cuba, Iraq, and now Palestine, Canada dissented from Washington, just as it had on Vietnam a generation earlier. Ottawa championed institutions like the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court while American administrations called them threats to sovereignty.

In other words, Carney’s supposed reorientation of Canadian foreign policy away from America only seems dramatic if one had been suffering under the illusion of a Canada far more deferential to American leadership than ever actually existed. Many liberal Americans appear to have been operating on the assumption that Canada has been a bottomless reserve of goodwill for the United States up to this point, making the cold reception of “even Canada” startling. But Canadians have always required an American villain to make their national project seem relevant; cooperation with the United States, even when self-evidently in Canada’s interest, has been portrayed as a spiritual failing vastly more often than celebrated as virtue.

Though delivered in his own flavour of righteousness, at its core Carney’s speech was the same “we don’t really need ‘em” rallying cry that Liberals have used for decades to excite Canada’s anti-American middle class, and the same boastful assurance we’ve long given the world that Canada possesses the moral bona fides to lead some grand alliance of “middle powers.” Needless to say, the “better” world order Carney anticipates does not appear to be one that will require Canada to make any sacrifice of wealth or relevance — his is a vision of a world in which Canada is praised and rewarded for having the courage to do all the things it wanted to do anyway.

More than anything else, however, I was struck by the sheer myopia of Carney’s tone. Carney has been running around confidently proclaiming the end of the American-led world order since the moment he assumed office. The supposed pretext is the cruel foreign policy of Donald Trump, a president who has never won the support of a majority of Americans in any election and has just three years left in his final term. Trump is a leader of extraordinary idiosyncrasy; he may have momentarily browbeaten his party into supporting the annexation of Greenland, but like most of his mad-emperor decrees, his willingness — delight, even — to risk war with NATO hardly represents any broad strain of American thought, even on the right. Yet Carney must insist otherwise, because Carney doesn’t like America and is eager for any opportunity to pivot closer to Europe, Britain, and China, places he imagines Canada’s proper soulmates in a world where “post-American” is more preference than fact.

Someday Trump will be gone and American foreign policy will change. But someday Carney will also be gone. Canada’s fate is not ordained to be carved in the image of either man.

Prime Minister Carney’s decision to invite King Charles to deliver this year’s throne speech scrambled many brains in Canada’s conservative elite. After all, numerous men at the highest levels of Canada’s centre-right establishment — bigshot intellectuals, pundits, staffers, and politicians — have long posited that the Liberal Party hates the monarchy, and that defending the crown should accordingly be understood as a defining cause of Canadian conservatism.

The stridency of this belief clashes awkwardly with observable reality, given the king’s invite was hardly unprecedented proof that the Liberals actually like the monarchy quite a bit. Justin Trudeau greeted the ascension of Charles with a flurry of stamps, coins, and medals. He put the king in passports and on the $20 bill. At a time when other Commonwealth governments were using Queen Elizabeth’s death as an opportunity to plot a royal breakup, Trudeau huffed “it’s not even something that I consider discussing.”

But if Liberals are delighted by such absurd celebrations of hereditary birthright, the Conservative base is decidedly not. An Angus Reid survey at the time of the King’s speech had 52% of Conservative supporters calling royalty “no longer relevant at all,” (compared to 38% for Liberals) while 52% of Conservatives said “no” when asked “do you think Canada should continue as a constitutional monarchy for generations to come.”

The monarchy is an illustrative example of the unsettling gap between the sorts of things Canada’s conservative elites often obsess over, in contrast to real-world Conservative voters. While plenty of conservative thought-leaders appreciate Canada for what it is — mostly middle-class, unmistakably North American, and home to a diverse population of work-and family-focused individuals — others clearly find this boring, preferring a more romanticized, fairy-tale version of Canada defined by dated theory and kitsch aesthetics. When used to animate political analysis, it’s a perception gap that results in substantial miscalculations of priority, strategy, and rhetoric.

Take the perennial fantasy of the Conservative Party making a “Quebec breakthrough.” Notions that nationalistic French-Canadians are “natural conservatives,” or that the party simply must gain traction with Canada’s “other founding nation” for hazy moral reasons loom large in elite Tory circles. It’s a naïveté that’s rationalized all manner of ideological cynicism and hypocrisy from Conservative leaders, from endorsing Premier Legault’s draconian language policies to backing the hideously anti-market “supply management” regime, to promoting Quebec mediocrities to senior positions in the party hierarchy. Even the Legault government’s recent efforts to ban praying have yielded strategically zipped lips from Conservatives willing to compromise their commitment to religious freedom for… what exactly?

Despite ample pandering, this year the Conservatives once again finished third in Quebec, with 11 seats and 23.5% of the vote. Outcomes in this range have been the norm in every election in the two-decade history of the modern party — including Stephen Harper’s majority victory in 2011. If anything, the Conservatives would probably gain more votes if they got more adversarial with Quebec — think Liberals and Alberta — just given the number of Canadians who want to see Quebec reigned in surely exceeds the number of Conservative-curious Quebeckers.

Or take the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. All available data suggests the Charter, now 43 years old, is well-liked. A 2019 poll had 65% of Canadians identifying it as an important source of their national pride — fourth place overall.

Many conservative elites, however, openly despise the Charter and the limits on government power it imposes, viewing it as a crime against some theoretical alternative regime of pure legislative supremacy. Such sentiments inspire frequent celebrations of the Charter’s self-defeating mechanism: the notwithstanding clause. According to Angus Reid, however, a near-majority of Conservative supporters — 49% — support abolishing the notwithstanding clause altogether. To be sure, this is lower than the general public (55%), but far from a pronounced partisan signifier (Albertan support for abolishment is 58%, for instance).

The notwithstanding clause can be a useful, if clumsy, tool for overruling judicial activism, but most Canadians perceive it as more bug than feature. Its ideological rationale is not popular, given most Canadians — and conservatives — consider unequivocal legal protections for enumerated rights central to their identity as free citizens. Elite conservatives who theatrically loathe the Charter, or portray it as a betrayal of Anglo heritage, are affecting a weird, gratuitous stance not dissimilar from those flamboyantly repulsed by other popular symbols of bourgeois patriotism like the maple leaf flag or the name “Canada Day.”

It’s immigration, however, where a gap between conservative elites and the base has been historically widest — and most consequential, given the immigration crisis facing Canada today.

Though it’s fashionable to blame Liberals for breaking Canada’s “immigration consensus” through what Pierre Poilievre calls “radical open borders policies and mass migration,” Trudeau’s record-shattering immigrant intake simply continued a trend established by the previous Conservative government, which under ex-immigration minister Jason Kenney raised rates to 50-year highs. One will search in vain for any poll suggesting Conservatives, let alone Canadians, were demanding this.

