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Lula da Silva’s stunning victory in the second round of presidential voting last weekend was nothing short of a miracle. It’s the first time in the history of modern Brazilian democracy, in fact, that a candidate who placed second in the initial round has ever gone on to win — a testament to the remarkable mass mobilization the Lula camp achieved in the campaign’s final weeks. As one commentator notes here, this really was decisive in driving turnout and brought huge numbers of people to the polls who had sat out in the first round.

Among other things, it’s been both notable and encouraging to see how much interest his campaign garnered from people elsewhere, particularly in the United States. But amid all the celebrations today, one influential commentator has characteristically demurred.

There’s something almost charmingly quaint about this attitude. And if this were the 19th century, and the world still heavily consisted of traditional nation-states with localized identities there might even be something to it. The thing is, we no longer live in such a world and, if people now show increased concern for what happens in other countries, that’s partly a natural outgrowth of societies becoming more cosmopolitan and interconnected.

It also reflects the fact that all of us unavoidably have a stake in who governs the world’s biggest and most important countries. That’s true of the United States and it’s obviously true of Brazil as well. A nation of more than 200 million people, Brazil is both one of the planet’s largest democracies and home to a majority of the Amazon rainforest. What happens there will unavoidably have implications for all kinds of things relevant to people elsewhere: among them the future of global governance, the health of global democracy itself, and whether or not the planet remains habitable to future generations at all. A Bolsonaro victory would also have emboldened the far right in other places, so all of us had a more immediate interest in seeing Bolsonarismo’s defeat.

One reason is that the character of the far right itself has become increasingly global. From Brazil and America to Hungary, France, and beyond, reactionaries around the world have spent the last decade forging new alliances and working towards their common authoritarian goals. In light of this, cooperation between democratic forces everywhere is all the more vital. Internationalism is a laudable and high-minded value, but it happens to be a pragmatic one too. Brazil’s election result represents a real blow to authoritarian forces everywhere — and given the extent to which it sought to put its thumb on the scales to Trump’s administration in particular.

Regardless, the indifferent posture being endorsed by Yglesias here is neither coherent nor tenable in the 21st century. We might all be citizens of nation states but, to a greater extent than ever before, our fates are clearly bound together and what happens in the decades ahead will largely depend on our ability to plan and cooperate across national divides. Inevitably, that’s going to mean seeing other countries’ politics as local theatres of a wider war in which we all have a stake. Because they are and we do. Viva Lula.

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Earlier this week, Thomas Piketty published a short intervention on the ongoing youth-led protests across France, which he dubs “the twilight of Macronism.”

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A version of the following was first published in Jacobin in October 2023.

In 2017, writer and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff received an unusual invitation to speak at a luxury resort. Offered a generous commission and a vague but innocuous-sounding prompt — “the future of technology” — Rushkoff arrived at the appointed time expecting to find a Davos-esque gathering of a few hundred investment bankers ready to pick his brain about predictable subjects like 3D printing or the blockchain. Instead, the author was ushered into a space so small and unassuming he initially mistook it for a green room.

As it turned out, no audience of expectant financiers awaited him, just a small roundtable and five exorbitantly wealthy men drawn from the most elite niches of the hedge fund world, whose questions quickly took on a strangely sinister air.

In place of the techno-optimism that so often characterizes the public-facing rhetoric of the superrich, this coterie of plutocrats had a much grimmer and more dystopian set of concerns. Channeling Elon Musk’s fantasies of interstellar colonization, Peter Thiel’s quest to reverse the aging process, and the reveries of transhumanists who one day hope to upload themselves to computers, all were less interested in wielding technology to solve collective problems than in using it to escape them. They were, in Rushkoff’s words, “preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than . . . transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from [the] very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion.”

“Death is sort of an affront to American life,” as novelist Zadie Smith put it. “It’s so anti-aspirational.” In an era defined by existential crises, political paralysis, and raging inequality, the idea of escaping death itself is now a booming business. According to one estimate, the antiaging industry alone generates more than $80 billion a year despite having yielded no tangible results when it comes to actually extending the human life span. Last year, a single “Longevity Investors Conference” held in the Swiss Alps attracted more than one hundred millionaires and billionaires, each of whom paid $4,500 for admission while pledging to contribute at least $1 million to the cause. The Saudi royal family is also getting in on the action, planning to spend $1 billion a year through a newly created nonprofit, the Hevolution Foundation, on research to reverse aging. Silicon Valley’s Altos Labs, billed as a “rejuvenation startup,” counts the likes of Jeff Bezos — whose farewell letter to Amazon shareholders included the words “Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at” — among its most prominent investors.

Amusingly, or perhaps alarmingly, these cases probably represent the saner and more plausible end of the plutocratic imagination when it comes to the pursuit of immortality. Not content with the idea of simply living longer, a second faction is investing its hopes in the digital realm and seeking to transcend biology altogether. Drawing inspiration from futurist Ray Kurzweil, for example, Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov’s 2045 Initiative aims to “create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual’s personality to a more advanced nonbiological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality” — an objective its founder is “100 percent certain” can be achieved within a few decades. Silicon Valley’s Sam Altman, meanwhile, has already paid a hefty sum to join the waiting list of a start-up company that promises to digitally preserve human consciousness after death. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” Altman told the MIT Technology Review in 2018.

Whether biologically or cybernetically oriented, the whole enterprise raises a number of obvious political and moral questions, to say nothing of the many glaring scientific and philosophical ones. On its face, there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of using medical science to help people live longer. The current immortality craze, however, is less a democratic quest for collective human betterment than an expression of various pathologies that now predominate among the global superwealthy.

Every ruling class in history has seen itself as exceptional. But as Rushkoff observes in his 2022 book Survival of the Richest, ours is the first that has “assumed that the primary impact” of its own activities will be to “render the world itself unlivable for everyone else” and consequently look for ways to escape from it. On a more basic level, many of the planet’s wealthiest people — accustomed to having their every whim satisfied in the material world — are evidently frustrated by the reality that even boundless riches have their limits. “If you buy a yacht, you can always get a bigger yacht; if you buy a plane, you can always get a bigger plane,” billionaire Christian Angermayer told last year’s Longevity Investors Conference in Gstaad, Switzerland. “But,” he continued, making a pitch for big investments in longevity science, “the [extent to which] your life is changing with more money is actually very minimal.”

Viewed this way, the superrich’s quest for immortality is merely the logical end point of its visceral lust for power and desire to operate without regulation or constraint. Markets — not representative democracy — increasingly rule the world, and twenty-first-century capitalism has allowed their greatest bene-ficiaries to accrue more freedom and influence than anyone in human history. Rich or poor, however, existence is finite, and mortality, by definition, democratic. In this sense, death is one of the few frontiers of democracy the planet’s plutocrats have yet to overcome.

