Quotulatiousness

March 30, 2025

The Conservatives “must perform all kinds of popular pantomimes, hide their conservative values, and they cannot act on principle”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

James Pew on the trouble Canada’s Conservatives and right wing parties across the western world face in trying to get elected:

Trump vs. Poilievre
Image by Grok

“Knock it off.” That is Poilievre’s message to Trump concerning the so-called “trade war”. Honestly, I think Poilievre should take his own advice. I don’t think he can though. Rightwing parties, in all Western nations, with the sole exception of the U.S., are strategically unable to be honest. They must perform all kinds of popular pantomimes, hide their conservative values, and they cannot act on principle. Not if they want to win in general elections. In the current Canadian election, you absolutely must be seen as adversarial to Trump if you are to have a hope in hell of winning.

While someone like me, who is constantly yelling at the radio, or the newspapers, when I read or hear about the stupidity that passes for political analysis in mainstream Canada, would love a principled leader (like Maxime Bernier) to tell it like it is, to stick to conservative values, to defend the traditions of the Western world, this is just not going to happen anytime soon in Canada.

Let me take this opportunity to dress down the entire edifice of Canadian elites. The ones of today and of the past half-dozen decades. From the business leaders, to politicians (including Poilievre), to the media (the absolute worst), they have all shown that principles are not something they prioritize. I’m not even sure if the majority of Canadians care. I know readers of this newsletter do, but there aren’t enough of us. The country is literally full of low-information, unprincipled partisans. Many are unstable emotional wrecks. Things that should be approached logically, sensibly and analytically, are almost always treated instead with histrionics.

What responsibility does the media (Canadian, American, and other media around the world) hold for both creating and escalating what should more accurately be considered trade negotiations, maybe even a trade dispute, not “trade war”!? This is exactly what Trump wants (at least I think it is, there is no way to really know). He is a master provocateur. He is playing the media, and as a consequence, the public too. The media are reacting in the way Trump and everyone else expects. I think far too many of us secretly love the drama; things are getting exciting, instead of boring as usual. The whole mess, which really should be a major bore of a story involving trade policy wonks, diplomats and business leaders, has been artificially amplified and exaggerated into an existential economic crisis. Pearl-clutching on the fainting couch has been the anticipated response of literally all involved, most importantly, Trump himself (again, this is little more than an educated guess). And the public eats it up (no guessing about that).

All of this is not to insincerely or callously downplay the very serious implications on Canadian businesses and workers. I absolutely put Canada first. Although, I see no sense in engaging in anything that can be construed as a “war”, against a nation we rely on economically and that protects us militarily in a world that grows more hostile by the day. It is the Chinese Communist Party and expansionist Islam whom I see as existential threats to Canadians (and the West). And, while I do not agree with or appreciate Trump’s rhetoric and actions towards Canada one bit, I cannot help pondering the situation Canada’s past leaders have placed us in, which makes us utterly reliant on American economic and military strength — is that not our own fault? Everything Trump is doing in the world, or at least everything he thinks he is doing, is meant to bolster the two things Canada relies on most: the American economy and military. This reality makes Canadian fightin’ words directed at America ring hollow.

Paradoxically, since the failure of Canada’s elites has rendered the country unable to stand on its own, anything Trump can do to strengthen America (including hurting Canada unfortunately) is in Canada’s overall best interests. What a tragic circumstance for any sovereign nation to find itself in. This would not have been the case, if over the lost Trudeau decade, and many decades before that, the country had been led by nation-builders engaged in ambitious nation-building. In the modern period, we have failed at nation-building. Maybe not miserably, but the overall effort has been inadequate. The post-national era of Trudeau being the height of this failure, and the absolute depths of our current despair. And now, sadly, pathetically, we are at the mercy of the orange one.

March 29, 2025

“Spending time with his family” palled remarkably quickly for Liberal minister Sean Fraser

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Now that we’re officially in an election period, The Line has revived their “Bullshit Bulletin”, covering what it says on the label: the obvious bull crap excreted by all the parties during the campaign. One of the easier targets in this week’s roundup was a Liberal cabinet minister who announced he would not be seeking re-election as he felt he needed to spend more time with his family, only to change his mind once the writ dropped:

The 2026 Poutine
The Line.

You might remember the now-former member of the Trudeau cabinet announcing some months ago that he was leaving politics to spend more time with his young family. “Today is a decision I’ve made for personal reasons”, he said, “because my kids aren’t getting any younger and deserve to have their dad around”. You might also remember the number of Liberals who rushed to his defence, insisting that he was totally sincere and that the then-grim fortunes pollsters were forecasting for the Liberals had nothing to do with Fraser deciding to tap out. He’s a family man, we were told. That’s all this is. Leaving politics to spend more time with the family.

Well, anyway, he’s decided to run again.

It’s all about public service, you see. It’s about standing up for Canada.

Sure. Just like bowing out was all about his kids.

Fraser insists he and Carney had a talk and he’s been assured he’ll be able to spend more time with his family, which is a weird thing for someone who’s experienced to pretend to believe — elected political office is an intensely consuming job, and the only people who succeed in it, as Fraser has, are the kind of people prone to being consumed. So we call bullshit on that. But, to be honest, we probably wouldn’t have even mentioned this if the circumstances weren’t so blatantly egregious. It’s low-level bullshit. Other Liberals changed their minds, too. As Liberal polling fortunes have improved, we saw Anita Anand, for example, reverse her earlier decision to bow out and decide to run again. And we didn’t really comment on that, because, well, it’s her choice.