Kenney is an eccentric character whose idiosyncrasies tend to mirror those of other out-of-touch conservative elites, who accordingly revere him. He is a sappy royalist and Quebec romantic, and much of his willingness to hike immigration appeared bound up in similarly sentimental notions that immigrants (like Quebecers) were naturally right-leaning — to say nothing of more esoteric theories framing mass migration as “an inheritance from what was best about British liberal imperialism.”

Conservatives got scant credit for Kenney’s approach — contra conventional wisdom, there’s not even much data suggesting Conservatives did that well with immigrant voters. Liberals still operated as if their Conservative predecessors were immigration hardliners, hiking rates as a correction to imagined Conservative stinginess. Today, many Kennyists are belated converts to a restrictionist cause they spent 10 years scorning.

In the decade the Conservative Party has been out of power, Canada’s conservative movement has only grown more antiestablishment. Covid and the Freedom Convoy deepened the right’s libertarian instincts, while unpretentious social media stars like The Pleb Reporter, Mistersunshinebaby, and Clyde Do Something help set the populist tone. Conservative elites who dismiss the salience of this set in favour of churning out yet another essay weeping about insufficient loyalty to His Majesty won’t remain elites for long.

Tucker Carlson and JD Vance think the MAGA movement must embrace its antisemite wing.

The dark paranoia offered by antisemitism is the sort of thing spiteful, nihilistic men like Tucker believe America needs more of, while autocratic politicians like Vance appreciate fairy tales that can be deployed to manipulate voters more simple-minded than themselves. Both adore what’s euphemistically called the “energy” of the far-right internet crowd, who traffic in Jew hatred as a matter of course. Said energy is vicious and extreme, which makes it useful to those whose political project entails waging remorseless war on American institutions.

Eager to prove who’s side he’s on, Tucker gave a chummy interview to the antisemitic influencer Nicholas Fuentes the other day, and the president of the Heritage Foundation — the group behind Project 2025 with whom Tucker has some manner of professional relationship — rushed to applaud. He said he had no problem with what Tucker had done, and scorned skeptical conservatives for “sowing division.” Tucker’s coalition-building logic in platforming Fuentes clearly won the day, and one expects Nick will soon speak at CPAC or the RNC. Who would say no?

Antisemitism has proven capable of being laundered into American conservatism in a number of ways. One popular option is suggesting the charge of “antisemitism” itself is little more than an attempt to shame “heritage Americans” from pursuing their interests, as JD Vance did in a recent speech to the Claremont Institute where he pointedly cited the anti-Defamation League as a group excessively critical of white people.

Portraying contempt for US-Israeli relations as an emancipatory act liberating American foreign policy from some shadowy cabal is popular too.

In his strutting speech at a Turning Points USA conference in July, Tucker argued — with little evidence but no shortage of self-confidence — that the sex predator Jeffrey Epstein was very obviously an Israeli intelligence agent, but “no one’s allowed to say that.” This was a reoccurring leitmotif of his infamous chat with Ted Cruz as well, where a scrunch-faced Carlson expressed theatrical befuddlement about the senator’s love for a country that’s leading America to war and ruin, yet “no one will ever criticize.”

Though the Trump administration has been aggressively supportive of the Netanyahu government, Vance often tries to make this support seem wary and conditional, because he knows a pro-Israel foreign policy offends the online antisemites he’s trying to court. Asked by a young right-winger at the University of Mississippi earlier this week why Americans should support a country that “openly supports the prosecution of Christians,” the Vice President replied “my attitude is, let’s have those conversations.”

Republicans grew more and more supportive of Israel throughout the ‘90s and 2000s, as evangelical Christians like Senator Cruz became more dominant in the party. This implied a cause-effect relationship, and evangelicals themselves have often linked their deference towards Israel to millennialist beliefs about the end times. It’s worth asking if the War on Terror was perhaps more important. A broader scan of history certainly suggests Christian theology has not always cast Jews as divinely-ordained allies.

Even as it grows more fiery and self-righteous, American Evangelical Christianity has also been getting more secular; a religious movement that increasingly uses right-wing politics to “meet the longing and the needs that aren’t being met by churches and traditional faith communities” as Peter Wehner noted in the Atlantic.

If a conspiratorial-minded conservative movement finds secular theories about a Jew-controlled America a more satisfying frame for understanding 21^st century politics than religious exhortations about God’s chosen people, then it’s logical to assume American evangelical culture will come to embrace that line of argument, with some new Christian justification tacked on later. “My loyalty is to Christ first and America always,” said the president of Heritage.

I suspect we are not far from some minor shakeup of the status quo that provides the final pretext for MAGA to embrace a more unapologetic and open antisemitism. If Netanyahu is replaced by an Israeli prime minister who’s less American-passing and lacks Bibi’s deep, multi-decade relationships with American conservative elites it will become easier to cast the Israeli government as something exotic and sinister that America Firsters should properly view with fear and contempt. The Israelis may well respond in kind — impossibly enough, Netanyahu’s critics on the Israeli right believe the Trump administration has ben an excessively moderating force on the prime minister, likening Trump’s vaunted Gaza ceasefire plan to “peace with Hitler.”

In such a context, Vance or Tucker or whoever could emerge head of a post-Trump Republican Party in which condemnation of the sinister Jew is a standard trope of Republican rhetoric. The audience will be primed to see nothing wrong.

Charlie Kirk’s gruesome murder is a historic event of great cultural significance; a dark acknowledgment of the prominence of professional political commentators in modern American life. Regardless of his killer’s motive, the shooting was a concession to Kirk’s fame; the death of a new kind of celebrity born from a recent cultural epoch. As many have reminded, I coincidentally released a video the other day chronicling the specific cultural era that produced Charlie; an era that began with Rush Limbaugh, ran through the rise of Fox News and MSNBC, and continued into our current age of internet polemicists.

As Vice President Vance’s eulogy candidly reminds, Kirk was a very simplistically partisan person, even by the standards of his peers. Modern political commentary grew out of political journalism, and even as the guiding ethics of punditry drifted towards ideological pandering, most commentators of recent times have still tried to follow vaguely journalistic best practices, including maintaining some professional distance from politicians. Kirk didn’t care about this, because he understood his identity as an agitator for political victory in a very literal way. He wasn’t queasy about working hand-in-hand with his preferred party to earn them wins he understood as his own.