“This is as self-serving as the Medici building a Renaissance chapel in Italy, but with a little extra Silicon Valley narcissism thrown in,” remarked one skeptical scientist in 2017 of the ultra-wealthy’s quest for eternal life. “It’s based on the frustration of many successful rich people that life is too short: ‘We have all this money, but we only get to live a normal life span.’”

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Last night, Brewers first baseman Jake Bauers hit a two-run bomb and helped give Milwaukee a 3-0 stranglehold in their series against the Dodgers. Bauers’ at bat was really something to behold. Over the course of 6 minutes he took 11 pitches total from ace Blake Snell before finally smoking the ball to put the Brewers ahead.

After the game, Bauers was asked in an interview why he’d decided to re-sign after initially being relegated to a minor league contract. Here’s the relevant part of the exchange:

INTERVIEWER: Take us back. [It’s the] end of 2024, you’re contemplating quitting. You’ve had a nice career and [you thought I’ll] try to be a family, try to be a dad. And you were this close from what I understand. Take us through that decision and what brought you back.

BAUERS: To be completely honest the only thing that brought me back was that my wife got pregnant and I’m like ‘alright, well, we need health insurance for these kids. So that’s what brought me back…

This obviously doesn’t rank anywhere near the top when it comes to horror stories about America’s healthcare system, but I still can’t get over how completely insane it is to hear. This is an elite professional athlete talking! And it’s the guaranteed outcome of a system that links health insurance so tightly to employment. In this case, that meant that a young couple’s desire to start a family was conditional on [squints] the ability of one partner to secure a contract with a professional baseball team (and, to a lesser extent, be good enough at the sport to work his way back up from the minors).

There are only so many ways to repeat the obvious here, but tying health insurance to employment is a Dickensian horror show. It gives employers tremendous power over their workers and forces people to stay in jobs they hate or want to leave. The same is true of private health care in general. It devastates families, burdens them with crippling medical debt, and limits their ability to have children. It stops them from seeking treatment when they’re sick and makes going to the hospital an economic decision. Even among those who can afford insurance, it creates different tiers of care and inevitably means that rich people get it faster and at higher quality — which is just another way of saying the American healthcare system ascribes your life greater or lesser moral weight depending on your bank balance.

What does one even say at this point? The so-called healthcare “debate” is nothing of the kind. The leaderships of both major parties oppose healthcare that’s free, universal, and public because they’re as addicted to dead market dogmas as they are to donations from a powerful industry. The dumbest people alive will tell you that healthcare is best delivered by the marketplace and that the ability to purchase it as a commodity like any other is, in fact, the essence of freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth.

[video via @DylanTweetin]

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A few years back, I wrote an essay on Paul Simon’s career for the Toronto Star. The occasion was ’s 2023 documentary In Restless Dreams, which — in addition to being very well done — seemed like a wonderful excuse to spend a week digging as deeply as I could into Simon and his work.

Simon, incidentally, turned 85 this week, which similarly seemed like a good excuse to bump the essay that resulted. The process of researching and writing it, among other things, really impressed on me what an incredible melange of sounds and styles Simon has channeled through his music. In addition to being one of our finest popular songwriters, he is a quintessentially American syncretist is the best sense: an artist who, as I put it in the piece, excels in working at the intersection of different genres and styles and discovering points of agreement between them.

Anyway, here’s a link to the essay on the Star’s website and an archived link in case for those unable to read it at the first one. Finally, here’s Simon’s 1983 track “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War” — which I include because I think it might be the best melody he’s ever written (particularly in the bridge section) — and the original, stripped down version of him and Art Garfunkel performing The Sound of Silence (which often gets tragically overshadowed by the better known recording from 1966). In any case, enjoy.

-Luke

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I enjoyed Richard Evans’ Third Reich Trilogy so much that I periodically find myself returning to bits of it for no particular reason. Lately, I’ve been digging back into the first volume — in which the Nazis barely even feature until partway through. Evans instead begins his story in the 19th century and spends hundreds of pages carefully mapping all the various ideological and political currents in German society.

This is by no means an original point, but when you read about the mass politics of the Weimar period — or even of the Wilhelmine period that preceded it — it’s really striking how different they were from what people know as politics today. It wasn’t just that there were high levels of political participation (registered by vast rallies, high turnout in elections and so on). It was that the parties themselves were fundamentally social organs whose roots extended deep into civil society.

If you were, say, a social democrat or conservative nationalist, it’s likely you drank and socialized at specific pubs. When a member of your family passed away, the party itself might well have arranged and paid for their funeral. Political parties devoted considerable resources to political education, but also often provided for leisure and recreational activities as well. Had you sought out a pro-Kaiserite bowling league or rabbit hunting club in Saxony circa 1912, there’s a very good chance you would have found one. Much the same applied to churches, labour unions, women’s groups, and other organizations too. Associational life in general ran incredibly deep.

Among other things, this partly explains how the Nazis were able to build such a profoundly totalitarian regime once they’d seized power. When everything in civil society — from politics and education to social and recreational life — is so thoroughly institutionalized, taking over and disciplining (or banning) those institutions is going to be a very powerful lever. (This is also, by the way, one area where I think much of the new literature on authoritarianism is limited by its reliance on 20th century reference points, and the example of 1930s Germany in particular. Societies looked very different in the first half of the 20th century, so naturally the nature of authoritarianism was very different too).

But the main thing that’s come to mind in my current revisiting of The Coming of the Third Reich is the extent to which people today — even the politically engaged — have no real experience with, nor any real conception of mass politics at all.

During the first few decades of my own life — which is to say the 1990s and 2000s — we were in a largely post-political era. Parties and electoral politics still existed, of course, but political participation (as measured in a variety of ways) was generally very low. As I’ve written many times over the years, there was a profound poverty of political imagination as well, the only real grand narrative being that the age of grand narratives was over.

As Anton Jäger argues, this era of post-politics has increasingly given way to [what he’s usefully called] hyperpolitics, i.e. a “process of repoliticization without reinstitutionalization.” Since the 2010s there’s been a pervasive, and in many ways surprising, politicization of social and cultural life that makes the current era distinct from the politically sedate decades on either side of the millenium. But, crucially, this has largely played out in ad hoc fashion and in the absence of the kind of institutional forms that undergirded earlier kinds of political participation.