What’s different about Fraser’s decision, though, is that clearing the way for him to run again meant dumping the man who had stepped forward to run in his place. Graham Murray had been declared to be the Liberal candidate in the Central Nova riding just a few days ago, and had even begun to campaign. He had signs and an office. The announcement of his candidacy is now a dead link on the Liberal party’s website.

Now you see it:

Now you don’t:

So yeah. Murray was the guy. He’d probably told his family and friends and everything. I’m sure they’d said nice things about him. And then Fraser — apparently tired of hanging out with his family after a solid few months, and having duly concluded his kids did not in fact deserve having their dad around — glanced at the latest polls and had the poor son of a bitch who stepped forward to run in his seat shoved into a disintegration chamber so that Fraser could come back.

Look, we’re not here to shed any crocodile tears for a political candidate being roughly handled by their party. But in this case, we still can’t help but feel some human sympathy for Murray. The poor guy. This is like campaigning to get a job, being told you’ve got the gig, and then showing up on your second day of work and being told you’re fired because the last guy wants his job back.

Carney, our unelected PM, announces the end of our generations-long bilateral relationship with the US

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As many folks on Twit-, er, I mean X have pointed out, Mark Carney is just a caretaker PM, not having ever been elected to the position, so it’s more than a bit breathtaking that he’s making announcements like this without any mandate from the voters:

Later, we get to vote on whether he made it to the podium

The last Liberal leader promised real change too. Apparently this one uses a different definition.

“It is clear that the United States is no longer a reliable partner,” Mark Carney said after a cabinet meeting on Thursday. “It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations we will be able to restore some trust. But there will be no turning back.”

Uh, sir, you’re sounding kind of categorical —

“The next government — and all that follow — will have a fundamentally different relationship with the United States,” Carney said.

So if I understand correctly, what you’re saying is —

“Coming to terms with this sobering reality is the first step in taking necessary actions to defend our nation,” Carney said. “But it’s only the first step.”

In a career that now stretches back to before many of my readers were born, I’ve covered speeches like this before, of course. Maybe five. Well, two. No, strike that, this was new.

“Over the coming weeks, months, and years we must fundamentally reimagine our economy,” the rookie leader of the Liberal Party of Canada said.

Well, you know, “fundamentally” can mean a lot of things —

“The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.”

Oh, so you mean fundamentally.

In French, a language that fits this Savile Row man like a hand-carved barrel — it covers the essentials while leaving the odd splinter — Carney did a version of the Doug Ford thing where he asked for a strong mandate to undertake negotiations. Unlike Ford he put no real effort into selling it. Was he being overconfident? Not at all, he said, as every man ever has in response to that question. He still needs to “win every vote,” he insisted.

But it “would be better” to have a large mandate “to have a large, comprehensive negotiation, the most important in our life.” Here he didn’t pause, really, so much as consider the ramifications of what he was saying while the words were still coming out.

“Especially in my life. When I was born the Auto Pact was created.” Which sounds grandiose, sure, but to be fair I believe Carney, who was born in Fort Smith in 1965, was merely asserting correlation, not causality. “And now it’s over.”

Wait, what? The AUTO PACT is over? That’s like saying it’s time to shut the ski operation at Whistler down, if Whistler contributed 11.5% to Canada’s manufacturing GDP. “It’s very serious, this situation,” he concluded, mildly.

Later, some of the early reaction to Carney’s remarks seemed to me to skip too lightly over the plain meaning of the Prime Minister’s words. And yes, it feels odd to call him the Prime Minister. We haven’t yet had a vote on the matter, although I’m told one will be held shortly. But the people in the cabinet room were people Carney had appointed, and the Parliamentary Protective Service let them in, so I guess in a rough-and-ready way, he really is — Anyway. It’s possible Carney’s words meant nothing. Or that he’ll be forced to eat them later. Or that, it being election season, he’ll never get a chance to implement them. In the latter case, the Carney Tariff Scrum of March 2025 would become an item of wonk trivia, like Kim Campbell’s genuinely impressive government reorganization of 1993.

March 21, 2025

QotD: Gordon Brown and the “Gillian Duffy affair”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Gillian Duffy affair, the start of this People’s Decade, was fascinating on many levels. Fundamentally, it revealed the schism in values and language that separated the elites from ordinary people. To the professional middle classes who by that point — after 13 years of New Labour government — had conquered the Labour Party, people like Mrs Duffy were virtually an alien species, and places like Rochdale were almost another planet. Indeed, one small but striking thing that happened in the Duffy / Brown fallout was a correction published in the Guardian. One of that newspaper’s initial reports on the Duffy affair had said that Rochdale was “a few hundred miles” from London. Readers wrote in to point out that it is only 170 miles from London. To the chattering classes, it was clear that Rochdale was as faraway and as foreign as Italy or Germany. More so, in fact.

The linguistic chasm between Duffy and Brown spoke volumes about Labour’s turn away from its traditional working-class base. Yes, there was the word “bigot”, but, strikingly, that wasn’t the word that most offended Mrs Duffy. No, she was most horrified by Brown’s description of her as “that woman”. “The thing that upset me was the way he said ‘that woman'”, she said. “I come from the north and when you say ‘that woman’, it’s really not very nice. Why couldn’t he have just said ‘that lady’?”