In this sense, one of Kirk’s great competitive advantages was delivering less qualified Republican propaganda to his audience. This made him a less idiosyncratic figure than say, Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro, and thus less interesting to thinkers on the left. He was an evangelical Protestant, for instance — not an adult Catholic convert, not a conservative Jew, not some vaguely “spiritual” agnostic with respect for “cultural Christianity” — and as a result was always able to offer explicitly Christ-centered arguments to a Republican base still dominated by the boring Christian right. Kirk had an uncomplicated trust in Trump forged from a close personal relationship with the first family, and as much as he bent them a certain way, he bent their way too. It’s revealing that near the end of his life his agenda was defined by an increasing embrace of white nationalism and dismissiveness of the Epstein scandal.

Though Kirk was talented, he was not indispensable. Many of his most successful initiatives, from recording arguments with college students to organizing mass gatherings of conservative influencers, were things others on the right had already been doing, and with more craft. Nothing he did was rare or interesting enough to make him any sort of cult leader. When I heard the news, I was having lunch with a friend who thought Kirk was Nick Fuentes. Not in some metaphorical way — he literally thought Charlie Kirk was the Nazi guy with the ferns. To the hyper-literate, the difference between Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes and David Pakman and Michael Knowles and Brian Tyler Cohen might seem glaring, but assuming the average voter can distinguish every random political pundit from each other is a pretty big ask.

It’s interesting that so many on social media are nevertheless choosing to interpret Kirk’s death in such an exaggerated, theatrical way, usually in the direction of the apocalyptic doomerism that’s so in vogue these days. People on the right thunder that there will be a “reckoning” in response to what they are choosing to imagine as targeted leftist violence that they are choosing to imagine as common, while people on the left announce that the feral conservatives have their Reichstag Fire pretext to begin pogroms and lynchings.

These reactions are so tendentious it’s hard to take them seriously. A great many people now function as ideological hammers for whom every random news event is a nail to be pounded into their preexisting structure of beliefs. Charlie Kirk’s assassination proves the imminence of the next American civil war, but so too did any number of previous shootings, court rulings, elections, speeches, tweets, congressional redistrictings etc. Politicians speak in their own tendentious way about the importance of “turning down the temperature;” when Trump was shot, President Biden gave an Oval Office address imploring Americans “to lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, while we may disagree, we are not enemies.” Such language presumes violence of the sort that wounded Trump and killed Kirk is cleanly correlative to political rhetoric, as opposed to mental illness or attention-seeking — a theory that’s still largely unproven.

A more necessary exhortation would be for Americans to not be so goddamn melodramatic all the time, to resist the impulse to constantly treat life as a movie in which human tragedies are exciting plot twists accelerating a cinematic narrative, as opposed to strange and miserable events that are quickly forgotten because they don’t mean much beyond themselves.

Last night I finished Showa 1953-1989: A History of Japan, a thick manga book by the great Japanese cartoonist Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015).

Written around the time of the death of the Emperor Hirohito in 1989, which officially triggered the end of what the Japanese call the “Showa” age, Showa: A History of Japan was originally a series of eight autobiographical mangas called Showa History (昭和史) that chronicled Mizuki’s life from the time of Hirohito’s ascension in 1926 to his passing over six decades later. From 2013 to 2015 the American publisher Drawn & Quarterly released an English translation of the books in a four-volume set. Ironically, this rerelease, nearly a quarter-century after their original publication, wound up coinciding with Mizuki’s own death.

There is something uniquely compelling about the idea of Japan’s Showa age. I found myself freshly seduced by it during a trip to the country last year, after having been away for a decade and a half. In 2020s Japan, the boxy characters of Showa, 昭和, are used mostly as a generic adjective to market nostalgia to Gen Xers and Millennials — there are “Showa cafes” with retro decor, junk food companies sell “Showa editions” of chips and candies done up in old-style packaging, eccentric “Showa toy stores” have shelves crammed with second-hand action figures, the best Godzilla is said to be “Showa Godzilla,” etc. A Japanese publisher called the Tatsumi Group sells a vast array of cheerful books full of colorful photographs documenting all sorts of random Showa-era stuff, from school supplies to “love hotels.” “Seeking nostalgia, warmth, comfort, and the flavor of simpler times... relive the golden age!” reads some promotional copy.

In this sense, “Showa” means Japan’s prosperous, consumerist 60s, 70s, and 80s — the era Mizuki’s last history book chronicles. Yet this modern usage is always slightly unnerving, coming from the fact that this is not Showa’s literal definition. In the Japanese era-dating system, Showa encompasses the entirety of the reign of Hirohito, every year from 1926 to 1989. Mizuki’s books choose to spend far more time on the early decades than the later ones; the volume I read, 1953-989 is a single book (three in Japan) documenting nearly 40 years of the postwar era. The previous three volumes (five in Japan), by contrast, document half that time, and are mostly about Japan’s role in World War II.

This makes sense, given the books’ are primarily the story of Shigeru Mizuki’s life. The second son of a middle class family, at age 21 he was drafted to fight for the emperor. Dispatched to defend Japanese-occupied Papua New Guinea, his platoons faced the wrath of the American island-hopping campaign in the lopsided warfare that defined Japan’s spiral into defeat. At one point his left arm had to be amputated without anesthetic.

In 1953-1989, Mizuki portrays himself as a man riddled with anxieties and trauma. He is a skilled artist whose talents are gradually rewarded, but has few meaningful relationships with friends or family (his parents are bossy and aloof, his marriage is arranged and lifeless). His only true joy is escapism; researching the supernatural creatures that come to define his comics, and endlessly longing for Papua New Guinea, which he visits frequently and fetishizes as a simple place of carefree, jolly people. The postwar modernization of Japan alienates him, and between vignettes of Mizuki’s life we are given news-report style stories of the various grotesque and upsetting things that dominated the Japanese headlines during the 60s, 70s, and 80s: Communists, serial killers, cults, plane crashes, corruption scandals and the like. Mizuki’s neuroticism becomes a sort of parallel to the anxieties of Japan as a whole; a country stretched between its desires for safety and stability, and the need to embrace the values of the democratic world order it fought against.

When the emperor Hirohito dies in 1989, Mizuki feels a sense of relief at the symbolism of the moment — the long trauma of the Showa era is finally over, an era that forced men of his generation to kill and be killed in a pointless war that left them mangled and disturbed, and ultimately ill-equipped to deal with the jarring new age of chaotic freedom that followed Japan’s surrender to the west.