Again, I’m not building to some grand or original point here. But when you revisit the age of mass politics — in interwar Germany or anywhere else — it’s striking how profoundly alien it would now look to most people in the 21st century. Those of us who seek a revival of democratic mass politics would probably do well to keep this in mind. Because, should they suddenly become possible again, they will probably look very different and we will in a sense be starting from scratch.

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If you’re a non-Canadian reader, you may have seen headlines like this one (from the BBC) in the international press this morning: “Separatist party wins Quebec election, adding new test to Canada’s unity.” I’ve seen coverage elsewhere to this effect and, anecdotally at least, a few takes out of English-speaking Canada in a similar vein. I’ll confess to not having followed this particular Quebec election as closely as I’ve followed some others, but I do find this framing somewhat perplexing and wanted to share a few related thoughts.

1) The results

To first deal with the obvious, the sovereigntist Parti Québécois did indeed win the election — just. In fact, with a minority government and less than 30% of the popular vote the PQ ultimately underperformed compared to what many polls had suggested was possible.

The other big story here (obviously) is that the ruling Coalition Avenir Québec, which has governed since 2018 and which won 90 seats in the National Assembly just four years ago, was completely wiped out — with even Premier Christine Fréchette losing her seat in Trois-Rivières.

The CAQ did manage a little over 13% of the vote, but under Quebec’s electoral system this doesn’t count for much. It’s also, I think, reflective of the fact that the CAQ — right of centre, nationalist but not separatist, cobbled together from breakaway chunks of other parties, partly a personal vehicle for founding leader François Legault — has always been something of a cartel party and was never a very coherent formation in the first place. I fully expect the CAQ to disappear as a factor in Quebec politics.

The other novel part of the results here is the surprising success of the Conservative Party (not affiliated, incidentally, with the Conservative Party of Canada). This probably reflects the collapse of the CAQ to some extent, though I really have nothing interesting to say about it. Finally, Québec Solidaire — the only real left wing formation competing — lost two of its seats but had a slightly better night than some polls suggested was coming. Depending on how things play out, it may be in a position to exert some positive influence over the (increasingly right-leaning) PQ in a minority legislature.

2) The PQ’s victory

With the above out of the way, I think it’s worth reflecting a bit more on what so many of the newspaper headlines are focusing on this morning, i.e. the fact of a sovereigntist party committed to creating an independent state forming a government. If you’re a foreign reader and are basically going on these headlines alone, you might be under the impression that a PQ government is somehow novel to Quebec. But it isn’t. In fact, the PQ has been — alongside the federalist Liberals — one of the two dominant parties in the province since the mid-1970s. For that reason, I think it’s a bit misleading to interpret a result like this as having a 1:1 relationship to the cause of Quebec independence. Plenty of those who vote for the PQ, of course, passionately believe in this cause but Quebec is a political culture like any other and people’s political preferences are similarly shaped by their views on other issues like immigration and the cost of living. Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, incidentally, campaigned partly by leaning into conservative culture war politics (among other things, a departure from the PQ’s more social democratic roots).

All that said, the PQ is officially committed to holding a third referendum on Quebec independence — the others having been in 1980 and 1995 — after Donald Trump leaves office in January 2029. What, then, should we make of that pledge?

3) The national unity question

Since so many write ups on the Quebec election seem to be focusing on the supposed threat to Canadian unity posed by the incoming PQ government, I think it’s worth saying outright here that the current background conditions are especially — perhaps even uniquely — inauspicious for the sovereigntist side. The PQ has won a minority government with less than 30% of the vote, Mark Carney remains popular in the province, and polls suggest there is presently record low support among Quebecers for independence.

Back in 1980, the PQ was still a new force in the province, the Quiet Revolution was still fresh in people’s minds, and Canadian politics as a whole was consumed by existential and constitutional questions. In 1995’s much closer vote, the Yes side benefited from the recent failures of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords — which, again, reflected the continued salience and deeply contested nature of constitutional questions in general.

There is simply nothing analogous now and it seems to me that a hypothetical Yes campaign in 2029 will have a much shakier foundation on which to stand. If I can make a less dispassionate point here, I think the reduced salience of the sovereignty question in Quebec is also a testament to the success it’s had in safeguarding its culture and majority language. It was by no means inevitable that a few million Francophones living amid a vast sea of English speakers would be able to endure as a distinct society. But no one who visits Quebec today would ever doubt for a second that they are anywhere else and, in many ways, Quebecers have probably been more successful than their Anglophone counterparts in the rest of Canada at resisting the cultural gravity of the United States.

Anyway, things could always shift in the years ahead. Canada is an unpredictable country and the 21st century is a uniquely unpredictable time. But if nothing changes and the PQ does decide to hold another referendum, there is no reason to think it will meet with much success.

4) Federal implications

I’ve seen several headlines suggesting the PQ victory will be a test of national unity and thus a problem for Mark Carney. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some mild disappointment among federal Liberal insiders that the PQ didn’t perform a bit better. In a crass strategic sense sovereigntist Quebec governments have sometimes been a boon to federal Liberal ones in the past because they’ve increased the salience of “national unity” in the rest of Canada and this has traditionally redounded to the Liberals’ benefit.

Anyhow, I think I’ll conclude these somewhat scattered impressions there. Who knows? With a minority legislature incoming at Quebec’s National Assembly, Quebeckers may not have to wait very long before they go to the polls again.

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What follows is a lightly edited version of the speaking notes I prepared ahead of a conference on political economy at Toronto’s York University last week. Since the conference wasn’t streamed, and because time constraints compelled me to give a somewhat truncated version of my remarks, I thought I might as well publish them here in full.

A point I don’t engage below is the fact that the Carney government remains broadly popular. This is something I hope to write on in more detail in the future, but suffice it to say for now I think it mainly comes down to 1) the profound weakness of the Conservative Party at the moment; 2) some widespread misconceptions about the nature of the Carney government’s agenda; 3) the ongoing presence of Donald Trump as the single biggest thing on everyone’s minds.

Relatedly, since it had yet to be published when I was preparing my talk, I’ll quote here from some recent reporting in the Star, which notes that “American-controlled multinational corporations have dominated the most lucrative federal contracts under [Mark] Carney’s leadership, a Toronto Star analysis of government data shows. The share of government contract dollars going to U.S. companies also increased.”

Less than two years ago, something quite extraordinary seemed to be happening in Canada. A species of Canadian nationalism that had seemed to be dormant, perhaps even dead since the free trade election of 1988, suddenly arose from its slumber. The catalyst, of course, was Donald Trump’s abrupt shattering of the continental trade consensus and its accompanying threats of annexation. But in the midst of this, we collectively experienced not only a sudden flourishing of civic patriotism but also, I would argue, a sense of political possibility unlike any this country has experienced in my own lifetime.