One reason Brown probably didn’t say “lady” is because in the starched, aloof, technocratic world New Labour inhabited, and helped to create, the word “lady” had all but been banned as archaic and offensive in the early 2000s. Since the millennium, various public-sector bodies had made moves to prevent people from saying lady to refer to a woman. One college advised against using the word lady, as it is “no longer appropriate in the new century”. An NHS Trust instructed its workers that “lady” is “not universally accepted” and should thus be avoided. In saying “that woman”, Brown was unquestionably being dismissive — “that piece of trash” is what he really meant — but he was also speaking in the clipped, watchful, PC tones of an elite that might have only been 170 miles from Rochdale (take note, Guardian) but which was in another world entirely in terms of values, outlook, culture and language.

“I’m not ‘that woman'”, said Duffy, and in many ways this became the rebellious cry of the People’s Decade. She was pushing back against the elite’s denigration of her. Against its denigration of her identity (as a lady), of her right to express herself publicly (“it’s just ridiculous”, as Brown said of that very public encounter), and most importantly of her concerns, in particular on the issue of immigration and its relationship to the welfare state.

The Brown-Duffy stand-off at the start of the People’s Decade exposed the colossal clash of values that existed between the new political oligarchy represented by Brown, Blair and other New Labour / New Conservative machine politicians and the working-class heartlands of the country. To Duffy and millions of other people, the relationship between welfare and nationhood was of critical importance. That is fundamentally what she collared Brown about. There are “too many people now who are not vulnerable but they can claim [welfare]”, she said, before asking about immigration. Her suggestion, her focus on the issue of health, education and welfare and the question of who has access to these things and why, was a statement about citizenship, and about the role of welfare as a benefit of citizenship. But to Brown, as to virtually the entire political class, it was just bigotry. Concern about community, nationhood and the impact of immigration is just xenophobic Little Englandism in the minds of the new elites. This was the key achievement of 13 years of New Labour’s censorious, technocratic and highly middle-class rule — the reduction of fealty to the nation to a species of bigotry.

Brendan O’Neill, “The People’s Decade”, Spiked, 2019-12-27.

March 14, 2025

“CDU Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz is screwing up”

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t follow German politics closely, so I depend on regular updates from euygppius, like this post from the other day which I’m sure wasn’t popular among CDU voters or personal fans of Friedrich Merz, the likely next German Chancellor:

For some time now, I’ve wanted to catalogue in one place all the ways that CDU Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz is screwing up. His strategic failures are really a thing to behold; I’ve never seen anybody screw up this frequently and this dramatically before. Yet I have delayed writing this post, above all because I wanted Merz to reach the end of his present streak and stop screwing up for a while. I wanted to have a complete unit – a full collection of screwups – to present to my readers for analysis. I now accept that this is never going to happen, and that the coming months and years are going to provide nothing but an unending parade of screwups, one after the other, each more inexplicable and baffling than the last. We must begin the tiresome work of trying to understand Merz’s screwing up now, because there will only ever be more of this.

As with all deeply rooted phenomena, it is hard to tell where the present parade of screwing up began. There was the lacklustre CDU election campaign and Merz’s ill-advised flirtations with the Greens that began last autumn, which cost the Union parties precious points in the polls. None of that looked auspicious, but the screwing up did not begin in earnest until January, in the wake of Aschaffenburg – when Merz decided to violate the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland. For the first time in history, the CDU, the CSU and the FDP voted with AfD in the Bundestag, first in a successful attempt to pass a meaningless if sternly worded anti-migration resolution, and then in a failed attempt to pass an actual piece of legislation that would take real steps to stem the influx of asylees from the developing world.

This manoeuvre had the real glimmerings of strategy, and so we would do well to ascribe it to Merz’s underlings rather than to Merz himself. It was only superficially an attempt to stop the tide of voter defections to the AfD. Above all, it was an effort to gain leverage over the Greens and the Social Democrats in any future coalition negotiations. Merz and his CDU, sobered by polls showing a left so weakened that they feared having to govern in a nightmare Kenya coalition with the SPD and the Greens both, wanted to send a clear message: “We’re not afraid to achieve parliamentary majorities with the AfD if you won’t go along with our programme”. Had Merz stuck to this line, he’d be in a far better place than he is today. Alas, the man chose to screw up instead. Spooked by yet another wave of leftist protests “against the right” – a “right” which now included not only the AfD but also the CDU and the CSU – Merz lost himself in a string of disavowals. A minority government with AfD support would be unthinkable, he and his lieutenants said. The Union parties would never work with the AfD, he and his lieutenants said.

In this way, Merz’s firewall gambit succeeded only in outraging and energising his future coalition partners, while achieving nothing for himself or his own party. A lot of CDU voters would like to see some measure of cooperation between the Union parties and the AfD, and for his constant never-again-with-the-AfD rhetoric Merz paid a price. The CDU underperformed the polls, crossing the finish line with a catastrophic 28.5% of the vote on 23 February. The Greens whom Merz had spent months courting – at the cost of alienating his own base! – emerged from the vote too weak to give his party a majority, and so the man was left to deal with the Social Democrats, newly radicalised not only by their own dim showing but also by Merz’s firewall trickery.

Thus it came to be that Merz ceded the high ground in negotiations to the SPD, the biggest losers in the 2025 German elections. That is itself remarkable, the kind of thing you could not be certain of achieving even if you tried. And yet it is only the beginning!

March 10, 2025

“I, for one, welcome our new unelected globalist technocratic overlord”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

With a resounding 99% 85.9% of the voters whose votes were allowed, Maximum Leader Mark Carney has finally been elected to a position for the first time in his adult life:

With the support of most of Justin Trudeau’s team, Carney has been ushered in to continue on with more of Trudeau’s signature economic policies, the ones Carney has been advising Trudeau on since 2020.