Mizuki became rich and famous from the society Japan became, a society in which creative works of entertainment like manga served as cornerstones of a mighty cultural economy. To many Japanese people living today, his comics and characters embody the essence of Showa aesthetics and charm, lively and expressive and imaginative in a way the more self-serious Anime of the 21st century is not. Yet 1953-1989 reminds that many of the works of Showa postwar culture, the retconned Showa that begins in 1945, were produced by broken men who immersed themselves in their careers as a way of suppressing the guilt and anguish that comes from serving a fascist system so totalizing that even its destruction cannot be enjoyed.

There’s a cheeky phrase that certain right-wing types in the US have recently grown quite pleased with: America is not an idea. It’s a clear thesis statement of a new flavor of rightist thought that’s unapologetically illiberal, anti-democratic, and (by my definition) anti-American; a new breed of conservative eager to conserve something other than the Constitution, the spirit of the Revolution, the postwar world order, and indeed American culture and society as it has been practiced in the context of these things. Many of these types revel in their own imagined naughtiness; since “America is an idea” is a very famous, even cliched thing for presidents and the like to say, they mischievously reply that um actually, no it isn’t. Take that, Reagan!

John Daniel Davidson has a piece in The Federalist where he tries to make a case for what’s become known as the “a nation, not an idea” thesis. He does this mostly by suggesting it’s somehow very self-evident that white South Africans (he specifically says “Afrikaners”) would be good Americans in a way other types of immigrants would not.

This is very obviously a racial essentialist argument, though John pretends it’s not. We can tell it’s a racial essentialist argument because John projects all sorts of romantic imagined qualities onto the Afrikaners as a collective, who are then analogized to a certain romantic conception of True Americans:

If we prioritize the Afrikaner farmer, as Trump proposes, it’s because his cultural and ancestral roots are largely the same as the pioneers and pilgrims who first came to America from Europe and whose descendants founded our republic. Last week Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Trump’s “vision is the right one: this is the sort of immigrant we want, and if the South African regime now — kleptocratic, anarchic, and increasingly incompetent — does not want this historic class of entrepreneurs, then America does.”

Rollins is correct, and her characterization of Afrikaner farmers as “the sort of immigrant we want” gets to the heart of the matter—and it’s not about race or ethnicity. We don’t want the Afrikaner because he is white, we want him because of his many cultural ties to America. Rollins mentioned some of these in her statement, lauding “the Afrikaner devotion to land and heritage. Pioneers in the best tradition, they made gardens of the wilderness and transformed their country into the breadbasket of a continent.”

The plain fact is that an Afrikaner farmer, a descendant of Dutch Calvinists who settled in South Africa more than three centuries ago, will assimilate to our American way of life much faster and more easily than a Muslim from the Middle East or a villager from the Peruvian highlands—or even a computer programmer from India.

It’s not clear to me that John Daniel Davidson knows who “Afrikaners” are. Within the context of South African whites, they are the ones who — due in large part to how they chose to honor their Dutch Calvinist heritage — have been traditionally considered on the most reactionary end of South African society. My grandparents were Dutch Calvinists from Holland who tried to immigrate to South Africa because they considered the postwar Netherlands a sinful, decadent place. They would have been good Afrikaners.

South Africa’s Dutch Calvinist settlers are known for resisting British rule around the dawn of the 20th century, culminating in the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902 (“Boer” being another term for the Dutch settlers). Canadians participated in that war, which was spun as a very patriotic battle between the civilizing forces of the British Empire and the savagery of the Boers. The Nazis would later use the plight of the Boers in anti-British propaganda, and pro-Nazi sentiment among the Afrikaner population was a major crisis for South Africa’s pro-British government of the time. I once worked with an old man who was an English South African. His father had served in the war and was later murdered by a gang of pro-Nazi Afrikaners.

After World War II, South Africa’s Afrikaner population mobilized to elect an Afrikaner nationalist government that cut ties to the British Commonwealth and established a new political regime in their own image. This included making Afrikaner Dutch (“Afrikaans”) the dominant language of the state, and marginalizing the country’s black majority through the notorious Apartheid system of racial segregation (introduced by Dutch-born prime minister H.F. Verwoerd). The Afrikaner-supremacist regime, known to South Africans as the “National Party” era, would proceed to become a pariah state to much of the world until a new constitution introducing multiracial democracy came into effect in 1994. Many English South Africans, who were more liberal, and made up the bulk of the white opposition to the National Party regime, emigrated to the west during its reign, including America. Elon Musk, for instance, came from an English family and emigrated to Canada with his divorced mother in 1988 (John wrongly calls Elon “an Afrikaner,” which Elon has explicitly denied being).

I bring up all of this just because it shows that there’s no reason to assume Afrikaners are ideal Americans based on some vague appeal to “culture.” If one believes, as John writes, that America’s “culture and way of life are indelibly English” then it’s pretty easy to observe that a lot of Afrikaners have consistently stood in opposition to that “culture and way of life” over the last century or so.

The only way it’s possible to see Afrikaners as better would-be Americans than any other type of person, in turn, is if we display absolutely no curiosity into the nuances of South African culture or politics, and instead simply assume that all their white people are basically the same, and because America was founded by white people the Afrikaners will barely have to assimilate at all! It is romantic nonsense to assume that Afrikaner farmers have some inherent compatibility with the 21st century United States (agriculture work as a share of total employment: 1.2%) on the basis of their imagined similarities to the pilgrims, while also displaying zero curiosity about the ways in which Afrikaner and American culture (even the most Anglo-supremacist definition of it) have deviated since pilgrim times.

This highlights the absurdity of trying to evaluate the fitness of future Americans according not to their identities as individuals, but rather sweeping generalizations of the groups they belong to — especially if said generalizations are made by ignorant men equipped only with half-informed cliches rooted in racial stereotypes.

I know this is a triggering statement to some, but as a New World nation settled by immigrants, the United States has always been diverse, and it’s impossible to create a “nationalistic” immigration system for a diverse country without first attempting to order the existing diverse population into some sort of hierarchy of national worth, and then trying to carefully solicit people from some corresponding hierarchy of all the outside world’s nationalities. John might be excited by the thought of undertaking such a viciously Darwinian project, but luckily it’s not necessary, since the United States is a country defined by a secular, liberal constitution that articulates the essence of being American in terms of ideas, not make-believe ethnic inclinations.

Trump’s odd and unanticipated obsession with imposing tariffs on imports from Canada has dominated Canadian headlines for weeks, clouding the country’s politics with the same Kafkaesque frustration that, as Anne Applebaum described recently in the Danish context, has made crafting public policy feel “arbitrary, pointless, even surreal.” What Trump’s tariffs even exist to do, after all, is a question only answerable with hunches and armchair psychoanalysis. Are they punishment for Canada’s lax border policing? Economic warfare preluding annexation? The beginnings of a new Washington revenue regime where tariffs displace income taxes? Partisan vindictiveness at Trudeau’s woke government? An empty threat from a fundamentally unserious, mercurial boy-king?

