Goodbye to the Liberal Order
Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, Keir Starmer, Joe Biden are bungling towards Bethlehem
Justin Trudeau’s finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, quit spectacularly this morning, in rejecting the “costly political gimmicks” being pursued by her own government.
Just hours before, Olaf Schulz picked up a cheap pen to sign a request that the Bundestag to hold a confidence vote on his government — a vote he knew he would lose. (And he did.)
Emmanuel Macron is in month five of trying to cobble together a government, having already run through two prime ministers, he’s trying to make this third one last.
Keir Starmer has, this week, become more unpopular than Nigel Farage, the racist git who embodies unpopularity.
Joe Biden’s transition to lame duck is so thorough and complete that Americans seem to have forgotten that he remains the president.
In short, the world is in chaos and the titans of Western liberalism have driven their cars into the lake.
It is an ignoble end to a gang of world leaders who were supposed to be the response to a rise in global populism and unserious demagoguery. Their humiliation is thorough, but not yet complete.
That’s because they continue to govern a state of denial. These five men continue to insist that their kind of liberalism is coming back in vogue.
Scholz stood in the Bundestag today to plead for relevance as he heads into a winter election campaign: “I ask you, dear citizens, for your trust.” They are likely to say nein. Macron, in watching the National Assembly reject his second hand-picked candidate for prime minister, lectured the country that his party “still knows how to do big things, that we know how to do the impossible.” They’re responding: On vous croyez pas. Starmer has taken to accusing Whitehall’s civil servants of being “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline,” an accusation that many are reflecting right back onto his government. Biden, I’m sure, has made some statements, too.
As I write this, we haven’t even heard from Trudeau. He remains locked in his tower, conspiring with staffers about how best to spin his government’s calamitous unravelling.
This week, on a special emergency edition of Bug-eyed and Shameless, a few words on the sorry state of liberalism.
Does Trudeau stay? Does he go? I don’t think the prime minister himself knows.
If you’re curious to get my thoughts on how we got here, I put together a rapid reaction for The Toronto Star, and I joined
and to crunch through some of the consequences right here on Substack. (Apologies for the initial quality of my video — I forgot to turn my wifi on.)
Instead of ruminating more on the state of play in Ottawa right now, I want to cast a little bit further into the future: To June, 2025, when the leaders of the G7 are slated to meet in Kananaskis, Alberta.
Even since Donald Trump was declared the winner of November’s election, it was clear that this leaders’ summit was going to be weird.
During his first term in office, Trump treated these global summits as a nuisance, at best; and as a venue for shakedowns, at worst.
The last time the leaders met in Canada, in 2018, the internationalists — Trudeau, Macron, and Angela Merkel — were whispering in a corner, worried that Trump was about to hop on Air Force One and quit the summit altogether. Trump, who sows chaos to bolster his negotiating position, walked up to the three, reached into his suit pocket, pulled out a handful of Starburst, threw them on the table, uttered: “There, Angela, don’t say I never did anything for you,” then walked away. Trump left without signing the all-important communiqué.1
Back then, 6 of the G7 were united on the idea that the liberal order had to be protected from the other 1. Those liberals, progressives and establishment conservatives alike, had popular mandates.
Today, the prime minister of Italy is a positively Trumpian figure. Japan’s ruling conservatives have lost their parliamentary majority and seem to be teetering on the brink. Starmer looks positively aimless. Scholz is sure to be replaced early next year. Macron is being brutalized by both the left and the right, and the final two years of his mandate are sure to be excruciating. And it is far from certain that the dean of the G7 and its host, Trudeau, will be around to see the summit through. His likely replacement, Pierre Poilievre, is both cosplaying as Trump and vowing to talk tough with the U.S. president — something that rarely goes well for world leaders.
When the leaders met last year, they were building a consensus on achieving a ceasefire in Gaza, strengthening Ukraine’s defence against Russia, fighting climate change, implementing a global minimum corporate tax, and reducing migration flows. All of those agenda items are now, functionally, dead.
The new agenda? Whatever Trump wants it to be.
The promise of this liberal block, which existed both as a bulwark against Trump and as an ideological rejection of right-wing populism, always relied on it being the safe harbor for institutionalists. Put more simply: This brand of liberalism, practised by Trudeau and Macron, worked because it was a default. A functional shield against a rising intolerant, illiberal kind of hard-right politics.
In existing solely in opposition to something, however, this liberalism stopped being an end onto itself.
What defines liberalism today? Trudeau’s undoing comes because he was trying to mail $250 cheques to his voters, a move his erstwhile finance minister, rightly, rejected as cynical and irresponsible. Macron is trying to slay his obscene budgetary imbalance by taxes on the rich and pension cuts, something that rarely goes over well in France. As his government imploded, Scholz earned faint praise from the far-right AfD, who congratulated him for refusing to provide more equipment to Ukraine.