Suddenly, all bets were off. Fundamental, even existential questions, concerned with Canada’s democratic sovereignty and economic independence, indeed the whole of the broad policy approach taken by successive Canadian governments as a corollary to our integration with the United States, were back on the table. If the advent of free trade had gone hand in hand with the era of neoliberalism and concomitant weakening of our civil society, our social welfare model, and much else too, maybe its terminus would mean the fundamental transformation of our domestic political consensus as well.

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This week, Britain’s new prime minister Andy Burnham delivered his first major speech to the Labour Party’s annual conference. I don’t want to comment on the speech as a whole, and will leave that others who’ve followed recent goings on in British politics more closely (Novara Media has an excellent roundup, and I also recommend pieces by Grace Blakeley and Owen Jones). But Burnham’s comments about electoral reform struck me in particular, because they immediately elicited memories of how these sorts of commitments have played out in Canada.

Instead of directly promising to replace Britain’s current first past the post system — a system Canada similarly uses — Burnham is promising to convene a national commission to explore various options, the ultimate goal of which will be to create a system where “everyone's vote counts, and everyone's voice is heard.” Burnham, for what it’s worth, has been supportive of proportional representation as recently as last year’s Labour conference. It’s also significant that he’s saying this as prime minister, because committing to electoral reform from opposition — and then conveniently forgetting about it when you win — is a whole lot easier to do.

Here, incidentally, is why the Canadian experience with electoral reform came to mind. During the federal election campaign of 2015 (which is to say, before he became prime minister) Justin Trudeau made the following pledge:

This line was endlessly repeated on the campaign trail and, in the crass electoral sense, it worked because it implicitly gave prospective NDP and Green voters permission to vote Liberal. Trudeau notably never promised to implement any specific system and was doggedly vague about what he actually intended to do. Instead, the 2015 Liberal platform promised a process — and notably made reference to ranked ballots, which are not actually a form of PR.

Following the election, an all-party committee was indeed convened and expert testimony strongly favoured proportional representation. After that, participants at town halls across the country overwhelmingly backed it as well. The result? Trudeau’s government broke its promise, abandoned electoral reform of any kind, and went further by attacking PR as something that would benefit the far right.

This, in fact, is merely one among several of Canada’s near misses with PR. Various provinces have put the question to a referendum (Ontario once and British Columbia twice), usually with a threshold that is incredibly difficult to meet. Again and again, these processes have brought together experts and ordinary citizens who passionately believe in electoral reform and have made earnest contributions. They’ve debated the merits of various systems — Single Transferable Vote, Mixed Member Proportional, etc — and pursued laudable campaigns of public education to build support for them.

And yet, I don’t think we’re any closer to proportional representation in Canada than we were 10, 15, or 25 years ago — despite the case for it probably being stronger than ever. All this has finally convinced me that electoral reform will only ever happen under the following two scenarios: 1) There is a minority Parliament and the largest party is compelled to implement it because it needs the support of a smaller party that is demanding it; 2) A party campaigns on an explicit pledge to implement a specific model of electoral reform, then promptly does so after it wins an election. No commissions, no parliamentary committees, no expert panels or town halls, no referendum. Just simple legislation, ideally followed by a well-financed public education campaign to explain the new system.

In Britain today, as in Canada, the case for some form of PR is pretty overwhelming. Multi-party systems regularly produce distorted outcomes under first past the post, and often give huge parliamentary majorities to parties that receive well under 50% of the popular vote (Britain’s current Labour government, in fact, won a landslide in 2025 on less than 34%). It’s possible that Burnham is sincere in his desire for electoral reform. It’s also possible that the unprecedented fragmentation of the UK’s electoral map will create the right combination of incentives for various parties, including Labour, to back PR.

I certainly hope so. But Canada’s experience with electoral reform is a bracing testament to where these sorts of pledges usually go.

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Last weekend, Rolling Stone published a somewhat scoldy article whose author is frustrated by a purported constituency of people who — it’s suggested — are pretending not to know about a record-setting country track called “Choosin’ Texas” by singer-songwriter Ella Langley. The piece’s framing was classic rage bait and, in this sense, it was something of a throwback to a style of pop culture writing that was ubiquitous in the early and mid-2010s. True to form, it thus makes assertions like this: “At this point, though, if someone contends they’ve never even heard of ‘Choosin’ Texas’ or Langley, it may say more about the listener than the song. Or, for that matter, what they want to project to the world.”

You can probably guess where the article goes from here. Essentially, its author makes the case that performative disdain for country music can sometimes be synonymous with a kind of metropolitan, middle class snobbery. Fair enough, I suppose, but that’s not really what interests me here. (I also, for the record, think the incessant conflation of people’s cultural and aesthetic sensibilities with political and/or moral virtue we saw so much of during the 2010s was a bad idea, though that’s not what interests me either).

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Speaking recently at a forum hosted by Colgate University, Barack Obama offered the following assessment of where America’s liberals have erred:

What people are starved for at the moment is the ability to tell a moral and ethical story about how we live together in this moment. And I think one of the mistakes that Democrats and some on the left have made for awhile was making everything mechanical and instrumental and materialistic about tax policy and earned income tax credits. All that stuff is important. But there is an underlying moral foundation to how do we see each other and treat each other that so often came out of the church or the temple or the synagogue or the mosque…Not everyone participates in organized religion in the same ways but the essential questions…our leaders have to be able to speak that language in a serious way, in an earnest way."

The bolded section, for obvious reasons, has been making the rounds in a viral clip — widely eliciting the equally obvious rejoinders (as one representative comment reads: “look i love obama but this is just incredibly emblematic of the different realities and spheres of understanding that wealthy people live in compared to almost everyone else”). Obama, in fact, has issued periodic salvos against materialism (see here), which is, well, more than a little rich coming from someone who has devoted so much of his post-presidential life to the enterprise of becoming fabulously wealthy. As the New Yorker’s points out, Obama’s argument is also somewhat puzzling even on its own terms given the extent to which Democrats have chosen to tell an abstract story about the soul of the republic in place of any more tangible offer to voters.

More substantively, though, Obama’s remark seems emblematic of a tic we’ve seen again and again from America’s centrist liberals: namely, the blinkered belief that the challenges confronting liberalism today are primarily problems of narrative and storytelling; something concerned with comms, messaging, and aesthetics rather than policy, program, or ideology. That, among other things, is the register through which politics is mostly framed and discussed on popular liberal shows like Pod Save America. It’s similarly appeared in plenty of shallow campaign postmortems and been the cri de cœur of many a failed primary campaign.