Whatever the case, the mere threat of tariffs have already been hugely damaging to US-Canada relations and an enormous setback to the cause I believe in more than most — the deepening integration, on all fronts, of the United States and Canada.

An American administration imposing tariffs on Canada is a provocation that validates multiple preexisting Canadian theories of anti-American nationalism whose proponents are forever hungering for a pretext to implement their agenda. If tariffs are imposed, and especially if they become a permanent reality of North American relations, then it’s safe to assume one of Canada’s nationalist factions (or some medley thereof) will either gain or presume a mandate from Canadians to begin happily reversing the gains of decades of continental integration and return to historically failed, impoverishing ideas that continental integration arose to redress in the first place.

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If there’s one quote Justin Trudeau gets an unfair amount of flack for, it’s this one he gave to The New York Times Magazine’s Guy Lawson in 2015:

[Justin Trudeau’s] embrace of a pan-cultural heritage makes him an avatar of his father’s vision.

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he claimed. “There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.”

On the one hand, Trudeau is making a rather banal point here: diverse democracies lack a “mainstream” that can be defined by anything other than common values.

On the other, he is obviously lying.

The ambitious phrase “postnational state” implies a country that has completely shed any pretence of being definable by traditional nationalistic characteristics like race, religion, and language, and Trudeau simply does not believe Canada is a country like this. Much of his governing agenda has marched confidently in the opposite direction, in fact.

Canadian nationalism tends to be a very top-down, Ottawa-directed thing, and Trudeau’s government has been little different from its predecessors in celebrating and strengthening all the clichéd pillars of Canadian identity in the fashion Canada’s patriotic elites have traditionally demanded.

Such pillars include:

• Official bilingualism generally and the promotion of the French language and francophone culture specifically,

• the entrenchment and exaltation of the British monarchy’s presence in the Canadian political system,

• the dignified veneration of the Canadian armed forces and Canada’s military history,

• and the uplifting and integration of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities and culture into the mainstream Canadian story.

On all these fronts, there is little doubt that Trudeau is a sincere believer. He has passed immigration initiatives designed to grow the Francophone presence both in and outside Quebec, introduced an array of coins, stamps, banknotes, and medals to celebrate the reign of King Charles, unveiled grand new monuments and delivered superlative speeches honouring Canada’s military past, and incorporated indigenous art, language, dance, music, costume, and spiritualism into virtually every state-sponsored event he’s presided over. None of this feels terribly postnational.

Canadian elites in journalism, politics, and the broad public intelligentsia — especially the right-of-center ones — clearly suffer some degree of cognitive dissonance about this. Trudeau’s 2015 “postnational” quip is often held as a sort of Supreme Truth that all other facts about his government must be subordinate to, even when this requires ignoring observable reality. I’ve heard elites hallucinate positions Trudeau has never come remotely close to expressing — “he hates the monarchy,” for instance — simply because they feel like the sort of things a “postnational” prime minister would do.

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Elites believe the “postnational” myth about Trudeau because it serves as a kind of useful shorthand for ascribing a coherent motive to his actions that might otherwise seem inexplicable — a kind of reverse version of the old adage to “never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” After all, for Trudeau to be as unpopular as he is, and for Canada to be failing across as many metrics as it is, surely begs an explanation. The idea the prime minister hates his own country — his own nation — offers order to the chaos.

Yet Canadian elites do themselves a disservice when they misunderstand Trudeau this way, as it becomes a path to deepening their misunderstanding of the country itself, which has rarely shown much interest in the sort of national shibboleths those in and around the federal government consider existential. If Trudeau has undermined Canadian pride and made the country ashamed of itself and its people less proud to be Canadian (which polls seem to show), it’s because he has betrayed a quite different understanding of the country; an understanding defined far more by material conditions than old-fashioned nation-state sacraments.

The Canadian dream, said Will Ferguson, is “success without risk.” Like most observations about Canadians, this one carries an implied “unlike Americans…” prefix, but there is truth to it. Patriotic middle class Canadians often believe their country is good to the extent it functions as a stable, safe, bourgeois utopia, in which life’s most important bills are paid by someone else (healthcare, retirement) while everything else (real estate, food, gasoline, etc.) is cheap and abundant. There is no gun violence or endemic poverty, and if that means the citizenry are too complacent and risk-adverse to produce an Elon Musk, well, that’s a fair trade.

Throughout the Trudeau years, Canadian elites, in my mind, have often stubbornly misunderstood what really bothers people about how Canadian culture has changed during this decade, and instead assume middle class Canadian voters are bothered by the same sort of high-level offences against the dignity of the Canadian nation as they are, rather than the more immediate practical manifestations of Trudeau’s misgovernance.

Is the declining fate of the Canadian oil and gas industry, for instance, problematic because it reduces Canada’s geopolitical standing as an energy power at a time when Putin’s belligerence has exposed the dangerous, paradoxical dependence of many NATO members on Russian energy? Or because it’s one more thing contributing to high gas prices?

Are woke teachers and professors who emphasize the importance of “decolonizing” the curriculum obnoxious because they’re fostering dangerous disrespect for Canadian history in a way that undermines the heroic legacy of Sir John A. Macdonald and other nation-builders? Or because they’re filling students’ brains with useless theories at a time when practical skills are what’s necessary to triumph in a competitive job market?

Should militant pro-Palestine protestors be hated because they’re undermining Canada’s credibility as a stalwart defender of Israel in the wake of October 7, or because they make Canadians feel unsafe at the mall?

Pierre Poilievre has shown excellent instincts when it comes to these sorts of questions. His rhetoric of Canadian pride consistently puts the sustainability of the middle class lifestyle front and centre, reserving his floweriest language for descriptions of the small dignities of bourgeois life Trudeau’s government has stolen, and Pierre promises to restore (“...a cold drink in one hand and a hard-earned paycheque in the other.”)

This, to me, seems the most sustainable vision of Canadian patriotism, one more likely to serve as the basis for a broad and inclusive “core identity” than the grand historic narratives and “Two Founding Nations” symbology favored by much of the Laurentian establishment. It offers the best theory of why Trudeau has failed, and with it, the best vision of what Conservative success should resemble.