Yes, Carney said that he will scrap the capital gains tax changes that have hurt so many small business owners, but that had to go. He also promised to drop the consumer carbon tax but would also increase the industrial carbon tax, a move that will have the same impact on manufacturing industries like steel as Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Few Canadians will know about the discrepancy in Carney’s plan or any others because there has never been a leader in this country elected to such high office with so little vetting. Carney preferred speeches and rallies over news conferences and interviews with U.S. media outlets over Canadian ones because the interviewer would know little about Canadian politics.

When he wasn’t appearing on The Daily Show or the podcast of Trump’s short-lived spokesman Anthony Scaramucci, Carney preferred to speak to friendly liberal media outlets like CBC. While the media narrative is that Carney has reinvigorated the Liberal party and closed the polling gap with Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, neither claim is demonstrably true.

While more than 400,000 people signed up as “registered Liberals” to vote in this nomination process, just over 151,000 actually took the time to vote. This is a chance to pick the next prime minister of our country at a time when we are facing a threat to our sovereignty and a threat to our economic future, yet our next PM was chosen by so few people.

By comparison, the last Conservative leadership race saw more than 400,000 people vote with 295,285 ballots cast for Poilievre alone. Sure, it might have been a longer timeline, but the stakes – becoming leader of the official Opposition with no election in sight – were much smaller.

In the National Post Chris Selley doesn’t seem to be a fan of the new unelected leader of the federal government (assuming that Justin Trudeau will actually step down, of course):

Every speaker of note [at the Liberal leadership hootnanny], from the four leadership candidates to outgoing leader Justin Trudeau to former prime minister Jean Chrétien, who held the room in the palm of his hand for what felt like a day and a half, mentioned the need for Canadians to stand together, united and altogether resolute against the threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs.

At the same time, of course, Liberals were insisting that the Conservatives — who have as much or more support nationwide, and until recently had a lot more — are bent on destroying all that’s good and holy about this country. That isn’t really a unifying message.

“Pierre Poilievre just doesn’t get it,” Carney averred in his victory speech. “He is the type of life-long politician … who worships at the altar of the free market without having made a payroll himself. And now … at a time of immense economic insecurity, he would undermine the Bank of Canada. Poilievre has called for the shutting down of CBC at a time when disinformation and foreign interference are on the march. He insults our mayors and ignores our First Nations.”

“A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney said of Poilievre, who has been raining invective on Trump just as fast as he can in recent days — and indeed someone whom Trump himself denigrated in recent days as “not a MAGA guy”.

Oh, and Carney said “Pierre Poilievre would let our planet burn” — on the same night he promised to axe the consumer carbon tax as a first order of business.

Other than all that, though, we’re in it together. Okey-dokey.

Dan Knight is even less impressed:

And here’s where it gets even better. The polling — oh, the polling. For months, the Liberals have been sinking. Before Trudeau resigned, they were floundering at 24% support. Then, magically, within days of picking a new leader, they skyrocket to 33%? A 9-point jump in the blink of an eye? Wow, what a coincidence! You mean to tell me that the same Canadians who couldn’t be bothered to sign up for a free membership, the same Canadians who have overwhelmingly turned against this party, suddenly decided they’re on board again — just because the party swapped one out-of-touch elitist for another?

No. That’s not how this works. That’s not how enthusiasm works.

This isn’t some grand Liberal resurgence. This is the Liberal-friendly media manufacturing a comeback narrative because their government subsidies depend on it. The same journalists who screamed for years about the Conservative “far-right” threat are now bending over backwards to convince you that Mark Carney is a fresh outside

And you know what? Maybe if they had actually let Ruby Dhalla into this race, they would’ve stood a chance. Seriously. I had to do a double-take when I looked at her policies — supporting small business, tough on crime, actual immigration regulation — I mean, that’s how you win the center. That’s how you stop a Conservative majority and turn it into a minority government. If they had let her run, we’d be having a very different conversation right now.

But what did the Liberals do? Oh, they disqualified her over — get this — campaign finance irregularities. But guess what? They kept the money. That’s right. The party flagged “violations”, kicked her out, and then conveniently pocketed the cash. If that’s not the most Liberal Party thing I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is.

Can you feel the Carneymentum? It’s supposed to sweep the land from sea to sea to sea … any minute now.

March 9, 2025

Mark “the human snooze button” Carney

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Chris Selley explains the attraction of a Mark Carney-led Liberal Party to mainstream Canadians:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Ironically I suspect what Poilievre is up against is one of the most basic and powerful forces in Canadian politics: conservatism, but in one of its purest forms, namely suspicion of change — especially in a crisis. Recall that Canada saw 10 elections during the pandemic — one federal and nine provincial. The incumbent parties won eight of them, in some cases even as their health-care and long-term care systems collapsed on their heads and their “pandemic preparedness” folders turned out to contain nothing but some old Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.

No question, there are problems here specific to Poilievre and the Conservatives. The Royal Order of Laurentian Elites nearly fainted when Poilievre started saying “Canada is broken”, but people seemed to calm down about it and engage with it once it became clear most Canadians agreed: 70 per cent, according to a Postmedia-Leger poll last year.

Saying “Canada is broken” nowadays is likely to get you branded a traitor by a mob of people who think Beaver Tails, Tim Horton’s, Molson advertisements and a Tragically Hip playlist comprise a national identity. Canada can be broken and Trump can be a lunatic at the same time, but nationalist outbursts have little time for such nuance.

