In light of strong interest, I’ve decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox. NOTE: A version of the following was originally published in Jacobin in 2023.

Last year, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro debated Tucker Carlson on the question of automation. Ventriloquizing a familiar market-conservative argument, Shapiro asked his guest point-blank whether he would support restrictions on the use of technology in order to protect jobs. In his reply, Carlson was nothing short of incredulous.

Shapiro: You talk in [your] book about technology and how it’s shifting and taking away jobs from folks, and you make specific reference to truck driving and the fact that there are going to be these automated cars on the roads. So would you, Tucker Carlson, be in favour of restrictions on the ability of trucking companies to use this sort of technology specifically to, sort of, artificially maintain the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry?

Carlson: Are you joking? In a second. In a second. In other words, if I were president, would I say to the Department of Transportation, “We’re not letting driverless trucks on the road, period”? Why? Really simple. Driving for a living is the single most common job for high school–educated men in this country.

In this answer, there’s a hint at where Carlson’s argument is ultimately rooted. For him and other social conservatives, the question of automation is primarily about the stability of the patriarchal family unit, with the male breadwinner at its centre. As far as his prescriptions, Carlson even went as far as saying that the government should contrive a phony pretext for banning self-driving trucks altogether.

There is, of course, a third option that neither Shapiro’s market dogmatism nor Carlson’s reactionary luddism was willing to entertain. As conservatives, both clearly see some inherent good in people having to work. The former might favour the “creative destruction” wrought by markets and the latter certain restrictions on them, but neither views technology as a potentially liberatory tool for workers.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, simply took it for granted that technological progress would eventually give rise to a leisure society in which people, freed from the necessity of toil, would have all the time in the world to pursue and nurture their interests as they saw fit. Over the last hundred years, however, only one half of this prophecy has been borne out. Technological progress has been unprecedented, making production more efficient and all kinds of difficult tasks less arduous. Between 1950 and 2020, the United States experienced a 299 percent increase in labour productivity, and jobs of all kinds became safer and easier.

At the same time, many were eliminated — and with them the livelihoods they once sustained. Better telecommunications technology, after all, means you don’t need switchboard operators. Self-checkout units reduce opportunities in retail employment. Aided by machines, factories can now produce more with fewer workers involved. With the advent of AI technologies and self-driving vehicles, the same process will only unfold at an accelerated pace in the decades ahead.

This is hardly an original thought, but the social consequences are pretty alarming to contemplate. Despite being more productive than ever, workers’ wages have long been stagnant, and punishingly long working hours are already causing a needless seven hundred thousand deaths per year, according to the International Labour Organization. As millions more jobs are eliminated and service work in particular becomes more precarious, a process that could — and should — benefit workers will instead be one that makes their lives more difficult and insecure.

That the current political climate precludes potential solutions to this problem doesn’t make those solutions any less obvious. Modernization presents a clear opportunity to legislate shorter working weeks — something for which there is already historical precedent. As Bernie Sanders put it recently: “In 1940, the Fair Labor Standards Act reduced the workweek to 40 hours. Today, as a result of huge advances in technology and productivity, now is the time to lower the workweek to 32 hours — with no loss in pay.” (Iceland’s experiment to this effect, incidentally, has already yielded great results, which you can read about here in my 2021 discussion with researcher Guðmundur D. Haraldsson.)

During a recent interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan, Sanders also raised the prospect of a robot tax that would compel companies to pay a premium for replacing workers. Though the idea remains underdeveloped at the level of detail, it’s one that’s been floating around in various forms since the 1980s as a potential response to automation and could help generate the revenue needed to fund new public goods and universal services.

In the end, it’s ultimately these that represent the best solution to the problems posed by automation. Despite what some on the reactionary right might insist, there is no need to artificially limit technology in order to preserve jobs that can be performed by machines. With high-quality, universal services in place and an economy structured around the imperatives of social need rather than those of private profit, the importance of work in daily life would dramatically recede. Freed from the constant grind of tedious and unnecessary labor, countless millions would instead be able to spend their time however they chose without having to grind and struggle just to obtain bare subsistence. This, in some ways more than anything else, has always been the fundamental goal and basic objective of socialism. As Chris Maisano writes:

The one-sided focus of most Marxists and socialists on distributional questions has obscured the fact that the animating principle of the Left is not so much equality, but rather freedom — freedom from alienating work and freedom to use our time and creativity for our own self-directed ends. Socialism does not equal the roughly equal distribution of stuff; the martyrs of the labour movement didn’t give up their lives so that everyone could have the right to buy an iPhone or a plasma screen TV, or to waste their lives working at crap jobs…So long as the Left does not seek to fundamentally alter the labor process nor shorten the working day to the least amount of time possible, it fails to act on what should be its most fundamental principles.

Here, we are hardly grasping for some utopia. The socialist project, in spite of what its critics might say, are not pursuing a society without problems. Instead, to borrow from Freud (by way of ), socialists seek a future in which hysterical misery has been transformed into ordinary unhappiness.

Unless you’re wedded to retrograde ideas about work, gender, and the family, there is no reason not to welcome such a future with open arms.

In light of strong interest, I’ve decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox.

A version of the following was originally published in Jacobin in 2022.

At its best, futurist thinking represents a flourishing of the human imagination. Emboldened by the invention of new technologies, artists at the turn of the twentieth century envisioned a world largely free of everyday toil, in which the work of machines would allow ordinary people to live fuller and happier lives without the grinding poverty and tedium associated with industrialization. This vision may have reflected a kind of misplaced techno-utopianism, but it was also a genuine expression of progressive thinking in a world of growing class consciousness and democratic militancy.

Today, what passes for futurist optimism is often more a sign of civilizational paralysis and economic stagnation — the increasingly absurd billionaire space race offering us a counterfeit vision of utopian promise in the form of climate-destroying vanity flights and dystopian fanfiction about Martian colonies. Unlike earlier iterations of futurism, this plutocrat-manufactured version substitutes the transcendence of earthly inequalities for their extension into the solar system, imagining a century of space exploration planned and carried out by a tiny handful of the world’s wealthiest people. This makes sense insofar as it reflects both the prevailing logic of a top-heavy and decadent global economy and a political order incapable of accommodating real alternatives to the status quo. When a system looks exhausted but reforming it also seems impossible, the only option left is to scale up and hope it yields a better result.

Something like this is at least the implicit premise of a new report from the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute entitled Space Invaders: Property Rights on the Moon, which mounts a Lockean case for the ownership of land off-world. To researcher Rebecca Lowe’s credit, the argument is intellectually quite rigorous and represents a philosophically consistent application of classical liberal thinking. Noting that earlier, more universalist frameworks for the exploration of space feel less viable today than they did in the 1950s or ’60s, Lowe proceeds to consider an approach that is neither nationally or globally based and would instead see individuals “to attain morally-justified property rights in space.”

She’s certainly correct that anything resembling the egalitarian vision of space once represented in the popular imagination by something like Star Trek looks decidedly more distant in a world of transnational competition and disempowered nation states. She’s also right to recognize that the codification of rules and regulations surrounding interstellar colonization are bound to be complex and also that debates about them will inevitably reflect unresolved disputes about the design of existing human societies.

In true libertarian fashion, the case for property rights is asserted as axiomatic and advanced as fundamentally egalitarian in spirit. “Moral property rights,” Lowe writes, “are rights that simply reflect truths about morality, and which do not depend on positive law.” While democratic nations, she argues, may be in a position to “share fairly amongst their citizens the opportunities of the national appropriation of space,” the existence of authoritarian societies means some will be unable to reap the off-world bounty:

Under such [national] approaches, for instance, if democratic Country A was newly allowed to appropriate a certain amount of space land, then separable parts of this amount could, for instance, be made up for grabs amongst competing citizens, on fair terms. But the same could not be expected from authoritarian regimes. There is an egalitarian argument, therefore, that the arbitrary oppression of opportunity that some individuals already face simply by being born in, or otherwise inhabiting, particular countries should not be further entrenched by a nation-focused approach to the governance of space opportunities.