Is this modern liberalism? Vote-buying schemes, pension cuts, and a half-hearted struggle against modern imperialism? Is this what we are asking voters to put faith in, as the barbarians rattle the gates?
Conservatives, like those in Germany and Canada, are becoming a natural alternative to the progressive-tilting liberals, but they are fundamentally the same. They have no real plan for how to handle Trump’s economic nationalism, whilst rebooting productivity, whilst handling a chaotic and uncertain world, whilst combatting an extraordinary rise in distrust and anger. If they have a plan to succeed on those fronts, we haven’t seen it. These people are just liberals without a plan to pay for anything.
But in damning this pathetic liberalism, you must turn to the even-more-feckless state of the left.
In Canada, the center-left is helmed by Jagmeet Singh, an empty suit of a leader whose sole policy agenda appears to be implementing a price cap on groceries. The German left-wing, Die Linke, has slid so far into irrelevance that it has been supplanted in the polls by the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance: A Russophile anti-immigrant party that claims to be leftist. In the UK, Starmer ostensibly represents the left, a sad joke in-and-of-itself. In France, the fractured and restless left remains somewhat popular but held together by one aging man, in Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
The promise of liberalism is steady, predictable, capable government. The opportunity for the left and right is where they can illustrate the shortcomings of the status quo.
Yet, today, predictability is a liability, not an asset. And the left and right’s meek insistence of doing things slightly differently, more like how things used to be done, substantially underwhelms.
More perplexing still is that the far-right, outside of the United States, continues to under-perform. The AfD have climbed down from opinion polling highs reached last year, and the British electorate still doesn’t seem hot on Farage. In France, Marine Le Pen is the most popular candidate for the 2027 presidential election, but only just barely.
This is all to say that Western establishment politics is in a state of active collapse all over. It is a decline that may reverse itself as inflation cools, but I doubt it. Perhaps, too, Trump’s return will imbue these liberal politics with a new sense of purpose. It’s not worth counting on.
Instead, I think, we should be looking for new political figures who look, feel, and act differently. Who are capable of describing an economy of abundance while also recognizing the economic inefficiencies that presently make it impossible. Who speak plainly, but without condescension. Who exist outside the normal establishment parties, but who can still operate within our democratic systems.
I have one to offer. He’s the only politician in France who bests Le Pen in a head-to-head matchup. His name is François Ruffin. He’s the leader of a party called Picardie Debout!, which boasts as its slogan: “They have the money, we have the people.” I want to leave you with some remarks he delivered last year, in opposing Macron’s pension reforms. (My translation below.)
François Ruffin: You are pitiful.
Voilà, the sentiment you inspire in our country.
Coming out of the COVID crisis, we are tired, exhausted, exasperated. After that, we plunged into war in Ukraine, with gas above 2€, with energy bills skyrocketing. In this tunnel, what light is illuminated for the French? None. What hope, what project, what desire for the future?
None. None. Just this little thing, this banal, petty, narrow thing: Pension reform. What mediocrity. You are pitiful.
In The Elysée, Emmanuel Macron boasts, and I’m quoting, ‘his grand reformational ambition.’ What magnificent ambition!
[…]
What would real be real ambitious reform? Hospitals, pillar of the social state, are in tatters. Schools, pillars of the Republic, recruit teachers through “job dating.” […] But most of all France, like all of humanity, has to confront its most difficult challenge: Climate change. It will upset our agriculture, our housing, our industry, our travel. That is what demands real reformational ambition.
And to achieve this prodigious, but perilous, Paris, we must unite, come together, channel all of our energy in the country to capitalize on our manufacturing, our know-how, our intelligence. But, right now, what are you doing? You’re blocking the country, you’re bogging it down. All that, for what? To save 0.1% of GDP. This is your priority! You are worthy of derision. […]
You will not enter the history books, because you are already inexistent in the present.
Watching these titans of liberalism squander their precious time in office, that indictment rings particularly true.
Bug-eyed and Shameless debout! Tell your friends.
That’s it for this emergency dispatch.
I was hoping to publish a very different dispatch today, but that will have to wait until later in the week.
If you’re looking for my take on Luigi Mangione, I penned a deep-dive into this new kind of political violence for The Star.
For those of you with a subscription to The Logic, I break down some of the considerations going into securing the U.S-Canada border.
I’ve got some other interesting stuff coming out on the horizon, so stay tuned.
I leave you with a song that was rattling around in my head this morning, particularly these lines:
It might appear like I'm driving straight for the moat Oh, baby, but it's one of those cars that turns into a boat
This was told to me by someone who was in the room, and has since been reported elsewhere.
Amazing analysis …when an animal reaches this stage of ill health the kind thing is to put out of their pain
In the US there are multiple groups forming to fight authoritarianism and safeguard democracy. Their rallying cry is "We're not giving up".
That's the way I feel.