In a recent video, I described Canada as being ruled by a “necrocracy,” or government by the dead, given our prime minister has such rock-bottom numbers it’s inconceivable he’ll be re-elected to another term. Situations like these invite partisan jeering, since the desperation of an administration with one foot in the grave can be deeply pathetic — Prime Minister Trudeau’s $250 handouts, for instance. Yet they also manifest something darker, and the subject of another recent video of mine: the paradoxes of democracy.

In standard republican theory, the opinions of the people are expressed through the politicians they elect. But in an age of constant, widely-available public polling, the politician’s necessity as middleman declines. To the question of whether the Canadian parliament should vote non-confidence in Trudeau, for instance — the highest act of democratic rejection in the Canadian system — we need only look at his 29% approval rating and the fact that 68% of voters don’t want him in power as evidence of a strong public mandate for parliament to remove him.

The rebuttal would be an appeal to Burkian elitism — the notion that politicians possess insights that voters don’t, and should be offered deference to their judgement. Yet the modern world also makes our politicians’ motives less mysterious, and there’s little evidence the Canadian parliamentarians withholding the votes needed for a confidence motion are animated by any remotely defensible logic.

We can excuse Liberal members of parliament for remaining doggedly loyal, and the Conservatives are doing their best in the other direction, having instigated three confidence votes this year. This leaves the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP as the parties most responsible for keeping Trudeau in power, and yet neither of them agrees to concede this obvious reality, let alone justify their culpability in perpetuating it.

The Bloc Quebecois is a strange and cynical party that refuses to understand the Canadian government as anything beyond an insecure parent to extort goodies from. Since its politicians dwell in a cuckooland where an independent Quebec is as imminent as the Great Pumpkin, they prefer to ignore indignities like the fact that Justin Trudeau is their prime minister too, and their behaviour as Canadian parliamentarians partially responsible. The Bloc is now rhetorically in favor of a confidence vote, but they refuse to frame this as anything but an act of retaliation against some recent Trudeau policies they’ve declared contrary to Quebec’s interests, as opposed to a holistic assessment of Trudeau’s fitness for high office.

The NDP delegation cannot hide behind self-delusion. They are overtly patriotic and believers in the Canadian system, and Jagmeet Singh has repeatedly declared that Justin Trudeau is a bad and failed prime minister, a man who has “proven again and again he will always cave to corporate greed,” as he put it when the NDP backed out of his coalition with the Liberals in September.

And yet – he will still not support a confidence motion. The NDP is polling badly and will not benefit from triggering an emergency election, and many NDP parliamentarians will not meet the six-years-in-office qualification necessary to receive a government pension unless the parliamentary term extends to October of 2025.1 As a progressive, Singh could argue that as bad as Trudeau is, it would be worse if the Conservatives replaced him, but he does not make this argument. He instead makes the ludicrous claim that he is running for prime minister himself, and dismisses the very idea of a confidence vote as “playing games,” hoping this thought-terminating cliche will suffice in place of an explanation.

When politicians are this cynical or disingenuous, the principles of parliamentary democracy break down. The system presumes parliamentarians will take seriously their responsibilities of ensuring the nation is equipped with a leader capable of facing the challenges before it. It does not anticipate politicians who prioritize self-serving, extra-constitutional partisan interests that knowingly prolong misgovernance.

President Trump’s tariffs represent a severe danger to the Canadian economy and the country’s greatest crisis since Covid. A recent Abacus poll, had 45% of Canadians saying they believe Trump will prefer working with Pierre Poilievre over Trudeau, which only makes sense. As a conservative, Poilievre will communicate with Trump in language he understands, while evidence suggests Trump’s handlers have radicalized him into seeing Trudeau as a member of the leftist horde he just finished campaigning against. Reagan and Mulroney singing Irish folk songs it won’t be, but from an objective national interest perspective, Pierre’s election as prime minister is understood as necessary and inevitable.

Every day the Canadian parliament delays this inevitability, by contrast, and instead chooses to perpetuate the rule of a zombie administration the public doesn’t trust or want is a day the country is made to endure a pointless, destructive era of instability, mismanagement, and uncertainty regarding the future of US-Canada relations and countless other matters. It is an indictment of Canada’s pretence of “responsible government” and casts a harsh light on the myths of Canadian democracy.

The data-driven story of Trump’s reelection solidified within hours: his was a candidacy buoyed by a coalition of voters that was astonishingly multiracial by the standards of a Republican, and threateningly so by the standards of a Democrat. I’ve always wondered what cultural narrative could be spun from a second Trump victory, and with this outcome we’re closer to an answer.

As I said in a recent video, Trump’s movement elevated conspiracy theories, ignorance, vulgarity, and far-right ideas into the American political mainstream like never before. The fact Trump was not rejected by voters last Tuesday, despite displaying what was arguably the worst version of himself, and a version openly under the sway of cranks like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, suggests the most toxic version of Trumpism is actively desired by a narrow majority of Americans. But the numbers also suggest that majority was not particularly defined by race.

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I am sad, which already feels like a dangerous concession in this new era of might-makes-right politics. One reason people say Trump’s movement has a fascistic character is because of the unconcealed joy it derives from the weak and suffering; this is also a reason why people say it’s not much of a Christian movement, despite its pretensions.

In the aftermath of last night, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with friends. Because I am a political person, people expect me to have a lot of deep thoughts on what has transpired. And I suppose I do, because I have trained my mind to work like that. But I am also quite miserable and at times like these I wish my mind worked some other way. As I walked the streets last night to clear my head, I once again found myself consumed with jealousy of the people laughing with their friends and talking about other things.

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Q. What does this mean for conservatism?

A. As far as I’m concerned, “conservatism” of the sort that could have been identified as existing in some form between the Reagan and Obama presidencies, is basically dead as the animating orthodoxy of the Republican Party.

Conservatism of this sort was basically a mix of libertarian economic views, a hawkish foreign policy posture, and a traditionalist Christian code of social morality. This was the most influential political ideology of late 20th century America, but by the 2010s it was becoming increasingly scorned as out-of-date and out-of-touch. “Zombie Reaganism” was a popular slur, and David Frum had a clever line where he called the philosophy “solutions from the 1980s to problems from the 1960s.” Today it’s become increasingly associated with former speaker of the House Paul Ryan for some reason, I guess because he was the last high-profile Republican to sincerely believe in all that before the complete Trumpist takeover of his party.