Ethically speaking, it’s not a bad argument. Having basic egalitarian commitments, after all, implies not wanting people to be disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth or subject to what Lowe calls “arbitrary oppression” — of opportunity or otherwise. The irony is that market societies have such oppression built-in by design, and that modern apologists for inequality regularly invoke property rights as the preeminent justification for not eliminating it. According to this line of thinking, properly functioning markets offer everyone the same opportunities to own and to compete.

The problem, of course, is that they do nothing of the kind. Market societies are, by definition, also class societies in which a comparatively small few own the means by which wealth is generated and a much larger group must earn subsistence through wage labor. The latter group produces, while the former extracts rents and skims the surplus value. In lieu of radical measures like the complete abolition of inherited wealth from one generation to the next, “equality of opportunity” is mostly a mirage and markets inevitably yield social relations defined by entrenched domination.

This obviously has profound implications on its own. But it’s also relevant if we’re considering hypothetical frameworks for the future use of space. What is presently called “private space exploration,” after all, is in practice the domain of a few exorbitantly wealthy billionaires, and there’s no particular reason to think that would change with the extension of property rights onto the moon.

Putting aside the question of whether lunar colonization will ever be viable or commercially profitable to begin with, the inherent asymmetries in global capitalism mean that any realistic version of it will simply project structural inequality into the heavens: a small few among those who are already rich will own and profit, while others will work and attempt to subsist. (One clue in this regard was offered by none other than Elon Musk when he was asked about the high costs of transport to Mars. His answer? That those unable to afford the price of a trip could take out loans and pay them off by toiling in Martian sweatshops upon arrival.) Equality of opportunity under a system of lunar property rights is thus every bit as mythical as its earthly equivalent.

Rigorous and systematic as it is, Lowe’s proposal therefore suffers from a broader problem inflecting much of what passes for futurist thinking today: namely, that it remains bound up in the logics of the very status quo it promises to transcend. While people in every era may struggle to see beyond their own immediate horizons, what the late Mark Fisher called capitalist realism arguably makes ours unique in this respect. From billionaire-led space exploration to cryptocurrency to the so-called Metaverse, the various schemes and technologies currently trying to claim the futurist mantle are so fatally limited by their allegiance to capitalism that they are inevitably strained of emancipatory potential.

Plutocracy is bad enough on earth. If humanity ever does expand into the heavens, let’s hope it’s in a future that has left billionaires and class hierarchies far behind.

In light of strong interest, I’ve decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox.

There was a revealing moment on the episode of CBC’s Power and Politics that followed the New Democratic Party convention in Winnipeg a few weeks ago. Unsurprisingly, the panel’s Conservative voice Fred DeLorey had little nice to say about the NDP’s new leader Avi Lewis, speaking dismissively about his association with “extremists” and casting him as an electoral dud incapable of moderating sufficiently to win (by way of contrast, DeLorey favourably cited the example of former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair — a funny thing to do given what happened in 2015 when the latter made his pivot to the so-called “centre”, but I digress).

This is the kind of spin we’re liable to get from these panels and it’s par for the course. But, in describing the left wing policy agenda with which Lewis won the NDP leadership, DeLorey abruptly shifted into a more alarmist register:

DELOREY: “This is a guy who wants to nationalize grocery stores, defund our military…”

CATHERINE CULLEN [HOST]: “He was very specific earlier this week that he does not want to nationalize grocery stores…He wants there to be publicly-run grocery stores…”

DELOREY: “Maybe that’s a slippery slope to his eventual plan to nationalize. But even then, having Canada Post delivering groceries, is that next on his plan too?”

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My first encounter with Straussianism, perhaps appropriately, came while reading Machiavelli as a second year undergraduate.

“Straussianism,” for those unfamiliar, refers to a broad camp of political theorists who draw on the thought of the late German émigré philosopher Leo Strauss. Many (though by no means all) of them are politically conservative and some have even been active in right wing politics. The exact nature of the relationship between Strauss’s thought and Straussian conservatism has been fiercely debated and is well beyond our remit here. Regardless, the main thing to know about Straussians is that they champion an esoteric approach to reading and interpreting great texts like The Republic. In plainer language, you might say they look for hidden meaning: forensically parsing subtext; peeling back artifice; identifying obvious gaps in a writer’s arguments and wondering (sometimes justifiably) whether they might be intentional.

In light of strong interest, I’ve decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox.

In reading The Prince, for example, I learned it could be useful to ask questions like why Machiavelli had chosen not to mention Christ in a list of “armed prophets” alongside Moses, Theseus, Cyrus the Great of Persia, and Romulus (the mythical founder and first king of Rome). Was he in fact making a cryptic claim about the political fecklessness of Christian morality here? In cases like these, the Straussian approach can be genuinely useful and yield real insight. Indeed, there’s no inherent reason why such an interpretive method should be conservatively-coded at all.

Straussianism often intersects with right wing politics, however, because many of its disciples also believe that major texts in the philosophical cannon were intentionally instilled with multiple layers of meaning by their authors — the deepest of which are, by design, only accessible to a tiny elect capable of identifying and grasping them.

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I was particularly struck by two of Zohran Mamdani's recent videos: one a reflection on Ramadan, the other a St. Patrick's day message to Irish New Yorkers. As is typically the case with Mamdani, the depth and substance in both is striking. He speaks well, is characteristically engaging, and there's a lot more reflectiveness and history to be found here than what one generally sees from politicians doing these sorts of things ("Today, we recognize the distinct and ongoing contributions of Culture X or Diaspora Y to [insert jurisdiction here]..." etc etc).

Here, and elsewhere in his communications, Mamdani is doing a very useful kind of public education. To this end, his Ramadan video manages to be, at once: a gently moving tribute to Muslim life in New York,1 a celebration of the different backgrounds and traditions — geographic, culinary, and so on — that reside within Islamic culture, and an introduction to the meaning and rituals of Islam's holy month for non-Muslims. In this case, there's obviously a personal dimension at work. But regardless, it's a far cry (in the best sense) from the rather shallow style of diversity theatre that became so popular among liberal politicians during the 2010s.

Note: This piece represents a continuation of ideas I first explored in a lengthy 2020 review of Barack Obama’s memoir A Promised Land (co-authored with Nathan J. Robinson) which you can read in full here.

In light of strong interest, I’ve also decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox. Enjoy.

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Thank you , , , and many others for tuning in live. There will be more livestreams ahead, so stay tuned.

-Luke

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In light of strong interest, I’ve also decided to extend last month’s discounted subscription offer. Until the end of April, that means you take out a full year’s subscription for just 50% the regular cost. To subscribe at the discounted rate and support my work you can click here or alternatively subscribe for free and still get the regular free posts sent right to your inbox. Enjoy.

Among the most striking features of the US-Israeli war against Iran is the near total indifference of American elites in particular to public opinion. I was 14 when the Bush administration invaded Iraq and can still vividly remember the year of concerted propaganda that came beforehand. If you weren't born or were too young to remember, it's difficult to convey how aggressive this actually was. It was a campaign truly global in scope, advanced on multiple fronts, and something that showcased in pretty terrifying fashion the awesome power of the modern state and its media surrogates to manipulate public opinion. By the time the actual invasion was launched in March 2003, a majority of Americans were basically baying for blood and more than half had been convinced Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11.

Fast forward to the present day and you see something quite different. From the outset, polls have shown there's very little support within the American public for this war. And it hasn't really mattered a lick, registering only in the tortured triangulations we've seen from people like Trump, Rubio, and Vance. Whereas the Bush administration sought to create both a humanistic pretence for its war — and one concerned with national security, weapons of mass destruction and so on — Trump and his people have barely even seemed to try.

We have, it seems, evidently moved beyond propaganda as it's traditionally been understood. The classical form of propaganda still assumed it was important, indeed necessary, to establish and maintain some kind of public legitimacy for the actions of the state or regime. That's been true in liberal democracies as well as totalitarian societies (and has plenty of precedent in pre-democratic and pre-liberal societies too).