[…]

Change is unavoidable in the forthcoming election, of course. And by rights, Canadians should want it: Like COVID, Trump’s demands on border security and military spending, and his obviously sincere belief in the power of tariffs — as untethered from reality and sense as these demands are — have exposed massive weaknesses on our part that we should want to fix for our own sake. Poilievre should speak more to us about those fixes.

Mark Carney never made any sense to me as a potential saviour for the Liberals. The most obvious recent event they needed to replicate was Kathleen Wynne’s jaw-dropping majority win in 2014 for the Ontario Liberals, after Dalton McGuinty had driven the party into a pond and left it there to drown. Wynne was a proven, veteran campaigner. Carney is … well, certainly not an “outsider”, but this is his first go at politics, and it certainly hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

But Carney seems set to win the party’s leadership race on Sunday, anyway. He’s boring, and he’s a technocrat, and Trudeau is neither. And neither is Poilievre. A boring technocrat might well look like a safe harbour for a lot of Canadians. Poilievre needs to put a more positive spin on the changes we so desperately need.

March 1, 2025

Celebrity fatigue

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve always been pretty disinterested in products and services with celebrity endorsements, but they must have worked well enough as they suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Grant McCracken notes that they seem to have reached their sell-by date recently:

Wayne Gretzky Estates produces wine and other beverages in the Niagara Peninsula. They may be fine products, but I’ve never tried them.

Talented, wealthy, beautiful, admired, they live charmed lives.

Until the last decade or so. Now they take turns doing an Icarus off the high board.

And investors are noticing.

Ann Gehan reports “Investors Drop Celebrity Brands From A-List”.

    Four early-stage investors who previously backed celebrity brands said they are shifting focus to promising products as opposed to celebrity buzz

What are investors noticing?

Well, there was COVID. We all noticed how really irritating celebs were, singing us songs from the well staffed majesty of their magnificent homes. This cost them some standing.

And then there was the presidential elections. Say what you will about Kamala, the celebs who supported her must have worried about a loss.

Right?

Of course not.

Celebrities don’t lose elections. Neither do the politicians they support.

So the election too was costly.

You don’t get famous unless you know how to read the room. Celebs are their own strategists. They can hear what the country wants. They can detect change and adapt.

Until they can’t. And now they can’t.

February 28, 2025

Trump’s done something most of us thought impossible – giving the Canadian Liberals hope for re-election

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Canadians were sick to the teeth with Liberal PM Justin Trudeau and itching to throw him out of office … until newly inaugurated US President Donald Trump tossed Trudeau a lifeline:

The BOM and the Little Potato on his way to another Taylor Swift concert.

For President Trump, making America great again in his second term includes tariff threats against Canada, along with talk of turning America’s northern neighbor into the 51st state. What that’s mainly achieved so far is to make Canada woke again.

Prior to January 20, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre had been cruising in the polls, and with elections coming this year in Canada, North America seemed headed for a right-leaning political bromance between a President Trump in Washington and a Trump-lite Prime Minister Poilievre in Ottawa.

That was before Trump got elected and began talking about 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods (10 percent for energy), which would likely wreck Canada’s economy.

One poll showed that four in ten Canadians see Poilievre and Trump as alike and that is hurting him as “Canadians increasingly associate Poilievre to Trump’s negative rhetoric aimed at Canada,” said Mark Marissen, a Liberal party strategist.

For the first time since 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party is ahead of the Conservatives in the polls. If an election were held tomorrow, 38 percent of decided voters would choose the Liberals, while 36 percent would back the Conservatives. This is a massive shift — just six weeks ago, the Conservatives were leading by 26 points.

[…]

“Poilievre’s rhetoric is nothing like Trump’s. He only takes conservative positions when he’s pushed in that direction,” says Nichols. “A Poilievre government is going to be exhausting. He seems behind the curve on a lot of social issues, such as DEI and gender ideology.”

The reality is that the Canadian right generally doesn’t resemble the unruly U.S. version. This, in turn, reflects a more moderate political culture whose roots go back to Canada’s early years as a refuge for loyalists to the British crown fleeing the American revolution.

Eric Kaufman, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, argues that Poilievre’s reluctance to mimic Trump reflects the fact that Canadian conservatism has always been “very wet”, with Conservative politicians reluctant to challenge the progressive consensus on culture and identity.

“Poilievre only takes a stand on social issues like DEI and immigration when there’s already overwhelming momentum in the press. He still plays within the safe sandbox of talking about economic issues which is permitted for Conservative politicians in Canada,” says Kaufman.

February 27, 2025

Getting Elected in Ancient Rome

Filed under: Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

toldinstone
Published 8 Nov 2024

The chief officials of the Roman Republic were chosen through one of history’s most chaotic electoral systems.

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:33 The Roman Republic
1:33 Cursus honorum
2:08 Comitia Centuriata
2:58 Comitia Tributa
3:49 “Optimates” and “Populares”
4:22 Campaigning
6:19 Political graffiti
7:06 Romanis Magicae
7:51 Election day
9:11 The end of elections

February 25, 2025

German election results

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Germany voted on Sunday (on paper, and the votes all got counted in less than 24 hours) and the most likely result will be a coalition between the centre-right CDU and the social democratic SPD, excluding the second-largest party, the extremely extreme extreme right-wing AfD:

The federal elections in Germany are over, and the preliminary count is in. The CDU/CSU have narrowly avoided the Kenyapocalypse, as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht failed to meet the 5% hurdle for representation in the Bundestag by a mere 13,435 votes. In consequence, the Social Democrats and the Union parties together will command a thin but workable parliamentary majority of 328 seats. In all likelihood, we will have a black-red government under CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz – a not-so-grand coalition of the kind we grew used to under Angela Merkel.