After Trump won in 2016 rallying against illegal immigrants and free trade deals but striking a defensive tone about social security, some conservative intellectuals naively hoped this agenda could be refined into a novel form of populist-conservatism based around entitlement-friendly state-guided industrial planning or whatever. Instead, as the years have gone on, it’s become obvious that Trump doesn’t really know or care if his various idiosyncratic fears and fixations add up to anything coherent, and he mostly sees the pursuit of elected office as a means of attaining glory for himself and an ability to crush his imagined enemies. Vindictive use of state power against the hated is the guiding spirit of Trumpism, and there are a great many targets in his sight, including immigrants, journalists, Marxists (broadly defined), and trans people. Trump’s “intellectuals,” to the extent they can be called that, are people like Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and VP-elect JD Vance, who are drawn to Trump primarily because they can see the usefulness of a tyrant who hates the same people they do. This cause might be labeled “conservative” out of charitable tradition, but it’s not, really.

Q. So do you still consider yourself a conservative, then?

A. Trump’s movement has open contempt for American institutions, given they have a tendency of criticizing him or otherwise holding him accountable for his actions — something he has never cared for. He and his common-cause allies therefore fantasize constantly and loudly about destroying, suspending, or radically remaking the great institutions of a free America and creating something new in their place, something that makes it easier to reward good, loyal Americans and punish the traitor/scum/vermin/enemy-of-the-people-Americans.

As I said on my anti-Trump livestream, I think it’s easy to make the case that Kamala Harris was the more “conservative” candidate, in the sense of the candidate who clearly wanted to conserve American institutions — the professionalized civil service, the free press, the rule of law, an apolitical armed forces, the constitution — rather than destroy them, or bend them to her personal whim. But this is a literal and dated definition.

In his first post-election column, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall described the American political system as being divided between “one civic democratic party and one populist autocratic party.” That strikes me as broadly correct. I identify with the forces fighting to preserve civic democracy. America is clearly entering a post-ideological era in which the split of the partisan divide is about different things now.

Q. What does this mean for Canada?

A. I’ll have more to say about this in an upcoming video.

As far as US-Canadian relations go, I suspect Canada will weather the storm because even an ultra-protectionist administration inevitably puts Canada in a different category than other countries when it comes to things like trade and tariffs. I think there’s plenty of reasons to suspect a Pierre Poilievre-led government will have a more functional relationship with Trump, simply because Trump’s handlers have probably convinced him to conceptualize the left-wing Trudeau as an extension of “the enemy at home” in a way he didn’t previously. It’s interesting to note that MP Jamil Jivani, who is likely to become a high-profile cabinet minister under Poilievre, was JD Vance’s roommate at Yale. I suspect this could play a large role in Pierre giving Jamil a job with some relevance to US-Canada relations.

As far as Canadian conservatism goes, I stand by something I said in a video I made earlier this year; the conservative movement in Canada does not have an intellectual core that exists independently of the one in the United States (as is the case with most things in Canada). In my other Trump video I quoted Josh Marshall saying some pessimistic things about the future of right-wing youth culture, and these things will also affect Canada — which is to say, their introduction to the political right, what it stands for and believes, will be heavily shaped by right-wing message boards and online influencers. That faction isn’t yet as strong in the Canadian Conservative Party as it is in the Republican Party, but theres no reason to suspect their influence will do anything but grow over time.

It’s important for a healthy democracy to have a principled, policy-focused party of the left and a principled, policy-focused party of the right. For now, Canada seems more committed to preserving this traditional ideal than the United States. This is something the left in Canada should be willing to concede, as tempting as it will be to paint Pierre as a terrifying Trump-in-waiting for partisan purposes.

Q. Did the Internet win this for Trump?

A. Because Trump won, his courting of the hyper-online vote certainly seems vindicated. Jeremiah Johnson wrote a good piece about this, where he concludes:

…I can’t help but think back to the 2000s and 2010s when people would dismissively say things like “The internet is not real life. Twitter is not real life. You need to log off and talk to real people.” If that was ever correct it’s certainly not any more. It’s almost more correct to say that people knocking on doors need to get off the street and get back on the internet. To compete in modern politics you must be fighting in online spaces. It’s more important to win Joe Rogan than it is to win James Mattis. It’s more important to get your hashtags trending than to knock on doors. Social media is now more real than real life, and the politicians who recognize that are the ones who will win.

It’s not like Kamala did no online stuff at all, but it does seem that Democratic Party culture is overall more dismissive than not about the relative importance of “traditional” in-person political organizing versus being highly visible online. This strikes me as a conclusion that’s heavily bound up in a sort of gauzy liberal sentimentality for the labor-coded aesthetics of physically “organizing” as an end unto itself, and it’s probably worth discarding. A challenge for Democrats, however, is that they probably have fewer natural allies among online influencers, given how many of the biggest ones are fairly openly right-wing at this point. This mirrors a problem an earlier generation of Democrats had with talk radio, which was also disproportionally right.

If we accept, as I said earlier, that the traditional party divide has now transcended the ideological right/left axis and become something new pitting the forces of Trumpist authoritarianism against the defense of traditional American institutions, then I think many creators like myself have to think seriously about what side of this divide we want our content to be explicitly supporting, and what we can do to make that support consequential. In the last two days I have spoken with many of my YouTuber buddies who seem freshly enthusiastic about creating content that is more overtly or deliberately motivated by the cause of uplifting classically American liberal values in the face of a hostile government. I find that encouraging, and hope it succeeds.

I am confident that over time appetites will grow for content that is neither Trumpist nor of the useless, nihilistic far-left variety that clearly contributed nothing of substance to the fight against a second Trump term. Trump getting back in the White House is depressing, but a good thing about getting older is that it makes you realize that politics is fluid, and things inevitably fall in and out of fashion.

People will tire of this.

As I get older, I get a little existential about political opinions. The opinions I have now seem sensible, but I understand they’re also products of the evolution I’ve undergone as a man who’s been alive for four decades. In some ways I’m more dumb and uncertain at 40 than I was at 25; in other ways I’m more smug and condescending. Though I’d like to think I’m mostly smug and condescending about the virtues of admitting you’re dumb and uncertain.

I started identifying as a “conservative” when I was in high school, which meant opting into a certain set of conclusions that were byproducts of that particular context. This was in the late 90s, the epoch of boomer liberalism on this continent, a time when many young conservatives were motivated by a youthful contrarianism that saw continuity between the bossy liberal authorities in their lives and the ones assumed to be in power elsewhere. A line from the history teacher to Al Gore. 

My first year of college was the first anniversary of 9-11, and I remember observing a student union vigil where they ostentatiously declared their memorial was also for the thousands of Chileans who had perished under the American-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, whose coup happened on September 11, 1973. Theatrical anti-Americanism of that sort was threatening to my fragile faith in American exceptionalism, and like most conservative undergrads, I extrapolated campus spectacles of this sort as reflective of larger ideological trends within the elite. 