What we have seen in Trump's otherwise quite lackadaisical messaging around the war is a concerted attempt — or rather a never-ending series of them — to prod and manipulate market behaviour, particularly when it comes to oil prices. In some instances, this looks to be straightforward case of insider trading. Here, for example, is how the New Yorker's John Cassidy recently described the aftermath of a single Trump TruthSocial post:

Since the war began, trading in the futures markets has been heavy and, sometimes, frenetic. In terms of their absolute size, the trades that took place immediately before Trump’s announcement last Monday weren’t off the charts. But the volume of trading was unusually large for the time of day: according to data collected and analyzed by Bloomberg, it was roughly nine times the average volume at the same time during the previous five days. The sudden surge in trading of stock futures was also unusual: until Trump’s post, there had been no big news. “The timing and the fact that the two trades were placed at the same time, it kind of smells like something was off,” Mike Khouw, a veteran futures trader and portfolio manager who used to run a derivatives desk at Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street investment bank, told me.

Beyond this kind of rank corruption, however, I think there’s ultimately something else at work. For Trump and Vance — who, lest we forget, won a narrow victory in a cost of living election less than two years ago — the prime concerns here are financial markets and gas prices rather than public opinion vis a vis the war itself.

It’s a perfect illustration of what the market society really means. Insofar as there’s propaganda, its target constituency is not the people but Wall Street. And insofar as there’s democracy, it’s simply the democracy of consumers — who have no real power or influence as citizens but who might angrily ask to speak with the manager if prices remain too high.

Note: You can listen to my full conversation with Avi Lewis, the new leader of Canada’s NDP, here. Until April 1st, I’m also offering annual subscriptions at 50% off the regular rate. There’s never been a better time to subscribe, and you can redeem the offer by clicking this link.

Avi Lewis’s victory in the NDP leadership race has already elicited a response from certain corners of Canada’s political and media class that is arguably without precedent in the 21st century. Here, courtesy of Alberta-based blogger David Climenhaga, is just a small sample of that reaction from Wildrose country:

“Under new leader Avi Lewis, federal NDP looks more communist than social democratic”— Don Braid, Postmedia’s Calgary Herald

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Note: You can listen to my full conversation with Avi Lewis, the new leader of Canada’s NDP, here. Until April 1st, I’m also offering annual subscriptions at 50% off the regular rate. There’s never been a better time to subscribe, and you can redeem the offer by clicking this link.

On Sunday, Canada’s New Democratic Party officially elected its new leader in Winnipeg. There is plenty to say about the result. But first, a story.

I attended my first NDP convention in the summer of 2009, just after starting university. It was a memorable experience, and I met many people there I still know today. Held in beautiful Halifax while the late Jack Layton was leader, some of the seeds of the party’s 2011 electoral breakthrough were already visible. I was then very young and inexperienced in politics, but I also had an at least murky awareness that some of the fault lines in Canadian social democracy were visible too.

The NDP, as is true for any party bigger than a sect, has always had different tendencies and factions residing inside its tent. Because of Canada’s size and the complexities of its federal structure, some of these are regional. Thanks to the party’s origins in the merger of its predecessor (the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation or CCF) and the Canadian Labour Congress, its internal politics are to some extent shaped by those of the labour movement as well.

But there is also a deeper, more existential divide when it comes to the NDP’s modern identity, and flashes of it were evident to my younger self some 17 years ago in Halifax. On the rostrum that week were MPs and labour firebrands like Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers (who among other things got a round of applause by reminding the room that Conrad Black was still in prison). One of the convention’s keynote speakers, on the other hand, was a senior operations staffer from the recent Obama campaign, while one of the convention’s most discussed resolutions (not passed, for what it’s worth) proposed to drop the word “new” from the party’s name altogether in an apparent nod to the party of Obama and Clinton.

The remarks delivered by former leader Ed Broadbent and the newly-minted NDP premier of Nova Scotia Darrell Dexter in particular underscored two radically different ideas of what the party is and how it should orient itself. Both, as Bryan Evans writes in the 2012 book Social Democracy After the Cold War, suggested there was something “Janus-like” about the NDP and its identity. On this point, Evans is worth quoting at some length:

Broadbent delivered the convention’s opening keynote speech; it was the first time he had spoken to a party convention since resigning as leader in 1989. Indeed, in historical terms, the convention was taking place at the height of the Great Recession, when there appeared to be a global deathbed conversion to old-style Keynesianism. Broadbent noted that we were living in a “social democratic moment” where “even governments of the right . . . have now had to adopt the kinds of policies we social democrats have advocated all along.” The theme of his address was the importance of state intervention to stabilize the market economy and to promote greater equality through redistribution of resources and opportunities. Canada’s postwar welfare state had contributed significantly to this goal through concrete policies and programs that Broadbent succinctly summed up as “government pensions, universal health care, trade union rights, comprehensive unemployment insurance, the expectation that every boy and girl with ability could go to university,” all contributing to a state in which, ideally, “all were paid for by adequate levels of progressive taxation.” But he lamented that three decades of neoliberalism (he did not use this term) had effectively eroded this social democracy through tax cuts and an increasingly regressive taxation regime, and the termination of redistributive programs — all of this resulting in expanding inequality. In closing, Broadbent identified his party’s task: “to demonstrate, show and persuade Canadians that with more equality” a more civil, productive, socially cohesive, and healthier Canada was possible. In other words, he exhorted his party to advocate for the social democracy of redistribution, a mixed economy, and an effectively regulated market.

This was vintage Ed Broadbent as I later came to know him. It was hardly the radical stuff you might find in his speeches from the 1960s and 70s. But in both content and style, it still reflected an idea of the NDP that was consciously grounded in the values and objectives of social democracy — envisioning a party guided by an explicit critique of the established order and anchored in an alternative social vision of its own. Dexter, who had just made history as his province’s first NDP premier, gave a rather different kind of speech. Here’s Evans again:

In contrast, the new premier of Nova Scotia, the head of the first New Democratic government in Atlantic Canada, presented a different narrative. The day after Broadbent delivered his impassioned denunciation of inequality and market fetishism, Dexter urged the party to “not be shackled by the past” and to “embrace a wider set of values,” adding that the NDP is a “new modern political party” that needs to become a “big tent.” But the delegates at the convention were not completely convinced to follow Dexter’s advice: resolutions calling for tax credits for small and medium-sized businesses, similar to a Dexter-government policy, and a proposed renaming of the party, met such strong opposition that they did not make it to the convention floor.

I’ve since visited Nova Scotia several more times, though I can’t pretend to be an expert on the record of its only NDP government. What I can say — having volunteered on quite a few campaigns, worked as both a federal and provincial staffer, and run as a candidate for the Ontario NDP — is that there was more a stake in the contrast between Broadbent’s speech and Dexter’s than I appreciated at the time.

Now, to the race.

To first state the obvious, Avi Lewis’s victory in Winnipeg was resounding and decisive. Given both the campaign’s fundraising numbers and the sizeable crowds turning out at Lewis’s events, I was not exactly surprised (on Saturday, in fact, a left wing slate’s sweep of the NDP’s federal executive offered an even stronger hint of what lay in store). Still, the scale of Lewis’s victory was considerable — and, as someone who has been quite public about my own preferences, I am very pleased with the result.

Regarding the vote tally, a few specific points are worth making. First, with just under 80,000 electors participating, 2026 marks the largest voting electorate in the history of an NDP leadership race (surpassing 2017 by a few thousand). In both percentage and raw numbers, Lewis’s victory sets a record also. At almost 40,000 total, he’s won more votes than any other NDP leadership candidate since the introduction of the party’s current one-member-one-vote system. When you add to this his record-breaking fundraising haul, you have the potential ingredients for the kind of political recovery the party so desperately needs.