Here is a district-by-district map of the election results, with each district coloured according to the winning party. Black is CDU/CSU, blue is AfD, red is SPD and green is Green:

My district is the one all the way due south of Munich on the Austrian border. The CSU got 41.9% of the party vote here – one of their best showings in all of Bavaria.

The Losers

The preliminary results of each party compared to the last elections in 2021 reveal last night’s losers clearly enough:

This vote was as poignant a rejection of Olaf Scholz’s parodically bad traffic light coalition as anyone could imagine. Everybody has improved at the expense of red-green-yellow, but it is interesting to observe who has done the worst.

The Greens dominated the traffic light, and voters have dealt them the lightest punishment of all. Imagine how crazy you have to be ever to enter a government with this toxic party: They get their way on all major political issues and you get punished for it. Even so, the Greens did much worse than I thought they would. Almost everybody beyond their hardcore devotees has abandoned them, and Green Chancellor Candidate Robert Habeck (who also lost his direct mandate in Flensburg-Schleswig) has announced he will never again seek a leading role in the party. We have finally rid ourselves of his Majesty the Sun Chancellor, the champion of speech crime charges, and that alone is worth a stiff celebratory scotch.

The FDP lost far harder than the Greens. Last night was their worst showing of all time – worse even than the last time they were chased out of the Bundestag in 2013. Party chief Christian Lindner will resign and withdraw from politics, and he should. The FDP stood idly by and waved through ruinous Green policies like the building heating ordinances, all the time pleading that things would be even worse if the FDP weren’t in government. After the constitutional court in Karlsruhe killed the budgetary schemes of the traffic light, the FDP could have left the coalition, but they subjected all of us to another year of Scholzian incompetence and insanity. If there is any justice in the world the FDP will become a minor West German party that nobody thinks about anymore.

The next biggest loser of the night was the Social Democrats, who likewise booked their worst electoral result in history, and also achieved the worst-ever electoral collapse of a chancellor party in the 80-year history of the Federal Republic. Olaf Scholz has said he will not participate in any future government or coalition negotiations, and party co-chair Lars Klingbeil spoke last night of a “caesura” in the history of the SPD, promising substantial changes in party leadership. The first such change happened almost immediately, with the resignation of SPD faction leader Rolf Mützenich. Klingbeil will replace him. Many expect that Klingbeil’s co-chair, Saskia Esken, will also be forced out before long, although she is clinging to her job for the moment.

Looking from the US, CDR Salamander notes the very high turnout for a federal election with approval:

Sunday, Germany held national elections for the parliament, the Bundestag. Congrats to the German people and their ~83% turnout, the greatest I believe, since unification.

The previous government led by SPD and hobbled the the Greens was unstable at best, and was not doing great things for the German people. That would be why the SPD’s results were the worst since 1887.

    Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has clear words for the performance of his SPD. “This is a devastating, catastrophic result,” he said. “There is no way to sugarcoat it.” He congratulated the Union on its election victory. “I hope that — especially in view of Friedrich Merz’s speech in Munich yesterday — they will now strike the right tone and understand that it is about keeping the democrats together and not playing them off against each other.” An AfD at 20 percent cannot leave the Social Democrats in particular at rest.

Nuff said.

The above numbers were from Sunday night and are not final, but we can safely assume that they are roughly where the final count will be.

You need 316 seats to control, and you need 5% to enter government. That last bit puts FDP and BSW out of the picture. I’ll chat a bit about that at the bottom of the post, but let’s focus on the big boys.

First things first, Germany voted for right-wing governance. CDU/CSU (Union), and AfD got 49.2% of the vote. However, no one will form a government with them, so the Germans will not be getting what they voted for.

[…]

AfD broke into the former West Germany. Both Kaiserslautern and Gelsenkirchen voted for AfD. I also find it interesting that in addition to the West Germany/East Germany divide, the East Berlin/West Berlin divide is still there.

History is sticky.

I lived with Germans for four years, yet I don’t fully grasp German politics. Still, some political constants hold true everywhere.

Again, the Germans voted for a right-wing government. With Union having to partner with SPD, that will pull the center of the government to the left, further away of the center of the electorate … again.

Were I a German, I would want a few things, in this order:

  1. Cheaper energy — lower monthly bills and prices across the board. It will also make German manufacturing more competitive. Yes, the only way to do that is to restart the nuclear power plants. With the Greens gone, no reason not to.
  2. Stop migration. Expel illegal migrants. If someone has vacationed in the nation they claimed to seek asylum from, deport them. Etc.
  3. Be a player in ending the war in Ukraine, if it can be ended. If Russia refuses to be reasonable at the table, then fully back the Ukrainian fight. As this is aligned with the general direction of the USA and other allies, it makes sense.
  4. Redouble spending on national defense. 2% will not do. 2.5% is the floor, and must be reached faster.

All the four above will be more difficult with SPD in government. Remember my long-held position that applies everywhere, not just in Germany:

    When the center-right and center-left refuse to address the legitimate concerns of the people, especially in issues of migration and culture, then the people will look elsewhere for their concerns to be met.

If AfD were brought into government, they would be forced to moderate and to be held accountable for the action of government. With AfD in opposition — with a bone in their teeth — they will most likely, if they do not implode due to their well-known “personnel challenges”, they will increase their popularity with voters.