The basic contours of the Democratic platform itself have barely shifted since 2016 (arguably before) and the stuff that is new is largely about reverting various things to their pre-Trump status quo. On the other hand, vast empires of discourse and meta-narrative have risen and fallen: “moral capitalism” (why hasn’t someone thought of that?), Popularism, Nudging, Abundance/Supply side liberalism, most of them a variation or friendly amendment to the so-called Third Way — whose basic assumptions much of America’s liberal braintrust has stubbornly refused to revise since adopting them in the 1990s.

Incidentally, I have a story of my own to offer here.

In the 1990s, the first Democratic president elected since Jimmy Carter finished Reagan’s work by gutting whatever remained of the New Deal: pursuing a trade agenda that destroyed manufacturing jobs and laid waste to vast segments the country while relieving high finance of regulatory guardrails and transforming America’s economy — and its housing market in particular — into one giant casino. When the bubble inevitably burst, the next Democratic president was swept into power with a mandate to pursue sweeping change but chose instead to shower banks and major financial institutions in cash while the middle class was left to drown. By the time he left office, the legitimacy of America’s political class was so thoroughly eroded that a mercurial reality show host could be elected president simply by giving it the middle finger.

Ten years, and one Democratic presidential term later, millions of Americans are struggling like never before and economic inequality has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age. In the wealthiest society on earth, even the most basic financial security is increasingly viewed as a luxury and stable employment a thing of the past.

I would humbly suggest, therefore, that the issue here is not some vaguely defined spiritual crisis nor about the inability of the liberal leadership class to unite people around a shared moral narrative. In our secular age, the most successful vehicle of social solidarity has been mass democratic politics: not as an end in itself but as a means for winning the kinds of universal rights and public goods that make authentic community possible while allowing individuals to flourish.

Ordinary Americans, really and truly, are not pining to hear a more compelling story about the public squalor and economic dysfunction they are compelled to live with every day. What they need is universal healthcare, affordable housing, and an education system that doesn’t drown them with debt. They need free transit, bountiful jobs, real representation at work and a government that doesn’t funnel trillions into the military-industrial complex. They need an economy where finance and commerce are properly regulated and the behaviour of most politicians isn’t dictated by the whims of plutocratic campaign donors.

What they categorically do not need is another cozy fable whose only real purpose is to sooth them amid the rot.

If you read me here regularly, you may have noticed a relative dearth of pieces over the last few weeks. This is partly down to work on other projects — I’m currently juggling three different manuscripts (of which more soon…). But the truth is I reached a point in early August when the words were no longer coming as they usually do. I don’t mean literally, of course — in fact, this period of relative stasis yielded many unfinished drafts. But the ineffable spark that produces good prose simply wasn’t there. It was incredibly frustrating, because I’m often able to formulate ideas and pump them out with ease, all while recording my podcast every week, doing periodic interviews, and continuing to work through developing ideas while hammering away at my various book projects.

I am incredibly fortunate to be able to write for a living and earn my keep in the realm of ideas. Not having had a job with regular 9-5 hours for several years now, though, I’ve sometimes found it hard to establish anything but the most porous borders around my work. I'm not really talking about work/life balance here, though that’s obviously part of it. In my line of work, the bigger problem is that anything that interests me has the potential to be turned into a piece of writing or — if you’ll excuse my use of such an insufferable word — “content.” To wit: I can be watching the Blue Jays, playing video games, or reading James Joyce and there is now a permanent part of my brain which instinctively asks “Can I wring an essay, article, or podcast out of this?”.

Either way, the upshot of all this is that I’ve been terrible at taking real time off. Towards the end of August, I finally slowed down a bit and the act of writing already feels more like it’s supposed to. And, once I’ve emerged from the journey ahead of me, I expect to be in a much better headspace.

Every year — as perhaps the major exception to what I’ve written above about taking time off — I head north, rent a canoe, and take it as deep into the Canadian wilderness as I can, usually with a friend or two. I grew up in rural Ontario and thus spent plenty of time in nature as a kid. But, until you’ve spent a week travelling by canoe in a place like Killarney or Algonquin, you will never truly understand what the experience is like.

Algonquin Provincial Park is one of my favourite places on earth and among the most beautiful. Consisting of thousands of interconnected lakes, streams, and rivers, it’s nearly 8,000 square kilometres in size and its somewhat unique geography — formed by the retreat of glaciers toward the end of the last Ice Age — mean it can be traversed with little more than a canoe and two paddles. It’s an ancient frontier, strewn with the detritus of abandoned homesteads and 19th century logging camps; a peaceful oasis where nightfall announces itself with the mellifluous warble of loons and shimmering stars smile down at you from across a vast and limpid sky.

The “Algonquin National Park of Ontario” was established in 1893 by the government of Premier Oliver Mowat, but Canada’s first peoples were exploring it in their canoes long before the arrival of European hunters and trappers. In the early 20th century, it was frequented by artists like Tom Thomson, whose paintings still capture a landscape that remains largely unchanged over a century later.

I experience a feeling of placid calm in Algonquin that is difficult to describe. There is no cellular service, which means a blissful respite from messages and notifications. But, more profoundly, a distinct clarity of purpose takes hold when all the usual distractions have been removed.

Paddling is exhausting, and portaging — the process of traversing land with the oppressive weight of your gear and a canoe mounted on your shoulders — still more so. You must carefully study maps, be prepared for encounters with wildlife like bears, beavers, and moose, and be ready to deal with everything from lashing winds to roaring thunderstorms. Your body will be sore and your feet will probably get wet. A beaver dam may unexpectedly block your root and you might have to stand shoulders-deep in mirky bog water to push your canoe across. Your body will quickly get dirty, but at no point will you care. Depending on how you enter the park, you may see dozens or even hundreds of others in campgrounds. But, after a few hours of paddling, you’re unlikely to glimpse anything beyond the odd canoe at a distance or hear any voices besides those of the loons. Outside the precious twilight hours before sleep each night, there will almost always be something to do: a mighty lake to traverse, a campfire to get going, a tent to be set up, a meal to be cooked; a paddle to be thrust into the water, pulled back, lifted out, and thrust back in again.

Somehow, amid all of this activity and movement, you will improbably discover a state of clarity and peace. Algonquin is a vast and beautiful place, but it is also a refuge from the incessant noise and clutter of everyday life. When I emerge in roughly a week’s time, I expect to be exhausted, invigorated, and restored.

All of which is to say: this will be my last dispatch for at least seven days and, if you’re reading this, it means me and my companion have already pushed off toward the beckoning horizon. Do wish us luck. I’ll see you on the other side.