Regarding the other candidates, a few supplemental points. The big question on the first ballot was whether the anti-Lewis vote would effectively consolidate around a single candidate or be split between MP Heather McPherson and union leader Rob Ashton. It ultimately did cohere around the former, but without sufficient numbers to force a second ballot. Ashton’s vote was lower than I think many expected, and here I’ll defer comment to Labour Studies professor Larry Savage (incidentally no relation). Tanille Johnston, a gifted organizer who narrowly lost her race in the BC riding of North Island-Powell River last year, deserves immense credit for finishing third, and Tony McQuail ends the race with the respect of everyone involved.

What exactly happens next is to some extent anyone’s guess.

Avi Lewis has won a landslide mandate but also takes the reins of a party burdened by debt, down to just six MPs, and still fresh off the worst result in its history. He himself will not have a seat until at least the next election (unless he changes his mind and decides to run in an upcoming by-election, though I think this is unlikely) and faced negative broadsides from the leaders of the Alberta and Saskatchewan wings of the NDP within minutes of being elected.1 Lewis’s approach, as he told me in February, has been to welcome open debate and disagreement — indeed, this is one of the reasons I endorsed him — while stressing points of commonality with figures like Alberta’s Naheed Nenshi (Nenshi in particular evidently has no intention of paying Lewis or the majority of NDP members throughout the country the same courtesy). The barrage from right wing talking heads and pundits is bound to ramp up as well and will only get shriller as Lewis’s national profile grows.

Weathering these attacks will take resolve and discipline, and the best defence will be a continuation of the populist strategy Lewis embraced to win the leadership. The electorate, by and large, does not love corporate monopolies, unaffordable housing, concentrated wealth, or high grocery prices. The Carney government, for the time being at least, remains very popular, though polls suggest a majority disapprove of its orientation in some areas — notably, the prime minister’s recent endorsement of the US-Israeli attack on Iran. Clearly, there is fertile terrain for a left populist alternative here and, for what it’s worth, I am optimistic that the NDP can gain seats and win back official party status after the next election. Only once this objective has been achieved can anyone begin to think again about the much more ambitious goal of forming government. Here, I stand by what I wrote last year for the Perspectives Journal and I think many of the obstacles and strategic challenges ahead will be familiar:

If the [NDP] hopes to rebuild on a national scale with the goal of eventually forming government, it will need to solve the strategic issues that have persistently thwarted even its most promising efforts to date. Broadly-speaking, these include (in no particular order): 1) the continued salience of the federalist/sovereigntist dynamic in Quebec and the obvious challenges this poses for a national social democratic party; 2) the continued, if sometimes provisional loyalty of many self-identified progressives and so-called “strategic voters” to the Liberals; 3) the party’s periodic inability to translate its often high levels of provincial support in Ontario and the West into a commensurate number of federal seats…In any case, it’s clear the NDP cannot effectively recover if its renewal is treated solely as a rebranding exercise. Breaking the logjam of two-party politics will require more than just effective leadership and good messaging. Fundamentally, it calls for a creative populist strategy as well: rooted in both the engaged participation of a mass membership and the kind of bold, left-wing program that is impossible for the Liberals to appropriate or co-opt.

Avi Lewis’s victory is significant in its scale, but is consequential in less strictly measurable ways too. Contrary to what some have insisted over the past six or seven months, the NDP’s leadership race really was about the party’s fundamental values and purpose rather than the more straightforward question of how it should communicate.

Beneath the race’s often irritating debates about political language, I think there lingered a somewhat deeper divide and, thankfully, the party’s left was able to convince a majority of NDP members of its case. To some, the idea of “meeting people where they’re at” has evidently come to mean never speaking or thinking in ideological terms at all. This, in turn, means conceiving of members and voters like passive consumers of political messaging rather than as active agents or participants in politics just waiting to be organized. It means invoking broad concepts like “fairness” and “compassion” and pitching vaguely-defined “solutions” rather than trying to meaningfully alter the contours of Canadian society. It means treating the NDP’s populist history as a heritage object rather than as a living tradition or source of inspiration.

All of which is to say, there is a potential for renewal here that goes beyond what might be tallied in membership signups and fundraising numbers. When Lewis and his team say they hope to make the party into a “political instrument of the people” there is every reason to think they really mean it. The state of the country, indeed the state of the world, clearly demands nothing less.

Cut the hawsers - haul out - shake every sail! …
Steer for the deep waters only…
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all…
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!

— Walt Whitman

From those condemned to labour
For profit of another
We take our new endeavour.

For sect and class and pattern
Through whom the strata harden
We sharpen now the weapon.

Till power is brought to pooling
And outcasts share in ruling
There will not be an ending
Nor any peace for spending.

— Frank Scott1

Travelling across Canada by train in 1926, roughly six years before the founding of the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation, J.S. Woodsworth scribbled these words in his diary:

“[As] I write, my train is rushing forward through the night carrying me homeward. The universe too is driving onward — we may well believe it is toward some goal and inspired by some increasing purpose. But as I rest back in my seat in the car, I must confess that I am not bothering about the road-bed or the train dispatchers or even possible accidents. I am being carried forward. That is enough. So in his study of phenomena or in his dealing with practical affairs, the modern man is not worrying much about first causes or final causes. He is absorbed in the consideration of the process itself. His faith is shown in his reliance upon the force that seems to be driving the world onward and upward.”2

Woodsworth, who had been elected to the House of Commons in 1921 as an MP for the Independent Labour Party, hailed from a tradition of dissident Methodism called the Social Gospel. Those in the Social Gospel movement believed that to live the truth of Christ meant working to alleviate human suffering, here and now, rather than trying to save people’s souls for the life beyond. This called not only for the doing of charitable deeds but for building a new society, a New Jerusalem, through which the evils and injustices of industrial capitalism would be transcended for good. An ordained minister of the church, Woodsworth was also a committed socialist who dedicated his life to the cause of earthly salvation.

The words above have stayed with me since I first encountered them because they so beautifully capture the ethos of democratic socialism (Christian and otherwise) in the early 20th century. Woodsworth, who is mostly remembered today as a prophet, was equally a serious and disciplined political organizer who was under no illusions about the challenges facing the socialist project in Canada and beyond. But riding in his railcar against the black canvas of the Prairie night, he felt ineluctably carried forward, as if propelled by some celestial force with a momentum of its own.

This was how many socialists, religious and secular alike, once saw the world and their place within it. Whatever difficulties or setbacks might confront their movement, history and human existence had a telos that would ultimately lead to the promised land. A party elder whose family has been in the movement since it began once told me that in childhood the New Jerusalem always felt tangible and inevitable. Many turns and detours awaited, yes, and the hard political work still had to be done. But the endpoint was never in doubt and humanity would duly reach the Kingdom of Heaven at the appointed time, as sure as Woodsworth’s train had pulled into Winnipeg’s dusky dawn.

Since the founding of the CCF in 1932 and its successor the NDP in 1961, there have been many turns and detours and some real victories to go with them. Family allowances. Trade union rights. Paid parental leave. Employment Insurance. Medicare. Workplace health and safety laws. Public pensions. A legislated minimum wage. But the promised land still remains elusive, and there have usually been more defeats to mourn than victories to celebrate. Throughout my own life, in fact, the celestial force of which Woodsworth once wrote has seemed to pull backwards rather than forwards.

Last Saturday would have been my friend Ed Broadbent’s 90th birthday and, just like Woodsworth, Tommy Douglas, David Lewis, M.J. Coldwell, and countless others before him, he never lived to see the world socialists dream of creating. This, tragically, has been the lot of millions who’ve walked the same path throughout the past two hundred years. In the 19th century, modernity and mass politics set alight the flames of justice and emancipation only to see the first half of the next century tamp them down. The evils of war, poverty, exclusionary nationalism, colonial violence, and genocide were not abolished, and today the spectres of oligarchy and authoritarianism threaten the fragile promise of democracy once again.