February 22, 2025

“German politics have become a sad farce”

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

German elections will be held very soon, and the all-party-but-one alliance to keep the extremely extreme extreme right wing out is sagging badly but the technocrats and the media are doing everything they can to hold the line:

“We are the cordon sanitaire – no cooperation with the AfD”: the banner leading the Berlin protest against AfD and CDU on 2 February, which was financed in part by the German taxpayer and arranged by semi-affiliated apron organisations of the governing Green and Social Democrat parties of Germany.

Behind all of the disingenuous fact-checking and the performative outrage, one detects in German mainstream commentary the deeper recognition that J.D. Vance was very far from wrong about a great many things in his landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference last Friday. Only the truth can provoke the kind of panicked and intemperate reactions that followed Vance’s remarks. German politics have become a sad farce – a ridiculous performance that every day I find a little more embarrassing. The primary reason for this farce, as Vance said, is the fear our political class harbour towards their own people, and their complete inability to reverse course on any of the catastrophic policies they have put their names to, from the energy transition to mass migration to the war in Ukraine.

The firewall will keep German politics frozen in amber for some time still. It will keep everything as it was ten years ago under Angela Merkel, until this inflexible, sclerotic system suddenly breaks and unleashes all of the potential energy it has accumulated in one great chaotic crisis. And make no mistake about it, that crisis coming, precisely because the controlled demolition that would be in the best interests of our rulers is also utterly beyond their imaginations and their talents. This might read at first like a pessimistic post, but I promise it’s not. I’m developing a cautious optimism almost despite myself as I try to ponder what will happen in the coming months.

In two days and thirteen hours, German voters will elect a new Bundestag. The polls could not be worse for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and their smaller Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union. The latest INSA survey presents a nightmare scenario for both parties. It has CDU/CSU at 30%, Alternative für Deutschland at 21%, the Social Democrats (SPD) at 15%, the Greens at 13%, Die Linke (the Left Party) at 7% and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) at 5%.

On the left are the INSA poll results, and on the right is the “theoretical seat distribution” that these numbers, if they were election results, would yield.

Readers often ask me whether the polls are understating AfD support. That is possible, but I’d argue the question is not important, because whether AfD come in at 20% or 23% won’t make much difference. Everything actually depends on the small socialist parties that few are talking about right now. Die Linke – successor to the DDR-era Socialist Unity Party – seems all but certain to make it back into the Bundestag, following a social media blitz that has won them wild popularity with young voters. The BSW, meanwhile, probably have even odds of clearing the 5% hurdle for representation.

If both Linke and BSW make it in, CDU and CSU are absolutely screwed, and this by their own cowardly insistence on the firewall. Refusing AfD votes means they will have to cave to the SPD and the Greens on everything to form a coalition with them. Otherwise, the left-wing parties will band together, hijack Bundestag procedure and form their own minority government right under their noses.

That’s right: The firewall means we stand a real chance of getting basically the same deeply unpopular SPD-Green government we have now, additionally radicalised by the hardline socialists of Die Linke. This is precisely the thing nobody wants and precisely the thing our political elites are prepared to deliver, all to keep the Evil Fascist Nazi Party away from power. If this happens, we’ll get a paralysed leftoid Chancellor who is incapable of so much as passing a budget. The AfD will climb in the polls and the CDU will bleed voters until the pressure grows so great, or the political crisis so intense, that they decide to break the firewall after all and chase the leftists out of power.

January 29, 2025

German democracy in its death throes as extremely extreme extreme right gets an anti-immigration bill up for a vote

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The situation in Germany appears critical, as the extreme right Christian Democrats (CDU) seem to be moving closer to working with the extremely extreme extreme right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to pass an anti-immigration bill:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Despite everything, the cordon sanitaire against the Evil Hitler Nazi Fascist party known as Alternative für Deutschland really appears to be crumbling. CDU Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz has set in motion a chain of events he can no longer control. This coming Friday, there is every chance that anti-migration legislation will pass the Bundestag and become law with the help of AfD votes – an eventuality that was unimaginable even seven days ago.

As I reported in my prior post, Merz said last week that he was open to passing anti-migration bills with AfD support. His statement was remarkable, because it violated the most important tabu in German politics, namely that against achieving any outcomes with votes from the AfD. This tabu excludes the political voice of opposition voters and insulates the traditional party system from political change.

Almost from the beginning, there was messaging confusion from within the CDU about Merz’s statement. The reversals, re-reversals, doublings down, and contradictions that have flowed from Merz and his party over the weekend are highly significant. They suggest a panicked CDU leadership that is in disarray, eager to stem the tide of defections to the AfD and desperate to weaken the negotiating positions of the leftist SPD and Green parties. The cordon sanitaire is a wedge driven straight through the right that allows an ever more unpopular left to punch far above their weight and maintain their vice-grip on German migration policy. It was intended to wall out the AfD, but as the AfD has grown stronger, it has only walled in the CDU. Remarkably, the CDU seem to have finally figured this out.

Merz responded to the growing cries of outrage from the left at first predictably – by backtracking. He insisted he wanted not the AfD but the “political middle” to support his anti-migration legislation. In a strange statement on Saturday, he announced that “We have sent the SPD, the Greens and the FDP all the texts that we want to pass next week” so that “We can … agree on how we will vote next week.” He added bizarrely that “The AfD is not receiving these texts.” These “texts” leaked almost immediately; they turned out to be resolutions calling on the Green and SPD government to tighten border security and increase deportations.

January 26, 2025

German democracy under further threat from extremely extreme extreme right

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

German voters seem to be under the misapprehension that their votes should have something to do with the composition of the government. Because the voters increasingly cast their votes for the extreme right, government in Germany finds itself under incredible pressure to actually pay attention to the pestiferous voters:

This is a potentially huge story. It could be the beginning of a sea-change in German politics, that is how big it is. At the same time, it could be also be nothing. We’ll have to wait and see.