-Luke

I am fascinated by what seems like an ambient consensus that neoliberalism is “over”.

The first time I remember encountering this claim was in 2020, when governments were suddenly spending massively on relief benefits and eschewing the kind of fiscal conservatism that’s been the norm since the 1990s. The problem with it then was that neoliberalism has never solely been about fiscal austerity (and certainly not “small government”). Neoliberalism is fundamentally about the privatization of public goods, the marketization of life, and the disciplining of labour power vis a vis capital. It seemed highly unlikely, to say the least, that temporary pandemic benefits were going to dramatically transform those dynamics.

And now?

I’m equally sceptical — perhaps even more skeptical — of the claim that neoliberalism is over and that we’re consequently living through something else. In fact I’m quite puzzled this claim has become so fashionable to make to begin with. Because American power is declining? Because a multipolar world is gradually emerging? Because it’s become trendy on parts of the New Right to make philosophical critiques of liberal individualism that are never meaningfully taken up by actual right wing governments when they’re in power? Because international trade is being reconfigured? Because American administrations have begun to flirt with vaguely protectionist industrial policy? Because the old consensus is broadly disliked and now facing a series of insurgent challenges from populist forces left and right?

All of these are real developments and many of them are potentially profound. But the extent they’re going to fundamentally transform the underlying dynamics of global political economy remain pretty unclear. An old order losing legitimacy does not in itself suggest it has disappeared (powerful institutions, after all, can remain entrenched even when they’re no longer supported). If anything, it seems to me that the core dynamics of neoliberalism have only intensified over the past half decade.

Having inherited pandemic era budget deficits, governments everywhere promptly moved to suppress wages in a doomed bid to bring down inflation while mostly doing nothing to cap prices on essential goods. Tech oligarchs have successfully captured key levers of the global economy and are wielding them to commodify daily life like never before. For all we’ve heard about populism, mass politics — of the kind that predominated throughout much of the 20th century — have not yet reemerged. Union density, at least when compared to the 1960s or 70s, remains cavernously low. As distinct from the 1990s or early 2000s, genuine alternatives are beginning to find their feet. But these remain, at best, on the periphery of real political power.

Far from being over, I think neoliberalism has simply entered a new and more heightened stage. Once again, I’m puzzled anyone think it’s otherwise.

In the early months of 2025, Canadian politics looked to be in a moment of unprecedented flux. Facing unprovoked belligerence from their southern neighbour, the longstanding continental trade consensus (and much else) was on the verge of collapse. Canada was going to have to radically rethink its relationship with the United States and, with it, the very foundations of its economy and its place in the world. As a sudden wave of civic nationalism swept across the country, even Canada’s more cautious and conservative politicians seemed to take note: contemplating a suite of retaliatory measures that would previously have been unthinkable.

The chief political beneficiary of this moment was Mark Carney, who in his election night address warned that “America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country…President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us.” In terms of what needed to come next, Carney sounded unequivocal: “Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over…We have to look out for ourselves and above all we have to take care of each other.”

In the election’s aftermath, Carney quickly shifted gears: trading the language of defiance for the rhetoric of conciliation in an effort to secure a new trade deal with the White House. Carney’s skills as a negotiator had been central to his campaign pitch — though, importantly, the exact nature of the deal he was ultimately seeking was never really specified.

Regardless, the past 18 months have seen Carney’s government adopt an astonishingly deferential posture towards the Trump administration. As I wrote earlier this summer for the Star:

Since last year’s election, however, the Carney government has repeatedly assumed a far more deferential and obsequious posture in its dealings with Washington. In trade negotiations, it capitulated to U.S. tech giants by abandoning plans for a Digital Services Tax, dropped retaliatory tariffs and introduced draconian border legislation that has been justly criticized by human rights groups. More worryingly, the prime minister’s efforts at cajoling the Trump White House have seen him go beyond these kinds of policy concessions and align quite explicitly with some of its most abhorrent behaviour.

Earlier this year, Carney offered swift backing for the illegal U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran (even as that war’s earliest casualties included nearly 200 children killed in the bombing of a school.) He has similarly backed the administration’s Orwellian “Board of Peace” plans in Gaza, indicated a willingness to sign on to its proposed “Golden Dome” defence initiative, refrained from criticizing Marco Rubio’s attempts to dismantle the International Criminal Court through coercion and sought to reassure American investors by pledging to help “Make America Great Again.” Last fall, the government also invited Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts — a key Trump ally and architect of the far-right blueprint Project 2025 — to attend a closed-door meeting with members of cabinet (the visit was ultimately cancelled, almost certainly thanks to the ensuing backlash.)

This approach was clearly a far cry from the days of Elbows Up, but its defenders argued it was the necessary path to any new trade pact.

For my part, I don’t believe any deal negotiated with the Trump White House was ever going to be one worth signing. But, putting the desirability of any such deal aside for a moment, the recent collapse of trade talks suggests it was never really in the cards to begin with. A would-be negotiating partner who openly muses about annexing you was never going to deal in good faith and offering concessions of any kind to Donald Trump was only ever going to result in him demanding more.

This, in fact, is exactly what happened. And, as Alan Beattie notes in the Financial Times, Trump’s penchant for making outrageous demands very likely saved Canada from accepting a bad deal that Mark Carney would have tried to spin as a victory.

So, here we are. Eighteen months on from the dizzying days of Elbows Up and right back where we were in the first place: the trade war is back on, counter-tariffs are on the way, Donald Trump has reverted to 51st state talk and is trying to rename things, and Doug Ford is busy performing the kinds of empty gestures that shouldn’t get him a bump in the polls but probably will.

This outcome wasn’t inevitable in January 2025, but the conservative direction taken by Canada’s Liberal government after last year’s election made it very likely. Under different leadership, Canada could have seized the moment to reverse the decades’-long experiment that brought us here in the first place.

As I wrote for in February 2025:

In the wake of Trump’s threats, there’s a much more ambitious vision of nation building to be pursued and plenty of older questions that are worth asking again.

Do Canadians really want their country’s economic destiny so closely tied to the boardrooms of American multinationals and the shifting whims of Washington? Do they really want the power of their elected governments to protect Canadian workers and industries to be constrained by anti-democratic trade agreements? Do they want to live in a permanently stratified society or in one bound together by an ethic of solidarity, community, and social co-operation?

Substantively speaking, the only satisfactory answers to any of these questions will all involve rebuilding the capacity of the democratic state and wielding that capacity to intervene in the public interest. In the short term, this means we should be looking beyond retaliatory tariffs and consumer boycotts to more ambitious industrial policies that create good jobs and high-quality manufacturing. Instead of building pipelines and financing privately owned infrastructure, we should be exploring green options like the creation of an east–west electricity grid and fully national, fully public high-speed rail that will both fight climate change and consolidate our energy independence around clean and renewable resources.