But, whatever its failures and disappointments, the socialist tradition is no mere artefact or heritage object. Today, and always, it remains a living and powerful inheritance: a source of vitality, inspiration, and strength handed down to us by millions who never lived to see their New Jerusalem come into being but died believing in it nonetheless. In a secular age, when so little feels certain, it can be hard to fathom the hopeful convictions of our political ancestors. But if, even in the throes of the Great Depression, Woodsworth and his contemporaries could feel the winds of history at their backs, there is no reason we should resign ourselves to the doldrums. Instead, we should hold close his prayer, which calls on us to name and confront injustice wherever we may find it; to recognize beauty in the world and the goodness human beings are capable of; to make from a society of exploitation and competition a richer pattern of life and a future of equality and justice for all.

J.S. Woodsworth wrote:

“We pledge ourselves to united effort in establishing on the earth an era of justice, truth and love. May our faces be to the future. May we be the children of that brighter and better day which even now is beginning to dawn. May we not impede but rather cooperate with those spiritual forces which we believe are impelling the world upward and onward. For our supreme task is to make our dreams come true; to transform our city into the holy city and to make this land, in reality, God’s own country.”

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I have little to say about the late Robert Mueller as a person, not just because I didn’t know him but because I count myself among those who believed, and still believes, that the Mueller investigation was a colossal waste of time and energy. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump clearly called for some serious rethinking on the part of America’s liberal mainstream. At minimum, it demanded some measure of accountability from the elite operatives and pundits who had so confidently assured everyone that Trump couldn’t win and that Clinton had it in the bag. The Democratic Party’s leaders held themselves up as the only things standing between the country and fascism, and the smug, self-righteous offering they put to voters ultimately handed the keys to a nuclear-armed superpower to the former host of The Apprentice.

Instead of accountability — instead of any reckoning with what had just occurred — the guardians of America’s liberal mainstream preferred to insist that literally anyone else was to blame and that, in fact, they did not really lose. In 2017, Russiagate formed the locus of this delusion by mystifying things and outsourcing an electoral defeat to malign external agents. The problem was not that Democratic strategists had underestimated and misunderstood Trump’s appeal, allowing him to win voters who had once supported Obama. It was not that Clinton had more or less spat on the millions of primary voters who had rallied behind Bernie Sanders. It was not that Democrats had abandoned blue collar workers in the midwest or chosen to meet an anti-establishment moment by lecturing struggling Americans that their anger was misplaced. If the Democratic Party, by definition, cannot fail then it can only be failed by cosmic forces beyond anyone’s control.

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Note: Until April 1st, I’m offering annual subscriptions at 50% off the regular rate. There’s never been a better time to subscribe, and you can redeem the offer here.

EKOS pollster has just released a set of new numbers that offer us a fascinating snapshot of Canada’s current federal landscape.

His top line finding, echoed by other pollsters, is that — roughly a year after becoming prime minister — Mark Carney remains very popular, as does his government. If an election were held today, in fact, the Liberals would likely be on course to win well over 200 seats, and possibly a landslide that would rank alongside Brian Mulroney’s in 1984 and John Diefenbaker’s in 1958. Even more remarkable are some of Graves’ regional numbers, especially in Alberta where the Liberals are actually four points ahead of the Conservatives.

The other striking thing about these numbers is the relative recovery they suggest may be underway for the New Democratic Party. By historical standards, 15 percent would be a fairly average result for both the NDP and its predecessor the CCF. But it would also be more than double the vote share the party received in last year’s federal election (6.29%) and more than enough to reclaim official party status in the House of Commons. Both here, and on the question of the Liberals’ surging numbers, Graves’ analysis is quite interesting:

The NDP’s rise is being driven by the emergence of a new progressive populist segment. These voters are skeptical of elites but strongly supportive of social programs, unions, and a more active government. They are politically homeless, but for now, they are far more comfortable with Carney than with Poilievre.

The Liberal coalition itself has also changed. Some of the “borrowed” NDP vote from the spring has drifted back, but this has been offset by gains among more moderate Conservative voters who are comfortable with Carney’s economic stewardship and tone. The result is a broader, more centrist coalition, one that now reaches into places that were previously out of bounds.

Now, this is obviously just one poll, and Canada’s political landscape remains very much in flux. But, should the dynamic hold, it would imply a fairly significant realignment of the party system as we’ve known it, and a profound shift in the political strategy favoured by the Liberals.

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A version of the following was originally published in Jacobin in 2022.

In his excellent 2019 book, No Longer Newsworthy, Christopher R. Martin charts the gradual erasure of America’s working class from its media landscape. This process, as Martin shows, has brought about profound changes in the way all kinds of stories are written and framed. And, far from being a product of some unknowable alien force, it has both observable causes and discernible material roots. Amid consolidation and competition from the then-ascendent medium of TV, newspapers pivoted to a business model premised largely on advertisement aimed at upscale and middle-class audiences — transforming not only their own readerships but also the way vital issues were conceptualized. As Martin writes:

In this new vision of how a newspaper should serve its community, the newspapers and their corporate owners only wanted the right kind of readers, those who were “well-to-do,” “affluent moderns,” “influentials,” and people with plenty of “effective buying power” and “giant-sized household incomes.” Nearly every newspaper began publicizing their readership as if they were the children of Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon: all above average.

Among the most memorable illustrations of what these changes have done to transform the news comes midway through the book as Martin contrasts New York Times coverage of two strikes separated by roughly forty-two years — a chasm, it turns out, defined at least as much by ideology as the actual passage of time.

A Tale of Two Strikes

In March 1941, some 3,500 members of the Transport Workers Union walked off the job, demanding, among other things, a 25 percent pay increase, paid vacation time, and an eight-hour workday. “WALKOUT HALTS 1,305 BUSES, NO SETTLEMENT IS IN SIGHT; THRONGS JAM SUBWAYS, CABS,” blared a headline on the front page of the March 11 edition of the New York Times. This, in itself, was perhaps unsurprising. As the accompanying story reported, the workers — employed by two companies that together supplied 95 percent of all surface transit in Manhattan — had successfully paralyzed a bus system used daily by some 900,000 New Yorkers.

Remarkably, though, the lengthy article quite prominently detailed the workers’ demands and implicitly celebrated the extra business going to taxi drivers as a result of the strike. As Martin notes in his book, no riders were even quoted or represented in photos — which instead featured empty buses sitting in their warehouses, the chairman of one of the companies involved, and a street packed from end-to-end with cabs.

More than four decades later, in March of 1983, America’s great newspaper of record would report on another transit strike, this time brought about by several hundred conductors and other workers employed on suburban commuter lines. “RAIL STRIKE CLOGS TRAFFIC ON ROADS IN NEW YORK AREA,” announced the paper on its front page, its headline accompanying a story framed heavily around frustrated and inconvenienced riders.

Many paragraphs are expended before the actual cause of the dispute finally enters the picture, the article instead emphasizing the disruptions inflicted by the strike and its impact on hapless (and seemingly well-off) commuters. “I’m lost,” remarks one Don Gilbert of New Canaan, Connecticut — the first of several to be quoted and reportedly an employee of the Chemical Bank at Park Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street. “I’ve never done this before. If I didn’t follow the crowd, I wouldn’t know where to go.” The last word of the piece, meanwhile, is reserved for an explicitly anti-union message. “The idea of such a small minority having such an impact on such a huge majority is just not right,” says someone identified only as a “25-year-old man from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.”

Particularly when seen to scale, the contrast between the two reports only becomes more striking. As Martin notes, 1983’s labor action concerned far fewer workers and ultimately affected one-tenth of the riders impacted by its equivalent in 1941. Nevertheless, it was largely packaged to readers of the New York Times as a tale of needless chaos and middle-class inconvenience.

It’s just one of many possible examples, but a clear illustration of the way changes in the media’s business model have gradually transformed the way news is consumed and, ultimately, the way it tends to be presented. In the first half of the twentieth century, many large outlets drew on a broad swath of readers and were compelled to serve up a vision of the world that was at very least legible to working-class audiences.

Today, as many newspapers populate their pages with consumer reporting, pricey real estate listings, and other content tailored to a predominantly upper-crust subscriber base, it’s become all too clear that the orientation of the media has changed — and that the concerns and interests of a far narrower socioeconomic niche now overwhelmingly shape its business.