For those who don’t want to read my ramblings (this will be a longer post), I offer this TL;DR: The cordon sanitaire against Alternative für Deutschland is showing signs of serious rupture. The centre-right CDU are suddenly – without warning – reconsidering their long-standing tabu against cooperating with the “extreme right” opposition. It is this singular tabu that has kept the traditional German party system frozen in amber despite a massive rightward political shift across the West. Should the cordon sanitaire crack even a little, its days are numbered. The simple arithmetic of parliamentary majorities would sooner or later make the most noxious political fixtures of current-year Germany, like the Green Party, broadly irrelevant at the federal level. The German left would be deprived at once of almost all their power.

I am sceptical that this can really be happening. Yesterday, I would’ve expected a change like this in 2029 at the earliest. Many are saying (justifiably) that the CDU should not be trusted, that they will say anything to get elected and that nothing will come of their promises. All that may well be true. Words, however, matter all by themselves: In 2019, tacit cooperation in Thüringen between the CDU and the AfD unleashed an entire national scandal; the press hyperventilated for weeks. Now the federal leadership of the CDU is openly pledging to pass legislation with AfD votes in the Bundestag, and major CDU-adjacent journalists are writing long opinion pieces about why this is just the right thing to do.

This development arises directly from the pressure of mass migration, and specifically from the four recent deadly migrant attacks I have covered in the past year:

  • On 31 May 2024, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Sulaiman Ataee killed the policeman Rouven Laur and severely wounded five others in a knife attack in Mannheim.
  • On 23 August 2024, at a “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen, a Syrian migrant to Germany named Issa al Hasan killed three people and wounded eight in an apparently Islamist attack for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
  • On 20 December 2024, a Saudi migrant to Germany named Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a rented BMW through the Christmas Market in Magdeburg, killing 6 people and wounding 299.
  • On 22 January 2025, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Enamullah Omarzai killed two people and wounded three in a knife attack in Aschaffenburg.

Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and now Aschaffenburg: That is the catalogue of migrant terror pounding like remorseless waves on the brittle outdated politics of the Federal Republic.

These attacks have become a symbol for the entire mess migrationism has wrought. The dead and the wounded count for a lot in themselves, but they have also come to represent the dwindling social cohesion, the stretched financial resources and the erosion of domestic security that accepting entire foreign populations into one’s nation entails. All of it is for nothing, nobody has any solutions and there is no end in sight.

In liberal democracies, policies have to be normie-friendly, and mass migrationism was normie-friendly only until enough migrants crossed our borders to make their presence felt socially and culturally. Mass migration isn’t normie-friendly anymore. It’s become a foul political poison.

Mass migration is also a very hard nut to crack. We have outsourced a great part of our border security and migration policy to highly bureaucratised international authorities and a tangle of high-minded humanitarian legislation that leaves us little room to manouevre. Solving mass migration will require a great deal of political resolve and a willingness to pick fights with globaloid EU pencil-pushers. All of this meant that, until Mannheim, Alternative für Deutschland had a near-monopoly on hardline anti-migration politics. The unrelenting series of attacks by people who have no business being in Germany, together with the collapse of the government and the impending early elections in February, have left the centre-right CDU desperate to stake their own claim to this increasingly central political space. That, and perhaps a healthy dash of the Trump Effect, are the forces currently pushing the traditional party system of the Federal Republic to the brink.

January 15, 2025

German democracy continues to reel under continued pressure from Elon Musk

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Wasn’t it just the other day that the progressive legacy media in the US were accusing Elon Musk of being Hitler? Apparently his day job(s) aren’t keeping him busy enough because the German progressive legacy media are singing the same song:

The Christmas holidays are over, the politicians and the media have awakened from their winter sleep, and Germany finds itself in the thick of an election campaign. Almost every day there is a new poll, and in almost every new poll, Alternative für Deutschland gets stronger. An Infratest dimap poll published on 9 January (survey conducted from 6–8 January) pegs them at 20%; a Forschungsgruppe Wahlen poll published on 10 January (survey conducted from 7–9 January) has them at 21%; and the latest INSA poll, published today (survey conducted from 6–10 January) places them at 22%:

For the centre-right CDU and CSU, the story is the opposite – one of a steady decline from the low- to mid-30s in December, to around 30% or just below in the latest surveys. The right-leaning vote overall is holding steady, at around 51%. Support is merely wandering from the acceptable Union parties behind the cordon sanitaire. Every day the establishment loses a few more seats; they vanish into the abyss of the Brandmauer, and the hurdles to the lusted-after CDU/CSU-Green coalition grow ever higher.

Some of this is surely down to the Musk Effect. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD and his conversation with Alice Weidel on Thursday (however much a disappointment I found it be) has surely normalised the party for a small but significant number of German voters. The media vilification of the American tycoon is as unbalanced and hysterical as it is unconvincing …

The latest cover of Stern magazine: “Attack on our election: Fake news, cyber warfare and rabble-rousing – this is how Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin are manipulating the German election.”

… and it comes all too late. Until December, Musk enjoyed mainstream credibility in Germany; our rulers eagerly celebrated his Gigafactory in Berlin-Brandenburg as a sign that all was not so terrible for German industry after all. They made Musk into a symbol for the carbon-free, electrical-vehicle future that awaits us all. It is hard to turn around in an instant and reconstruct the man as literally Hitler.

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