Beyond those things, however, Canadians should be looking at the current trade war as an opportunity to think more profoundly about the nature of our institutions and the structure of our society. In this spirit, a renewed sense of national solidarity in the face of external threats can be made concrete through policies that begin to reverse the long march of social and economic inequality. The tens of billions some hope to see invested in new military equipment—at least some of which is ironically bound to end up in the hands of American arms contractors—could instead be used to end food insecurity, wipe out homelessness, and lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.

Since I wrote those words, the spirit of democratic ambition they describe has been largely absent from the Carney government’s agenda. Over the past year and a half, the crisis prompted by Trump’s trade has been transformed into an excuse for lacerating public sector cuts and the embrace of military Keynesianism. The promise of renewed “economic sovereignty”, meanwhile, is now synonymous with the steamrolling of environmental regulations and the creation of a more favourable investment climate; billions in handouts to profitable corporations with progressively-coded phrases like “sovereign wealth fund” and “industrial strategy.”

As a final indignity, the very government elected on the heels of Elbows Up quite literally bent over backwards could to secure a new trade agreement with the Trump White House and was only pulled back from the brink by the president’s impulsiveness. Eighteen months later, things are right back where they were.

A long and circuitous voyage, it would seem, only to reach a very familiar shore.

I recently joined Derek Davison and Danny Bessner of the excellent American Prestige podcast for a broad-ranging discussion amid the recent collapse of trade talks between Canada and the United States.

As I explained to the hosts of AP, I’ve been quite skeptical from the outset that any kind of deal was ever going to be desirable here — let alone possible when one of the parties was Donald Trump. The Carney government practically bent over backwards to get one anyway, but this outcome always seemed probable to me. Why? Mainly because Canada’s strategy of non-stop concessions and endless cajolery were only going to convince the White House it could keep asking for more. And, sure enough, the Trump administration added a roster of last minute demands that no Canadian government would ever be able to accept.

Anyway, you’ll hear me discuss all this and more with Derek and Danny in the video below. I also talked about what may be coming next, how Canada’s domestic politics have responded to the collapse of trade talks, and (perhaps predictably) field a question about Doug Ford. Hope you all enjoy!

-L

PS: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but writing takes time and energy and if you’re able to subscribe here at one of the paid tiers and support my work you’d be doing me a solid. If you’re unable to afford a paid subscription, consider subscribing for free or send me a message and I’ll gladly comp your subscription.

Note: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but writing takes time and energy and if you’re able to subscribe here at one of the paid tiers and support my work you’d be doing me a solid. If you’re unable to afford a paid subscription, consider subscribing for free or send me a message and I’ll gladly comp your subscription.

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and fielded a question about Medicare For All from host Kristen Welker, who among other things noted his co-sponsorship of Medicare for all legislation from 2013 to 2021. Here’s the rest of their exchange:

Jeffries: Well, listen, these are all conversations that the House Democratic Caucus is going to have to have. Right now, we’re focused on November 3rd, not January 3rd. What we are promising the American people is that we’re going to fight to make health care affordable for every single American. And we know there’s a lot of damage that Republicans have done that we’ve got to restore and repair. For instance, Republicans have enacted the largest cut to Medicaid in American history. More than a trillion dollars or so has been cut from Medicaid. And what you’re going to have is about 14 million Americans lose access to healthcare.

Welker: Do you personally support Medicare for all? Do you personally support Medicare for all?

Jeffries: No. As you indicated, I haven’t co-sponsored the Medicare for all legislation that has been introduced over the last several years. I do think we need to figure out how to fix our broken health care system and then build something better once we repair the damage that has been done. Now, that will include doing things like extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits so that more than 20 million people who have seen their health insurance premiums skyrocket in some cases by up to $1,000 a month, that’s not sustainable. And that’s something that Donald Trump and Republicans have visited upon the American people.

Pressed by Welker a third time, Jeffries then concluded the exchange like this:

I think as you’ve uh indicated in your question to me, it’s not legislation that I currently am co-sponsoring or that I support. Okay. But we do support the notion that we’ve got to find a path forward to fix our broken health care system and make health care affordable for every single American.

So, there you have it. The House leader of America’s nominal liberal opposition party opposes Medicare For All but boldly supports “the notion” that Democrats “have got to find a path forward” to fix a broken system and make healthcare “affordable” for every single American.

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Note: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but writing takes time and energy and if you’re able to subscribe here at one of the paid tiers and support my work you’d be doing me a solid. If you’re unable to afford a paid subscription, consider subscribing for free or send me a message and I’ll gladly comp your subscription.

The image of totalitarianism found in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has become so iconic that the subtleties of its world can sometimes be overlooked. Oceania — the novel’s thinly-fictionalized version of postwar Britain — is most often remembered as a place of absolute centralized control; a panoptic police state so intensely authoritarian that the private lives of individual people have effectively ceased to exist. This is true for people like the novel’s main characters Winston and Julia, who belong to Oceania’s ruling party. What’s often forgotten is that life outside the party’s inner confines is allowed to carry on under much less scrutiny.

The “proles”, who comprise Oceania’s vast underclass, actually enjoy certain rights that party members don’t, notably when it comes to leisure and entertainment. Here, the actual production of culture is still managed by the state, but the culture it ultimately produces — which is variously formulaic, dull, and titillating — is for the proles’ consumption alone:

And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programs, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the Party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section—Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.

Later in the book, when Winston watches a prole woman singing in her backyard, we even catch a glimpse of what the versificator produces:

Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:

“It was only an ‘opeless fancy,

It passed like an Ipril dye,

But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred

They ‘ave stolen my ‘eart awye!“

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.

In writing this scene, Orwell was clearly drawing inspiration from media that already existed: e.g. tabloid newspapers, mass market fiction, the formulaic films churned out by big studios. His innovation, however, was to imagine a version of these things that required no human input whatsoever.

In the hands of a different writer, it’s easy to imagine the same idea manifesting as a promethean fantasy about machines surpassing Goethe or outdoing Shakespeare. But the versificator exclusively exists to produce an endless output of cultural slop whose sole purpose is to distract, stimulate, and anesthetize. “It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity,” he relatedly observed in a 1946 essay called The Prevention of Literature, “to write books by machinery,” adding that “a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism.”

Note: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but writing takes time and energy and if you’re able to subscribe here at one of the paid tiers and support my work you’d be doing me a solid. If you’re unable to afford a paid subscription, consider subscribing for free or send me a message and I’ll gladly comp your subscription.