On a recent episode of the London Review of Books’ On Politics podcast, James Butler hosted a conversation about the current state of Britain’s Labour Party with Sienna Rodgers (deputy editor at the House magazine) and Jeremy Gilbert (a professor of cultural and political theory at the University of East London.) If you haven’t been following British politics lately, you might not be aware of how profoundly things are currently in flux. Less than two years after winning back government, the Labour Party seems on the precipice of electoral oblivion. Keir Starmer’s premiership is on life support, and will probably reach its ignominious end when Labour is hammered in local elections this spring. As I wrote recently, the Starmer project was supposed to be the ultimate vindication of centrist and centre right electoral theory and has instead yielded a government so existentially unpopular that it’s now an open question whether Labour will remain a major party at all.

The discussion between Butler, Rogers, and Gilbert gives a wonderful all-around picture of how Labour’s right has brought the entire party to the brink. But one exchange struck me in particular. A little under an hour into the conversation, Butler notes the existence of “a significant political faction [within the British electorate] that wants significant political change from the left.” Here, he’s referring to the sizeable chunk of millennials and other left-leaning demographics which the Labour Party had lost by the time of Gordon Brown’s defeat in the 2010 general election. During the 2010s, these people went on to be the backbone of tuition protests and anti-austerity demonstrations. Some of them probably supported the Liberal Democrats in 2010, though many were subsequently radicalized and went on to be the vanguard of Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning and improbable campaign for the Labour leadership in 2015. Today, needless to say, the overwhelming number have abandoned the Labour Party and shifted their allegiance to parties like the Greens. According to Gilbert, the number of left wing members who have departed or been expelled from Labour since Starmer took over is roughly 300,000 — an exodus that likely has few parallels in modern history.

Indeed, Gilbert observes that this group has ultimately turned out to be far, far bigger than consensus political wisdom understood, and asserts that roughly one-quarter of the British electorate has effectively been socialist in attitude since even before the 2010s. Mostly, however, it has not had any kind of political voice. It’s been largely ignored and unrepresented in the media, considered outside the mainstream of Britain’s major parties, and assumed to be more a minor fringe than a tendency worth taking seriously.

That changed when Corbyn won the Labour leadership, and I still remember the generalized bafflement that greeted his victory throughout most of Britain’s political and media elite. There was even greater bafflement at the results of the 2017 general election, which in every way defied the conventional wisdom of elite pundits and political strategists — and did so despite segments of the party’s own machinery being in more or less open revolt against its leader. Labour, tragically, did not win. But in all my years of following politics I don’t think I’ve ever felt more euphoric than on the night of June 8, 2017.

From its outset, the Corbyn project had been dismissed as irrelevant, dangerous, marginal and, above all else, doomed to be crushed by Theresa May. But 2017 ultimately produced a swing to Labour on a scale not seen since Clement Atlee’s 1945 landslide. Under more conventional electoral conditions — which is to say, in a pre-Brexit environment — its 40 percent vote share would in fact have comfortably secured Corbyn a majority government. Again, such a result was not supposed to be possible.

It wasn’t that 40 percent of the British electorate had suddenly become socialists. But, as Gilbert notes, the result did affirm the potential for a quite expansive left/centre-left coalition uniting fairly conventional progressive voters with a more radical bloc seeking a more profound kind of social, political, and economic transformation.

2017 confounded elite consensus wisdom because it proved that the left’s base of electoral support was (and still is) much larger than the maybe 2-4 percent it was previously thought to represent. This, in turn, struck down another pillar of the reigning political cosmology since at least the 1980s: namely, that the left and its ideas are fundamentally off-putting to the kinds of respectable, educated, middle-class voters in swing constituencies who often decide elections. If you accept this, it becomes toxic for a party like Labour (or, indeed, the Democrats) to campaign and govern from anywhere but the mushy middle. In order to win liberal-ish property owners who have a postsecondary degree and a car in the garage, so this thinking goes, you can’t afford to indulge the left’s transformative demands.

This has in many ways been the essence of Keir Starmer’s strategy since replacing Corbyn, and it was informed by a corollary assumption that left wing voters — having nowhere else to go — could be more or less openly spat upon without consequence. The problem is that, in order to sustain such a belief, you have to pretend that the 2017 general election simply never took place. And, indeed, since Corbyn’s 2019 defeat especially, much of Britain’s political and media class has basically opted to act like it never took place.

Ironically, the pyrrhic Starmer “landslide” of 2024 — achieved on a record low turnout and vote share and owning mainly to the Tory/Reform schism on the right — demonstrated the profound stupidity of its architects’ fundamental assumptions. Since then, Starmer and his faction have stubbornly learnt nothing and torched their own mandate in record time. By way of a brief summary:

In due course, Starmer did away with the hated, unpopular policies of centre-left governments past and proceeded to do the kinds of righteous and exceedingly popular things that the median voter craves instead. It cheerfully welcomed the patronage of the world’s billionaires and plutocrats. It handed over portions of the state to Big Tech and high finance. It embraced J.K. Rowling’s gender policies. To save a few bucks and make ritual sacrifice to the financial markets, it cut winter fuel allowance payments because apparently not enough pensioners were freezing to death in the winter. It armed Israel to the teeth, criminalized dissent, openly channeled Enoch Powell, and aggressively purged the left.

Labour’s dismal fortunes, confirmed by its recent third place showing in the longtime fortress seat of Gorton and Denton, only underscores the continued salience of 2017 and the broader electoral dynamics it revealed.

For decades, leading politicians and strategists of the neoliberal centre have confidently told everyone that you can not only win without the left but that parties like Labour or the Democrats can actively gain ground by openly scorning and alienating it. In the US context, Kamala Harris’s failed strategy against Trump offers us further evidence to the contrary.

The lessons of 2017 remain a living rebuttal to the neoliberal theory of electoral politics. But they remain relevant for the left too, because they give us a glimpse of what a successful electoral coalition will probably look like if it coheres in Britain or anywhere else: the socialist left in partnership with progressive liberals; a vanguard of downwardly mobile young voters; cross-class, multiracial; urban and post-industrial. Centrist neoliberals, with their derelict analyses and horseshoe theory of politics, cannot possibly build a coalition so broad — and, if the far right continues its ascendency, it will be the only viable alternative.

Take a look at the four images below and tell me what you see.

If my life depended on it, I could not name a single one of the shows pictured here and, if you told me they were all taken from the same series I would believe you. The first thing that comes to mind is Game of Thrones, but we could just as easily be looking at one of the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies or any number of the expensively-produced high fantasy series’ that now regularly pop up on streaming services like Prime and Netflix. One imagines these shows probably have a feudal setting of some kind and maybe a dash of magic realism. There’s probably some violence, maybe even intense violence, but our heroes also get to enjoy a few laughs. I’d wager there’s a quest of some kind, and a bearded oaf whose deceptively grouchy manner in fact masks a more tender side that ultimately lies beneath. Does it matter? Even if you’ve never seen these shows, you almost certainly kind of have.

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Good afternoon.

When you read Ed Broadbent’s old speeches, there are certain trademarks that quickly become familiar. And one of these was that — whatever the place, theme, or the context happened to be — there was usually some more general statement of principles on which Ed rested his words. That may partly have been the teacher in him. Maybe a bit of the political theorist as well. But, whatever the reason, Ed Broadbent always tried to impart on his audience more than just the bare facts or prosaic details about which he may otherwise have been speaking.

The upshot was that those who came to hear him talk about inflation, the government’s jobs record, or the NDP’s latest proposals for Medicare, would also be treated to flourishes like this one — a definition of socialism which Ed chose to include in one 1975 speech at a small community hall in Edmonton.

“Socialism,” Ed told his audience,

“...is an optimistic creed, based on a fundamental assumption of the equal worth of all people, and the greatness of the human society that they can create through their collective endeavours. It is a philosophy of compassion, believing that each is responsible for the welfare of all. It is a doctrine of courage, prepared to challenge those who would maintain privileged positions through the exploitation and oppression of others.”