College kids tend to be hungry consumers of political writing, and often display great credulity for any author with a pretense of provocation. I remember reading Dinesh D’Souza’s Letters to a Young Conservative (2002) around this time — a book heavy on the “conservatives-are-the-real-rebels” theme that’s so prevalent now — and finding his arguments exhilarating. Today, I understand that 9-11 vigil as just a different manifestation of my own appetite for youthful contrarianism, in their case fed by “dissident” leftist authors like Noam Chomsky whose simplistic theories of propaganda and war scratched similar itches.

A lot of the political culture of our current moment is defined by mass seduction to this sort of political novelty. We’re all college kids now. The internet has made it easy to spread information to a greater variety of people, including a great many who might not have otherwise encountered the Noam Chomskys and Dinesh D’Souzas of the world.

Democratization of knowledge produces a true “marketplace of ideas” online, where the most enticing ideas enjoy great popularity. What makes a belief enticing, in turn, seems to be some mixture of comprehensiveness (does it provide a lot of answers), intuitiveness (does it feel correct based on what you already know), flattery (does it make you feel superior for knowing), and relevance (does it allow you to do something in the real world). Beliefs and belief systems that check these boxes are very attractive when we’re young because they can provide a shortcut to many of the things we crave in early adulthood — certainty, confidence, authority, independence — but the modern world has shown that a lot of people crave those things later in life as well.

It’s also true that American culture in general has gotten very political lately, and this begets pressure to participate in political debates and comprehend media with political themes.

The outcome has seemingly been an explosion of people suddenly concluding they’re alt-right, or far-left, or fundamentalist Catholics, or goldbugs, or anti-zionists, or some other identity offering a theory of everything. Oftentimes, these people will proudly tell you that they “weren’t into politics” until very recently. They have what is sometimes called the “convert’s zeal.” Trump in particular seems to have both assembled, and is seeking to broaden, a coalition of people who (like himself) haven’t historically thought much about politics but now have the convert’s zeal about the uniparty or great replacement or whatever. 

A lot of Trump supporters bring out my condescending side, as do  a lot of the far-left people on TikTok heaping praise on Osama Bin Laden or the Unibomber for their “brilliant observations.” I know they will one day age out of thinking like this, because these beliefs are silly and simplistic and life will eventually expose them to complicating facts that will humble them.

Someday enough people will be humbled that it will be cool to be nuanced and even-tempered and modest, to be pragmatic and utilitarian, and judgemental of anything that reads as crankish or conspiratorial. We’re far from that now, but it will happen someday, because that’s how these things go.

In the lead up to the 2020 presidential election I made a video documenting a phenomenon I’ve been tracking for about two decades: election-predicting portents with a record of 100% accuracy. 

At one time, there were quite a few of these: the outcome of the Washington Redskins’ final home game predicted who would get elected president from 1940 until 2004, when it foretold a Kerry win; the Scholastic corporation did a poll of children that predicted every winner from 1964 up to 2016, when the kids failed to anticipate Donald Trump.

Dr. Allan Lichtman is one of the few high-success portents that remains; he’s a history professor with a pseudo-scientific formula for predicting presidential elections — the 13 “Keys to the White House” (also the title of a book he wrote in 1988) — which has called every winner since 2004. The keys ask a variety of yes-or-no questions about the candidate of the incumbent party and the state of the country (are they already president, is there a foreign policy crisis, etc) and if there are more than six “no’s” the incumbent party loses.

I’ve been willing to give Dr. Lichtman some benefit of the doubt over the years. As a scholar of American history and political commentator, his analysis is often insightful and helpful. In contrast to some, I respect his talent for self-promotion, which has doubtless brought a lot of favourable publicity to the history department of American University. Many of his 13 Keys seemed a bit too subjective (“is the challenger charismatic?”), but I could accept them as a useful shorthand for thinking about the meta-forces that dictate electoral success beyond the political campaign.

A video he posted the other day on his YouTube channel has given me pause, however. What he said in his own defense makes me wonder if the 13 Keys actually sit closer to the football game end of the predictor spectrum. 

I said Dr. Litchman has called every presidential winner since 2004, but Litchman prefers to say he’s got only one election wrong since 1984 — he called the 2000 vote for Al Gore. In his recent video, “Setting My Record Straight,” he attempts to justify this error, but in the process just muddies the integrity of his system further.

Al Gore, he says, should have become president in 2000. He was denied the presidency because of skullduggery among Florida vote-counters — a common charge. He also says that he never predicted Donald Trump would win the popular vote in 2016, which some people evidently thought he did. 

My system, he says, is “unmistakably talking about who would govern over the next four years not who would have a plurality of the popular vote.” Al Gore should have governed and Trump did, ergo the 13 Keys system is sound.

This is curious, because the 13 keys have an obvious pretence of anticipating democratic reaction to various stimuli: economic growth, significant changes in public policy, social unrest, and others. It seems the system should therefore be able to predict the popular vote winner, since that’s the most visible expression of public reaction expressed through national election. If you ask me, Dr. Litchman should have claimed 2000 a win for his system and 2016 a loss; that might have hurt his credibility in the age of Trump, but brought more long-term coherence to what his keys are measuring.

If the keys just declare “who will govern,” by contrast, then it’s hard to understand why they need bother concerning themselves with data coloring the national mood. 

As we know, the US Electoral College can and has elected presidents the majority of Americans don’t want. This seems like it should make key #12 asking whether a candidate is uniquely “charismatic,” for instance, fairly irrelevant. If he is very charismatic, so what? His charms win over a majority of Americans? That advantage can still be cancelled out by an electoral college override, assuming those who don’t find the candidate charismatic are concentrated in enough of the right states. The same can be said of those Americans who are upset at a bad economy, or civil unrest, and everything else the keys track. 

Litchman’s 13 variables about the state of America are self-evidently important, but it’s hard to understand how a bunch of nationwide phenomena can be used to predict “who governs” when the governing decision is ultimately made by a bunch of states  independently allocating discrete numbers of electoral votes.

Perhaps I am missing the point. Perhaps the 13 Keys just measure correlation, not causation. But if that’s the case, the system is hardly deserving of anymore serious attention than keeping track of which candidate sells more Halloween masks.

EDIT: a reader shares this vastly more comprehensive takedown of Allan Litchman. It’s a remarkable read. It is about a through a debunking and discrediting of anyone as I’ve ever come across. The authors reveal not just that Dr. Litchman’s system is dubious, for reasons including those I discussed above, but also that Litchman himself has been incredibly dishonest over the years about how his system works.