By the time you’re reading this, voting will be well underway in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. At time of writing, I can’t say for certain what the result will be but the race appears to have broken wide open for insurgent challenger Abdul El-Sayed — who looks poised to defeat establishment favourite Haley Stevens by a considerable margin. That this has even become a competitive race at all, in fact, is pretty remarkable. The dark money has been flowing fast and loose and you can probably guess which candidate it’s backing. As Mother Jones here reports:

No Democratic congressional primary in history has ever attracted so much super PAC cash. The overwhelming majority of the outside money has gone toward ensuring that Stevens, a moderate, pro-Israel Democrat, defeats El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed champion of Medicare for All and Israel critic.

If you haven’t followed the race closely, I cannot stress enough how much it has ultimately become a retread of the Democratic presidential primaries in 2016. The difference, of course, is that in this case the insurgent challenger is a Muslim and the contest has seen Democratic alignment with Israel take centre stage. Among other things, this has often made things very ugly and evoked memories of the Clinton ‘08 campaign’s truly hideous dog-whistling strategy against Barack Obama (Stevens, incidentally, worked on said campaign).

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Note: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but writing takes time and energy and if you’re able to subscribe here at one of the paid tiers and support my work you’d be doing me a solid. If you’re unable to afford a paid subscription, consider subscribing for free or send me a message and I’ll gladly comp your subscription.

Long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba...The Pacific will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be daily electric communication with every part of the globe. What an age! What a land! Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to be?

—Walt Whitman. May, 1870.

I have a piece in today’s issue of the Toronto Star on the Carney government’s handling of relations with the United States. Last year, amid an unprecedented trade war and persistent aggression from the Trump administration, Canadians gave Mark Carney a mandate to disentangle our country — economically and diplomatically — from the empire to the south. By any reasonable standard, he has done the opposite: aligning closely with Trump on the world stage, trying to cajole the White House wherever possible, and deepening our integration with the American military-industrial complex. From the piece:

Earlier this year, Carney offered swift backing for the illegal U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran (even as that war’s earliest casualties included nearly 200 children killed in the bombing of a school.) He has similarly backed the administration’s Orwellian “Board of Peace” plans in Gaza, indicated a willingness to sign on to its proposed “Golden Dome” defence initiative, refrained from criticizing Marco Rubio’s attempts to dismantle the International Criminal Court through coercion and sought to reassure American investors by pledging to help “Make America Great Again.” Last fall, the government also invited Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts — a key Trump ally and architect of the far-right blueprint Project 2025 — to attend a closed-door meeting with members of cabinet (the visit was ultimately cancelled, almost certainly thanks to the ensuing backlash.) Does anyone seriously think this was what Canadians elected the Carney-led Liberals to do?

It’s important to recognize the duplicity and dishonesty at work here. But we also need to grapple with the extent to which Carney’s ingratiating approach to Trump is a direct extension of his government’s right-leaning domestic agenda:

When the prime minister gave his big speech in Davos earlier this year, what many heard was a stirring call for a new progressive internationalism in the age of Donald Trump. But, as I argued at the time, what he was really saying was that middle powers like Canada can no longer afford to ground their actions in the pursuit of idealistic notions like human rights. This, not incidentally, is more or less how the government has sought to justify its own right-leaning domestic agenda as well: its abandonment of climate targets and gutting of environmental regulations; its tax cuts for the wealthy; its slash and burn attitude toward the public sector; and its overzealous embrace of AI.

Both at home and abroad, the Trump threat serves as a pretext for a form of would-be pragmatism that is really just conservatism by any other name. Within its own borders, Canada is increasingly being run less like a country and more like a business. On the world stage, it is barely even pretending to care about concepts like international law and human rights.

Either way, this is plainly not what millions of people who voted Liberal in 2025 elected Mark Carney to do.

You can read the full piece here.

Note: Until the end of July, I’m offering paid annual subscriptions at 50% off the regular rate. You can redeem that offer here, and I hope you’ll consider supporting my work if you can.

There’s a recent clip from The Ben Shapiro Show that’s been making the rounds, mostly because it’s incredibly funny. Shapiro, who a justly-mocked profile once dubbed “The Cool Kid’s Philosopher” is such an irritating little dork you sometimes have to remind yourself that an entire media empire has somehow been built around him. That’s generally easier to do on the right because a near bottomless well of billionaire money exists to pump up figures like this.

But I’ve always thought the conservative media ecosystem has another built-in advantage related to its complete and utter shamelessness — especially in the realm of advertising. These guys, truly, seem willing to sell or promote anything so long as it makes them buck, and half the products you see touted on these shows are just garden variety consumer items with anti-woke branding. (Have YOU been looking for a protein powder that refuses to use they/them pronouns and supports the troops? Well, for the low, low price…)

Anyway, Shapiro’s recent viral moment1 came courtesy of his rather jarring transition from what initially sounded like a eulogy for Lindsay Graham into an ad read for ZipRecruiter:

All the worst people are very, very excited about Lindsay Graham’s death. All the worst people. But, listen, whenever you talk about mortality or the passage of time it’s a big reminder that you don’t have time to waste. It’s just a reality. We just had a baby, that means we are super, duper busy. There is no time to waste. And that’s also true when it comes to your business. We all have our own time-saving hacks for everyday life. If you’re a business owner, how can you save time hiring? ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that lets…[etc etc]

The transition here is pretty funny, and I think it especially tickled me as a podcaster who has always steered clear of ad reads. I also, however, find its totally seamless nature weirdly fascinating. As best I can tell, as much as one-fifth of revenue at The Daily Wire (Shapiro’s media company) comes from advertising, so its figurehead is at this point very practised at hawking things in the midst of his shows without skipping a beat. But when it comes to the seamlessness of Shapiro’s transition in the clip above, I found myself landing on a somewhat different interpretation.

Ben Shapiro, like much of the modern conservative movement, has always been a total market zealot. To an even greater extent than certain others in the Republican tent, he really is someone who thinks market relations should determine basically everything (this old exchange between him and Tucker Carlson is a good example). This obviously translates into all of the usual policy preferences — destroy the social safety net, unions bad, more tax cuts for billionaires, etc. — but I think it ultimately constitutes a much deeper ontology for social and individual life.

Once you’ve decided that markets and private property are the One True God it follows that everything else becomes subordinate or secondary to them. All life, in effect, is just some variant of commerce and the entire spectrum of human experience is bent around the logic of buying, selling, and making a profit: your political preferences; the imperatives of your media empire; the programming on your YouTube show; your relationship to the natural world; the passage of time; the realities of life and death.