This was Ed Broadbent’s creed as a national politician. But you’ll also notice that his language there doesn’t limit itself to Canadians or to Canada. Above all else, that’s why these words felt like a fitting way to begin this talk.

In the time I have today, I’m going to give you all a short sketch of my late comrade Ed’s engagement in the realm of international affairs. The occasion for that is partly this conference’s official theme, which is “Defending Democracy Across Borders.” And in light of what’s currently happening in the world I would probably have chosen to speak on the question of internationalism anyway.

But when it comes to Ed’s legacy I think this subject is important in and of itself because it is easily the least well-known and least written about aspect of Ed Broadbent’s roughly seven decade career in public life. That, in my opinion, is a serious oversight and, if nothing else, I hope the remarks today by myself and Frances will do some small part to correct it.

Ed Broadbent’s interest in international affairs began very early. As a young man from Oshawa thinking his first political thoughts, he often seems to have looked abroad for political inspiration — finding it in left wing American magazines like The Nation and also in the work of midcentury European writers of the democratic left (his favourites being George Orwell and Albert Camus).

His first published writing on a question related to foreign policy I’ve been able to find comes in the form of a report, written in October 1956 while Ed was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, for its student newspaper The Varsity (incidentally where I got my start as a writer). The occasion for that report was a debate held at Hart House about Canada’s membership in NATO in which Lester B. Pearson faced off against a quite precocious second year student from University College by the name of Stephen Lewis.

But it was in the 1960s that Ed Broadbent’s ideas about the world really began to take shape. This, after all, was the decade of Paris ‘68, of the New Left, the civil rights movement; of growing global protests against the American war in Vietnam; and, here in Canada, of the Bomarc Missile Crisis, the Waffle, and the Quiet Revolution. And Ed — who in those days sported a leather jacket, drove a motorcycle, and was described in 1967 by one student journalist as a “button-wearing Vietnik” — fit right in. Helping to organize protests against the war in Vietnam while a professor of political science at York, he soon carried his antiwar activism into Parliament. As a keynote speaker at Ottawa’s 1969 Moratorium Day protest, Ed had harsh words for US president Richard Nixon, remarking “[That] the main enemy of the people of Vietnam” was not a communist conspiracy but the military superpower to the south of us.”

Notwithstanding this history, it should be noted that international affairs was not initially one of Ed Broadbent’s major areas of focus. As a young MP, he was a member of the Canadian delegation to the United Nations and spoke periodically in the House on issues related to foreign affairs, notably the US-backed coups in Chile and Greece. In 1974, in the first of several trips that would see him develop a dialogue with Fidel Castro — and an even greater love of cigars — he visited Cuba and delivered a fascinating report on the trip to an audience in his home constituency of Oshawa.

But as a newly minted MP in the early seventies he was mostly preoccupied with domestic issues — notably the question of industrial democracy (the subject, perhaps, of a future talk). Becoming chair of caucus, and then the NDP’s parliamentary leader in the wake of its 1974 election setback, developments abroad often took a backseat to the more basic task of rebuilding.

Beginning in the late 70s, however, this changed.

Over the next decade, during the height of his popularity as a national politician, both international affairs in general — and a range of Third World causes in particular — became a major and persistent concern for Ed Broadbent. This was evident when Vancouver played host to the 1978 Congress of the Socialist International, a conference which welcomed Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinistas as guests (in Ed’s words scaring “the bejesus out of the good of citizens of British Colombia.”) Through the SI, in which he served as vice president, Ed became acquainted with key figures from across the wide spectrum of the global social democratic left: among them Willy Brandt of West Germany (then the organization’s head), Bruno Kreisky of Austria, Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, Gough Whitlam of Australia; and from the Democratic Socialists of America, Michael Harrington and Irving Howe.

The SI was by no means a perfect organization, and as Ed later told me and Frances, it ultimately never became the presence in global affairs some had hoped that it would. In the 1970s and 80s, however, it quite ambitiously sought to establish itself as a third force on the world stage: expanding its membership to include an array of new parties from across Asia, Africa, and the Americas in a bid to create an alternative to the what were then the duelling models of Washington and Moscow.

Now, there is simply too much history here for me to be exhaustive in the time that we have here. But suffice it to say that the 1980s saw Ed Broadbent become a loud and vocal advocate for global nuclear disarmament; a passionate student of Latin American affairs; and a fierce critic of the Reagan administration’s anticommunist crusades. In these causes, of course, he was certainly not alone: counting as important allies a crop of others drawn from what was then the new generation of MPs in the federal NDP caucus. And here I’d be remiss not to mention people like Dan Heap, Pauline Jewett, Ian Waddell, Svend Robinson, Bob Ogle, and Jim Manley.

To give you all a flavour of Ed Broadbent’s international engagement during this period, I’d like to read a bit from a speech he delivered just a few short blocks from here in Parliament on October 27, 1983. For context, in just one of its countless acts of aggression in the region, the Reagan administration had just invaded Grenada. The invasion, officially justified on the absurd grounds that the tiny island country somehow represented a security threat to the USA, came amidst the overthrow and brutal murders of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop alongside several of Grenada’s most prominent trade unionists.

Forcefully condemning the action Ed Broadbent warned that the Reagan administration was “turning...the whole of Central America into a crusade against any kind of political regime which can be seen in any sense…to be philosophically left of centre…

It is supporting in this crusade…any kind of regime on the right, providing that it supports the government of the United States…[And if this aggressive behaviour] undertaken against the nation of Grenada…[is allowed to succeed] then I ask, can Nicaragua be far behind? And after Nicaragua, will it be Cuba? After Cuba will it be the Dominican Republic? And after the Dominican Republic, who knows?...Haiti, Guatemala, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. All those countries in our lifetime have had violence inflicted upon them by the United States…These countries have been attacked, have experienced the violence of America’s marines and invariably the argument given was that the purpose was to create the conditions for democracy. Quite the opposite occurred. After each of these actions of violence…democracy did not grow. Vicious, inhumane dictatorships were what emerged from these invasions — dictatorships that lasted not for a year or two but for decades.”

Needless to say, I think those words resonate with a particular force today.

Friends, as we confront the geopolitical realities of our own time, from the unconstrained aggression of the Trump administration across the Western hemisphere and beyond to the still ongoing campaign of genocide being waged against the Palestinians; as we navigate the continued unraveling of a liberal order discredited and undone; as we grapple with our own government’s triangulation on the world stage and the moral torpor with which it has chosen to meet the moment; and as we welcome so many wonderful friends from different corners of the world to this conference, I’d like to conclude my remarks by giving the final word to Ed in the hope that his powerful legacy of human rights and international solidarity can be a source of inspiration to us all in this very difficult and dangerous time.

In 1986, against the backdrop of more US aggression in the hemisphere — this time against Nicaragua) — Ed Broadbent wrote the following. And I really can’t think of a passage that better illustrates his internationalism or, indeed, the vision of a different world that brings us here today.

“The world of a politician is a world of light and shadow. Never merely pragmatic, it is always moral. For us in the international social democratic movement there has always been the difficulty of reconciling certain universal principles with their application in a variety of countries with widely divergent histories. It is…difficult — but it must be done. We apply the principles of equality, liberty, and economic justice constantly within our own nations, of course; this is a difficulty we take for granted. But just as we must make critical judgments at home, so, too, must we [make them] when we look at other countries. Cultural and historical differences must certainly be taken into account, but they never absolve us of the obligation to judge, decide, and act. When we talk about democracy, pluralism, religious freedom, tolerance, human rights, and self-determination, we are not giving voice to mere abstractions relevant to a only few nations; we are talking about human values and ideals that we believe [to be] desirable for all people, at all times, in all parts of our world.”

Thank you very much.

Barely two months on from Mark Carney’s widely-discussed Davos address, the prime minister recently had this to say in the wake of the US-Israeli attack on Iran — among the first victims of which appear to have been over a hundred schoolgirls between the ages of 7 and 12:

Nothing about Ottawa’s position is left ambiguous here, and the language is striking in that it does not even pretend to offer any justification rooted in international law. Officially, Mark Carney and Anita Anand not only endorse the Trump administration’s pretext for the war (only adding in a later statement that Canada’s military will not itself be getting involved) but have also eschewed any pretence that the country’s global posture rests on much beyond the law of the jungle. In view of that, I can’t have been the only one to think about the prime minister’s assertion in Davos that his government would remain “Principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter and respect for human rights.”

On this basis, there is quite plainly no defence of US-Israeli bombing to be made — and, again, it’s notable that Canada’s leaders have not even tried to fudge one. As , a former Minister of Foreign Affairs and a Liberal, observes in the Toronto Star:

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I do most of my reading in the mornings, and sometimes unwind from writing by playing video games. My usual preference, at least when I’m not looking for simple, dumb fun, is games that are stupidly intricate, incredibly hard, or some combination of both (if you’ve ever played a FromSoft title, you’ll get the idea). That way, I’m still forced to use my brain, and the fact I’m using it for something entirely pointless is, well, very much the point.

A few days ago I picked up a brand new game called Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown (which comes by way of a Hamburg-based developer that seems to specialize in point-and-click adventure games). I really haven’t played anything like this since I was a kid playing Monkey Island in the early 2000s — and probably would have preferred to play something more flashy on a console had I owned one at the time. Across the Unknown isn’t purely point and click, and nor is it a purely text-based experience in the mould of stuff you might have gotten on floppy disk in the 1990s. Essentially, it’s an adventure/survival/rogue-lite game based on the TV series Star Trek Voyager (1995-2001).

If you never watched the show, its premise involves a starship that’s been stranded on the far side of the galaxy and is trying to make its way back to Earth. Voyager, distinct from other Trek settings, is a small science vessel: state-of-the-art but also cramped and forced to navigate vast and uncharted regions of space. For reasons that are probably too nerdy to get into here, there is also a major schism in the crew that creates the potential for mutiny and thus threatens to make the situation even more dangerous.

I enjoy Voyager, and in many ways (with apologies to Scott Bakula and Enterprise, a noble effort I enjoy as well) it’s the last Trek show to fully feel like Star Trek. But I’ve also always felt the show had some unfulfilled potential, and that — despite some great characters and solid episodes — ultimately failed to take its rather unique premise far enough.

In the first few seasons, it does often feel like the ship and crew are fighting for their very survival. But Kate Mulgrew’s Captain Janeway usually upholds the standard Starfleet morality and the crew’s basically ethical behaviour generally works out for the best. Among other things, this sometimes blunts the potentially interesting sense of danger and risk you’d want from a show with this premise. After Season 3, Voyager pivoted to what was arguably a darker and more brooding tone — among other things throwing the most terrifying of all Star Trek species (the Borg) into the mix. If nothing else, this did add a genuine sense of menace. The problem, though, was that it repeatedly forced the show’s writers to devise episodes in which a tiny science vessel was somehow able to thwart the most implacable and invincible of foes (often through an annoying deus ex machina attached to some technological gimmick).

The biggest problem of all, however, was that the show kept dangling potential ways that the ship and its crew might suddenly get home: a special, magical wormhole perhaps; a new kind of warp drive; a weird rift in space, etc etc. These, of course, never went anywhere because the show needed to continue and was fundamentally about being trapped in the most distant regions of space. As a result, many of Voyager’s most frustrating episodes are revolve around some supposed One Weird Trick that doesn’t ultimately work out.

Across the Unknown definitely isn’t the most polished game. Among other things, there is limited voice acting and much of the dialogue is text only. The realtime ship to ship combat looks pretty cool, buts its mechanics are also pretty rudimentary: Voyager steers itself and your job is mostly to give broad commands about how to maneuver, what to shoot at, or when to fire a torpedo. The business of exploring systems, conducting away missions, and so on also isn’t very flashy. It’s mostly point and click, and you are forced to make choices that will either work out or get half the crew killed. The game’s narrative seems to roughly trace the narrative arc of the show (I’ve only played a few hours so far) but beyond its narrative-based tasks much of it is procedurally-generated, meaning there’s tons of room for random chance.

Where this game really really shines is in its ship and resource management systems. Its key interface shows you Voyager in profile, as something like an ant colony and with a POV reminiscent of one of Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Sections (hey, remember those?). The ship and its crew are a living ecosystem, and it’s your job to allocate resources, clear away and repair the many damaged areas you start the game with. You have to think about types of food, energy expenditure, what’s worth fixing or building, what to keep running and what to turn off. The interface (pictured below) isn’t static either. You can zoom right into individual rooms of the ship and what you do or don’t do effects what you’ll see there (for example, relaxed-looking, well-fed officers lounging in spacious quarters or exhausted crew at wit’s end in cramped, hastily-constructed cubbies). Again, there could be a bit more polish here. But it’s honestly pretty fucking great. The game’s mechanics are surprisingly sophisticated and the process of trying to figure out how exactly everything works while supplies are running low, the crew is mutinous, and hostile ships might attack you at any time is extremely challenging in the best sense.

The highest note of praise I have for this game, however, is that it somehow manages to stay firmly anchored in the show’s lore and plot while also introducing a real sense of risk and dread. If you mess up, overlook something, or face some sudden development beyond your control, major characters might die or the ship might quite literally be destroyed. And when this happens, it’s game over. There is no manual save function, so you can’t just go back to a few turns (or “cycles” in the game’s nomenclature) and try for a better outcome. To finish, you have to traverse twelve sectors — playing over three evenings I’ve only just made it to the fourth — and, if the ship is destroyed, the only saving grace is being able to start your current sector from the beginning (the game doesn’t make you start from the very beginning, in other words, but an individual sector can take many hours).

The upshot is that Across the Unknown ends up being pretty hard (I’ve died a few times already, and I haven’t even entered Borg space yet). There is a genuine sense of danger, precarity, and chance that the show itself so often lacked. You never really feel safe and there is always something to plan for or attend to. The game could use a few more bells and whistles, and with any luck the developers will be adding them through patches over the next few months (the away missions in particular are a definite weak point in my view). But I think some among the current crop of mixed or downright negative reviews are missing something here. Across the Unknown is basically The Oregon Trail meets Star Trek, with perhaps a dash of games like The Sims thrown in.

Among other things, it’s a satisfying and — in certain places — very well-crafted experience involving intricate systems, meticulous planning, and delicate resource management. More to the point, it’s also the punishing journey of risk and survival that the series itself too often failed to be.

As a minor production note, this is the third piece of livestream/audiovisual content I’ve published recently. And, while this Substack will very much remain anchored in writing, I do enjoy the format and hope to continue with this kind of thing in the future. Enjoy.

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I have a long essay in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine about one of the most important strikes in American history: the Flint Sit-down strike of 1937. Among the reasons I wanted to write about this episode in particular is that it a somewhat unusual case of political power taking the side of workers in a labour dispute. When thousands of exploited, underpaid autoworkers occupied GM factories in the early weeks of January, 1937, there was good reason to believe authorities would either force them out at gunpoint or pay others to do the same. But when Michigan’s Democratic Governor Frank Murphy left for Flint accompanied by the state’s police commissioner and the adjutant general of its National Guard, he did so with a very different purpose in mind: to create a buffer between the workers and anyone who attempted to dislodge them. The upshot was that a daring and incredibly risky labour action successfully strong-armed General Motors — at that time the world’s largest corporation — and won a generation-defining victory for workers everywhere.

Anyway, I spent over a month immersing myself in every detail I could find. This is a fascinating story and a powerful case study of electoral and extra-parliamentary politics working in tandem. It was also, without exaggeration, a very real instance of ordinary people getting their hands around the wheels of history and successfully shifting its course. If you happen to subscribe to Smithsonian or can find a newsstand nearby, you’ll find the essay in the magazine’s March issue. Otherwise, it’s freely available online here.